Then Came You (17 page)

“Movie,” said Darren, following me down the sidewalk. “My treat. Raisinets. Big bucket of popcorn.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“If you’re sure . . .” He pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it over. “See you soon.”

“Why?” I called toward his back. “In case I need to investigate another stepmother?”

He waved without turning, and I heard his voice as he descended down into the subway station. “You never know!”

I walked home along Fifth Avenue, through throngs of tourists gawking at the skyline, past the boutiques with their windows filled with feathered hairbands, sequined purses, eye shadow, pearl necklaces. Maybe I’d just wait for a few days more. I’d talk to my brothers and try to reach my mom. But when I got off the elevator, my father and India were standing in the foyer, waiting for me, the way they’d waited in Bridgehampton. Her arm was around his waist, his arm was around her shoulders, and both of them were beaming.

I set my bag down on the antique ebonized table. As usual, there was a towering floral arrangement at its center—calla lilies and hydrangeas in shades of orange and cream. Twice a week a florist would come and distribute flowers throughout the two stories of the apartment, from the big arrangement in the foyer to the roses that my mother used to have in her dressing room, like she was an actress on opening night. The apartment had been photographed for
Architectural Digest
and featured in
Metropolitan Home,
but I’d long since stopped seeing its grandeur, the important art on the walls, the views of the park and the river and the city’s skyline. To me, it was just home.

“What’s going on?” I asked my dad.

He turned to India, beaming. “I’ll let India give you our good news.”

I studied her, wondering, again, exactly what she’d had done to go from the girl in the mug shot, with a big nose and a bad perm, to the sleek creature who’d snagged my dad; how long it had taken, how much it had hurt. I was so lost in my thoughts that I barely noticed India crossing the room until her arms were around me.

“Guess what,” she cried, sounding as happy as I’d ever heard her, “we’re having a baby!”

M
arcus and I had gotten married in September. Our wedding was a tasteful affair that included forty guests and cost fifty thousand dollars.
No bridesmaids,
I’d said, giving him a small smile tinged with regret.
I’m too old for all of that.
This, of course, got me out of having to include Bettina in the festivities. I cringed, just imagining her coming down the aisle, pinching my bouquet between her fingertips like it was diseased, giving me the side-eye when her father said
I do.

We honeymooned for a week in Hawaii—we would have gone even farther away, but seven days was as long as Marcus could take off from work. Six weeks later, I was still tawny, my honeymoon glow maintained and improved with a little spray tan, and Marcus would occasionally twirl the gold band on his finger, like he hadn’t gotten used to it being there. We were having a quiet dinner at home, watching the leaves spinning down to the lawn in Central Park, when he pushed his veal away, half eaten.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He rubbed his hand against his chest. “Just heartburn. We brought in Mexican for lunch.”

I felt an icy prickle at the back of my neck, but I kept my voice calm as I asked him, “How long has it been hurting you?”

“I don’t know. Since this afternoon, I guess.” He stretched his arms over his head, yawning loudly. In our time together, I’d learned that Marcus seemed incapable of accomplishing a yawn, or a sneeze, or any other involuntary action at a volume less than deafening. It should have driven me crazy, but, somehow, I found it endearing. “We got any Pepcid?”

I hurried to the medicine cabinet. When I came back Marcus was rubbing at his chest with his knuckles. Fear tightened screws in my own chest. “I’m calling the doctor.”

“Honey, don’t. It’s nothing.”

Lightly, I said, “We’re paying for concierge service. Might as well use it.”

“It’s nothing,” he said again . . . but the way he moved, stiff-legged, to the living room, before lying down gingerly on the sofa, told me otherwise.

It turned out to be a constricted artery—no big deal, the doctor said, but better to deal with it sooner rather than later. Marcus went to Beth Israel that night, and his cardiologist did a cardiac catheterization the next morning. The radioactive dye he injected showed exactly where the artery was pinched. A simple fix, said the doctor, explaining how he’d thread a catheter through Marcus’s chest, inflate a tiny balloon, use a laser to blast away the bits of plaque that remained, then pop in a stent. “Your husband will be good as new!” I held on tight to Marcus’s hand as he lay on the stretcher the next morning, his legs pale beneath the blue-checked hospital gown, his normal smell of cologne diminished by whatever cleanser they’d used on the patch of shaved skin on his chest. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” he said, and kissed my cheek. I tried not to notice that his breath was stale and his cheek felt sandpapery.
Do I love him enough?
I wondered. If something went wrong, if I ended up caring for him, would I think of him fondly, or would he just be a burden, a sick old man holding me down?

Up in the hospital cafeteria, in my three-hundred-dollar jeans and a mohair sweater, light and soft, I sipped a cup of watery coffee, imagining, in spite of myself, what would happen if things went badly. I pictured Marcus’s vast fortune as a pie, a pie currently split into four slices, one for each of his children plus a slice for his granddaughter, little Violet, a squat and beady-eyed creature with two crooked teeth, notable only for her ability to produce endless rivers of drool. Unconsciously, I pressed my hand against my midriff. I was over forty and had been on the Pill for more than two decades. Could I have a baby with Marcus? Was it even possible? Maybe it was time to find out.

I tossed my coffee cup and found myself thinking about my own mother. Her parents had named her Lorraine, but when she was a teenager she’d shortened it to Raine. Raine Stavros, first-generation American. Her parents had emigrated from Skiathos, Greece, and ended up running a diner in Toledo, where they gave birth to a fine-boned, tiny-waisted girl with wide brown eyes, a proud, shapely nose, and wavy dark-brown hair.

Lorraine might have become captain of the cheerleading squad and queen of the prom before going off to the college education her parents had spent years saving to pay for. Instead, she got pregnant the summer she was seventeen, and rather than having an abortion or giving up the baby, she had me, and named me Samantha. Her high-school boyfriend said he’d marry her, had even given her a ring, but he enlisted in the army three months before I was born . . . and this was during Vietnam. Not exactly an endorsement of what he thought life with a wife and a baby might be like.

Raine—even before I could talk, she’d instructed me to never, ever call her “Mom”—dropped out of high school. Three days after I was born, she drove home from the hospital, dropped me at her parents’ house, and then, full of righteous indignation, pot, and possibly LSD, she’d taken off with her best friend in a
secondhand VW Vanagon to see the world, or at least the parts of it the Grateful Dead were touring that summer. She never really came home.

When I was old enough to understand, my yaya wasted no time in telling me that she was not my mother, a fact I’d already gleaned by comparing her stiff, beauty-parlor-dyed curls and lined face to the ponytails and peppy smiles of my classmates’ moms. “Here’s your mother,” Yaya would say, tapping one fingernail against a picture of a sullen Raine in a dress that looked like it was made out of canvas, with an empire-style waist that gathered beneath her breasts, then fell straight to the floor: a good look, considering that she was four months pregnant when the picture was taken.

“Where is she?” I would ask, and Yaya would give one of her sighs and dutifully pull out the atlas, running her finger across the country to land on the location of the Dead’s latest show. I had more questions—
Why did she leave me?
and
When will she come back?
chief among them—but my grandmother’s pinched face, her expression somewhere between sad and furious, kept my mouth shut.

My mother would come home a few times a year and she usually managed to show up around the holidays. She’d appear the day before Thanksgiving or three days after Christmas and, usually, in the week either before or after my birthday, as if she couldn’t quite remember when the actual day had been. I remember sitting at the window, watching her slam a car door shut and bounce up the driveway, still looking like a teenager. There would be presents in her hands, the smell of incense in her clothes, necklaces twinkling against her cleavage, feathered earrings tangling in her hair. There would usually be a man in tow, hanging shyly behind her shoulder, or holding her hand possessively. Sometimes she’d be tan, if she’d been out west or down in Florida. Her hair was long then, dark-brown and shiny,
hanging almost to her waist. Once, she’d come with her hair in a hundred narrow braids, with different-colored beads on the end of each one. I sat on her lap and ran my fingers endlessly through those braids, gathering them into bunches, then parting them like curtains.

I remember that her fingernails were always painted, usually either dark red or silver, and that her front teeth had bumpy little ridges on their bottoms. Once she showed up in cowgirl boots made of red leather, and I wanted those boots more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. Easter Sunday, when I was six, she showed up at church in a white lace skirt that turned out to be completely see-through in the bright sunshine of the Easter egg roll that was held on the church’s front lawn (my yaya, in a polyester blouse and black skirt, had hustled her wayward daughter back to the station wagon, hissing “You’re not decent!”).

Raine wore a silver ring on the second toe of her left foot and the Claddagh ring that my father had given her on her right hand. She had a blue unicorn galloping over a rainbow tattooed on her right hip. “Don’t tell Yaya,” she’d said merrily, laughing as she soaped me off in the shower, then gathered me into one of her mother’s stiff, line-dried towels, rubbing my skin until I was pink. It stung, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of complaining. I wanted her hands on me, even if they hurt. I had so little of her—a few snapshots I’d peeled from my grandparents’ photo albums and kept in a shoebox under my bed, a handful of postcards she’d sent from around the country, a feathered roach clip that I’d found behind a couch cushion, and saved without knowing what it was. If I could have gotten that same tattoo, I would have done it. I wanted to be marked as hers; I wanted every moment I had with her to count.

One Christmas Day when I was nine, Raine had arrived, a little tipsy at eleven o’clock in the morning, with a red-and-white Santa hat askew on her head, her mouth bright with lipstick,
flashing an engagement ring with a tiny diamond and introducing me to a shy young man who she said would be my new daddy. My grandmother’s face folded tight as she yanked out the pullout couch, muttering in Greek. The man got the couch (my uncle Ryan’s bedroom had been turned into a study), and Raine slept where she normally did, next to me in my single bed, in the narrow rectangle of a room that had once been hers. The faded pink wallpaper was dotted with red and white balloons; the closet, behind accordion-style plywood doors, still held some of her clothing; and her stuff was still pinned to the walls: a blue ribbon she’d won in a swim meet, a Polaroid of her and her onetime best friend at a pick-your-own-pumpkin patch, Jerry Garcia’s face, emerging from a tie-dye swirl on a black velvet poster above the bed.

She pulled me against her, whispering about how we’d move to Los Angeles and have a tree that grew lemons in our backyard. “You’ll love California, Sammie,” she said, telling me about a road that ran along the cliffs looking over the ocean, and a restaurant high on a bluff where you could eat fried shrimp and watch the surfers; the bonfires that dotted the sand at night, and how there was music, always music, everywhere you went. I fought to keep from falling asleep, wanting to stay up all night listening to her, wanting to hear every word.

When I woke up, she was gone. The sheets were still warm from her body; the pillow still smelled like her hair. I gathered it against me, telling myself that she’d come back and take me away, to the house with the lemon tree in the backyard, to the beach with the surfers and their bonfires. We would eat fried shrimp and salty French fries and listen to music all night long. I didn’t see her again until I was seventeen.