Then Came You (30 page)

“Do you want to see him?” asked the nurse.

I did not. I wanted to hold in my memory the way he’d looked the first time I’d seen him in the Starbucks: healthy and fit, splendidly dressed, completely in control of the world around him, confounded by the coffee. Still, I nodded and let the nurse lead me down a hallway and into the tile-floored room where my husband had died.

Marcus lay on a bed, on top of dirtied sheets, alongside a single inside-out rubber glove. There were stickers pasted to his gray-furred chest, wires hooked up to box on a wheeled stand, an IV plugged into his arm. The room smelled like shit. His eyes were closed, his hair sticking up on the back of his head, and his face seemed to have somehow collapsed, giving him the look of a much older man.

“We need to get him cleaned up before the children see him.” My voice came out just right: clear and cultured, a voice used to being obeyed.

“Of course,” said the nurse. She went to the corner and picked up a phone. I reached out, smoothing my husband’s hair and realizing that what I’d suspected was undeniably true. He had been the love of my life. Every night, I’d fallen asleep with his arms around me and his face nestled in my neck. Every morning he’d brought me tea and kissed me.
You’re my favorite person in the world,
he would say.
What will become of me?
I wondered again, touching his forehead, feeling his skin, already cool and waxy, underneath my palm.

“What do I do now?” I asked.

The nurse looked at me, not unkindly. She had a ring on her left hand. I wondered if she had children, where she lived, what her life was like, if she was happy, if she was loved. “There’ll be a social worker coming along soon. She can talk to you about arrangements. Do you know what his wishes were?”

I almost laughed. His wishes were that we’d live together for years and years, that we’d travel, go to parties, go to dinners, go dancing. He wanted to buy a house in Vail and take his kids skiing. He wanted to sleep in on the rare Sunday morning he didn’t have to work, and then be woken up with a blow job. “I’m a simple man,” he’d always say when I was done.

“We’re having a baby.” My voice was faint. My hand was still on Marcus’s hair.
He’s sleeping,
I told myself, even though it didn’t look like that at all. His features had already started to change, to become somehow cruder. The nurse looked at me, surprised, first at my face, then at my belly.

“Oh, not me. A surrogate. She’s—we’re—due in May.”

The nurse looked like she didn’t know what to say to that. I sympathized.
Congratulations? I’m sorry?
Nothing was right.

There was a sink against the wall, a container of hand soap bolted beside it. In the bathroom, I found paper towels and, in a cabinet along the wall, a kidney-shaped plastic pan. I filled the pan with soap and warm water. Someone had sliced through his
shirt and pants, and they lay like a discarded wrapper against him. “Can you help me?” I asked.

“Oh, ma’am, we can take care of that.”

“Please,” I said, and found that I was crying. “Please.”

She helped me shift his body, pulling off the clothes, throwing them away. I wiped off the backs of his legs and pulled the sticky plastic pads off his chest, found a brush in my purse and brushed his hair. “You’re going to be a wonderful mother,” said the nurse, helping me cover him with a clean sheet. She stepped into the hallway, murmuring briefly with one of her compatriots from the desk. Then the kids filed in, Tommy pale and sick-looking, Trey with his wife beside him, Bettina weeping, thin lips trembling over her buck teeth.

“We should call Mom,” she said. “Mom should be here.” They huddled together, and none of them noticed when I slipped out the door.

I left my contact information at the desk. If the nurse there seemed surprised to see me go, she kept it off her face. Maybe she was used to all kinds of strange behavior from the recently bereaved; maybe she was just glad that I wasn’t screaming or tearing at my clothes or threatening to sue someone.

Outside, it was still daytime. The sun was still shining; I could hear music coming from a passing car’s open windows and construction workers shouting as they gutted the building across the street. I texted Manuel and sat on a bench until the big black car glided to the curb. He held the door, and I slid into the backseat. “Mr. Croft died.” It was the first time I’d said it. I imagined it would be the first of many.

He gave a small sigh, and crossed himself. “Ma’am, I’m sorry. He was a good man.” I wondered about that. I knew Marcus was generous to all of his employees. He gave raises and holiday bonuses and paid vacations. I also knew he expected his people to work as hard as he did, to be available whenever he needed
them, at five in the morning or in the middle of the night, or on Christmas or on weekends. I didn’t know whether Manuel had a family, whether he’d resented Marcus, or liked him, or felt protective toward him, or jealous of him, or absolutely nothing at all.

“Home?” he asked, and I nodded, wondering how much longer it would be my home. The decorator had finished the nursery the week before.
Nice,
Marcus had said—a single-word assessment of a room that had cost more than thirty thousand dollars to put together, six thousand for the antique rocking horse alone.
It’s crazy,
I’d said . . . but I’d loved it, and Marcus insisted that I buy it.

As we drove, I felt a bleakness settle through my body. Probably I wouldn’t even be able to stay in the apartment—it would, I guessed, give Bettina and Tommy and Trey a great deal of pleasure to make me leave.
Just until the will is probated,
they’d say.
Just until we get things sorted out.
The sorting out would take months, maybe years. There’d be lawyers, hearings, court dates, newspaper stories, unflattering pictures, all my history, my secrets exposed. It was paranoid, I knew—Marcus and I were legally married; this was legally my home . . . but I couldn’t shake the feeling, swelling into certainty with each passing block, that his children had never liked me and that they’d do whatever they could to harm me now that their father was dead.

I hurried past the doorman with my head down, hair obscuring my face, and was grateful to find the elevator empty. Upstairs, I took off my high heels and set them neatly by the door. Then I sat on the couch, cross-legged, my head hanging down, my eyes squeezed shut. I didn’t open them until I heard the front door slam. I raised my head and saw Bettina glaring at me. Anger had reddened her cheeks and darkened her eyes. Her hair stood out around her head in ropy tangles. Her lips curled
back from her gleaming teeth. In her fury, she almost looked beautiful.

“Did he find out about you? Is that what happened? He found out the truth and had a heart attack?”

“He was at a business lunch,” I said slowly, repeating what I’d been told, before her words could register.
Found out about you.
For the second time that day I started to shiver. Bettina pulled a folder out of her purse and threw it in my lap. Papers and photographs spilled out onto the carpet . . . and there was my old face, staring up at me from the floor.

“Did you tell him?” Bettina asked. Every drop of culture, of private schooling and summers in the Hamptons, was gone from her voice. She sounded as common as my own mother as she shrieked. “Did he know you’d been arrested? Did he know that you were still married when you married him?”

My body sagged against the couch. Blood thundered in my ears, and when I found my voice it was a raspy whisper.

“What are you talking about? I was . . . we got...”
Divorced,
I wanted to say, but Bettina started talking first.

“I hired a detective. I knew you were a liar the first time I saw you. I just didn’t know how bad it was.”

I managed to straighten the pile of pages into a stack. My hands were steady under Bettina’s glare, and my eyes were dry. “Your father didn’t know about any of that. All he knew was that I loved him.”

“Some love,” said Bettina. “How could he have loved you? He didn’t know what you were.” She smiled at me, a horrible, humorless grin. “You thought you’d waltz in here and fuck him to death and get everything. Well, you were wrong, Samantha. You’re not getting shit. I’m going to tell everyone.” She crossed the room in three swift steps and snatched the folder out of my hand. “Everyone. I’m going to ruin you.”

The door slammed shut. I was alone.

I sat for a minute, shaking, numb, breathless, forcing myself to think. What could she do to me? And what would it matter? I’d lost my love. I hadn’t lost my home yet, but that would be coming soon. And there’d be a baby. A baby and no Marcus. In that moment, I was eighteen again, eighteen and trapped and terrified, with no resources, no family, eighteen and barefoot on the black-and-white tiled floor of my first husband’s apartment, shaking so hard that the plus sign on the pregnancy test between my fingers was a blur, and the only words I could think were
I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

In the dressing room, I flipped through the hangers until I found the jeans I wanted, a pair left over from my pre-Marcus life, dark-rinsed, worn through at the knee. I put on one of his T-shirts—freshly washed and folded, of course, but I imagined it still retained the ghost of his scent, his cologne and his skin—and a soft gray wool cardigan on top.
He is gone,
I told myself. He’ll never come through the door again, never kiss me in bed, never pull out a chair for me at dinner, never pull my head into his lap while we’re watching TV. He’ll never see our baby.
I can’t,
I thought, with the frantic desperation I’d felt as a teenager, all those years ago.
I can’t.

Our luggage was kept in specially built shelves along one of the closet’s shorter walls. I took a duffel bag, a simple thing made of coffee-colored leather. It took me ten minutes to fill it up with jeans and T-shirts, underwear and bras, a set of workout clothes, a pair of sneakers, a toothbrush, and a comb.

In the media room, I sat at Marcus’s desk, flipped open my laptop, and logged onto the travel site I used. There, I bought a direct flight from Philadelphia to Puerto Vallarta, leaving the next morning. A ticket from Newark to Los Angeles, leaving an hour later. From Boston to the Bahamas. From LaGuardia to Vancouver. From Hartford to Paris. My fingers flew. The telephone
trilled. Fraud protection. My friends at American Express were concerned about suspicious charges. I assured them that the card was in my possession, that all of the charges were legitimate. “Is there anything else I can help you with today?” the pleasant-voiced customer service representative asked, and I told her, nicely, that I was all set.

I bought myself three more tickets—Frankfurt, London, and Lexington, Kentucky. Then I picked up my bag, hailed a cab, and slid into the backseat. “Newark airport,” I said, and started to run.

I
don’t understand,” I said, for what felt like the sixteenth time that morning. I was sitting at a table in a conference room in my father’s office with Jeff, my father’s lawyer, at my side and my father’s baby, with her wrinkled rosebud of a face, in a car seat on the floor beside me. I could have left it—
her,
I reminded myself,
her
—at home, with the doula, but I wanted her with me as a kind of visual punctuation, a reminder to the assembled attorneys of what had happened, and the situation I was in.

On the other side of the table was Leslie Stalling, director of the Princeton Fertility Clinic, who’d brought a lawyer of her own. There was an urn of coffee, a platter of pastries, and a bowl of fruit on a table against one wall, but no one had touched any of it. Both lawyers had briefcases at their sides and legal pads in their laps, and both had set digital tape recorders out on the table. Instead of a tape recorder or a notebook, Leslie, a fit middle-aged woman with bright blond hair, a strand of pearls, and a well-cut taupe suit, had a box of tissues in her lap. She wasn’t crying, but she looked like she might start at any moment.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to me. “In all the years of operating the clinic, we’ve never had a situation like this.”

“I get that.” How could I not? She’d said that line, or some variation of it, at least a dozen times:
In all my years of running
the clinic, in all my years of working with infertile women, in all my years on the planet I’ve never seen a situation like this.