After You (27 page)

“I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to say anything just yet.” The disappointment squeezes my lungs, makes me feel small and light, a human paper airplane. There was a part of me, larger than I care to admit, that had hoped Phillip would take me in his arms, promise to love me and the baby forever, and press restart on the life we had been living. We’d be a new and improved version of PhillipandEllie, one where we wouldn’t be tested and fail. Where we had learned our lessons and applied them, like the straight-A students we once were.

Instead, I can feel his confusion and heavy terror. His reaction identical to mine when my mother pronounced me pregnant. When she couldn’t grasp how terrifying the prospect was.

“A baby.” Phillip breathes the word.

“Yup.”

“We need a specialist. Like a neonatal expert, or a high-risk-pregnancy one, you know? Someone who knows what they’re doing. We can’t, I can’t, I wouldn’t survive if, if something happened, to the baby, or to you.”

“I’m going to be fine.” I motion to my belly. “We’re going to be fine. This is not a high-risk pregnancy. I spent the first trimester throwing up, which is supposed to be a good sign, and now I feel great, and … I don’t know. I just know we’re going to be fine. But, you’re right, a specialist couldn’t hurt.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t there while you were throwing up. I should have been there.”

“You didn’t miss much, believe me. It wasn’t pretty.”

“Still.” Phillip grabs my shoulders and turns me to face him. His move is forceful and strong, angry. “Wait a minute. You’ve known about this for thirteen weeks, and you’re just telling me now? Are you serious?”

“I wanted to tell you in person.”

“There are these things called planes.”

“I’m sorry.” Empty words, I know, but I mean them. I
am
sorry. I have chosen me over him every time, and I have to stop doing that. Soon I’ll find a way to explain that I needed those three months to get over my fears, to make sure this was real, that the baby was going to stick around. That I needed that time to grow back into me again. That telling him would have somehow made it too real too early. We would have started making plans—of course we would have been presumptuous, we wouldn’t have been able to help ourselves—and I couldn’t risk that.

I am not sure my explanations matter. It’s done.

“For God’s sake, Ellie.” Phillip gets up off the ground and walks away from me, to the water, so close to the edge he could wet his feet. He just stands there, his hands in tight fists, trying to fight too many emotions at once, sadness and fear and anger and confusion, and maybe excitement too. For too long, he stands like that, showing only his back, riding out the carnival in his head.

* * *

“Are you staying here or are you going back to London?” he asks me now, again sitting forearms to knees, about a foot away from me, his eyes bloodshot from tears I have not witnessed.

“Yes. I mean, I’m staying here. I’ll visit Sophie as much as I can, but we’re having a baby. I want to be here.”

“Were you planning on coming home?” He means the house in Sharon, our home. An honest question. Far from an invitation.

“I don’t know. I guess it depends.” And then my own tears come, because I don’t even know what it depends on. More than Phillip taking me back. I realize now that I am as confused as I’ve always been, that the unburdening of words, of the truth, can’t undo the last few years of retreat. I left Phillip and Phillip left me, long before Lucy died, long before he mentioned the D-word in the hotel room, back when our sentences started piling up in corners around the house, like impromptu book stacks, everything that never got spoken or heard or asked about. All the times we turned away while the other was speaking, absorbed in our BlackBerrys, or the television, or a novel; a whole year may have gone by where we barely looked each other in the eyes. How do we get back to something recognizable?

Phillip nods.

“I don’t know either.” There is only sadness now where anger used to live, in that gaping space between us. There won’t be answers today or maybe anytime soon. Too many layers to be unraveled, and poked at, and aired. Too much work for an afternoon like this.

“Must have been a strong swimmer,” he says now, and I follow his eyes out to the river, looking for a brave soul in a wet suit, but there isn’t one.

“Huh?”

“To have hit the jackpot on that one time? That was wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. I mean, seriously, a strong swimmer.” Phillip smiles, all masculinity and pride. “That’s a good sign.”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. I mean, wow.” Another smile. This one, my favorite of his: Phillip looks like a little kid the second before clawing into wrapping paper. Pure wonder.

“Yeah. Wow is right.”

And then, without asking, he takes his hands and slips them under my sweater, so they are cupped against my belly, warm and surprising. He moves them back and forth, waving hello to our baby.

48

I
am sitting at the dining table in my dad’s house and Sophie is sitting on her mini-bed, and it’s almost like we are in the same room. I want to reach out and touch her hair, tuck the piece that has fallen out of her messy ponytail behind her ear, smooth down the bumpy top. The wonder of Skype, something not so far off from what I dreamed up in my dot-com days. We’ve been talking for two minutes, and Sophie has already shown me her armpit, the inside of her left nostril, and her tonsils. “How many days?” she asks. “Ten.”

“I’ve been meaning to tell you, you left your book here.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
. I’ve been reading it.”

“Soph, I don’t think that’s appropriate for your age.”

“I’m nine now.”

“Exactly. You’re not allowed to read it until you’re at least thirty.”

“But it’s interesting. Like a science book. Do you have hemorrhoids?”

“Sophie.”

“And are you taking folic acid? You better be taking folic acid. I don’t want my godsister having brain damage. Next time I see you, she’ll be, like, four and a half inches long.”

“She, huh? So you think it’s going to be a girl.”

“Yup. You know what I’ve been thinking about lately?”

“What?”

“Isn’t it weird that what happened to Mummy happened in the same year that you made a new person?”

“Yeah, it is. Kind of reassuring, if you think about it. That good can follow bad.”

“We so needed something happy this year.”

“We did.”

“And I’ve always wanted to be a big sister.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I used to do all these spells and stuff, but it never happened. And now look. You’re having a baby, and I’m going to be a godsister.”

“It’s almost enough to make you believe in magic.”

“Nah, it’s not magic. It’s biology. I learned all about it from Google.”

49

I
am sleeping at my father’s, but every day, when Phillip comes home from work—hours earlier than I remember him returning when I lived here—I meet him in Sharon, and we sit in our kitchen and discuss our lives over the dinner table we spent months picking out. The house looks only slightly different from how I left it; I haven’t realized how ingrained this place is, until I look around and can catalog the minute changes. The pen jar has migrated to the other side of the room; a pile of mail has been set aside for me on the counter instead of in the wicker basket. A new photo of Sophie is on the refrigerator, this year’s class photo, with a thank-you note for Phillip’s birthday gift. She hadn’t told me she sent him one, particularly one that says
WE miss you
with the
WE
triple-underlined. Our wedding photo is still framed in the entryway, which I decide to take as a good sign.

We are on a crash-course diet of confrontation. Fingers pointed, sentences slung like the weapons they are, doors slammed and opened and slammed again. We take turns screaming and fighting and apologizing and comforting, like we are spinning a chore wheel.

Phillip says he wants this baby, he has never wanted anything more, and he’ll use words that are new for him, that delight both of us—
-fate, miracle, blessing
. Ten minutes later, we flip them over and wallow in the dark edges. What if we don’t fix us? The words that are the opposite
of fate
and
miracle
and
blessing
rear up
: accident, mistake
.

“Are we kidding ourselves that we can do this?” Phillip asks me. “This is not the way you’re supposed to bring a child into the world.”

But we are bringing a child into the world, whether we are supposed to or not.

“I think we can do this,” I say.

We talk about Oliver, something we have never done, not really, not in a way that wasn’t about the practical: dismantling the nursery, the God damn medical bills, sending the stuff we had bought to Goodwill. Never about what it was like afterward, how we’d both turn away from our neighbors pushing strollers down the street, the horrible mail from the baby-product companies congratulating us on stages our child never got to reach, and that throbbing pain when my milk came in and there was no place for it all to go. The tears or the pain or the milk.

When Phillip saw me crying at the wasted wet circles on my T-shirt or sometimes at nothing at all, he looked away. And when he kept going for both of us—got up in the early hours of the morning and put on a flawless suit and went to work—I looked away, too, like he was doing something wrong. I tell him how much I regret that first flinch in the hospital room, how I lay awake at nights wondering if everything would have been different had I not moved away from his hand.

“It wasn’t about the first flinch, Ellie. It was the two years of flinching that came afterward. From both of us.”

“I retreated,” I say, remembering for a moment that cold paralysis I felt after we lost Oliver. How any comfort seemed a paltry, empty offering. The way everything and everyone suddenly seemed farther and farther away, like I was looking at them from an airplane window.

“Yeah, and after a while I retreated too.” He’s talking about this last year of late nights in the office, weekends also. Of us going to bed forgetting to kiss each other good night. Forgetting that there was a reason we had chosen to share a bed—our lives—in the first place. “And then you went and left. Literally. Just dropped everything, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

Our questions pile up, our answers meek in comparison.
Where were you? Why didn’t you hear me? What happened to us? Why did you go? How did we get here?
Nothing is clear or clear-cut, except that there is a baby, and it’s growing. I almost have a real bump now, and when we are not terrified and angry we are overjoyed.

Seven days later we are not on the other side. We are far from the other side. We don’t even know if another side exists yet. Please, let another side exist.

I relish the moments when we forget we are climbing anything at all and we fall back into ourselves.

“How’s your arm?” Phillip looks at my limb, takes it in his hands, and turns it over, looking for evidence.

“Totally fine.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Nope. As good as new.” I flex my fingers, bend my elbow, as if to prove it to both of us, my arm thick and strong and unleashed. I’m amazed by the fact that keeping my bone swaddled into a whole forced it to re-fuse, that the doctors relied solely on the power of proximity. A silent dialogue between bone and bone.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Phillip says.

I think about that white line the doctor showed us on the X ray, my breaking point, and wonder if the scar is still visible. Somehow, I think not.

Later, we are on the couch, our heads aching from the brutal rattle of words. We are tired of mountain climbing, of going backward through our marital garbage, of being adults and treating this like there is a problem to be solved. My head is resting on Phillip’s shoulder, his hand is on my belly.

“You know how your entire life can change in an instant for the worse? Like when Oliver suddenly stopped kicking or that call about Lucy? Everything changes. But do you think it can work the other way too? One second you think your entire life has gone to shit, and the next you realize that maybe things can be okay? Do you think that can happen?” I ask Phillip now, hoping that the answer is
yes, yes, yes
. That we can just decide to be the happy couple we had always intended to be. We hit restart. Do-over.

“I hope so,” Phillip says. He has decided to call in sick tomorrow, to give us more time, to do what, I don’t know. Hopefully not to
talk-talk
, hopefully for more of those delicious forgetting moments, when it’s just PhillipandEllie in a room together again. When we eat off each other’s plate, when one of us washes the dishes and the other dries, when we hold hands, just because our fingers are close.

In some ways, it’s like being back in the waiting room. Two futures here, both plausible, where so much hinges on some words. The doctor said
panic
, not
heart
. But he could have said
heart
. I was sure he was going to.

“Let’s just try to be us again,” I say. “Can we at least try that? Give it a shot? I mean the old us, the good us.” I hold my breath, hoping he sees it, too, the opening of a box in our brains giving ourselves the power to choose. We can go to couple’s therapy, for real this time. We can take a retest.

“Okay,” he says, and I can see in his eyes he understands what I’m proposing. The new, new PhillipandEllie. “We owe it to ourselves to try. Not even the old us, but the real us again.”

He looks at me, and I look back, and there it is: another promise we are making, another vow that we hope this time we will not break.

Phillip leans closer. His hand, my cheek. A soft, careful touch. I feel warm and loved, fragile, too, and I rest my nose in the spot on his neck. The home spot.

I hope I get to stay here.

“You think we can do it?” I ask, my words muffled by his skin.

Phillip doesn’t say anything. We are out of real words for the moment. He kisses me instead, tender, a warm blanket of a kiss. A memory, too, the way those kisses used to feel: precious and something to be savored.

His hand, my cheek, again, the slightest hint of touch.

“An eyelash,” he says, offering a black half-moon to me on his finger as a gift. “Make a wish.”

The baby, first the baby. But there is the real us, too, and Sophie and Greg, and my parents, Claire and Mikey, Lucy, even. I close my eyes, wrap us all into one thing, love and home and home and love, and I say it in my head like a mantra and I blow.

I open my eyes. My eyelash is still stuck to his finger. The wish has gone nowhere at all.

“Try again,” he says, and so I do.