After You (7 page)

I had no reply. She was right: Sophie wasn’t going back up the birth canal. It seemed to me Lucy had just played her part in one of only two irreversible things—birth and death—and she had chosen wisely. So I told her to rest, and I helped out with the baby—I thought of her as
the baby
then, too wrinkly and squinty and slithery to own a name like Sophie yet, and tried my best to make it all seem less overwhelming. Lucy’s fear eventually was overpowered by love, and she stepped up to motherhood, embracing it with the same hearty zeal with which she’d approached graduate school.

Later, at the ceremony in which I became a godmother, she laughed about her initial freak-out and spoke in unequivocal cliché, which was the only way she spoke when it came to her daughter: “Sophie is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

And then, to me privately: “You should have one, L. Not yet, I guess.
Soon
, though. Trust me, it’ll be the best thing that has ever happened to you too.” Though I tried to tamp it down, I couldn’t help feeling a bit put out. I hadn’t the slightest stirrings of baby lust, nothing like the pangs I have now, and still it felt like a rebuke. Lucy couldn’t help but remind me that once again she had gotten to a finish line first.

I am not proud of those moments of jealousy that used to hit unannounced and sometimes unprovoked. Now I would give anything to have Lucy sitting in this kitchen booth waiting for her family to rise. I would stand in that alley in her place, feel the tip of a sharp blade, if that would mean Lucy could be here and Sophie wouldn’t wet the bed, if that would mean Sophie would sleep through the night.

If it could have been me, I would have done it. I would have given my irreversible life. But that’s easy for me to say now, in the cruel early hours of a morning like this, considering I know it’s the one vow I’ll never have to keep.

13

G
reg comes down to breakfast smelling clean and sober, like baby shampoo, and heads straight for the coffeepot. I now know more things about my best friend’s husband that I shouldn’t. How he breaks his Weetabix into little pieces before taking a bite. Briefs not boxers. The threadbare, randomly snagged sweaters and faded sweatpants he wears around the house on weekends to keep warm against the damp chill of summer. At night, he snores, foghornlike and arrhythmic. What he smells like during the occasional bender, and how different he smells the next morning.

“Sorry about last night. Got a little carried away, apparently,” he says, while I wait in the kitchen, feet tucked under me, hands wrapped around a mug. His voice is sheepish, and he avoids my eyes. I used to think Sophie looked and acted exactly like her mother; now I notice her mannerisms are all Greg. This look on his face—cherubic and ashamed—is identical to Sophie’s last night.

“No problem, but—”

“Right, then. I’m off.” He drops his mug in the sink, even though he has barely had his first hit, the move so abrupt that coffee splashes his sleeve. He heads through the dining room, toward the front door.

“Greg? Wait. We need to talk about a few things. About Sophie.”

“Not now, Ellie. Please, I’m late.”

“She’s talking.”

“Good. I knew she’d come around. I told you she’s a tough kid.”

“Yeah, but last night she woke up screaming and wet the bed.”

“I didn’t hear her.”

“No, you didn’t. You were passed out.” I don’t mean to be as rude as I sound, but I need him to remember Sophie’s existence. I understand that he just lost his wife, but there is a little girl upstairs who, as far as I can tell, hasn’t seen her father in three days. I wish I could change my tone, sound less petty-wife, more understanding, but it has seeped in already—maybe I’ve had too much practice—and it feels too late to change things.

“Leave the sheets for the cleaning service.” His tone now matches mine, dulled and cooled by frustration. “Is that all?”

“Well, no, not really. I got the name of a psychiatrist. For Sophie.”

“A psychiatrist? But she’s talking.”

“Greg—”

“Can you please just back off? It’s too early to have this conversation. Later, okay? Please, let’s just do this later.” I don’t know if he means that it’s too soon since Lucy died, or too early in the morning, or both.

His desperation makes me lighten my voice and my expectations of him, since I have no right to expect anything from him at all. I am not the person here to whom he owes something.

“Have a good day at work, Greg.”

“Thanks. You too. I’m sorry, I don’t know how—”

“Forget it. It’s okay. You’re right. Not now. Go, you’re going to be late.”

Greg nods, one of those businesslike male nods you’d give to an employee, the one that says,
Well then, I must be going; there is money to be made elsewhere, and I should get there first
, and heads toward the refuge of the front door.

I watch his departing back and feel the full weight of my intrusion. I have burrowed my way into his home, penetrated the deepest intimacy of his life at its most vulnerable moment, even tucked his daughter into bed, and still, without Lucy, we wear the awkwardness of strangers.

Three hours later I am shepherding a gaggle of kids through the Gorilla Kingdom in the stinging rain wearing the inappropriate pair of black alligator peep-toe sling-backs I wore to the funeral. The exposed skin is frozen and throbbing. My first time at the London Zoo—which, truth be known, is like any other zoo, if a little bit more compact and scaled down to urban limitations—and I am one of six chaperones for thirty kids, a job that mostly involves corralling. Not how I originally planned on spending the day—I am supposed to be in the Stafford living room, watching reality television on the gigantic flat screen—but when Claire asked me to fill in after a last-minute parent dropout, I couldn’t say no.

The other chaperones, all mothers except for Claire, intimidate me with their posh chatter and perfect bodies—alienlike flat bellies and pert breasts, the sort of body only retouched celebrities return to postchildbirth, when they schedule simultaneous tummy tucks with their C-sections. They’re decked out in skinny jeans, knee-high brown leather stiletto boots, form-fitting cashmere sweaters (mostly navy), and a double string of pearls: as much a uniform as the kids are wearing, and their behavior as cliquey. They don’t seem interested in talking to me, perhaps because they worry about the contagion of our tragedy or because they notice their children aren’t friends with Sophie. Or maybe because I am not tall and thin and effortlessly glamorous, like they are. Either way, I ignore the feelings that were a constant staple of high school—not quite being cool enough, not special enough to sustain anyone’s attention, the feeling that all my tangential friends tolerated me because of Lucy.

It doesn’t matter, because I have found my friend for the day, and you really need only one. That’s maybe the grand lesson of my lifelong friendship with Lucy. Most of the time she—one—was enough. So Claire, when she is not yelling in her mannered way at the kids, chats with me, happy to have an excuse not to interact with the hands-on mothers. She is unmoved by their desire to have soy milk served in the cafeteria and their pleas that the school teach Chinese in addition to the already mandatory French in year one. It’s evident that parents are her least favorite part of the job.

“Look at her,” Claire says to me in a whisper and points over to Sophie, who is making eye contact with a gorilla ten times her size, fifteen feet away. She stands apart from the rest of the class, not noticing the commotion of the other kids, who are screaming and giggling, running in circles closer to and then away from the exhibit. Sophie walks right up to the fence, unafraid to court the gorilla’s attention. She befriends one in particular; he’s huge and hairy and named Bobby, Jr., a name better suited to an American trailer park than the London Zoo.

“Hello, Mr. Gorilla. I am Sophie Stafford. I wish I could lend you my brolly, because it seems you’re getting quite wet.”

“She has no fear,” I say.

“I know, it’s amazing, isn’t it?”

A boy joins Sophie in front of the cage. He has dark, thick hair tied up in a black cloth bun in the center of his head and long legs that seem to still be unfurling. There are a couple of Indians in the class, but he seems to be the only identifiable Sikh. He’s quiet, like Sophie, and hasn’t imitated the gorillas, like the other children have done. Instead, he’s stopped our tour guide a few times and whispered questions in his ear, which the guide then answered for the whole group. Because of him, I now know that Bobby, Jr., was wild born, originally captured for the circus, and weighs in at about thirty stone.

“Who’s that?” I ask Claire.

“Inderpal. Sophie’s reading partner. Great kid, though he has some of the same problems in class that Sophie does. The other kids tend to treat him like an outcast because of his topknot. I paired them together because they’re both so ahead of the rest of the kids academically.”

“He’s adorable. All the kids are.”

Sophie and Inderpal are standing next to each other now, and I notice I am examining their behavior much the way they’re examining the gorillas’: with complete awe and curiosity. They are so beautiful and so foreign. I have no understanding of their capabilities.

“I wish we were at a dinosaur zoo,” Inderpal says to Sophie. “How cool would that be? Like a real-life
Jurassic Park?
The cages would have to be gigantic, especially for the T. rex. They’re carnivores, and I’m an herbivore. So they could eat me, but I couldn’t eat them.”

“Have you ever eaten astronaut ice cream? That’s probably okay for herbivores. My dad bought me some when he took me to the science museum, and it was so weird. Like ice cream, because it melts in your mouth, but it’s not cold or anything. It’s freeze-dried.” I picture Sophie and Greg together in a museum, following the map on the brochure through the exhibits, room leading to room, learning about space and weather and the human body, finally ending in the gift shop, buying trinkets to remember the day by. The image soothes me.

“Nah. Hey, do you watch cricket? I have seven Monty Panesar posters in my room. You’ll have to come over and see them one day.”

“Who is Monty Pane-whatever?”

“Panesar! You must know Monty Panesar. He’s only the best cricketer in the world. My cousins from Luton actually got to meet him and everything. Mum says I look just like him, or I will do when I have a beard too. They call him ‘the Turbanator’ because he plays wearing a
patka
.”

“Seriously? They call him ‘the Turbanator’?”

“Yup. Mum thinks it’s rude, calling him that, but—don’t tell—I think it’s funny.”

“I won’t tell.” They turn their attention back toward Bobby, Jr., now eating a banana. The gorilla’s gigantic brow is furrowed, and he’s sitting with his legs crossed on the ground. He peels and then chomps his fruit, quick bites in succession without pause; when he finishes, he immediately picks up another and throws what’s left over his shoulder.

“Wow, he’s going bananas,” Sophie says, a corny joke, a Lucy joke, but her delivery is shy, almost whispered, like she is practicing before committing to saying it out loud.
Please, Inderpal, please laugh
, I think, as I watch him take stock of her, examine this previously uninteresting species: girl.

“That’s a good one, Sophie,” he says, and my heart swells when he giggles.

* * *

At the next exhibit, a red-faced black spider monkey is walking the ground on all fours with her baby clinging on—a mini-monkey along for the ride, upside down, belly to belly with its mother.

“Cute,” Claire says. There is a longing in her voice that I recognize as my own. I adjust her age up a few years. A thirties’ tone, that longing.

“Yeah.”

“You have any? Kids, I mean. Not monkeys.”

“No.” Is this technically a lie? I don’t know, I don’t know, I never know. “You?”

“Nope, not unless you count these guys.”

We enter Butterfly Paradise, a hot and humid tube shaped like a gigantic caterpillar and set to mimic Caribbean weather conditions. Though Sophie was unafraid of the gorillas, she is disturbed by this exhibit and stands closer to my leg, practically hugging my thigh. I see why she’s scared. The butterflies, with their large stained-glass wings, are free to mingle with us here, flying just by our ears, sometimes landing on our shirts. The flapping of their wings looks frantic, like they are desperate to hurl themselves forward through time, their efforts inefficient and spastic and not up to the task.

The other children sense Sophie’s fear, and, strangely, this brings them closer to her. They stop their imitations—arms thrown up and down, bodies jerking—to talk to us.

“So are you Sophie’s mum?” a cocker spaniel of a boy, with a bowl cut and an overbite, asks as a couple of the other children look on.

“No,” I say.

“Yes,” Sophie says.

Our answers overlap each other, and he looks at us, confused.

“I’m her godmother,” I say, and feel both sadness and pride that Sophie has claimed me as her own. Is she worried that this is one more thing—the lack of a mother—that will divide her from the other kids?

“Are you from America? You have a funny accent,” he says.

“She’s from Boston, that’s why,” Sophie says. “Which is in the state of Massachusetts, which is in America.”

“Well, you sound like one of the Transformers. I’d like to have a godmother who is a Transformer and can become like a car or something. That would be awesome,” he says, his whole body shaking with excitement at the prospect. He turns
awesome
into two words:
awe some
. “And then my godmother would go
RRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrroar.”

“That’s enough, Stephen,” one of the mothers—presumably his—says, and leads him away by the arm. A few minutes later, it dawns on me that he’s allowed to continue making his Transformer noises; she meant that’s enough of talking to the two of us.

“Ellie, thanks for coming along. You made the day lovely.” Claire and I are back at school, at the pickup and drop-off point where I seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time.

“My pleasure. Though those other mothers are scary. You notice how they’re all going for coffee now and they didn’t invite Soph and me?”

Claire looks down at her feet, embarrassed that I would come right out and say it. Apparently, I’ve made a social faux pas: my American reflex to say more than is necessary.

“Yeah, they’re not the warmest group of people. Sorry, Ellie. I hope you don’t get the wrong impression about this place. All the parents aren’t like that.”

“I know. Listen, I may be way off base here, but may I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure.”

“Are you seeing anybody? I ask because my brother lives in London, and, well, you seem perfect for him.”

“Really?” I can’t tell if the surprise in her voice comes from my breaking another cultural taboo—maybe Brits don’t set up friends they barely know—but then her face breaks into a grin. “Thanks! I’m actually terribly single at the moment. Just barely survived a horrible breakup not too long ago and haven’t quite made it back out there. You think these mums are scary? You should try dating in London.”