Eleanor (51 page)

The darkness is silent for a long moment, then says,
Her thread. It has been torn.
 

Again, some strange presence washes over Mea, distracting her, but she sees nothing. She can feel her shape distorted by a strong, invisible current, rushing around her, pushing past her, moving toward the faint ember in the distance.
 

The darkness feels it, too, and is made uneasy.
 

I felt something. What was
— Mea begins, then stops.
 

In the distance, the tiny spark that is Eleanor flares briefly, and goes dark.

Rain.
 

Agnes carefully saws through the baguette. Flakes of crust flutter onto the cutting board. The radio plays a Marvin Gaye song quietly, one she doesn’t know. She hums along anyway, feeling the music in her hips. She sets aside the knife and reaches for the butter, then gasps softly, and stops. Puts a hand on her round belly, turns and leans against the counter. She can feel the baby kicking, almost in time with the music.
 

“You like that?” Agnes asks.
 

Six weeks from her due date, and all she can think about is food. Her appetite had fled her during the first few months, worrying her. She and Paul had stayed up late one evening after an appointment with Agnes’s doctor. Paul wanted her to eat anyway, and he’d prepared chicken and dumplings—“My great-grandmother’s Texas recipe,” he said—but Agnes couldn’t manage a bite. Even the smell of food made her want to throw up.

But now she wants everything. She slathers butter and pickle relish on the baguette, craving the weird combination in some primal way that doesn’t even make sense to her. Paul wrinkles his nose at her choices lately, and offers to make chicken and dumplings again, but she turns him down, preferring instead the strangest food pairings. She thinks that Paul would be less critical of them if they didn’t seem like something a four-year-old would make themselves for dinner: peanut-butter-and-maple-syrup sandwiches, pizza with ketchup on top.
 

The baby kicks again, harder.
 

Paul is confident that it will be a drummer. They often lay awake at night, Paul’s cheek resting on the slope of Agnes’s belly, laughing at the rhythm of the baby’s kicks. The thumps come so quickly that they form a staccato beat, as if the baby is a tiny boxer trapped inside a punching bag.
 

“Except it’s learned to punch with its feet, too,” Paul says.
 

Agnes carries her plate into the dining room and sits down with a magazine. She narrates her actions so the baby will know her voice when it is born. “Your father says this magazine is trash,” she says, laying a copy of
Cosmopolitan
on the table, “but I like it. You’ll get to know that about us. Your father takes everything way too seriously. Me, I like the stories on TV and the gossip pages.”

Outside it begins to rain.

They put off choosing a name for as long as they can.

“We should wait until it’s born,” Paul says.
 

Agnes disagrees, if only because she hates calling the baby “it.”
 

“We’ll pick tonight,” she announces one evening when Paul comes home from work, and that’s what they do. No television, no board games, no yard work. They sit together in the bathtub, pink bubbles covering all but their knees and the crown of Agnes’s belly. She rests with her back against Paul’s chest, their skin slick and soapy, and Paul puts his arms around her.
 

“Henry,” she says. “If it’s a boy.”

She can feel his frown.
 

“What’s wrong with Henry?” she asks.

“I knew a kid named Henry when I was little,” Paul says. “We called him Slimesucker.”

“I don’t want to know why,” Agnes says. “Fine. No Henry.”

“No Henry,” Paul agrees.
 

“What about Robert? It’s a good, solid name.”

“Robert’s fine,” Paul says. “Boring, maybe, but I guess that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can surprise people when you’re a Robert. They don’t expect anything from you, and then
wham
, you write a bestseller, and they ask each other where in the world
that
came from.”

“It’s not a boring name. Maybe Stephen?”

“Gerald.”

“Ugh. No.”

Paul says, “What about if it’s a girl?”

Agnes says, “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that.”

“Maybe we could name her after—”

“Don’t say it,” Agnes says.
 

But Paul finishes. “—after your mother.”

Agnes tries to get up, but can’t find a surface to rest her palms on.
 

“Honey,” Paul says.
 

“I told you,” Agnes says, floundering around, trying to stand up. “I don’t want to do that.”

She slips and splashes back into the water, and a wave of suds cascades onto the floor.
 

“God
damn
it,” she says, and then stops struggling and slumps against Paul. “God damn
you
.”

“Sorry,” Paul says. “I just thought—”

“
Fuck
what you just thought,” Agnes snaps.
 

“It would be a nice tribute.”

“Yes, let’s name our child after a woman who abandoned her family,” Agnes says. She starts to cry.

“Hey,” Paul says.
 

“Don’t ‘hey’ me,” she snaps. “You know how I feel about this.”

“It isn’t like she ran away,” he says, quietly. “She disappeared. Something might have happened to her. It isn’t like she ran off with a movie star or—”

“I know what you think,” she says. “And—shit. I get it. I appreciate that you want to think the best of her. But—”

Agnes sits up, water streaming down her sides. She labors to turn sideways, then again to face Paul. She tucks her knees up, parting them to make room for her belly, and leans forward, her eyes damp.
 

“It doesn’t matter if she ran away, or if she drowned at sea, or if she was—it doesn’t matter,” she says. “I was four, Paul. I was four and my mother fucking vanished from my life when I needed her most. What do you think it was like, growing up with Dad without her? I spent all my childhood making sure he was okay while he got worse and worse and worse. So I don’t want to name our child after the person who took everything away from me. Including herself.”

Paul says, “She was your mother.”

Agnes just stares at him.

But it isn’t a boy, and it isn’t a girl.
 

It’s two girls.
 

Agnes wakes up from an afternoon nap, three weeks before her due date, to find the bed drenched. Paul comes home from work and grabs the bags that they packed, and drives her to the hospital. It’s a Thursday. The labor is prolonged and painful, and the girls don’t come until early Sunday morning. Agnes is only semi-conscious when the first cries sound in the crowded hospital room, and doesn’t hear the nurse exclaim, “There’s another!” She only grips Paul’s hand and pulls him close and whispers, “You name it,” and passes out.
 

When she wakes up, the girls have been washed and tagged and swaddled and are sleeping in a rolling bassinet beside the hospital bed. Paul is standing over them, enraptured—she can see on his face that he will be a better father than she will be a mother. She sees the two babies—each with a thicket of red hair, both in pink blankets—and then looks back at Paul.

He hasn’t noticed that she’s awake.

“I’m going to be the worst mother,” Agnes says quietly.

He looks down at her. He shakes his head and opens his mouth, but she puts a finger to her lips.

“My mother left me,” Agnes says. “I don’t know why, or even if she meant to, but I don’t know what a mother is supposed to do.”

Paul puts his hand on Agnes’s. “We’ll do it together,” he says.

But he has missed the point. Agnes is not afraid of being a parent.
 

She’s afraid of being a mother.
 

She’s afraid of those little girls.

“What are their names?” she asks.

Paul hesitates.
 

Agnes shakes her head. “Whatever you called them is fine. Really. What are they?”

Paul puts his hand on the bassinet. “This is Esmerelda.”
 

He looks at Agnes for a reaction, then puts his hand on the next bassinet.

“And this is Eleanor,” he says.

Agnes studies the girls quietly, without looking at Paul.

“I love you,” he says, hurriedly. “Are you mad?”

“No,” Agnes says. “No, I’m not mad.”

He takes her hand and squeezes. She makes no room for him in the hospital bed. Paul smiles, and stretches out in a vinyl chair in the corner. When some time later the girls wake, squalling loudly, Paul shoots up from his chair, but Agnes doesn’t stir.