If I Could Turn Back Time (28 page)

Fertility books, self-help books, daily affirmations, cards and keepsakes from a small circle of friends, a house that could have been glued right onto the one I’d grown up in and not had any style differences … all told a story I didn’t quite know. I couldn’t relate to it. Yet clearly my psychology was written all over the place here.

Nature versus nurture was ceasing to be a question for me.

But there was, of course, one thing I’d been ignoring. One factor that gave this “movie” a heavier implication: the baby I was apparently carrying.

I put my hand to my belly and waited. I don’t know what I was waiting for. I’ve never been pregnant, but I’m not a moron and I know you can’t feel the baby moving around at such an early stage. What I didn’t expect, though, was how hard my middle felt. Almost distended. Tendons were stretching and I felt heavy in a way I never had before. I had to pee constantly. While I’d gone through the keepsakes, I’d had to get up no fewer than three times, and it might have been four. It was uncomfortable, alien, but when I sat and tried to meditate on it, there was no accompanying sense of reality. I had no sense of a child, no sense of the person that child would be. No sense, even, of where my body was headed. It was like I was in a play and this was my costume.

There was no way to answer the metaphysical questions that this situation raised: Did we have many paths out there, lives being lived in accordance with every choice we could possibly make? Or could our own life shift suddenly into another, as mine appeared to have done, and did that happen all the time without our noticing it? If time wasn’t linear, did that mean we were as capable of changing the past as we were of changing the future?

All of these questions were moot as far as I was concerned because I hadn’t been able to change a damn thing in my experience. In fact, I couldn’t even figure out if my environment, or my self, was real. Presumably one of us was, but damned if I knew which.

I put the box back into the closet and searched for another, perhaps the one that contained the really interesting or juicy stuff, but I couldn’t find anything. So I went back downstairs and looked around, trying to find some sort of … I don’t know, clue? Reason I was here?

There were framed pictures of Brendan and me scattered about the house, taken over the years. I recognized one from our graduation / my birthday dinner at the Kona Kai. Others were hard to pin down. We didn’t look very different in them and I had no way to know when I had what hairstyle, so it was just a collage of a life we’d somehow had together. A trip someplace tropical—the kind of flash-front, palm-trees-in-the-back shot you might see on 90 percent of Facebook profiles. Skiing, though I’m pretty sure that was local, at Ski Liberty forty miles north. They’ll never hold the Olympic ski competitions in Maryland.

There was an office down a hallway off the kitchen, and I went in there hoping to find some paperwork from my job, some clue to what teaching was like and if it was enjoyable. I dug through the drawers and saw folders marked
TAXES
,
UTILITIES
,
HOME REPAIR
,
MEDICAL
, and so on, very neatly organized.

I had to have a valise or something somewhere. I started to poke around for it when the doorbell rang.

For a moment I froze. My impulse was to hide. To avoid interaction with anyone. But then I reminded myself that if I wanted to figure out what I was supposed to be doing and getting from this, then I needed to dive into it.

As I went back into the hallway, the bell rang again. I quickened my pace and opened the door to the worried face of a brunette woman, about thirty years old, wearing khaki shorts and a pink camp shirt, with a Coach bag slung over her shoulder.

“Oh, my god, Ramie!” She held a hand to her chest in visible relief. “I went by your classroom and they said you called in sick, and I was just so afraid that, you know, after last week … Is everything all right?”

What was I supposed to do? Was everything all right how? As far as I was concerned, everything was
not
all right, but I didn’t think the subtext of her question was,
Are you time-traveling?
or
Is anything seriously fucked-up happening to you?

The problem was I had no idea who she was or what her relationship to me was.

“Oh, no, it’s not, is it? Something’s wrong, I can just tell. What’s going on?”

“N-n-nothing’s going on,” I stammered. “Everything’s fine. I’m just not sure what you’re referring to. After
what
happened last week?”

“The cramps!” She bustled in, closing the door behind her with a quick glance over her shoulder, as if someone were out there who might hear this secret information. “I was afraid you were having another miscarriage!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“You’re not, right?” she went on. “You can tell me the truth. We can go to the doctor right now if you have
any
doubts at all. When I heard you weren’t at work, I was afraid you’d be here alone, too worried to tell Brendan something was wrong.”

“Why wouldn’t I want Brendan to know?”

“Oh, come
on.”
She half rolled her eyes. “He’d be all over you; you wouldn’t get a moment’s peace, and you know it. I thought we agreed that if you had any problems you’d call and say,
I saw Mr. McCormick in the hall today
. Hello? Did you seriously forget that?”

For a moment, I was completely baffled. Who
was
this woman and what the hell was she talking about? But then I smiled. Mr. McCormick. My seventh-grade math teacher. He was
such
an asshole. If I saw Mr. McCormick coming, it would mean I was in trouble.

I guess I’d come up with that as a code to let her, whoever she was, know I was in trouble.

“Mr. McCormick is nowhere near here,” I said, though actually I couldn’t literally be sure of that. Maybe, in this world, he was my next-door neighbor.

“Thank goodness. Do you have any of that vodka left, honey? I could use a slug. Sorry you can’t join me.”

“Um … yeah. Sure. Help yourself.” Because god knew I couldn’t help her. Given some time I could probably search out where we kept the liquor, but it might be a little suspect to do that while she was here watching.

I followed her into the kitchen, and she went straight to the freezer. Of course. Vodka was in the freezer.

“You sit down, girl,” she said, gesturing impatiently at me to sit at the table. “You shouldn’t be standing around, stressing those stomach muscles. Sit down and let me bring you something. Are you hungry?”

“No, I’m good.”

“Well, I’m at least bringing you a glass of milk. You need the protein and calcium.”

“Okay.” Whoever she was, she obviously had kids of her own, because she was very, very good at issuing orders in a kind and caring, yet very firm, way. And I was glad to take them, actually, because I was really tired. Stomach muscles or not, it was fatiguing standing on the hard floor. I wasn’t used to this body. It was really uncomfortable.

“Any symptoms today?” she asked.

“I’m just peeing a lot.” How was I going to get a name out of her when we apparently knew each other so well?

She laughed. “I remember that. Bad enough that you have to drink gobs of water, but then you have a baby sitting on your bladder. It’s murder. Absolute murder.” She opened a cabinet and took out a glass, took it to the fridge, and poured in milk.

“And my lower back is kind of sore.”

She kicked the fridge door closed and came over to me, glass of milk in one hand, bottle of vodka in the other. Was she just going to sit down and drink it right out of the bottle?

“Hurts steadily or is it coming and going like cramps?” she asked. “If it’s coming and going that could be cause for concern.”

“No, it just feels like I had a hard workout.”

Her shoulders relaxed. “That’s typical.” She took a shot glass off a shelf full of different ones that I hadn’t noticed before, and set it on the table. “My back hurt the entire time. For some of us just a few extra pounds starts the body aches coming.” She unscrewed the bottle, poured, then put the top back on and sat down. “That brood of brats has no appreciation for what I went through to have them.” She tapped her glass on the table, then lifted it and threw it back.

The gesture was familiar. It was a
thing
. A thing of ours? Or a thing I’d just seen somewhere before? Maybe it was a thing a lot of people did. But something else was ringing a bell in my mind.
Brood of brats
. Where had I heard that before?

“What’s the matter?” she asked. I must have been looking at her funny, because she raised a hand to her chin. “Did I spill?”

“No, I was just thinking about having a brood of brats. I’m not sure I can even handle one.”

“Well, as you know, I didn’t set out to have a brood. Who the hell knew you could have identical twins if they didn’t run in the family?”

I
knew. It was just mathematical odds. Fraternal twins were hereditary. I knew this because my cousins were identical twins and the random possibility of it both fascinated and scared me as I had once fantasized about my future family life. Had this woman and I really never talked about this before?

“Oh, wait. It’s fraternal twins that run in the family.” She poured another shot, then screwed the top on the bottle tightly. “You told me that. Honestly, I am so rattled today. Scott and I had counseling this morning and he was just completely uncommunicative.”

For some reason, that’s when it hit me. The note referring to a
brood of brats
. “Bonnie!” I cried.

She looked at me, alarmed. “What?”

Oops. “Counseling is supposed to make you feel
better
,” I improvised.

“Maybe, if you’re not married to the most selfish man on earth. Though”—she shrugged—“it’s driving you crazy being married to the most self
less
man on earth, isn’t it? Why couldn’t they just reach some nice point in between, eh?” I could tell she was loosening up. I wanted to encourage her to have another shot, so she’d be less likely to notice if I slipped up, but it wasn’t very responsible to try and manipulate someone into getting hammered.

The front door opened.

We both froze.

“Who is that?” I asked her.

“How the hell should I know?” she rasped back. “It’s your house, for god’s sake!”

“Hello?” a male voice called.

It wasn’t Brendan. Who was it? Wouldn’t any intruder, upon sensing people inside, do the same? What was the best response?

“Hello?” I called back strongly.

“Hey there.” A man walked into the kitchen. Good-looking guy.
Really
good-looking. About six feet tall, with dark hair and blue eyes. Tanned skin, though I had the impression that he always looked like that, not that he had an early season tan. I couldn’t guess at his ethnicity, but only because I was bad at that under the best of circumstances.

“Ramie,” he said, with a nod to me. Then he looked at Bonnie. “How are you?”

“Very well!” She didn’t add
now
, but I sensed it, though I still couldn’t tell whether that was because she knew this guy or not. “I’m Bonnie. Ramie’s pal.”

“Joe. Nice to meet you.” He registered her only briefly before his eyes flicked back to me. “You’re okay, then?” The words were casual, and to many the tone might have been as well, but there were just enough deeper notes there to give me pause.

I didn’t know what to say. “Good as ever,” I hedged.

It looked like it meant more to him than I’d meant to convey, but he ended with a nod and said, “I’ll just go on out and work in the garage, then. You know where to find me.” He didn’t wait for an answer but gave that tip-of-the-imaginary-hat gesture to both of us and turned right into the hall off the kitchen.

“He’s as cute as you said,” Bonnie breathed as soon as he was gone.

“Did I?”

“Did you?” She snorted. “You haven’t been able to shut up about him for months. I’m glad I finally saw him up close.”

“What did you think?” I couldn’t help asking.

“So gorgeous,” she said. “Even better than you described. What I don’t understand is why you’re not doing him.”

I had to laugh. Even while normal me would have been intrigued by the idea of “doing” him, it was an absurd question under these circumstances. “Might be something to do with my husband? Or maybe, just possibly, my pregnancy?”

She laughed but accompanied it with a dismissive hand gesture. “I’m not even sure that guy’s not the father!”

“What?”

I was startled; my voice had to be hard, maybe even the kind of tone I should apologize for, but she just looked at me, slowly and impassively. Apparently she thought I was the sort of person who might have a child with someone other than my husband, and then pass it off as his.

Dear god,
was
I?

“
Is
he?” she asked. “Is he the father? You know I won’t say a word to anyone.” She did that cross-my-heart gesture across the front of her Marc Jacobs top. “Honest.”

How much had I told her? Whatever it was, it was more than I knew now. So I had only to figure out whether she actually knew something or was goosing me about something she thought was common knowledge but was, in fact, a rumor.

“Bonnie, how many men have you known me to sleep with?” I made it sound like a foregone conclusion, but actually it was a question. A very sincere question.

“Fine,” she said, resolute. “I get it, there haven’t been that many that I know of. But you know how it’s been.… No offense, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d ventured out.”

Of course, I didn’t know how it had been. At all. And the idea of “venturing out” so casually on my marriage, particularly when I was pregnant, was a little alarming to me. Not because
anyone
might have done that. I didn’t have moral judgments for what anyone else might do. But the fact was, my apparent
friend
didn’t find the idea of
my
doing it surprising.