If You Lived Here (2 page)

I scowl. “No. She gets pleasure out of making me wait.” Over the years, I’ve fallen into the habit of depicting adoption agency officials as witches, or thieves, or petty heads of state.

Although he looks unconvinced, he’s clearly amused.

“Well, it seems like that to me,” I assert, but at least I’m laughing now. It’s a sign of my optimism that I can joke about our adoption. Martin grins. He has an astonishing ability to read my moods and know exactly how to respond to them. Mostly, though, it’s the sweetness in his face that helps to relieve my stress. He doesn’t look so different to me than he looked at thirty-two, when I first met him. Sometimes, in the glare of a summer graveside service, I’ll gaze at him across the expanse of mourners and see him as others might—average height, graying hair, skin pale, body a little thick around the middle. My mother calls him a fine-looking man, which is a perfect demonstration of how easily her feelings sway her. When she first met him, and hated the fact that I had fallen for a mortician, she called him “Eeyore.” Once, when she was really upset, she even referred to him as “Dr. Dead.” Now that she loves him, she says he’s “fine-looking,” “a real catch,” “Mr. Right.” The truth is, you wouldn’t notice him in a crowd. You’d only notice him if you accidentally ended up next to him at a dinner party or on a plane. Fifteen or twenty minutes

would go by with you entangled in some unexpectedly enthralling conversation about Sumatra or bowling or compost. You’d come up with the most arcane bits of information—things you didn’t even know you knew—and you’d be surprised by the breadth of your knowledge, and by how smoothly it combined with his, and you’d begin to feel that the two of you were among the most fascinating humans on the planet and, quite suddenly, you’d think: Hey, this guy is kind of cute.

We sit. I compose a memorial card for a funeral taking place tomorrow night. Martin reads. I glance at the phone every so often, willing it to ring. Finally, without looking up from his magazine, Martin says, “Let’s walk down to the river.”

I glance at my watch. I’ve completely forgotten that Theo’s band is playing downtown tonight. “Oh, God,” I say. “Then we’d better hurry.”

Wilmington lies on a peninsula that spans the distance between the Atlantic Ocean and the Cape Fear River in the southeastern corner of North Carolina. It takes more than forty minutes to walk from our place on Market Street all the way to the river, but on an evening like this one, it’s crazy to get in a car. Within five minutes of leaving our house, I feel better. I feel happy, even. I’m almost ready to believe that sometime in the next few weeks, we’ll actually have our child. I take Martin’s hand. I like to imagine Sonya here with us, the newest member of our family, lounging in her stroller, sippy cup in hand, admiring this orange sunset. We’re ten miles from the ocean, but I can smell the salt in the air and see, on people’s front porches, the seashells, chunks of coral, and driftwood they’ve carried back from the beach. Our little girl will enjoy, I think, this Wilmington spring, this flowering drama of dogwoods and redbuds, lace-draped cherries, lavender wisteria, giddy azaleas, peaches and plums. I believe that she will be happy here.

It’s nearly six-thirty by the time Martin and I get to Level Five, a downtown rooftop bar that overlooks the river. I don’t see Martin’s son Theo, but he’s sure to arrive any minute. Last summer, Theo founded the band, Carolina Waikiki, as a joke. He’d been playing bass in a jazz fusion group for years, but when they got an unexpected gig at a tiki

bar in Kure Beach they bought some thrift-store Hawaiian shirts and Theo pulled out his old ukelele. For some reason, the group tapped into an unknown market for Southern-tinged Hawaiian music, not only here in Wilmington but also up in the mountains, in Charlotte, and in Raleigh. Audiences go wild when they hear “Little Grass Shack” sung in a Carolina drawl, and the band has developed the kind of avid following that Theo had previously only dreamed about. Martin’s son is now considered the best ukelele player in our part of the state. They’ve even traveled up to Richmond.

We find a table at the edge of the roof and order hamburgers. Martin gets a scotch and I decide to try one of the piña coladas, which look like Slurpees to me. From where we sit, you can see the great gray hulk of the battleship
North Carolina
berthed below, and the shadowy woods of Brunswick County stretching to the west. The view is nothing but river, trees, and the scattered lights of cars heading out of town.

“We’ve got to work late tomorrow,” I remind Martin. “I’m going to make
halusky s kapustou
for the staff.” It’s a bland but filling Slovakian specialty—potato dumplings and sour cabbage. I’ve been trying to perfect it so that when Sonya arrives, she’ll have something to eat that’s familiar.

On the other side of the bar, Theo emerges through the door, tottering under the weight of an amp. Martin waves, then leans across the table. “Listen,” he says. “I want to give you something.”

“What?” It’s not my birthday or anything.

He reaches down to his jacket pocket and pulls out a
National Geographic
. Martin often goes around with a rolled-up magazine in his pocket, so I didn’t even notice this one as we walked downtown. “I found it a while ago, not that long after we got Sonya’s referral,” he explains. “I wanted to give it to you when we were closer to traveling, and we seem pretty close to traveling now.”

“I guess.” My eyes are on the magazine. You can tell it’s an old one because the cover design looks slightly different from how it looks on recent issues. The pages are crinkled and stiff, too, like something that has, over the years, become damp and dry many times over.

Martin carefully opens the magazine to a page marked with a Post-it, then turns it toward me so that I can read the title: “Slovakia’s Spirit of Survival.”

“I don’t know how much you’ll learn from this,” he says. “It came out in 1987.”

I pull the article toward me, gently turning the pages to reveal pictures of farmhouses and villages, a beer hall, the Danube River, our daughter’s native land. “I’ll learn so much!” I gush. A woman who has just received an enormous diamond from her husband could not feel more elated. I don’t actually need a lot of information about Slovakia; I’ve got books and books already. What I needed was a sign from Martin that he is with me now, that he and I are making this leap together.

We look at the pictures. “This is perfect,” I say, imagining him digging through thirty years’ worth of moldy boxes in our basement to find it. I know a few people who constantly clip out articles from the daily paper to send to friends, scrawling “Read This!!” and “FYI!!” across the margins. But, in my opinion, such behavior is kind of boorish. Martin is not like that at all. He’s a voracious, but private, reader. Sometimes, though, if he senses a need, he will search until he finds a perfect piece of writing to address it: a poem, a story, a cover article from
National Geographic
. Once, not long after Rita, our receptionist, lost her husband, Martin gave her an essay about sea lions he’d found in an old issue of the
New Yorker
. I can’t say exactly how the topic of sea lions could help Rita through that period, but it did. She said it was the most perfect thing she could have received, at the most perfect moment.

“How long did it take you to find this?” I ask.

Martin smooths down the pages with his fingers. “A couple of hours, I guess,” he says. Then he laughs. “Actually, I ended up reading a lot of things I didn’t need to read. I guess it took more like a week.”

I have a box in my bedroom closet where I keep the articles that Martin has given me over the years. I keep his letters, too, and various cards and photographs that I love. But nothing so precisely reflects the history of our relationship, our initial infatuation, and our continuing affection for

each other as the dusty pages that he has torn out of magazines and given to me from time to time, imperfectly stapled or clipped together, often rumpled or torn or oddly folded. “Remember the time you gave me all your
Geographic
s with stories about India in them?” I ask.

He smiles. “Of course.” We barely knew each other then, but, one

day, Martin brought me six different issues of the magazine in a brown paper bag. Together, we went through them, page by page, looking at pictures, reading captions, constructing a whole country through our conversations, disputes, and ruminations on what life might be like over there. Suddenly, “India” wasn’t just a name on a map, a promise of risk and adventure. It was
this
particular woman, standing in front of a train station, a basket of oranges on her head. It was
this
road,
this
palace,
this
field. For me, the idea of travel had only been about going and doing. Martin saw the world in terms of its content. He might not go anywhere at all, but he read, he asked questions, he listened, he tried to understand. He wanted the things he saw and did to have meaning. For Martin, every single minute of life was valuable and precious, and that way of being in the world felt completely new and compelling to me. I was crazy for him then, and still am, really. I can’t imagine going through this life of mine with anyone else.

Martin says, “I couldn’t believe that a twenty-year-old girl from Wilmington would think of traveling all over the world by herself.”

I grin. “I didn’t actually do it,” I remind him. It’s not a sore subject, but the truth is, perhaps, a little less exciting than the idea of me he once created in his head. “I married you, remember?”

More than twenty years have passed, and I have no regrets about the fact that I chose this adventure over that one. I pick up his hand and kiss it. He looks sheepish and shy. I think he’s always felt guilty that I missed my chance, that I decided not to travel because of him. The truth is, I would still rather fantasize about India with my husband than actually go there. He smiles at me. “So, we’ll go to Slovakia together.”

We toast, piña colada clinking against scotch, but I find it hard to speak. I keep hold of his hand, rubbing it against my cheek, gripping his

fingers. I don’t think I could love him more than I love him now. From across the bar, the first few notes from Theo’s ukelele drift toward us, then the rattle of the drums. Theo, all lilty voice and puppy charm, begins to sing. “Promise me, promise me, promise me, do, here where the waves begin to sigh. Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me, please, my lovely darling Hokuikekai.”

On Friday morning, I stay home for a while to make the
halusky s kapustou
for our staff, six of whom I’ve scheduled to work tonight. From four-thirty to six-thirty, Martin will run the viewing for eighty-nine-year-old Catherine Simmons in the small chapel’s viewing room and, at seven, in the main chapel, I’ll hold a memorial service for Bladen Hughes. I imagine that the Simmons viewing will bring in fifteen or twenty people at most, but we could see a couple hundred for Bladen Hughes, who was a Rotarian and raised millions for the renovation of Thalian Hall. You have to be ready for a large crowd, in any case. In my years in this business, I’ve noticed that a single death can affect a wide and often surprising range of people. Unlike a wedding, for which families compile a guest list that shows their varied allegiance to the outside world, a funeral demonstrates how outsiders feel toward a family and its loss. Grief is very democratic.

Our house sits on the far side of the funeral home property, separated from the main building by a parking lot and a stand of oaks. The house has been in Martin’s family for seventy years and the inside wall of our bedroom closet still has the pencil marks his mother made over decades of measuring her children’s growth. Ever since Martin and I began to try to have a baby, I’ve looked forward to the day I’d add my own child’s measurements to that wall. It’s been so many years, though. Your sense of hope drains incrementally, a drop at a time as each month goes by, as each pregnancy ends in miscarriage, as each new attempt at conception fails. It happens so slowly you almost don’t notice. The change is profound but inconspicuous. You keep on acting as though you’re having a child, but you start to lose your ability to believe it. The chart inside your bedroom

closet evolves from a happy promise into a constant reminder of something you still don’t have.

As soon as I get into the kitchen, I pull five pounds of potatoes out of the bag in the pantry, then a can of plum tomatoes and another one of corn. Tomatoes and corn aren’t in the recipe but they’re part of my plan to perfect it. I’m glad that Martin has gone over to the office already. He teases me about the quantities I cook. You can barely find room for a box of spinach in our freezer because of all the extra casseroles, quarts of soup, and third trays of brownies left over from the day I only needed one or two. I agree that all of us, except maybe Rita, our receptionist, could stand to lose a few pounds, and that so many crumb cakes and quiches won’t replace any loved ones anyway. Still, we living like to eat. I remember that I’m alive when I bite into an apple (although I seem to feel more alive when I bite into a piece of fudge). That’s why we fill the homes of the grieving with stew and pie. That’s why I cook. I concentrate on the sizzle of bacon, the knock of my knife, the sudden overbearing smell of cumin. I make my life tiny, nothing but frying pan and stove, sizzling onions, a piece of steaming potato pressed hot against my tongue. This is my narrow universe. This is me, I think, alive.

When the phone rings, I am opening the can of tomatoes. I don’t move immediately. Instead, I stare down at the can, a trickle of watery juice already pooling on the metal top, and I know it’s Carolyn Burns. I turn off the stove, throw a clean dishrag over the dumpling dough, walk to the phone, and answer it.

“Shelley? This is Carolyn Burns. Southeastern Adoptions.” After all these months, the woman still refuses to acknowledge the essential nature of our relationship, that I, like all her clients, am desperate for her calls. She could simply say, “It’s me!” and we would know who she is.