Pictures of You (39 page)

She was so silent that he began to be a little scared.

“You don’t still love me,” he said.

Isabelle drew her hands from the table. “I’m getting married,” she said quietly.

Charlie felt suddenly dizzy.

She reached across and took his hand, and again, he felt that same, strange heat.

“How could you marry this guy?” Charlie said. “How long have you even known him?”

“Since January.”

He looked at her. “You’re not crazy in love. I can tell by looking at you.”

“How do you know? And what does what I feel or want have to do with anything? He’s good to me. He doesn’t obsess. He’s steady and there aren’t any other women in his life. This isn’t the movies. Everything doesn’t turn out all tied up in a neat bow the way you want.”

His heart rushed against his ribs. “Why can’t it turn out the way we want?” he said.

“Because I’m pregnant,” she said.

That was why he recognized that look. He had seen it in April when she was pregnant with Sam, the way she had seemed as if she were carrying another secret self around that she wasn’t quite ready to reveal yet. That was when Isabelle’s loose dress began to make sense to him, the glow of her.

“Five months,” she said. She smoothed the dress against her and he saw, suddenly, the swell of her stomach.

“I thought you couldn’t …” Charlie said.

“I thought so, too,” she said. “Every doctor, every specialist I’ve ever seen has told me I couldn’t. I gave up trying a long time ago. I knew it was something I couldn’t even dare to hope for. And right away, it just happened. I was a basket case at first, just waiting to miscarry, plus it was a brand-new relationship, but everything has been good. It’s almost like it’s meant to be.” She folded her napkin, motioned for the waitress, and then turned to Charlie. “I’m having a little girl,” she said.

After lunch, they started walking to Hell’s Kitchen where she lived with Frank now. She pointed out her favorite shops and restaurants. Charlie tried to concentrate, but all he could think about was that he was here with the woman he most wanted, and she was pregnant by someone else.

“The city has a buzz, doesn’t it?” she said. “Look at that.” She pointed to a man walking down the street with a tree branch tied around his back with purple ribbons, but the only thing Charlie
could pay attention to was her. The air seemed charged around her. Colors seemed brighter. “My parents always thought I belonged here,” Charlie said.

“Do you think you do?”

The buzz Isabelle loved sounded like tinnitus to him, but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings by saying so.

“Come to dinner. Meet him,” she said, and he shook his head.

“I don’t think I can meet Frank,” Charlie said.

“Want to keep walking?”

Several blocks later, they were winding their way toward SoHo, when she stopped in front of a hotel, hesitating. The Mercer. She didn’t say anything to him, but she didn’t have to. He followed her inside and he paid for the room, using their real names.

A
S SOON AS
they were in the room, she leaned toward Charlie and kissed him. Isabelle slipped her shirt down and he saw the soft swell of her belly and he leaned down and kissed it. You be good to her, he wanted to whisper to the baby.

She slid out of her clothes. Every time he had touched her before, he had felt that he was cheating on April. Now there was nothing but this room, this bed with the squeaky springs. There was nothing but Isabelle’s pale skin and the way she sighed when he touched her. He reached for the lights, but Isabelle pulled at his hand. “No, I want to see you,” she said, and the whole time they were making love, she kept her eyes wide open. When Charlie shut his, she whispered, “Look at me,” and he did. He wrapped her hair around his hand and pulled her closer to him. He studied Isabelle and she touched his mouth. “I love you,” he said.

Her mouth moved. “You never said that to me before.”

“Yes, I did. All the time. Just not out loud.” He kissed her shoulder. “I love you,” he said again. “I always will.”

Afterward, they sat naked in bed and ordered room service. A salad plate, crusty bread, and sparkling water, because she was being careful not to eat a single thing that was bad for her. They
littered the sheets with their crumbs. Isabelle looked up. “Hear that?” she said. “All that traffic noise. It’s getting late.”

“I don’t hear anything,” Charlie said, reaching for her, but Isabelle got out of the bed. She began putting her clothes on. “We should get going,” she said.

“Stay,” he said, trying to pull her back onto the bed. She smiled and kept dressing. He got up and started dressing, too. He helped her smooth the sheets, as if no one had been in the bed at all.

Outside was still bright and hot and Charlie’s mouth was dry. He rested his hand along the side of a building for a moment. Isabelle walked him all the way back to his car. He saw her mouth wobble, just for a moment, before she smiled at him.

“Come with me,” he said. “Come back to the Cape with me. Come see Sam. I love you. I know you love me.” He grabbed her arm and held it and there was that fierce heat again and he felt like crying. “You can call Frank from Massachusetts. We can work all this out.” He thought of their whole life, like this big stretching picture. Every cell in his body was pulling toward her, like magnets. “I made a mistake,” he said, cupping her face in his hands. “Let me fix it. We can be a family. I’ll love your baby like my own. Like you love Sam.”

And then she pulled her hand away and folded it on her belly. Her lower lip trembled. “I can’t,” Isabelle said. She stepped back from him. “Please, Charlie. Please don’t make this harder.”

“You don’t love me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He felt a pull of desperation. “Maybe I could stay a few more days.”

“Please. Just go,” she said. “You have to go.”

Charlie got in the car. You could think you understood things, but the truth was that you could never see the full picture of someone else’s life. Not April’s, not Isabelle’s. He wasn’t even sure about his own life now. He looked back at her. Her hair was lush and full and shimmering. He wanted to jump out again and grab her and
tell her she had to come with him. He wanted to kiss her mouth, her neck, the slope of her shoulders. He drove slowly, and even though he knew it was crazy, he half expected her to run after the car, waving her beautiful hands, calling to him to stop, stop, because she had changed her mind, she couldn’t live without him, either. He knew she loved him. He thought of April, always holding something back, and then he thought of Isabelle, in the hotel room with him, her luminous skin, the smell of her hair. The way she kept her eyes open while they made love, the way every time he turned away, she would whisper to him, “Look at me.”

And he had. He had really seen who she was.

Charlie let himself look in the rearview mirror. The street was teeming with people, but Isabelle was gone. It was then that he started to cry.

A
FTER
C
HARLIE LEFT
, when she was sure he wouldn’t see her, Isabelle started crying right there on the street. She leaned against a building and sobbed into her hands and when she finally stopped, she dug out her sunglasses and then walked to the curb and hailed a cab. As soon as she was seated in the back, she blew her nose and then carefully put on a little makeup, assuring herself that by the time she got to her building, she’d look as if nothing had ever happened to her.

“How was your day, beautiful girl?” Frank was home, standing in the kitchen, in jeans and a denim shirt, stirring a red sauce in the pot. “I gave Nelson scallops,” he laughed. “Sautéed them, too.” Then he glanced at her, and his face filled with alarm. “Allergies again?” he said, and Isabelle nodded. The house smelled of basil and garlic. “I made something special,” he said. He turned, looking at her. “God, you are beautiful. I am so lucky,” he said.

“I’m starving,” Isabelle lied, and when she went to kiss him, she closed her eyes.

That night, Isabelle bolted awake. She’d been dreaming that she had said yes to Charlie, that she had driven away with him to the
Cape, flushed with happiness, and Sam was there and she had hugged Sam so hard, she had thought she might never let him go. She sat up, disoriented, seeing the contours of the oak dresser Frank had found for her, the framed photo of his restaurant. For a moment, staring at Frank, she didn’t know who he was. “Szzth,” Frank muttered. She glanced at the clock. Three in the morning. She got up to make some peppermint tea, one hand on her belly. She was terrified because the baby hadn’t kicked yet, and though her obstetrician told her it was nothing to worry about, that the baby had a heartbeat like a firecracker, she couldn’t help but be unnerved. She walked past the den, hearing Nelson rustling in his tank. She went into the kitchen and switched on the light. Outside, an alley cat was yowling, a strange, fierce cry in the night. She poured the tea and sat down. She thought of how Frank had made her a special dinner, how he sang sweet, silly songs to her when she called him on the phone, how surely he deserved someone better and kinder than she was, someone who loved him the way he loved her. “You should see the way he looks at you!” one of her friends had told her. Every night he rested his head against her belly and spoke Italian to the baby.
Ciao. Linguini
. Food words that made her laugh.

Charlie. Her heart raced and she suddenly felt sick. She was pregnant and she had slept with Charlie. She thought she heard Frank moving around, getting up. Any moment he’d come in and give her that worried look. He’d make her broth from scratch, he’d rub her back. If she said to him, I’m in love with someone else, he would tell her to go and be with that person, and he would be kind about it. She would ruin his life. And maybe she would ruin her own in the process. She touched the phone. She’d call just to hear Charlie’s voice and hang up. She’d call just because she could. She started to dial and then just as she punched in the last digit, she felt a tiny flutter in her belly, like someone was tickling her from inside. Her hands froze and she let the receiver clatter onto the table. She felt it again.

“Frank!” she shouted. “Frank!” Her voice was like a kite, rushing the sky. She heard his footsteps and when he tumbled into the kitchen, his face tight with fear, she was laughing out loud. She was standing in the middle of the floor in her nightgown, her hand on her belly. She reached for his hand and put it there, there on the side, where life was kicking. He kept his hand there, staring at her in wonder.

T
HE FOLLOWING SPRING
, after the baby was born, a beautiful sunny girl named Elaine, Isabelle began taking driving lessons. She hadn’t been anxious about being a passenger in a car for a long time, but driving had been a hurdle she hadn’t mastered yet. “Are you sure?” Frank said. “We have plenty of money for cabs, and most everything’s walkable, anyway.” Isabelle kept thinking of her baby, of what might happen if she needed to be the one driving Elaine to something. To a doctor or a playdate. You couldn’t spend your life being afraid. “I’ll teach you,” Frank offered, but Isabelle wanted someone neutral.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, a man named Ramon drove up and took her out. She was sick to her stomach for hours before he showed up, alarming Frank so much he begged her to reconsider. As soon as she sat in the driver’s seat, she broke out into a cold sweat. She gripped the wheel so tightly, her knuckles turned pale. “Relax,” said Ramon. He was wearing dark glasses and there was music in the car. “I haven’t lost a driver yet.”

He had a lot of crazy ideas. “Hit the break like a sponge,” he told her. He also told her to think of a spot ahead of her that was drawing her forward. She felt as if the world had narrowed, as if there wasn’t enough space for her to drive through. Hunching her shoulders, she struggled to breathe, and then panicking, she stopped and rested her head on the wheel. “Maybe some people aren’t meant to drive,” she said.

“What? Are you crazy? Who told you such a ridiculous thing? You drive like a pro. When you want to get your license?”

When she told him why she had stopped driving, he didn’t say anything. He studied her for a minute, tapping one hand against the wheel. “I taught a man to drive who had run over his baby daughter in the driveway,” he said quietly. “He hadn’t been looking. I taught a woman to drive again after she had been in an accident with her fiancé and he had died and she had survived. Drunken driver.” He looked at her. “People who are frightened, who don’t know where they’re going,” he said. “They’re my best students.”

Isabelle put her hands on the wheel and sat up straighter. “I don’t want to be frightened anymore,” she told him, “and I want to know where I’m going,” and then she stepped gently on the gas.

T
WO WEEKS BEFORE
his thirtieth birthday, Sam Nash was getting ready to make the four-hour drive from Boston to upstate New York to see Isabelle for the first time in nearly twenty years. Everything was set. Another obstetrician was going to be on call for his patients, though if any of them had been due for delivery, he wouldn’t have even thought of going.

“I’ll be back in a few days,” he told Lisa, the woman he loved. Lisa was already dressed in the extra pair of hospital scrubs she kept at his place, on her way to do a morning gall bladder surgery, but she lingered at the door with him. “I’ll leave the cell on all the time,” he said. She nodded.

“It’s good you’re doing this,” she said.

“Are you still mad at me?” he asked.

She shrugged. “A little.” She lifted up a brown paper sack. “Lunch,” she said, and when he stepped toward her, she pushed him away. “This doesn’t mean I’m not still mad,” she said. “I’m just giving you lunch out of your own refrigerator.” He took it, grateful, and she gave him a quick kiss that tasted like strawberry jam.

He watched her through the rearview mirror. She stood on the front porch, waving at him, while he drove away. He knew her. She wouldn’t go inside until his car disappeared from her sight.