The Birthdays (24 page)

“We’re going now. Goodbye.” Hilary turned, her chest
pounding. She headed toward the door and slipped her arm through Liz’s.

“Nothing? You want to invite him back to the house?”

She tugged her forward. “Let’s go find Dad.”

He was thumbing through something with a pale woman’s face on the cover, and though he didn’t seem ready to leave yet, he quickly slid the book back onto its shelf and followed them out.

On the way home, Hilary stared out the window at what she knew was the water but was now only darkness. How embarrassing this all had been. How utterly stupid of her to let Liz talk her into it. She felt her baby shift inside her and poke her … her what, her liver? To her left, Liz squirmed in her seat, complaining of pain in her legs as she wriggled around, trying to find a more comfortable position. The car jerked forward each time she moved and leaned on the gas. Hilary flipped open the book on her lap but couldn’t read a thing in the dark. She would read it when she got home. She would try to teach herself all about what it meant to be a father, and maybe, then maybe, she could show everyone that she was fully capable of handling this other life on her own, this little person who would be so dependent on her. She rubbed her fingers together. None of them thought she’d be able to handle it. Well, maybe Daniel. But Jake, and probably her mother—they thought her child was doomed.

“He didn’t seem so great,” her father said from the back seat.

“Thank you, Dad.”

“You’ve got enough to focus on anyway.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“You’re past all that,” he said so quietly it was barely audible.

“Past what?” Liz asked. “Men?”

“Men, boys, whatever,” Hilary said with as much conviction as she could muster. She turned to her father, who looked at her proudly and smiled.

Brenda asked Daniel
how long Vanessa had stayed at the clinic and whether she knew what had happened, and he told her that he’d promised Vanessa they’d call her. He found her phone number in his wallet, and Brenda picked up the receiver beside the bed and dialed. Someone else answered, and Brenda spoke quietly, Britishly, as she asked whether Vanessa happened to be available. She covered the receiver and mouthed, “Freeman,” and Daniel nodded once. When Vanessa came on the line and Brenda described what had happened, she turned away from him and her shoulders dropped. “No, they had to operate,” she said, and then, “I know, I knew something was wrong. I hadn’t felt anything for a while.” She reassured Vanessa that she was fine now, that the clinic seemed good enough and that no, there was no real need for Vanessa to come back, Brenda had just
wanted to let her know what had happened and thank her for the ride to the clinic. “Yes, all right, and I’ll call you when we get back home. Maybe we can arrange another trip up here, maybe next summer or something, or maybe you could come visit us,” she said, and Daniel pictured all of Brenda’s strange, situational friends—Vanessa and Esther, Morris Arnold and his girlfriend, as well as his foul dog Rex, Freeman Corcoran, even—crowded in their living room, having a drink.

After Brenda set down the receiver, she tried to stand beside her bed but began to sway whenever she took her arms away from the rail. After a few failed attempts, she sat back down.

“What is it about us that seems to invite such bad luck?” Daniel asked.

“Don’t be glib.” The fluorescent lights above them flickered and buzzed.

“I’m not. I’m being serious. Look at us.”

“I’d rather not,” she said, and draped the sheet over her legs. “I’d rather not just sit here and think about misery, to be honest.”

He adjusted his glasses. She was never one to want to dissect unhappiness. He was the analytical one, the stereotypically female one in that respect, he supposed. It was strange that his own wife didn’t share this tendency. “Can I ask you a question?” he pressed on. He began to have the sense that if he didn’t ask these questions, they would devour him. “Do you still like me?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, her eyes on the bed. “But I dunno, sometimes you can be tough, Dan. You know that. Sometimes I think about when we first met, and what I liked about you then. I liked your grouchiness, I suppose, because you weren’t
grouchy to me, only to everyone else. It made me feel as if I’d been admitted to some sort of club. And I liked your deep voice. I liked your nose.”

“My nose?”

She licked her lips twice. “I thought you had a good, strong nose, just the right length, no bumps or jags. It gave you a strong and decisive look. I didn’t know very many decisive men back then.”

“And now?” He drummed his fingers against the arm of his chair. He knew he should be asking her how she was feeling and whether she needed anything from him—a back rub, a glass of water? “Do you still like my nose?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Mum says you know what you need and want and at least you can articulate that, which is more than most people can.”

“How come you never told me any of this? I never knew you liked my voice. Or my nose, for that matter.”

“I suppose I just forgot to. Anyway, you’ve always known most everything else that I think of you.”

“That I complain too much, and that I’ve become a depressing person to be around.”

She nibbled her lip. “You’ve been through so much hell.”

“So have you now,” he said. “We aren’t such different people, you know.” He remembered when they’d lie in bed and he’d sketch her knee or her chin using only words. This seemed like decades ago.

“We both hate anchovies,” she offered.

He nodded. “We both love Barcelona and Lagos and our little island in Greece.” They’d spent their honeymoon on one of the smallest islands in the Aegean.

“Though you hate Nice, and I would be happy living
there.” She often spoke of happiness in a stingy way, as if it were only available to her, as if it were something he’d never attain because he wasn’t emotionally or perhaps biologically capable. At times, it seemed she did connect it with gender: only other women—her mother, her friends, even Vanessa—could understand her search for happiness, and could truly experience happiness themselves.

“Nice is expensive and overrun with snotty Europeans,” he admitted.

“We both sleep on our left sides, even now,” she offered.

“Some things haven’t changed.”

“A few, I suppose.”

“I’m still the same person for the most part, just living inside a slightly less functional body.” He wasn’t certain he fully believed this downplaying of the accident, but maybe just speaking the words was some sort of progress.

She made no expression, as if she too wasn’t convinced.

“We both lost something in the middle of a street,” he said, and swallowed. It hadn’t come out the right way at all. Brenda’s eyes filled, and he moved closer to her bed and sandwiched her small hands in his. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

She shrugged and took her hands back. Quietly, almost inaudibly, she said, “You’re forgiven.”

He wanted to ask her if he’d heard her correctly, and if he had, to please say it again, again and again, but he worried she’d take it back or say he was pulling too much from two little words. Still, he began to let himself think that she forgave him more than just this one insensitive comment—his loathing of Tammy Ann Green and Morris Arnold, his sharpness with Vanessa, all of his bitterness and despair both
before and after the accident. Indeed, he hadn’t changed all that much. She’d just gotten to know him better over the years.

He looked at her, then out the window at the leafy ash trees, their branches bobbing in the wind. He thought of their friends’ newborn baby who was born breech and of the Korean baby that Evan and John were going to adopt. He thought of Lily and Maria, or was it Marie?—twins Brenda’s cousin recently had in London, and the photograph of the two dressed in tiny hot pink jumpers and holding on to two enormous teddy bears wearing matching jumpers. He thought of James Roger McDonald, who was born to Daniel’s agent Richard the year before. He was a handsome baby, with soft blond hair and round, liquid blue eyes and Daniel squirmed when Richard handed him the baby for the first time, as he had no idea how exactly to hold him. The boy weighed nothing in his hands, and his head rested in Daniel’s palm like a baseball. He looked up at Daniel, right into his eyes, and Daniel leaned over to kiss his forehead. He smelled of bananas, and Daniel reached down to kiss him again. It was amazing to him that this was a whole life in his hands, and that a life could weigh so little. Daniel was surprised he remembered the boy’s full name now. He was usually terrible with names.

Brenda soon dropped off to sleep again, and Daniel dozed off too and was woken a while later by a nurse, who helped him onto the other bed, where the pillow was flat and the sheets smelled of mildew. He tried to make himself drift off again despite the too soft pillow and the smell. Brenda was now sleeping soundly. Or maybe she was just pretending. He’d done the same recently, when he heard
her stirring in their bedroom, unable to find a comfortable position for her stomach. Now it seemed the worst sort of betrayal.

He considered what it might be like to return home and to step inside their house for the first time without the baby and without a plan for what would come next. First he would call their counselor at the sperm bank and let her know. Then Brenda would phone her doctor and her family again. And then what? What to do when there was no one left to notify?

Suddenly he remembered Freeman Corcoran’s work—his childlike paintings in electric primary colors of houses, happy little houses flying through the air or floating on the ocean, drifting past beneath the sun or the moon. Fish, boats, whales drawn in bloated, silly shapes. It was a crime, the acclaim Corcoran got for these blocky, simplistic scenes that any five-year-old could have painted. People paid a fortune for his work. Brenda had to be lying when she said to Vanessa that she loved it. She had to be—it was the sort of art they loved to hate. Obvious, pretty, infantile art created for the widest possible consumption. “Fun” art.

He thought of Tammy Ann Green. And then it dawned on him. He would call the doctor she worked for when they got home, and Daniel would ask to meet him and hear more about his research on spinal cord injuries. Why hadn’t he thought to do this yet? He wouldn’t tell Tammy Ann, as she’d discourage him, so he’d do some research of his own and track down the doctor himself. Hell, he already knew the man’s name because Tammy Ann had mentioned it so often. It was a plan, and Daniel smiled to himself. Maybe he
would
walk again.

“Did you buy any books?” Ellen asked Hilary when the three returned from Books & Beans.

“She bought something about parenting,” Liz announced, and smirked at Hilary. The two were in cahoots over something, Ellen thought disdainfully, and rose from the couch. If they wanted to have fun during this sad time, let them. “It’s late and it’s been such a long day. I’m going to bed,” she declared, and Joe followed her into the green bedroom.

“What are they up to?” she asked. The curtains swayed.

“Boys.”

“What?” Ellen went to open the window a little more, and breathed in the scent of the ocean, briny and pungent.

“Liz wanted Hilary to see some guy she met earlier.”

It was some sort of breakthrough; Joe never paid attention to incidents such as these, and certainly never reported back about them. “She mentioned someone to me earlier, I think.”

“I couldn’t tell his age. But he looked younger than Hil. Anyway, it was unsuccessful. She decided against it at the last minute.”

“It? What ‘it’?”

“I’m not sure, frankly,” he said, lifting his shirt above his head. “I wasn’t about to ask.”

“I suppose not,” she said. She pulled her nightgown from beneath her pillow and slid off her skirt, and realized that for the first time in hours she was not thinking about Daniel or Brenda or, for that matter, MacNeil. “Did she tell you who the father of the baby is?”

“No.”

“You’d tell me if she did, right?”

“Ellen.”

“Well?”

“Of course I would, but she won’t, and you should stop letting it nag at you.”

She tried to pull back a little. “It’ll be good for Hilary move back home.”

“It will. We can help her with the baby when she needs it.”

“Just don’t leave all the hard work to me,” she said, apropos of nothing, for when the children were small, Joe actually did help more than the other young fathers they knew. He was an expert at changing diapers and bathing babies. His greatest contentment was seeing the kids in their pajamas first thing in the morning, rubbing sleep from their eyes, gathering around the table for breakfast and filling the room with noise.

Ellen lifted the sheet and blanket on her bed and slid beneath. Joe switched off the lamp between them and took a deep breath. He would be fast asleep in seconds, but she wasn’t tired yet. Her mind spun. Hilary and a baby alone—it was still hard to fathom. She replayed the conversation she’d had with her daughter earlier. Why not research archaeology, learn about the best people in the field living in Boston and bring Hilary to them? Once the baby was a little older, she’d have time. She’d need a job. Why not try to find one she liked? Joe could help. He loved research, the hunt for attainable answers.

But Daniel and Brenda needed her and Joe more right now, at least more urgently. Her primary focus over the next several weeks would be filling their house with art and color and life. Improving their immediate surroundings—beautifying their world. Once Isabella’s young son and later her husband
died, she threw herself into the building of the museum, the collecting, the details. It was only then, after so much tragedy, that she became a true curator. Two great sorrows, in the end, had prompted her toward such happiness.

The next morning she stretched her arms, sore from her sleeping in the same position all night, and tiptoed out of the room. Apparently she was the first one up. The living room had flooded with the early morning sun, the strongest sun since they’d arrived, she thought as she stepped out onto the back porch. Her cotton nightgown billowed in a cool breeze, and she felt almost naked, standing outside like this. She hurried to one of the Adirondack chairs and sat, tucking her gown beneath her legs.

Mornings were always her clearest time, and once in a while, just to think, she stayed in bed well past the time that Joe had woken and fixed himself coffee. Whether spent in bed or puttering around the kitchen, mornings gave her a sense of freshness, of newness and perspective. And after the rain and then the thick humidity, this particular morning was a relief with its dry, warm air, the quiet of the house and the rhythmic wash of the ocean before her, pushing and pulling its tide from the shore. Not one person could be seen on the beach, and she felt it was all hers for the moment, the great, wide Atlantic, all its fish and plants, its tides. And how perfect, how kind that the sun had chosen to shine like this today, on Joe’s birthday. Was it the sunlight, not the time of day, that gave her this rush of contentment in the face of everything? Either way, she felt more optimistic than she had in a while, and she began to plan what she would buy at the grocery
store for Joe’s birthday. She’d convinced Liz and Jake to allow her to buy this, at least. She decided she would cook flank steak, baked stuffed potatoes, Caesar salad, biscuits. It would be an unhealthy meal, full of fat and grease, but she would not let herself think about it, as these were Joe’s favorite foods.

Another breeze pushed against her legs. She tried to imagine what a weekend here with just Joe and MacNeil and Vera might have been like. Joe and MacNeil weren’t great friends but they seemed to respect each other. When Vera had been alive and the four had dinner, the men discussed sports and politics, predictably, but mostly they shadowed the women’s conversation, adding only incidental comments here and there. While the women chatted about Vera’s travels and growing art collection, Ellen’s children at school and the movies they’d seen recently, the men nodded and inserted words of support—“It was the coldest, the absolute worst weather to be in Venice,” MacNeil would add to his wife’s description of their Italian vacation; “He really is a little hellion,” would be Joe’s confirmation of Ellen’s story. Undeniably Vera had been the force that brought them together, the one who arranged the dinners in Lincoln, the trips to the museums, the one who got the conversations about love or sex or politics or art up and running and the one who kept them going, really, through the wee hours of the night. Vera had been the most charismatic of them all. Ellen considered the past few weeks. Whatever the deeper motivation to be with MacNeil was—a longing for a different life? envy of his financial and spiritual ease?—now seemed laced by a simple sort of pity, a draw to take care of this man in the aftermath of death. He needed her comforting words and her endless listening. Even now, so many months later.