The Hazards of Good Breeding (25 page)

18

W
ALKING DOWN THE LONG
HALL
to the window at the end of the intensive care unit, Jack can see his own reflection on the floor beneath him—wavery and indistinct, like something a child might have drawn and then erased. He has an unfamiliar feeling in his belly—a sort of scraping that accompanies the squeak of his rubber soles on the linoleum and the whir of air-conditioning through the complex maze of air ducts overhead. It feels quiet and empty up here after the mad rush of the emergency room. No screaming parents and shouting orderlies, or stretchers being rushed around by frantic interns. No visitors, just a row of rooms with their doors open, and inside, vague forms on cots dwarfed by massive electronic life-support systems. Now and then a plastic drip catches the reflection of the hall light and shimmers like an airborne jellyfish. Who are these people here? Are they unconscious or lying awake and silent in the dark?

Downstairs, Rosita is in labor. This is where the scraping in Jack's belly comes from—something between thrill and dread. It is similar to the feeling of reckless abandon he gets taking jumps on unmarked ski trails, or skydiving—the release of embarking on complete risk. This is not remotely what he felt any of the three times Faith gave birth. He can't remember these with great specificity—they exist in his mind in a sort of smoky blur. The twins, of course, he remembers with a certain vividness because they were the first. He went back to the darkened Park Avenue apartment he and Faith lived in, heated up onion soup and canned brown bread, and sat alone at the dining room table waiting for a phone call. This was before nervous fathers came to the hospital, strapped on surgical masks, and plunged into the childbearing process as if looking on could bring them any closer to the miracle of life. It has always struck him as foolish—the idea of pacing around, or, worse yet, going into the delivery chamber and counting or breathing or whatever it is they do these days.

He has left Rock, who drove after the ambulance with him, downstairs, outside the swinging doors to the obstetrics ward. The boy is young and foolish enough to sit there making conversation, offering words of support to nervous fathers, pacing the room, drinking coffee, and flipping through
People
magazine. For all his simpleminded exuberance, he is, Jack has to admit, a strangely helpful presence. His prattle about the Red Sox, the Yankees, the time his mother had appendicitis, allowed Jack to sit and stare at the institutional carpet—beige, flecked with almost indecipherable bits of turquoise. The work, it occurred to Jack, of some poor frustrated institutional psychologist who must have decided that turquoise, what—calms agitated nerves? Dulls fear?

Jack waited only long enough to hear that Rosita would be all right; that Caesar's jaws had left only a superficial bite wound, and that she had regained consciousness and was in fact going into labor—the baby would be five weeks early. Did he want to go in? The idea made Jack recoil. It is certainly not his place to see Rosita like this.

The window at the end of the hallway Jack has found himself at looks out over the parking lot, onto the towering lights and incomplete rows of parked cars. There is a print hanging beside it—one of the umpteen washed-out Monet reproductions the hospital has hung on its bleak pale blue walls. Jack has always hated Monet—the soft, euphemistic edges and inexact boundaries, the blurred pastels. But he stares at this painting anyway, taking in its uneven brushstrokes, the sweep of color that changes from orange to yellow to white, the humps of haystacks like tired, shaggy animals. It is exactly right here, among these bodies suspended in between the world of the living and the dead. It makes Jack understand all those cheap prints and posters, Monet umbrellas, breakfast mugs, stationery sets, mouse pads, and tote bags he has always scoffed at. They offer such reassuring visions, miniature images of a world in which borders are unimportant, in which there is no difference between straw and earth, sky and land, life and death. There is something about this that holds him here, staring—that stops the scraping in his stomach for a moment and stills his hands in his pockets. For the first time, Jack understands this longing for such softness—feels it stirring inside him like an uneasy sleeper.

There was a moment, looking at Rosita crumpled on the gravel, when Jack thought she was dead. Thought that in point of fact he had killed her. And it was a vast and shocking feeling like a black wall—the opposite of these vague, forgiving haystacks. She was having his baby and she was dead and he was responsible. And this was absolute and unequivocal and forever. She is not, thankfully, but he is still responsible for what becomes of her and the baby.

Jack has no doubt that the baby is his. He has known, in fact, through all the writing of the caveats about proof of paternity in George's letter, through all the time spent sitting outside her house, and all the hours spent working on his diorama, through even those first moments of seeing her at Colby Kesson. He can see now that he has held this knowledge, all along, like a photograph waiting for the right light to expose it. And seeing Rosita in the window of her shabby apartment, it was exposed: clear and absolute as day. He is not a man to doubt his instincts. He is the father of her child.

After the baby is born, he will marry Rosita. He has not discussed this with her yet. There has been no appropriate moment between the cacophany of her brother-in-law's rapid Spanish at the doorstep and the violence in his own driveway. But this is what Jack decided, sitting in his car watching her stand and look out through the plate-glass window. The notion of sending discreet yearly payments belongs to the degraded world of divorce and conditional morality, of equivocal notions of responsibility, and indulgence without consequence, profit without labor, expectation without commitment. Which is not the world of the Dunlaps.

And there is something else that makes him sure of this decision—something Jack has no name for, but that he was reminded of, looking at Rosita fold her arms, tilt her head to profile. A kind of wonder and respect he has buried, for the last six months, under the floes of forward movement. She is a woman who can fix leaky pipes herself instead of calling a plumber; who recommends tea and extra sleep to cure Eliot's headaches, not psychological counseling; who unflinchingly steadies a boy's impaled and bloody arm while teaching him to count in Spanish. She is a woman unlike any other he has ever encountered.

Outside the window, five stories below Jack, there is a man walking across the circle of the streetlight toward his car. Jack turns from the painting to watch him from above—he looks so small, nothing more than an outline, really. But for the second time in the last twenty-four hours Jack is seized with an almost physical realization of the wholeness of a life outside his own—here is this man walking alone across the dark parking lot, unlocking the door of his car, pausing for a moment and looking back toward the hospital. He, too, has a life that he is the only person living. No one else will know of this moment in the parking lot, standing under the orange streetlight, just as no one will know of this moment standing at the window in the intensive care unit. Jack feels suddenly terribly, unreasonably sad for this solitary shirtsleeved figure in the darkness. How many moments like this is he taking to his grave? Fifty percent of his life? Eighty? Even ninety-nine? Jack stares out at the taillights of the car he has climbed into, which blink once and then steady, the uneven clouds of exhaust streaming up from under the bumper. In a moment, the car has backed out of the space and driven to the exit, where it pauses before entering the traffic on the street.

“Mr. Dunlap.” Jack starts and turns to see Rock Coughlin making his way on squeaky soles down the hall. He looks wild, with his shaggy hair on end and ragged shorts and long arms—almost electric, like a charge making its way along a wire.

“It's a boy,” he says, when he is a few yards from Jack. “Five pounds seven ounces.”

Five pounds seven ounces. The words have a familiar ring. This is what Caroline weighed, Jack is amazed to find himself remembering.

“Healthy,” Rock says. He has come to a stop in front of Jack now. “Ten fingers and ten toes.”

Jack can only stand there feeling the blood rushing through his veins. “And Rosita . . . ?” he asks finally.

“Sleeping. Fine.”

Jack turns back to the window—the circle of orange, the incomplete row of cars.

“Here,” Rock says, tapping Jack's arm with the back of his hand. He is holding something out. “I bummed these off a guy downstairs.”

Jack takes the object Rock is holding out to him and lifts it, casting a light around his stunned brain for the word or meaning—a cigar. Because he has had a baby.

“In honor of the occasion.” Rock produces a lighter from his back pocket. He is actually smiling. Jack looks from this oddly exuberant boy in front of him to the cigar in his hand and then tentatively brings it to his lips. Rock reaches forward to light it, and automatically Jack breathes in the rich smoke and feels it pull back into his throat and lungs, fill his brain with a quick, heady burst of tension.

“To beginnings,” Rock says, lifting his cigar like a wineglass.

Jack stares at the smoke evaporating into the sterile hospital air, probably—certainly—forbidden. And he nods his head, just a slight inclination, but enough to concede.

A
T
23 M
EMORIAL
R
OAD
there is the hiss and then slam of the screen door, the screech of the porch boards, the gentle drone of cicadas—Faith feels stunned by the familiar. Here she is, a new person, and here is her old life, exactly the same.

A strange calm has come over Faith on recognizing this. She was right, first of all—Eliot is in trouble. There is no way to explain how she knew this except that she is his mother.
Watch him
, she thinks,
my sweet boy. Please, dear God, take care of my sweet Eliot
. She is not a religious person, but the prayers crop up in her train of thought like weeds.
Dear Eliot
, she finds herself praying oddly to her dead brother,
dear Eliot, watch over your namesake
. The words comfort her. There is just the question of waiting. Thank God Jack is not here.

Faith walks to the area to which Caroline has directed her and bends over, sweeps her hand in a tentative arc through the cold grass. It is nearly one
A.M
. and pitch-dark out on the front lawn. Darker than she expected away from the bright lights of the house. She squats down and then drops on all fours, pats her hands over the nubbly ground. Caroline has lost her watch here somehow in the chaos. She has described the events of the night at least twice, but Faith still has an indistinct picture of them. It is as if she is surrounded by a whole landscape that is invisible to her—full of dangerous drops and breathtaking valleys which she has to navigate by description. The dogs and the pregnant babysitter and Eliot missing—something about a photograph, the handsome moviemaker, and Rock Coughlin, Jr. And there is the “mess” Rock Coughlin, Sr., referred to, and the image of the woman dropping, as Caroline has described it, falling backward, one white sneaker bouncing upward and then down limp.

Faith is glad to have a task now—something specific, since there is nothing else she can do. She has called the police and the fire department, who refuse to look for Eliot until he has been missing for twenty-four hours. She has even braved calling her sons in Colorado and telling them calmly that Eliot seems to be missing, that she just wanted to tell them, she was sure it would be all right, not to worry. And she has gotten Caroline water and aspirin, made her lie down, told her everything will be fine. They have discussed all the possible normal things Eliot could be doing—remember this morning when he wandered off and came back? Or the time, when he was five, that he hid behind the water fountain? They have not discussed where Jack is now. They have not discussed the fact that this woman, possibly maimed or even dead, was pregnant. They have not discussed the dogs, who have been locked up in the garage. But all the same, there is the long-dormant feeling of closeness between them.

Inside the house, Faith can see Jean Pierre trotting around the kitchen, opening cupboards, pouring water, stirring something on the stove. God knows what he can be putting together from the bare cupboards of her ex-husband's house. “You have had no dinner,” he gaped at Caroline's admission. “But you must eat something, with no food in your stomach you can feel no hope.” Faith is awed by his sweet, oblivious bustling. He drove the whole way from the Wilford Inn without demanding explanations or asking nosy questions and never once made her feel stupid or hysterical or out of place.

As Faith watches, he looks up and glances out the window, but can't see her out here in the dark. He has put on one of her old aprons and tuned the ancient radio to a classical station, which sends lovely sweet strains of music out into the night. In forty minutes he has dismissed the oppressive, fierce solemnity of the house that Faith couldn't vanquish in twenty years. He has made the kitchen a place to create in, the house look like someone's home. Out in the darkness, Faith feels a swell of gratitude—he is so innocently clueless, so refreshingly out of this world. And he is casting his eyes out across the lawn to see her, Faith Dunlap, scrabbling around in the cold grass on her hands and knees. It makes her feel strong and vindicated—it is as if, in a way, she has finally transcended Jack, even here on his own turf. The blood and the dogs and the ambulance—it was so strange, as Caroline told her, Faith had the feeling she already knew. It is as if all these years she was waiting for it to happen, for Jack's own fierceness to turn on him.

There is a movement at the head of the driveway, a crunch of gravel that, for a moment, Faith thinks must be Jack. But then there is the white nose of a police car rounding the driveway. Faith is not sure whether to be relieved or even more terrified. She stays frozen, kneeling upright, one hand clutched in a fist against her chest. If it is something terrible, she wants to stay here in the darkness deflecting the blow like a lightning rod. But then the car comes to a stop at the end of the driveway and Faith feels herself scrabbling to her feet, almost losing her balance, and there is her son! Her dear sweet child climbing out of the backseat with his awkward, cautious way of moving, standing up and walking across the drive.