“Planned Parenthood.” The voice sounds so reassuring.
“Yes, I wonder if you could answer a question for me.”
“I’d be more than happy to try.”
“Is it possible to determine a fetus’s father?”
“It is.”
“How is it done?” she asks, reaching for pen and paper.
“Through DNA testing of either the amniotic fluid or the chorion, which is the outer lining of the sac surrounding the embryo.”
“And then that DNA is compared to the DNA of the possible father?” Anne asks.
“Exactly. How far along is the pregnancy?”
“About ten weeks.”
“In that case, the chorionic villus sampling would be indicated. It’s too early for amniocentesis. Of course, you’ll need a blood sample from the possible father.”
How is she going to get a blood sample from Charles?
“How long does it take to get the results?”
“About two weeks. The cost is around a thousand dollars. The company that performs the testing will coordinate the arrangements with your doctor.”
She can’t possibly go to her own gynecologist. Judith Arnold’s husband is a publishing executive; they travel in overlapping social circles with Anne and Charles.
“Oh, one last question.”
“Shoot.”
“How much of the father’s blood is needed?”
“Usually they take a syringe full, but all the lab really needs is a few drops.”
After she hangs up, Anne realizes her nausea is gone. There’s a knock on the door.
“Anne, lunch is here.”
Anne joins the crew as they eagerly unload the shopping bags full of scrumptious goodies from Dean and Deluca. Suddenly she’s famished. She finds a smoked turkey and roasted red pepper hero. There’s a tug on her pant leg.
“Where’s my focaccia?” Justin asks.
Anne digs into one of the bags and finds a thick slice of focaccia baked with mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes.
Anne kneels down beside the boy. “Here you go, buckeroo.”
“That’s a silly name. Are you a silly lady?”
Anne looks up at Nikki.
“I guess I am a silly lady sometimes.” Anne laughs.
“Silly like a fox,” Nikki says.
14
After waking from a deep nap, Emma walks to the corner bodega. She loves the smells in the cramped store: something fried and spicy, the dirt on root vegetables she never seen before, city cats. She gathers up two apples, two oranges, a can of spaghetti, tea bags, milk, a box of Fig Newtons.
On her way home she passes a botanica. She stops and looks at the plaster figures in the window: Jesus, the Virgin Mary, an array of heroic saints in heroic poses. Gaudily painted, they remind her of what you can win at the county fair ball-toss on a dusty August night if you have a boyfriend. At the fair, the plaster figures aren’t religious; they’re dogs and cats and Elvis Presley and all around the lights of love swirl and there are pink puffs of cotton candy and whirligig music and farm folks strolling and show animals lazy in the night air. Emma hates the county fair.
As she walks into the botanica the fat proprietress-in a thin red dress stretched so tight across her front that her bosom is mashed down and indistinguishable from the other rolls of flesh narrows her eyes.
“You have trouble,” the woman states, certain as a judge. She lights an unfiltered cigarette.
“What kind of trouble?” Emma asks.
“Bad trouble,” the woman says. She taps her temple and exhales by opening her mouth and letting the smoke billow out.
The store is heavy with smells, a thousand perfumes and incense sticks, the fresh layered over the stale in a dense mix that suddenly makes Emma dizzy. More plaster figures, their deadpan faces betraying no religious ecstasy, fill the shelves. And candles, hundreds of candles in glasses covered with saints and Jesus again. Jesus is everywhere in the botanica.
“I have magic for trouble,” the woman says, holding out a small glass vial.
Emma takes the vial and stares at the light brown liquid it holds. “What will it do?”
“Make you safe.”
“How much?”
“Twenty dollars.”
Emma starts to unscrew the cap.
“No!” the woman warns. “On your door make a cross with it and sprinkle it all around your bed.”
Emma hands the woman twenty dollars. Suddenly she wants to get out of the suffocating store. The plaster figures look evil-passive spectators to the world’s unspeakable acts. What do they care? They’re saints; they’ve cashed in their chips. As she closes the door on her way out of the store, Emma hears the woman mutter something unintelligible, in Spanish, something that sounds to her like a curse.
Before she unlocks her door Emma opens the vial-the liquid has a sharp fusty odor-wets her fingertip and makes a cross on the door. Inside, she unloads the food. She loves the bare cabinets, their corners home to crumbly spots of rust, and the noisy refrigerator with the cracked handle. She wants her apartment to be a refuge replete with books and teas and at least two different kinds of cookies. A safe place.
She moves the chair close to the window and eats the apple and then four Fig Newtons, savoring every grainy bite, as she watches the street life below. Across the street an old man sits in a lawn chair in front of his building; couples out for dinner stroll by; clutches of hip young people in black, long-limbed and laughing, ramble down the block. Emma finds the passing parade hypnotic, and a sweet fatigue comes over her. She sprinkles the rest of the magic water around her bed, crawls in, and reads Heart of Darkness until her eyes begin to hurt. She turns off the bedside lamp. Red light filters in from the neon sign and plays against the far wall. She can hear the distant muttering of a thousand voices, a thousand beautiful anonymous voices. Emma lies still for a long time, looking at the light and listening to the voices. She has always imagined her father living in a room like this.
It was a winter-weary day in March, filled with dirty snow and bare trees, and nine-year-old Emma was in no hurry to get home from school. Home to the creaky apartment over the hardware store. She was chilly in her too big parka and slightly soggy boots, but that didn’t keep her from walking slowly, kicking her way down the small-town streets. The first thing she noticed as she climbed the stairs was that it was quiet; there was no music-no Janis, no Billie, no Piaf. Her mother always played music in the afternoon, singing along as she drifted from room to room getting higher and higher, changing her outfits, touching up her makeup, staring at the long-untouched painting on her easel.
The front door to the apartment was ajar. Emma pushed it open. Her mother was on the living-room floor wearing a hot pink top and her souvenir-of-Hawaii skirt, a panorama of paradise, her eye shadow smeared. She was staring into space-her skinny gaudy glamorous mother, her going-mad mother, sitting there splaylegged on some crazy mixture of Seconol and Vivarin and Valium, some crazy chemical cocktail concocted to dull her dreams. Emma knew immediately that he was gone, her sad-eyed father with his longing for golden California. Strangely enough, she was relieved. At least it was over. The screaming, the hitting, that awful dead feeling that permeated an apartment shared by two people who blamed each other for everything, whose every waking moment was an unspoken shout of “If only I hadn’t met you.”
Emma said nothing to her mother, but walked slowly into her bedroom and crawled under her bed. She pulled
