I came to stand beside him, pulling a length of black electrical tape when he gestured for it. “What about Mom?” I said.
“A month before the wedding, I woke up and asked what in the name of heaven I was doing, throwing my life away. I didn’t love Patty, and I called her and told her the wedding was off. And three hours later she called me back to let me know she’d swallowed about thirty sleeping pills.”
My father sat down on the dusty green sofa. “Quite a turn of the cards, eh, lass?” he said, slipping into the comfort of his brogue. “I had to drive her to the hospital. I waited around until they were done pumping her stomach, and then I turned her over to her parents.” My father rested his head in his hands. “Anyway, I went to a diner across the street from the hospital, and there was your mother. Sitting on one of the counter stools she was, and she had cherry Danish all over her fingers. She had on this little red-checked halter top and white shorts. I don’t know, Paige, I can’t really explain it, but she turned around when I came in, and the second our eyes connected, it was like the world just disappeared.”
I closed my eyes, trying to picture this. I did not believe it was one hundred percent true. After all, I had not heard my mother’s side of the story. “And then what?” I said.
“And then we got married in three months. It wasn’t the easiest thing for your mother. Some of my old deaf aunts called her Patty at the wedding. She got china and crystal and silver picked out by Patty, because people had already bought the gifts when the first wedding was called off.”
My father stood and went back to the pacifier. I stared at his back and remembered that on holidays, when my mothen awhen my mer served with the rose-wreathed dishes and the gold-leaf goblets, she would get tight-lipped and uncomfortable. I started to wonder what it might have felt like to live your life in a place someone else had carved. I wondered if, had our china been blue-rimmed or geometric, she might have never left.
“And what,” I said, “ever happened to Patty?”
Late that night, I felt my father’s breath at my temple. He was leaning over me, watching me sleep. “This is only the beginning,” he said to me. “I know it isn’t what you want to hear, but he isn’t the one you’ll be with for the rest of your life.”
I heard his words still twisting in the air long after he’d left my room, and I wondered how he had known. A stale wind blew through my open window; I could smell rain. I stood up quickly and dressed in yesterday’s clothes; I moved soundlessly down the stairs and out of the house. I did not have to look back to know that my father was watching me from his bedroom window, his palms pressed to the glass, his head bowed.
The first drops fell, heavy and cold, as I turned the corner away from my home. By the time I was halfway to the Flanagans’ Mobil station, the wind shrieked through my hair and knotted my jacket around me. Rain battered my cheeks and my bare legs, so violent that I might not have found my way if I hadn’t been going there for years.
Jake pulled me in from the storm and kissed my forehead, my eyelids, my wrists. He peeled the soaked coat from my shoulders and wrapped my hair in an old chamois. He did not ask why I had come; I did not ask why he had been there. We fell against the dented side of a Chevy sedan, skimming our hands over each other’s faces to learn the hollows, the curves, and the lines.
Jake led me to a car waiting to be serviced, a Jeep Cherokee 4 ? 4 with a broad open compartment in the back. Through the fishbowl rear window of the Jeep, we watched the storm. Jake pulled my shirt over my head and unfastened my bra, moved his tongue from one nipple to the other. He traced his way over my ribs, my stomach, unzipping my skirt and tugging it over my hips. I could feel the rough rug of the car against my legs, and Jake’s hand on my breast, and then I felt the pressure of his lips against the thin film of my underpants. I shivered, amazed that his breath could burn hotter than the ache between my thighs.
When I was naked he knelt beside me and ran his hands over me, units of measure, as if I were something he owned. “You are beautiful,” he said, as quiet as a prayer, and he leaned close to kiss me. He did not stop, not even as he undressed himself or stroked my hair or moved between my legs. I felt as if there were a thousand threads of glass woven in me, a million different colors, and they were stretched so tight that I knew they would snap. When Jake came inside me, my world turned white, but then I remembered to breathe and to move. At the moment when everything shattered, I opened my eyes wide. I did not think about Jake or about that quick sting of pain; I did not think about the heady scent of Marlboros and pomade that clung to the Jeep’s interior. Instead I squinted into the frenzied night sky and I waited for God to strike me down.
chapter 12
The women lay on the blue industrial carpet like a string of little islands, their bellies swelling toward the ceiling and trembling slightly as they panted and exhaled. Nicholas was late for Lamaze class. In fact, although it was the seventh class in a series of ten, it was the first he’d attended, because of his schedule. But Paige had insisted. “You may know how to deliver a baby,” she had said, “but there’s a difference between a doctor and a labor coach.”
She was lying in the farthest corner of the room, her hair spilled around her head, her hands resting on the huge round mound of her stomach. She was the only person there without a mate, and as Nicholas crossed the room to join her, he felt a quick stab of remorse. He sat behind her quietly as the nurse teaching the class came over to shake his hand and offer him a name tag. NICHOLAS! it said, and in the corner was a chubby, smiling cartoon baby.
The nurse clapped her hands twice, and Nicholas watched Paige’s eyes blink open. He knew from the way she smiled at him, upside down, that she had not really been relaxing at all. She was faking it; she’d known the very second he’d entered the room. “Welcome,” she whispered, “to Husband Guilt Class.”
Nicholas leaned back against pillows he recognized from his own bedroom, listening to the nurse recount the three stages of labor, and what to expect during each one. He suppressed a yawn. She held up plastic-coated pictures of the fetus, arms and legs crossed, its head squeezing through the birth canal. A pert blond woman on the other side of the room raised her hand. “Isn’t it true,” she asked, “that your labor will probably be a lot like your mother’s?”
The nurse frowned. “Every baby’s different,” she mused, “but there does seem to be a correlation.”
Nicholas felt Paige tense at his side. “Oh, well,” she inn well,” swhispered. He suddenly remembered Paige as he’d seen her the night before when he came home from the hospital. She’d been sitting on the couch, wearing a sleeveless nightgown although it had been cold outside. She was crying, not even bothering to wipe the tears from her cheeks. He’d rushed to her side and taken her into his arms, asking over and over, “What is it?” and Paige, still sobbing, had pointed at the television, some insipid Kodak commercial. “I can’t help it,” she had said, her nose bubbling, her eyes swollen. “Sometimes this just happens.”
“Nicholas?” the nurse said for the second time.
The other fathers-to-be were staring at him, smirking, and Paige was patting his hand. “Go ahead,” she said.
