Forever is the Worst Long Time: A Novel Page 15

  One of these evenings, I believe it was in late December, I was perusing the dry-goods bins at Kroger—would I be in the mood for chocolate-covered pretzels the following day or Spanish peanuts?—when I looked up and saw Kathryn.

  Me being me, I was ready to rush off in the other direction, but she wheeled her cart straight at me. “Well?” she asked, looking at me in a way that suggested she already knew the answer to the question she was about to ask. “How are you?”

  Her cart was filled with various brightly colored produce and a jumbo-size box of diapers, presumably for the same child she had been pregnant with when I had seen her at Lou’s book party. It occurred to me that enough time had passed that she could have already had another baby.

  “Oh, you know. Peachy,” I said.

  “Are you still writing?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, because what was the point in lying? “How about you? How’s family life?”

  “Hard. Great, but really hard.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t, really. I didn’t want Kathryn to be miserable, but neither did I want her life with Christopher Bucknell, PhD to be a perpetual picnic.

  “I hear you’re having a child,” she said, and another woman pushing her cart past us turned to look at us, then scurried on her way.

  I decided that I would take both the peanuts and the pretzels and tore a couple of clear plastic bags off the rotating rod. “Says who?” I asked, scooping peanuts from a large plastic bin.

  “Says Lou.”

  I felt my ears get hot. So Lou had told Kathryn herself. I supposed someone had to. I wondered if it had been awkward, and whether they would remain friends. “Oh.” I dropped the peanuts into my shopping basket, which I had set on the floor. I arranged another bag beneath another dispenser and pulled the lever, unloading four times as many chocolate-covered pretzels as I’d intended to purchase. Had Kathryn not been there, I would have left the overstuffed bag beneath the dispenser and started over with a new bag, but her presence made me acutely aware that discarding the pretzels wasn’t the most ethical move. I dropped the bag of pretzels next to the peanuts in my basket. “Yes. We are. I’m very excited.”

  “James,” she said.

  I didn’t really want to hear it. Certainly not beneath the bright, artificial lights of my preferred supermarket—but not ever, really. “Yes, Kathryn?” I asked wearily.

  “I always knew.”

  “That we would meet again in the bulk-food aisle?” I said, in a last-ditch attempt to redirect our conversation.

  “That you were in love with her,” she said, too loud. “I always knew, deep down, that Lou was your idea of the perfect woman.”

  I was expecting it, I think, but I winced all the same.

  “You tried to fight it; I’ll give you that,” continued Kathryn. “And I wasn’t really concerned when we were together because I assumed Lou being with you was about as likely as you being struck by lightning. Then again, it never occurred to me that Rob might cheat on Lou. That kind of grief makes people do crazy things.”

  That’s not what it’s about. The man Kathryn had dated before me had cheated on her, more than once. Her frame of reference was different from mine, or so I told myself. “Are you angry?” I asked.

  She answered in interrogatives that made it clear she thought this was an inane question. “At Lou? For wanting a child? And keeping it? Even if that child happens to be yours?”

  “Well, yes. But I mean at me.”

  She pulled her chin back. “God, no. I mean, yes, it stings. But I feel way worse for Rob than I do for myself.”

  I startled. Of course, she was right; it was Rob who had fared the most poorly in all this.

  “Anyway, I’m not thrilled about it, but Lou and I haven’t been close since she split with Rob. I thought she just needed space, but now I wonder if that space had something to do with you. Maybe none of this is actually so sudden and surprising.” Kathryn eyed me warily. “As for you, not all relationships are meant to last. My life worked out as it should have.” She glanced at the scant contents of my basket, and back at me. “Though I guess you don’t ever really stop loving someone, do you?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Let’s be honest: I wanted to hear her come out and say, Of course I still love you, James. Because as I regarded her—her face scrubbed bare, clad in a t-shirt with a crusted, unidentifiable orange smear across the chest, in the middle of one of life’s truly tedious tasks—it hit me quite suddenly that I had loved her, far more than I had known or been able to admit. As she had just said, I always would.

  Kathryn put her hands on her cart, ready to return to her shopping. “I don’t know. But for your sake, as well as Lou’s and your child’s, I hope you’re able to enjoy what’s next.” She looked down at a beautiful gold watch on her wrist, which I had never seen before. “I need to get going; Isla gets up at the crack of dawn every morning.” She sighed. “Listen—as Christopher often says, parenting makes quantum mechanics look simple. I really do wish you and Lou the best.”

  “Thank you,” I mumbled.

  She began to wheel away but then turned back to me. “James?”

  “Yes?”

  She gave me a smile so small it could have passed for a frown. “It was good to see you.”

  Our run-in gnawed at me for days afterward. I thought about what she said about being able to enjoy what was next and tried to convince myself that clearly—clearly!—I would be able to.

  Mostly, though, I considered what she had said about Lou. I had held Lou up as the perfect woman—the ideal love, really. And I was only beginning to understand the consequences of that.

  SEVENTEEN

  January 2009

  You were born on an unseasonably warm day in late January, shortly after five in the morning. I wish I could tell you about your birth, but at that particular moment I was driving through the middle of rural Pennsylvania, not far from where Lou had once lived as a child, completely unaware that you had just come into the world.

  I had been granted a leave of absence from work, but I hadn’t planned to go to New York until the week of Lou’s due date. After all, she told me, most first births are late.

  But most is not all, and Lou went into labor two weeks early. And rather than the long, unmedicated labor she had been bracing herself for, her contractions had barely begun when you began to show signs of distress on a fetal monitor. She was promptly whisked into the operating room, where you were delivered not by her midwife, but by a surgeon she had never met.

  I arrived at the hospital around nine, dazed with sleeplessness and anxiety. Lou was fast asleep, tethered to a hospital bed with IVs. Jennifer—the one I danced with at Lou and Rob’s wedding—was slouched in an armchair at Lou’s side. When she saw me, she stood and whisked me into the hall.

  The air smelled of bleach and metal. Across the way, a woman groaned. “How are they doing?” I asked Jennifer.

  She was biting her bottom lip so hard I wanted to tell her to stop. “The surgery was scary,” she finally said. “One minute Lou was in labor and the next she was in the ER. But she was such a champ. She went into it with her chin up, even though she was terrified. I mean, you know how she feels about needles.”

  I didn’t, in fact, and yet another wave of guilt came crashing over me. Why did I listen to Lou? I should have come to New York at the beginning of January and waited it out. I should have been there. “And the baby?” I asked. “How is she?”

  Jennifer’s face lit up. “Gorgeous, and as healthy as a horse. She’s in the nursery. You can ask them to bring her in to see you.”

  Lou was just beginning to wake up when a nurse wheeled you into the room. Her face was puffy, and her slim limbs were swollen from the fluids they had been pumping in through her IVs.

  “There’s our girl,” she said as the nurse placed you in my arms. “Isn’t she wonderful?”

  As I stared down at you, my first thought was Yes, she’s the most wonde
rful thing that’s ever happened to me.

  My second: Don’t drop her.

  Oh, but you were a glorious little thing. Your skin was the same caramel of my father’s; your eyes were bright and almond shaped, like Lou’s, but gray at that point, rather than the hazel they would later become.

  I hadn’t spent much time around infants, and certainly not newborns. Even though I had seen you jump and swim in Lou’s womb, I still couldn’t believe how animated, how very alive you were in my arms. You lifted an impossibly small hand up to your face. Myopic and curious, you examined me, and I prayed some part of you recognized me as your father.

  “Did you name her?” I asked Lou. We had discussed a few names the last time I was in New York, but none had seemed right.

  “I was waiting for you.” She gave me a funny smile. “What do you think about Emerson Bell?”

  My heart seized, thinking of the Emerson quote about doing the thing you are most afraid of. “Emerson Bell Hernandez,” I said to you softly. “It’s perfect. You’re perfect.”

  If my love for Lou had been tangled up in indecision and regret, what I felt for you was pure and inevitable. I’ve never been one for organized religion, but on that morning I thanked God, and the universe, and every unseen force that had contributed to you being there in my arms. My actions had caused so much pain; they had brought me so much pain. But as I held you, all the pain fell away. What remained, Emerson, was you.

  EIGHTEEN

  Early 2009

  I stayed in New York for three weeks after your birth. I mostly remember feelings and fragments from that time. Joy, as I cradled you in my arms and sang every lullaby I knew, and a few I didn’t really know, too.

  Despair, when I couldn’t calm you in the middle of the night and had to wake Lou, who desperately needed sleep, so she could nurse you.

  Hope—that temporary balm, that ephemeral elixir—after Lou promised we would find a way for me to remain in your life.

  But the most pervasive of these was grief. Many a night, I found Lou sobbing in bed, only to have her send me away, reminding me that Rob was probably who she longed to have comfort her.

  Not that I could fault her, since my own instinct was to pick up the phone and call Rob, too. I wanted to share the news and show you off (Look! I’ve made a real, live human!). And each time I had this urge, I was reminded that he was no longer a part of my life and never would be again. I had recently overheard Lou tell a friend that divorce was worse than death because it came with all of the pain and none of the resolution. I knew just what she meant.

  I missed my mother, too, which caught me by surprise. She had treated tenderness as though it were ill timed, if not downright inappropriate. She didn’t really hug; if she kissed you, it was with her lips pulled so tight you could feel her teeth behind them. Reassuring words were reserved for friends and neighbors—not her children.

  But all the same, she was my mother, and she would have been thrilled to have a granddaughter. Maybe you would have even bridged the gap between us.

  Now the gap I faced was six hundred miles wide. When the day came for me to return to Michigan, I wanted to yell and kick and refuse to leave. But I didn’t break down in front of Lou. (And why? What cool-guy facade was I trying to uphold? I had no game, and we both knew it.) Instead, I kissed your wrinkled forehead and hugged Lou and made her swear she would let me know if she needed anything. I drove home mournful and spent.

  There is even less about the next month that remains in my mind. Did I fall behind at work? Probably. I seem to recall my colleagues looking at me questioningly when I lost my train of thought midsentence. Nessa, who was soon to take over for Craig as stewardship director and would therefore become my direct supervisor, covered for me more than a few times. “Been there, and not so long ago,” she said sympathetically when she found me drooling on my keyboard one afternoon when I was supposed to be in a meeting.

  Pascal called often—I do remember that, because he showed up at my office at the end of one workday in February to complain that I never picked up the phone. Then he dragged me to a steak house, where he ordered me a rib eye and fries. (“You look like a malnourished goat, and you don’t smell much better, either,” he muttered when I protested.) As I ate, he demanded that we devise a plan.

  I blew him off, arguing that a plan was pointless when Lou was the one calling the shots.

  “I’m not talking about Emerson or Lou,” he retorted—typical Pascal. “I’m talking about you. As your friend, I have no choice but to insist that you cannot walk around looking like that.”

  “Like what?” I said, as though he had not just compared me to underfed livestock.

  “You’re not going to get anything you want if you can’t think straight. And,” he said, sniffing me, “you need a shower.”

  I laughed and ate my steak, but I still didn’t see how any effort on my part would make a difference.

  The following day, a box of books arrived at my office. Some were new; others were dog-eared and marked to high hell. I found a note scribbled on a piece of university stationery at the bottom of the box:

  Kafka said a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. Start chopping. —P

  He had sent me at least a dozen volumes. Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love. Books I might have turned my nose up at during my MFA years, like Laurie Colwin’s Family Happiness, proved to be page-turners. Others, like Rilke’s Possibility of Being, were not as cathartic as I was anticipating.

  No matter: I read them all, one after another like my life depended on it. Which I suppose it did. I pored over the pages in the morning and at night, on my lunch break and in the bath. When Lou would put the phone near your head (not too close—we were all half convinced cell phones caused brain tumors, and maybe by the time you read this that will have proved to be true) so you could hear my voice, I would read lines from Colette or Alice Munro, more of Pascal’s picks.

  Buoyed by the books and a slow but surging feeling that maybe I could find some way to make the most of our fractured family, I flew to New York for a long weekend.

  I should have seen the signs, but I was so busy analyzing myself in relation to Lou that I failed to train a critical lens on her. Even leaking breast milk, exhausted and overwhelmed, she was beautiful to me—maybe more so than ever. But my heart no longer fluttered each time I looked at her. Was I just distracted by the baby, I wondered? Or maybe it was guilt at play. Even if Rob and I would go to our graves without reconciling, I owed it to him to not rekindle a relationship with Lou—regardless of whether she happened to be the mother of my child. Perhaps this, I reasoned, had finally managed to dampen my desire.

  And so I disregarded her being up in the middle of the night, even when you slept through until the morning. I assured myself that her spending the better part of the day in bed, too, was normal. I ignored that the bagels, Brie, and chocolate penguins I brought her—all of her favorites—went uneaten. I told myself she just needed a break when she didn’t want to go for a walk with us when the temperature rose to a glorious, sunny sixty-five.

  It was so easy to focus on the immediate—that is to say, you. You lifted your head! You gained half a pound! You smiled. (Or did you? I wasn’t always sure.) Everything you did was so fresh and fascinating that I couldn’t believe I had ever thought having a child would be a bad idea.

  When can I bring Emerson to meet my father, my sister, my extended family? I asked Lou. And when I received mumbled, inconclusive answers in return, I rationalized that away, too. For all intents and purposes, Lou was a single parent. Was it any surprise that her primary concern was how she would get through the next hour?

  On Monday afternoon, just before I left for the airport, I asked Lou if I could return in a month or two.

  “Sure,” she said, her voice void of emotion.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. She was in the same pair of pajamas she had been wearing since I had arrived, and her hai
r was matted at her shoulders. But maybe that was how new mothers looked. Who could be concerned about lustrous locks when there was an adorable if squalling child just across the room?

  “Never better,” she said, flashing a smile that was as hollow as it was brief.

  And I, the half-wit, let it go.

  “Come when you’d like,” she told me. You were cradled in her arms like a football—you were still so incredibly small—and she held you forward, almost like a peace offering.

  I took you, kissed you, and whispered that I would see you again soon. Then I kissed Lou on the cheek, promised to call, and returned to my life.

  When Rob and I were kids, April Fools’ Day was always a big production. One year I put part of a Hershey’s bar on Rob’s seat, and he walked around school half the day with a brown smear on the back of his pants. In retaliation, the next year he lay on my front porch, right under the door, his t-shirt coated in fake blood and his head bent at an extreme angle. But when I walked out the door, I didn’t see him there and stepped directly on his stomach, which made him jump violently, and between his screaming and crimson-soaked shirt, and my screaming, half the neighborhood came out of their houses and started screaming, too. No surprise, my father threatened to whup my ass and Rob’s, but that didn’t stop us from running over to Wisnewski’s and attempting to pull the same gag on him.

  And so, when my doorbell rang the morning of April first, I didn’t think, Maybe I have a delivery (back then, the UPS truck didn’t swing by twice a day to drop off batteries and Bordeaux and the countless other things one now orders online). No, I thought, someone’s playing a joke on me. And when I opened the door and Lou thrust you into my arms, I expected her to yell, “April Fools!”