The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Page 7

  “I’ve been watching you,” my mother said. She leaned against the door and looked weary, older than I’d seen her look in a long time. It had been hard on all of us—not only missing Henry, but facing the idea that your whole world can change, suddenly, irreversibly. We were reminded how flimsy everything is, as frail as the airmail envelopes my mother had sent us the summer she disappeared. This is the life you have and then it’s gone. I felt sorry for my mother. I knew what it was like not to be able to help your child, to change the incomprehensible randomness of life, to reverse a loss. But she had a plan. She was being valiant. “Come to brunch,” she said. “Let’s just talk.”

  hildren. For all of the times that you miss out on things you’d like to do because of them, there are an equal number of excuses they offer to get out of things you’d like to miss.

  “Abbot is exhausted,” I said to Elysius and Daniel. “I’ve got to get him to bed before he passes out.”

  Abbot was revved up on cake, Shirley Temples, and chocolate cubes. He could have gone on indefinitely. I was the one who was exhausted. I was fairly sure that my sister could tell I’d been crying. My makeup had been all but erased, and my eyes were probably still red-rimmed. But she didn’t say anything about it, for her own sake, maybe, but also for mine.

  It was dark now. There were small white lights strung around the tent like glowing beads and larger spotlights propped at the edges. The guests were still here, talking and laughing, the sign of a good party. Elysius looked tired but happily so, gorgeously so, and Daniel had kicked back at a table littered with purses and waning bouquets.

  “Thanks for staying so long,” my sister said without any hint of sarcastic subtext. She’d gone soft with all the displays of affection and really was forgiving me.

  I accepted it immediately. “I wish I could stay longer. It was a beautiful ceremony and a great party.”

  The wind was kicking up now, a strong breeze.

  “It might rain,” Daniel said, looking at the distant sky.

  “It’s allowed to rain now,” my sister said, like a small god. “My work is done.”

  And so Abbot and I headed back down the sloping lawn toward the studio. If his father were here, I thought, he’d carry him into the studio, up the stairs, and into bed. Did Abbot remember times when Henry had lifted him up from the backseat of the car after a long night? The scratchiness of his coat, the smell of his aftershave? Every child deserves that memory. I had my own: my father walking along the narrow walkway up to our front door, boxed by hedgerows that my shoes brushed against as we made our way, and he would hum a tune I didn’t know, the low register of his baritone vibrating from his chest to my cheek.

  Abbot was too heavy for me to carry, and so we walked along, hand in hand, and I became painfully aware, as I often did, that I was lucky to have Abbot. I could have been walking down this slope alone. Without the responsibility of Abbot, how would I have managed to go on? But this was something that Henry and I had wondered when we were still together, too. How had we managed to find life meaningful before Abbot?

  Abbot was a surprise, or, well, a kind-of surprise.… We finished culinary school and were both dizzily working, he in an upscale, high-pressure restaurant, I in a bakery. We both wanted to have a child but knew the timing wasn’t right. We had student loans. We wanted to save up to buy a house. We would take turns telling each other that rational people wouldn’t have a baby now. It wouldn’t make sense. It would be foolhardy, but this struck me as fool-hearty. “Fools of the heart,” I said. “Fool-hearty.”

  Henry was the one who finally came out with it. “Why don’t we have an accident?”

  “You mean you want to knock me up?” I said.

  “Accidentally,” he said.

  “But if I know about it, wouldn’t that be on purpose?” I said.

  “This isn’t a question of logic. Let’s be fool-hearty.”

  Instead of practicing safe sex, we practiced accidents. We got good at it. One week I was expecting my period and it didn’t come. I sent Henry to the store for a pregnancy test. I took it and the pregnancy box looked like it had a blurry line.

  “Go get another one,” I said. “I’ll fill up on fluids.”

  He went to the store and came back with three more but then had to race to work. He didn’t have a cell phone, and so, after three pink lines had shown up clearly in three clear windows, I drove to the restaurant around the time he got off work. When I saw him crossing a street to the parking garage, I blew the horn, parked the car at a red light, and got out.

  He turned around.

  “I am!” I shouted.

  He ran across the intersection, wrapped his arms around me, and lifted me off my feet. The guy in the car behind us stuck his head out the window. “And?” he shouted. “So what is it?”

  “She’s pregnant!” Henry shouted joyfully. “A kind-of accident!”

  “In that case, kind-of congratulations!” the guy said. “Can you get in your car and drive now?”

  We were ebullient. We called family and friends. Henry boasted about his sperm. We immediately jumped into name books. Henry said, “How about we go with Bantu? It means ‘the people.’ ” I was stuck on cheese—Gorgonzola, Gruyère …

  But eventually the thought of cheese made me sick, as did all foods. The nausea and exhaustion made me feel bludgeoned, drugged. I shuffled around the house talking about all of the women who came before me, all of the silent suffering. “I feel like I’ve survived a bomb blast.” I looked in the mirror and expected to find myself dusted in char.

  Henry rubbed my feet, my lower back. He made me chicken salad with cranberry dressing on croissants—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—for three weeks straight. It was the only thing I would eat.

  It turns out that the nausea and exhaustion had a purpose: they were blocking fear. And as soon as they lifted, the anxiety swept in. Now, looking back, it’s no wonder that Abbot is borderline obsessive-compulsive. I was terrified of pregnancy. That level of anxiety has to make its way through the placenta.

  Henry was calm about this, maybe because Italians have a history of big families. Babies get born, one way or another. One time I woke him in the middle of the night to tell him that childbirth was the number-one way women died throughout history. “Go to any old graveyard and read the tombstones and count how many women are buried with their babies.”

  He rubbed his face. “What are you talking about?”

  “I could take you to a graveyard right now and we could count tombstones of women and their babies.”

  “Are you asking me out on a date?” He smiled sleepily, seductively, and I slugged him in the arm and then laid my head on his chest.

  I read all of the pregnancy books I could get my hands on until Henry told me that he thought I should stop. “Not cold turkey. I don’t want you to get the DTs, but you should cut back.”

  I’d already read them all anyway. “The damage is done,” I told him.

  I sweated out every test, every ultrasound, every doctor visit. Each one that the baby and I passed only seemed to make it clearer to me that we were bound to fail a bigger one, until, finally, there was only one left: childbirth.

  Childbirth began in a textbook fashion: with small cramps and twinges that became more and more uncomfortable.

  Henry said, “We should head to the hospital or you’ll end up giving birth in the back of a cab.”

  “That only happens in movies. We’re not taking a cab.”

  “I know, but still …” He was standing beside me, somewhat hunched, his arms in front of his chest as if he were expecting the baby to fall out and he wanted to be ready to catch it.

  “I’m not supposed to go in until I can’t talk through contractions anymore,” I said through a contraction.

  And so we walked through the neighborhood. Sidewalk, birds, sun, fences, dogs … It was a normal neighborhood, completely unaware of what was going on inside of me. And what was going on? Abbot wasn’t a baby as much
as he felt like entire landscapes shifting, tumbling, cinching, and releasing.

  The contractions grew stronger, and I wanted to get out of my own body, to escape. I had the terrifying realization that there was something lodged inside of me. Lodged.

  I told Henry it was time. I remembered the sky through the car window, phone wires, trees. I said, “If I don’t make it out alive, you should tell the baby everything about us, how much we loved each other. You should tell the baby that love is possible—that it’s bigger than all of us.”

  “You’re going to live,” Henry said. “The baby is going to live, too. It’s going to be okay.”

  I looked at him pityingly, as if he were so naïve.

  “Think of all the people who are alive,” he said. “They all came from mothers. Mothers who went through this. The world is filled with people!”

  This didn’t comfort me. So many women, so much pain. How was it possible that everyone was born in this way? How could the world hold all of this suffering?

  “There was a woman who had a baby in a tree during the monsoons,” Henry explained. “She and the baby were fine! Even the tree was fine! People—and trees—are hardy.”

  I didn’t care about the woman in the tree. I closed my eyes during a contraction and the world disappeared. And then by the time we got to the hospital, I was aware only in small windows of painlessness—crisp, bright windows of nurses and IVs and gurneys and a small room with a rocking chair and Henry—Henry talking to the doctor, Henry holding my hand, Henry rubbing my lips with ice.

  The doctor said that he could see the head crowning.

  Henry said, “I see it.”

  See what? I thought. There was only this force of will. There was only a desire, wanting. There was no longer fear. Only breath. Only legs. Only the swell of my stomach and wanting to be above it so that I could bear down on it.

  A nurse arranged a mirror so I could see the baby’s head, but mirrors were beyond me. The heads of babies were beyond me. They meant nothing.

  There was a dense opening in my body, the movement of bones, the bearing down. And then someone said that the head was out, another push, and there was a release, something tumbling. And I never could have imagined what came next. Something squalling and ruddy and bloody. Something hefted up and moving toward me, placed on my chest.

  And Henry said, “You did it.” His face was flushed. He was crying.

  It took a moment for me to realize that this was what had been inside of me—this body with heels and elbows. All of the months of kicking made sense in a new way. I touched the baby’s fingers. I watched the flicker of heartbeat on his chest. I ran one finger over the fine, slick hair on his head.

  “It’s a baby,” I said to Henry.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s our baby.”

  “And we’re both alive.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Just like I told you.”

  I have a pared-down version of this story that I told Abbot, one of many Henry stories. Abbot liked this story in particular because it was about him as a baby—an Abbot story, really, the making of. He loved his own baby stories. But the truth was it always left me feeling unsettled. The unspoken deal between Henry. At the end of this story about life, Abbot was still alive, and so was I. And Henry was not. This fact—this irreversible fact—loomed at the end of this story in starker relief than all the other stories. The last time I told it, I pushed Abbot’s bangs from his face and kissed his forehead. “Goodnight,” I whispered, and then felt a catch in my throat. Don’t cry, I said to myself. Don’t cry. I turned out Abbot’s Red Sox night-light, and the tears were already streaming down my face. I went to bed and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore.

  I didn’t tell anyone that these collapses were still happening almost two years later—not even my mother, who would likely have found something comforting to say. I didn’t want comfort. I was afraid to tell someone, because I didn’t want to stop—grief was my connection to Henry. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing it.

  The night of my sister’s wedding, I tucked Abbot into the silky sheets on the sofa bed in the loft in Daniel’s studio and it struck me that I told Abbot Henry stories the way my mother once told us stories of the house in Provence. A weakness for her, too? Maybe it was a family tradition. Abbot knew all the stories by heart. If I left out a detail, one single small item—like the dollop of white sauce on the lapel of Henry’s tux at our wedding—he’d stop me. “Tell it right,” he’d say. “Don’t skip a thing.” I’d always thought that Abbot was my greatest ally, the keeper of the details. He would remember everything even if I slipped. Together, I thought, Abbot and I could keep Henry alive.

  I wondered if he was going to ask for a Henry story tonight. But I was now overwhelmed by all of the memories that the day—the announcement of the fire, my sister’s beautiful wedding—had drummed up. Maybe Abbot sensed this. Not tonight, I urged Abbot in my mind. Not tonight.

  I was surprised, though, when he reached into his canvas bag and pulled out his dictionary. He then climbed into bed and tucked it next to him, partly under the covers, like a teddy bear. Henry had given it to him on his fifth birthday. Originally, it had been a gift from Henry’s father when Henry went off to college, and there was a stiff inscription in his father’s scrawl, a quote from Galileo. It was written in Italian and then translated: All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered: the point is to discover them. And then he added: Use your words well.

  Henry had written a note to Abbot on the next page. It read: Ditto what Papa said. Be curious. Happy 5th Birthday! Love, Daddy

  The dictionary usually sat on Abbot’s bedside table. Was it a sign that Abbot was clinging to the past too much?

  It was an American Heritage second college edition—and what made it so special to Abbot was that Henry had taped tiny Xeroxed photos of Abbot over the pictures that lined the outermost columns of the pages. He’d taped Abbot’s picture over the head of a bison; over the astronaut’s head for the definition of pressure suit; on top of one of the polo players above the word polo; over the face of an immigrant; over the face of a helmsman as well as a statue of Eros. Of course, he also put Abbot’s face in the column on the page where abbot was defined, but he scribbled in his own second definition: Abbot (ab’at) n. The world’s most wonderful boy. [ME abbod < OE < Llat. Abbas …]

  I’d seen Abbot thumbing through the dictionary at night before, but I didn’t know he’d become so attached.

  “You brought the dictionary,” I said.

  “It helps me sleep,” he said. He smiled and gave a quick jerky shrug of his shoulders. He tapped it with his knuckles, a strange gesture that I couldn’t read, and then stared up at the night sky through the skylight.

  I opened one of the windows to let in the cool breeze and then hung his tux on a hanger I found in an old wardrobe, its mirror fogged with age.

  “Remember when you, me, and Dad went to that aquarium,” Abbot asked, “the one with the huge tank of beluga whales?”

  “Yep,” I said. “We walked through that glass underwater tunnel. I loved the jellyfish.” Their pink headdresses, all glow and flounce, seemed like lurid turbans, and their bodies moved like bright ball gowns, pulsing over our heads—puff and glide, puff and glide. Henry had caught me looking a little teary-eyed. I told him that they made me think about Abbot’s childhood, how it seemed to be slipping away from us.

  “I thought about that today when Pop-pop and I were watching the show on Animal Planet,” Abbot said. “Remember how Daddy loved the belugas?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He said that the beluga’s leg bones looked so real when it kicked its fins. He said it was like a man was trapped in the whale’s body. And how they had belly buttons. Whales are just like us.”

  Could Abbot know that this memory resonated with me so deeply? Children register things, I believe, even though they don’t understand a conflicted moment rationally, or maybe because it’s not rational, they
register it not in the conscious mind but more deeply, and so it gets stuck.

  That night after the aquarium, in the hotel in downtown Atlanta, I’d asked Henry if he felt like he was trapped, the way he saw the body of a man inside of the beluga. I worried that it had been symbolic, a metaphor, even a subconscious one. He looked at me, startled, and then said, “I’m not trapped inside of a whale or a life,” he said. “Are you?”

  I realized that maybe I was projecting my own fears onto him. Did I feel trapped? Was that the reason for the inarticulate longing I sometimes felt? “No,” I said, unwilling to admit to anything that awful. I was lucky. We were lucky. But then I whispered, “I just wonder if this is what life is, just this moment and then the next and the next and then it stops. And that’s all.”

  I could tell that I’d hurt him. “We’ve built this around ourselves together, but we’re not trapped. There’s a difference.”

  And now I saw the giant belugas in my mind. Henry was right. You could see their powerful legs beneath their skin, and it was so very human. Did I feel like a woman trapped inside of myself? I couldn’t think of any other way to live. Henry and I had built this life—a trap or not, it was what we’d built. And even though I felt lonesome now within it, I didn’t want out. All I wanted was our old domestic life back again.

  I told Abbot that I remembered what Daddy said, too, the beluga’s leg bones, its belly button. “Did you like the wedding?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he said. “But it wasn’t as good as yours and Daddy’s wedding.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Theirs was too fancy. Yours was just right.”

  I agreed but didn’t reply. Ours was just right—for us, that’s all. “Are you sleepy now?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Go to sleep,” I said.

  He opened his eyes wide and stared at me. “They have a smoke detector in here even though it’s just a studio, right? Not a house.”