Peter shakes his head. “You look so pretty,” he says. “That’s all.” When she doesn’t say anything he opens the door wider and asks her inside. He tells her Yvonne is teaching a class at the Y on grooming cats.
Rachel tries not to study everything in the house. She sees that animal hair coats everything. She sees framed photographs of Peter and Yvonne, all smiling white teeth. She smells some kind of fruity candle burning, one of those cloyingly sweet ones that make her slightly nauseous. But she concentrates on Peter’s back, the back she has followed through train stations across Europe, and up narrow stairways in pensions, and into crowds, and now through the house he shares with Yvonne. When he turns to ask her if she’d like a glass of wine, she is startled by him, by how she has loved him for so long. She actually gasps, she thinks. But he is too busy, uncorking and pouring, to notice.
She lets herself look around this room. Here is their television, their stereo, a rough Haitian rug that used to sit in the apartment Rachel lived in with Peter. Music is playing, something unfamiliar. A CD case lying on the floor says ENYA, but Rachel doesn’t know if that’s the group or the title.
“To Paris,” Peter says, raising his glass.
“Shut the door,” Rachel says. But she is thinking je t’adore.
She lets him kiss her. But she does the rest, the undressing, the reaching, the urging yes, yes, yes. For a few minutes they are somewhere else, on some forgotten bed in a foreign country, doing this same thing, learning each other. But when this is done, she feels something she has not yet felt about Peter: it is over between them. The thought strikes her, like a slap. Then settles into its proper place. It really is over, she thinks. When they hear Yvonne’s car pull up, they both scramble to their feet and dress hurriedly, without embarrassment.
For the first time, when Rachel sees Yvonne, she smiles.
“I was on my way out,” she tells her.
“We had a minor tragedy,” Peter says.
RACHEL GIVES HER notice at the toy store and spends her days with Sofia at the playground, or at home packing. Her friends have started to give her going away parties. She feels full, happy even. Later, when she sits alone in her small bathroom, two weeks before she and Sofia are to leave, staring at the bright pink spot appearing in front of her—a pink spot is positive!—Rachel wonders if she ignored the early signs just to have those weeks of feeling so good. Her hands are shaking as she lowers the early pregnancy test with its positive pink reading. She wants to call Mary suddenly, Mary who she has not spoken to since that awful phone call. And as soon as she thinks about doing it, she understands why—this could have something to do with Harry.
THERE IS ONLY one right thing to do. Rachel knows this. But still she calls her friend Liz—a real friend—and tells her. Liz is single, self-assured, a lawyer who wears suits in bright colors like magenta and tangerine.
“It could be Peter’s?” Liz asks.
It is the one question that Rachel has not let herself consider. Because there, in front of her every moment, singing “Frère Jacques” and skipping through the emptying rooms and splashing in her bath each night, is Sofia, the child she did have. Hers and Peter’s child.
“It could be that rooster’s too,” Rachel says, too quickly.
Liz recovers immediately. “That’s irrelevant anyway,” she says, in what Rachel guesses is her lawyer voice. “Let’s not waste time. Call your doctor. Set up an appointment.” Then, gentler, “You only have two weeks before you go.”
“I know,” Rachel says.
Outside, Sofia’s voice rises up to her through the open windows. It is late summer, the air has not yet turned cool. Everything around them has gone past green to gold and looks burned, parched. A wave of nausea washes over Rachel. Is it her first? She remembers thinking she had food poisoning at a picnic last week. She remembers thinking she might be coming down with something.
“I’ll drive you,” Liz says. “Let me check my calendar.”
“No,” Rachel tells her. She is thinking of other things. That flight to Paris in two weeks. The way a plane points straight upward when it’s first airborne.
“Look,” Liz tells her, “you’re not alone here.”
Rachel knows this. She has Sofia, after all.
SHE CANNOT FIND a doctor to do it.
“My God,” she tells Liz the night before, “it’s like the sixties or something. I mean, this is legal, right?”
In the end, there is no place to go except a clinic, where everyone else will be twenty years younger than her, clutching the hand of a frightened boy or a disappointed mother.