“I’m so so sorry, Nicky.” He did not understand why she was apologizing to him. Losing Baby was not her fault, and besides, he was not sure if he wanted Baby to come at all. She was crying softly in his ear. “It was a brother. A beautiful boy.”
For that whole summer she cried, or so it seemed at the time, but now he realized that only a few days passed when she could not bother to dress or leave the couch. When he was seven, he thought her sorrow would never end, and as she suffered, so did he. He moped about the living room, staring at cartoons on the television, not letting her far from his sight. He watched his father come from work and fill a glass with booze and drink until he remembered to order Nick to bed. He tiptoed around their misery. Sent out to play, he would sit on a rock and stare at the ocean. More often, he was shipped off to spend some time with Jack Peter, who never seemed to care about Nick’s feelings, unaware of anyone’s emotions but his own.
She got better like she said she would. The weight fell away in her sadness, and sometimes the whole pregnancy seemed nothing but a dream from beginning to end. His mother slowly came back into herself, and by late August, she was well enough to accept an invitation to the clambake the Keenans had planned to mark the end of another summer. Nick had looked forward to it for ages, a chance to return to normalcy, the Wellers and the Keenans on their own private stretch of paradise, just in sight of their dream house by the sea. The days were hot enough to go into the water, and the two boys were jumping over waves as they ran to the shoreline. They had been getting along just fine that day. He looked back over his shoulder. His mother was chatting with Jack’s father, his hand on her bare shoulder. Mrs. Keenan sat alone, reading a book, but he could not find his father anywhere. Nick pulled Jack into deeper water so that the swells nearly knocked them over. And then, in the middle of the ocean, Jack Peter had to ask about how they lost the baby. Why couldn’t he have been quiet and pretended all of it had never happened? Why did he have to make him angry? A word from Jack Peter about Baby, and he could have killed him on the spot.
Like a siren, the stereo downstairs blared with the soundtrack of Christmas and broke his memories. The same songs every year. His mom and dad were up and puttering about in their robes, probably wondering where he was and what was taking him so long and what kind of kid doesn’t come running on Christmas morning to see what Santa left and why is he the way he is. His mother would be putting cinnamon buns into the oven, the first whiff of hot sweetness just moments away. His father would be running the old electric train from his youth, the elaborate village set up beneath the tree with its endlessly fascinating circulation on the tracks. One or the other parent would be calling him soon, and he resolved to beat them to it by springing downstairs with a smile pasted on his face.
They hugged him and they kissed him, and they all wished one another a Merry Christmas. The cinnamon rolls popped out of the oven in gooey glory, and the train went round and round with a giraffe bobbing its head up and down, and they opened the gifts they had for one another with oohs and ahs and thank-yous. He watched his mother more intently than usual, following her actions so closely that several times she gave him a slightly reproachful look, and he would stop and pretend to be entranced by hockey skates or some new book rather than the changing patterns of her face. In some respects, his mother was the same as she had been that awful summer, and in her robe and jammies, she echoed the woman who had been stretched out on the sofa, mourning Baby. But in other aspects, she appeared much older, worn somehow, a crease in her brow every time she frowned. Faint lines at the corners of her eyes. A thin streak of gray spiraling from the hairline. The veins in the backs of her hands thick as vines. It wasn’t just the physical traits, really, but her manner that had aged her. She rarely laughed without restraint any more, not when she was sober, that giddy head-thrown-back cackle. Nick watched her watching her husband, regarding him coolly as if he had done something wrong that could never be forgiven.
Baby would have changed everything. A little kid around the house who still believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the bogeyman. Nick would be a big brother, not the only child, not the only one to take care of them. And maybe they would not drink so much, and maybe Nick could play with Baby instead of having to go to the Keenans all the time. The last gift exchanged and unwrapped, they all settled into their places, the easy chair, the sofa, the floor. Over the next hour, they drifted away, each heading nowhere, and by midday the morning’s happiness was but a memory.