The tears came. They evaporated in the heat. They reappeared. They disappeared again. Everything dies, Annie thought. Even tears.
Pregnant. She repeated the word to herself several times, but she could not connect it to Amber and Frederick. Funny, she thought, since it was a word that embodied, literally, the connection between them. Among them, she corrected herself. Among the three of them: Amber, Frederick, and the proto-baby. But try as she would, all she could really imagine and understand, each time she silently uttered the word "pregnant," was the memory, the reality, of her own pregnancies: the humid, overheated, swollen fleshy physicality of it; the weight of her belly pulling down and straining, simultaneously, horizontally, in its taut width; the vast dense fatigue; the fear, the pride, the terror, the joy, the extravagant joy. She had stretched herself out on the couch and read War and Peace both times, a different translation with each pregnancy. Yet she had never read Anna Karenina. Odd. But was it so odd? She had started Anna Karenina numerous times, and with each attempt had been flooded with a startled anxious concern for Anna and her comfort that made her close the book in panic. She didn't want to know what she already knew.
She suddenly missed her children. She missed them as the young men they were and as the babies they had been. The soft wavy hair that had become coarser with age, the little dirty hands that had grown big and clean, the eyes that looked out from their manly faces, eyes that were the same eyes she had looked into when each one was first placed, blue and scrawny, on her exhausted belly.
For the first time that she could remember, Annie felt alone, truly and desperately alone. Even when her husband had disappeared and she had been left to fend for herself with two little boys, there had been the two little boys. Now they were gone, too. They loved her and called her and sent her e-mails and would still snuggle up to her to be petted when they were in the mood, but they were men, and though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs.
She imagined Frederick coming home to his house, a house he loved and longed for. Perhaps it was that very night he left her at the library and his children urged him to stay in the city with them. He had driven and driven in the highway's nighttime of passing headlights and blank horizons. He had stopped for coffee, certainly. Maybe a doughnut, too. Then back in the car, his knees a little stiff, squinting at the windshield. When he finally pulled into his driveway, with what joy and relief he saw his little house, or his big rambling house, or whatever size house he had, with what joy and relief--a surge of emotion. I'm home, he thought. At last, I'm home. And then there, in her tiny jersey shorts and camisole, getting herself a late-night snack or pouring yet another glass of wine, there was Amber, a beautiful young woman in his kitchen smelling of the bath she had just taken, her skin glowing with youth and health. And she would have greeted him with so much warmth. And poured a glass of wine for him. And then they would have gone out onto the porch and listened to the sea as it swished up onto the sand. The stars would have stared down at them, or they would have watched the clouds rush across the face of the moon. He would throw out some lines of Shakespeare, she would be thrilled. He was so happy to be home. And part of that home was the pretty home sitter, someone so comfortable, so natural, in his kitchen, on the arm of his Adirondack chair on his porch, the arm of his Adirondack chair in which he was sitting while she kneaded his shoulders with her strong, young healer hands. And then, on the arm of his Adirondack chair, his own arm would notice her bare thigh against it, and the thought of comfort would fly from his mind, swept out by another thought, a new thought, an unexpected thought, but one he could not now unthink. And his hand would move to the suggestive curve of her leg, and he would take the suggestion and move his hand higher. And, with a little moan, the home sitter would slip into his lap, at home . . .
Annie, to her horror, could, and did, envision every movement of this New England soft-core courtship.
Turn the page, she told herself. Better yet, close the book.
Miranda had waited until her sister, that hovering, omnipresent figure of concern, had finally gone off for a walk. Then she sat up in bed. She opened her computer.
There he was.