I do only one thing then, and that’s check the fire safe box where I keep my money, to be sure someone hasn’t swiped every last penny from me. Because why else would someone break into the carriage home except to steal from me? I keep the box in the closet these days, hidden in the corner beneath the hem of a long winter coat where, God willing, no one will ever find it. I open the closet door, drop to my knees and gather the box in my hands. The box is locked. When I slip the key inside, I find every dollar accounted for. Whoever was here didn’t steal money from me.
I try not to let my imagination get the best of me, but to force logic to prevail. I tell myself that I never closed the shades in the first place. That I only thought about doing it, but never did. I think long and hard, trying to remember the smooth, woven feel of the white roller shade in my hand as I drew it southward and let go, watching it hold.
Did that happen, or did I only imagine it did?
Or maybe whatever springlike mechanism that makes the shades open failed to keep them closed. The ratchet and pin that hold them in place didn’t work. Simple human error or mechanical failure.
Or maybe someone was there, lifting the roller shades one by one so that when I returned, they could see me. I tell myself no. That the front door was locked. And that, as far as I know, only one person but me has a key. My landlord.
I step from the closet and make my way to a nearby window where I stare out and toward Ms. Geissler’s home. The room turns warm all of a sudden. Beneath my arms, I sweat.
There’s no one there, no one that I can see.
And yet, as it was last night, there’s a light on in the third-story window of the greystone home. The window shades are lowered, but not pulled all the way down. They don’t lie flush against the window sill. There’s a gap. Albeit a small one, only a couple of inches at best.
But still, a gap.
And as I stare at that gap for half the night, sometime around midnight I see a shadow pass by. Just a shadow, but nothing more.
eden
July 2, 1997 Egg Harbor
Be still my beating heart, it worked! We’re going to have a baby!
One single cycle of IVF and, as I sat on the toilet today after Aaron had gone off to work, the all-familiar pregnancy test cradled between my fingers, I spied not one single line this time, but two. Two! Two pink lines running parallel on the display screen.
My heart hammered quickly inside my chest. It was all I could do not to scream.
And still I had my doubts—after months of seeing only one line, it was easy to convince myself that I was imagining the second one there, that I had quite simply fashioned it in my mind. The one line was bright pink like bubble gum, the same dependable line that greeted me each month, bringing stinging tears to my eyes.
But the other, this new line, was a light pink, the lightest of light, the mere suggestion of pink, a whisper that something might be there.
I pray that it’s not a deception of my mind.
I went to the market wearing mismatching shoes. I drove above the speed limit with the window open, though outside it poured down rain. I ran into the store without an umbrella, saturating my hair. If anyone noticed my shoes, they didn’t point it out.
I purchased three additional pregnancy tests of assorted brands in case one had a tendency toward being inaccurate. I took them home and urinated on them all, every last one of them, and in the end, there were six lines.
Three additional pregnancy tests.
Six pink lines.
Aaron and I are going to have a baby.
July 5, 1997 Egg Harbor
For days we’ve been living in a constant state of euphoria.
I walk around the home, floating on air. I dream up baby names for boys and girls. I go to the hardware store and get samples of paint for the nursery room walls.
At home alone, I find myself dancing. Spinning in graceful circles around the living room floors. In all my life, I’ve never danced before. But I can’t help myself. I can’t stop my feet from swaying, my arms wrapped around myself, holding on to the life within. Dancing with my unborn child. I find an old record and set it on the turntable. I carefully place the needle on it, and move in tune to the music as Gladys Knight sings a song for me.
The day I discovered the positive pregnancy tests, I phoned Aaron at work to deliver the news. He was euphoric in a way I’d rarely seen him before. He left work at once and came home earlier than ever before, pulling his car in to the drive minutes before eight o’clock.
He brought me ice cream in bed; he fed it to me with a bent-out-of-shape spoon. He lay in bed beside me and rubbed my back. He massaged my feet. He stroked my hair. He told me how amazing I was, how gorgeous, and how already I had that beautiful pregnancy glow.
He stared at me then, just stared, and inside my heart began to cantor, a kaleidoscope of butterflies flitting inside me. I knew what would come next and it was then that my body began to want him, to need him like it hadn’t for so long before. I soughed at his touch, my skin breaking out in gooseflesh as he ran a hand across my arm, lacing his fingers through mine. As he stared, he said again that if our baby girl looked anything like me, that she would be the prettiest thing around. And then he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and I knew that in that moment, I was the most beautiful girl in the world to him.
Our baby girl.
He held me tightly and kissed me like he hadn’t in months, slowly and deeply at first, growing ravenous, a starved man who hadn’t been fed in years, and it was then that I realized I too was empty and famished.
My breath quickened as he slid a steady hand up the skirt of my nightgown.
“You think it’s okay?” I gasped as Aaron withdrew my underpants and set them aside, though there was nothing more that I wanted in that moment than a fresh start for Aaron and me and our baby, to be able to erase all the animosity in a single moment, with a single deed.
“You think it’s safe?” I begged, and Aaron assured me that everything was okay, and, as we moved together there on the bed, I believed him. For the first time in a long time, I believed him.
July 14, 1997 Egg Harbor
An ultrasound with Dr. Landry confirmed the pregnancy, though there was no need for Dr. Landry’s attestation because I, for one, already knew that it was true, that the manifold of pregnancy tests didn’t lie. The battle with morning sickness had begun already, a misnomer if I’d ever heard one for it was morning, noon and night sickness. Not once did I complain, but rather welcomed the nausea and the fatigue as a gift.
Dr. Landry told Aaron and me that our tiny embryo is currently measuring one-half of a centimeter from crown to rump. As I lay on the examination table, feet in stirrups, for once not put off by the wand inside me, the complete invasion of privacy that I’ve come to accept as par for the course, Dr. Landry pointed out the gestational sac and the yolk sac, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that pint-size nub that would one day be a baby.
Aaron held my hand the entire time. He stroked my hair. He kissed my lips when the image appeared, dark and grainy and impossible to see were it not for Dr. Landry’s informative voice and thin finger telling us what was the gestational sac and what was the yolk sac, and where our baby was growing, and then, once I found it, the embryo—a half centimeter long with paddle-like arms and legs and webbing between its toes and fingers, none of which I could see for myself though Dr. Landry told us were there—the one thing in the world I loved more than anything else, I couldn’t divert my eyes.
There was a heartbeat. We couldn’t hear it yet, but we could see it. It was there, the movements of it on the ultrasound screen. Our baby had a heart and a heartbeat, and blood that coursed through his or her tiny body. Its heart had chambers—four of them Dr. Landry said!—and beat like a racehorse, a heartbeat that easily trumped mine, though it too was going at a steady gallop.
I’m six weeks along. And we have a due date now.
By May, Aaron and I will finally have a baby. We’ll be parents!
How will I possibly be able to wait that long to hold my baby in my arms?