“Rebecca, that should be your own mom.”
“But it’s up to me,” she urged me. And her mother also lived out of state, and what if this all happened suddenly? So I agreed. Everything was on track, Becky told me. The baby was due any day. Her doctor said Becky just had to follow along. I knew she would remember that comment ironically someday.
I finished my book and turned it in. Stefan got ready for school to start in a couple of weeks. Jep began his quiet season, with hours at home with me, big meals, movie nights together.
All the other shoes had dropped. All the cats were out of the bag. We had lived innocently in Beforeland and suffered our sins in Afterland. Perhaps, this new land, Tomorrowland, was where we would live from now on.
16
At first, the snow on Greek Orthodox Christmas spun down in big lacy pinwheels that looked like something that would taste of pineapple. Then afternoon brought in a rock wall of weather, and the world disappeared. We ate early, with candles, the kind of meaty, stuporous meal that rightfully should be followed by two hours of baling hay. Instead, we topped it off with the ekmek kataifi that Amelia made to perfection and drank Greek coffee from demitasse cups. We would then ordinarily do something antique and embarrassing with the kids, like team charades, but Phoebe and Amelia wanted to leave for home earlier; and my parents decided to stay overnight. We had celebrated what my aunt Elena called “American” Christmas like most of the secular Christian world but Greek Orthodox Christmas in January was still a religious holiday for my parents, like “Greek” Easter, with its red-dyed eggs baked into tsoureki. It was celebrated when Americans celebrated The Feast of the Epiphany, if they celebrated it at all, the day when the three kings finally arrived at Bethlehem, after all those days of GPS-ing by that one outrageous star. I loved Orthodox Christmas, especially this Christmas—which I thought of as the first Christmas out from under—and it was especially thrilling because what Stefan had done to our decked-out house made me feel like I was living in a Viktor&Rolf perfume bottle. So after American Christmas, I might have been downcast when my sisters left, drawing all the chatter and teasing after them like a crown of ribbons, had I not known we would be together in a short while for another groaning meal and more presents. After they were gone, the five of us left broke holiday protocol by turning the television on, not to the Vienna Boys Choir but to 13 AccuWeather. By four, the front door was so drifted that Jep couldn’t open it.
“I have to plow,” Stefan said regretfully. “I should be ahead of it. What did I think it was, Christmas?” He told us he understood now why people worked in offices.
“I’ll come with you,” Jep said. “We can share father and son bonding. I can tell you lore from Christmases of old, stories of ancient Scandinavian drunks who are your forebears.”
“No, Dad, I’m not dragging you out in this. You nap by the fire, elder, with your new suede slippers,” Stefan told him. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. The big issue is Luck’s apartments and her new condominium complex. People are always outraged by snow. It’s like they think they live in Miami.” Most of his regular landscaping clients needed him, and I didn’t think a couple of hours would do it, but he assured me that, except for a couple of places, he would leave the hand shoveling to his teenage helpers after all that snow was down. It was only his third or fourth time driving the new truck—a massive red Ford only a few years old that came with a tough heavy-duty blade, a splurge he allowed himself because we were covering his schooling. The Whole Blooming World design burst from the doors. The first few snows of the year were sugary flirtations, but they’d taught him how to operate the plow. I could tell that he was eager to put his truck through its paces against some elements. He filled the biggest thermos in the house with hot sweet tea and set out, first scraping our own driveway to perfection. Jep and I geared up and tackled the walks with more will than success. Since it wasn’t cold, it was exhilarating to be out in it, such a dramatic storm with lightning that seemed to shatter among the stars. You could see how people would be tempted to read in it the message of some epic event. There were strange sights. A woman all in green fleece went power walking through the drifts. Two houses down, a white owl sat mythically on a mailbox. The neighbors across the street were toasting marshmallows near one of those free-standing fireplaces. Burly as buildings, the municipal plows roared down the street.
Two hours passed, then three. Feeling like an ass for doing it, I called Stefan and texted him. No response...because of course, he was busy. There were cars piled up all over, a four-car wreck on Highway 51. He didn’t really understand the physics of driving that big rig. The sharpest pity was reserved for people whose kids died on Christmas, on their own birthdays, on their wedding day...but I was being an idiot. The sharpest pity was reserved for people whose kids died just when they’d survived their worst challenges, when the sky was big and brilliant. I was being an idiot, driving myself nuts. Another hour passed, a slower hour marked by eight-minute increments, the most I could force myself to wait between bouts of checking my phone. Jep got out the ham to make a sandwich.
“How could you eat anything?” I snapped at him.
“It’s been three hours since my last feeding,” he said, one of those expressions his sister used to infantilize men, which drove me nuts.
Instead, I decided to join the devil. I ate another huge slice of the dessert, just to keep from checking my phone. When I picked it up, it rang, as if my touch had brought it alive. The number was unfamiliar. Hadn’t I asked for an ordinary life, with ordinary fears? This was ordinary life in a Wisconsin blizzard. Black ice on a road, on a frigid night. The paramedics would say he was breathing on his own, which was good...stop, Thea, I said. Stop it. But the universe was talking. There was no shutting it up.
It was Stefan. And he was calling from someone else’s phone because he’d left his in the truck.
“What happened, Stefan?”
Jep set his second sandwich down and came to stand next to me.
“It’s Rebecca. She’s in trouble here. The baby is coming. It’s awful. I’m taking her to the hospital.”
I pulled on my coat and Jep grabbed his.
“You don’t have to drive me,” I said. “You know I’m a better driver than you are.”
“Please,” he said. “Don’t disgrace the holy day by lying through your teeth. Anyhow, it’s more that there will be two of us if we get stuck.”
We got stuck within fifteen minutes, the car having spun like a figure skater and nosed into a snowbank. I was stunned by the amount of snow that had fallen, easily twenty inches. By then, I could see the lights of the hospital, like watch fires through the snow. “I’m going to walk,” I told Jep, who just shook his head. A few blocks on, I realized that the lights of the hospital were the urban equivalent of being able to see the Rockies from western Kansas. I was unavoidably reminded of the night Belinda died. Even my eyeballs were wet. A Jeep pulled over just ahead of me. In it were two boys, maybe eighteen years old. “Do you need a ride, lady?” one of them said. It crossed my mind that this was how murder podcasts began. It was the driver saying “lady” that convinced me to risk it, that and the fact that I had about four steps left in me by that point. When I got inside, I looked so woebegone that the person at the ER desk asked me the nature of my injury.
There were so few people in the hospital that someone from the information desk volunteered to personally walk me up to the OB floor, probably to have something to do. “She’ll remember this blizzard, huh?” the woman said, and I thought, Rebecca would be hearing this for the rest of her life.