She doesn’t stop drawing. She pretends, almost, like she’s not listening. But she is.
“My life. What I do. You know they’re bad for you the first time you try. Cigarettes. Pot. But you convince yourself it’s okay—you can handle it. One time, that’s it, just to see what it’s like. And then all of a sudden, you’re sucked in—you can’t get out if you want to. It wasn’t because I needed the money so bad—which I did. It was because if I tried to get out I’d be killed. Someone would rat me out and I’d end up in jail. There was never the option of saying no.”
She stops drawing. I wonder what she’s going to say. Some smart-ass comment, I’m sure. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t say anything. But the vein in her forehead fades away, her hands stand still. Her eyes soften. And she looks at me and nods.
Eve
After
I watch from the hall as James thrusts himself into Mia’s bedroom with great gusto. The sound of his footsteps outside the door, loud and clamorous, approaching quickly, startles her from sleep. She jumps upright in the bed, her eyes wide with fear, her heart likely thrashing about inside her chest as happens when one is scared. It takes a second for her to become aware of her surroundings: remnants of her high school wardrobe that still hang in the closet, the jute rug, a poster of Leonardo DiCaprio she hung when she was fourteen. And then it settles. She remembers where she is. She’s home. She’s safe. She drops her head into her hands and begins to cry.
“You need to get dressed,” James says. “We’re going to see the shrink.”
I enter the bedroom once he leaves and help Mia pick a matching outfit from the closet. I try to appease her fears, to remind her that here, in our home, she is perfectly safe. “No one can hurt you,” I promise, but even I am not sure.
Mia eats in the car, just a piece of dry toast I brought along for the trip. She doesn’t want a thing to do with it, but from the passenger’s seat, I turn around every few minutes and say to her, “Take another bite, Mia,” as if she is four years old again. “Just one more bite.”
I thank Dr. Rhodes for squeezing us in so early in the morning. James pulls the doctor aside for a private word, as I help Mia out of her coat, and then I watch as Mia and Dr. Rhodes disappear behind closed doors.
Dr. Rhodes will be speaking to Mia this morning about the baby. Mia is in denial about the fetus growing in her womb, and I suppose I am as well. She is hardly able to say the word. Baby. It gets lost in her throat and every time James or I breach the subject, she swears that it can’t possibly be real.
But we thought it would be helpful for Mia to talk with Dr. Rhodes, as both a professional and as an impartial third person. Dr. Rhodes will be discussing Mia’s options with her this morning, and already I can imagine Mia’s response. “My options about what?” she will ask and Dr. Rhodes will again have to remind her of the baby.
“Let me make this clear, Eve,” James says to me once Mia and the doctor have left the room. “The last thing we need is for Mia to be carrying the illegitimate child of that man. She will have an abortion and she will do it soon.” He waits, thinking his way through the logistics. “We’ll say the baby didn’t make it, when people ask. The stress of this situation,” he says. “It didn’t survive.”
I don’t comment. I simply cannot. I watch James, with a motion in limine spread across his lap. His eyes scan through the motion with more regard than he gives our daughter and her unborn child.
I try to convince myself that his heart is in the right place. But I wonder if it is.
It wasn’t always this way. James was not always this disinterested regarding his family life. In the quiet afternoons, when James is at work and Mia napping, I find myself unearthing fond memories of James and the girls: old photographs of him holding baby Grace or baby Mia in their swaddling blankets. I watch home videos of James with the girls when they were babies. I listen to him—to a different James—sing them lullabies. I reminisce on first days of school and birthday parties, special days that James chose not to miss. I excavate photographs of James teaching Mia and Grace to ride their bikes without training wheels, of them swimming together in a lovely hotel pool or seeing the fish at the aquarium for the first time.
James comes from a very wealthy family. His father is a lawyer, as was his grandfather and perhaps his great-grandfather; I honestly don’t know. His brother Marty is a state representative, and Brian is one of the best anesthesiologists in the city. Marty’s daughters, Jennifer and Elizabeth, are lawyers, corporate and intellectual property, respectively. Brian was bestowed sons, three of them, a corporate lawyer, a dentist and a neurologist.
There is an image for James to maintain. Though he wouldn’t dare say the words aloud, he’s always been in competition with his brothers: who is the most affluent, the most powerful, the preeminent Dennett in the land.