He texted a few friends. He typed in names like tossing a ring over a table of bottles, hoping one would land around a neck. But one by one they got back to say they couldn’t get out, their street hadn’t been plowed, it was so cold, nowhere was open anyway.
He watched TV on his phone and tried not to think about the fortune it would cost in data. When the show ended he went over to the liquor cabinet because he had a flashback of his brother-in-law giving him a bottle of Macallan two Christmases ago. Then he remembered taking it to the bar. He did inventory of what was left, little half measures. No gin. Some rum. There was a bottle of sweet vermouth at the back of the fridge. He returned to the couch and stared into space. He got up again, went to the freezer, and found a near-empty bottle of vodka, what was left gone syrupy, so he passed the bottle between his hands for a minute. When the viscosity looked normal, he went back to the liquor cabinet and found an unopened jar of olives. He was too lazy to dig out a martini glass, or a shaker, so he mixed everything in a highball glass. He took it to the couch, and as soon as he sipped it, he wished he’d done it right. He made himself drink exactly half and then he dumped it.
He fell asleep on the couch with his coat on at 7:30 p.m. When he woke up around midnight, his shirt was still damp with the sweat he’d worked up while shoveling. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom.
And then, lying on his side of the bed in the complete dark—no stars that night, no porch lights coming through the trees from neighboring houses, the streetlamps all dark—he heard a voice calling his name over and over, so regularly, in fact, that it had become part of the background noise of his mind. He heard it only because of the darkness, the silence, because his mind was circling and circling, looking for a place to land. Once he tuned in, he saw Siobhán, her face downcast at the bar, saying something about feeling bad. He saw the new guy, Neil, in her backyard, in the same golf shirt Malcolm always pictured, though that couldn’t be right. Malcolm saw him leaning down to lift something. A child.
Neil Bratton had three kids. And the youngest was only two.
“Wait a second,” he said aloud, and sat up.
He checked his phone. No missed calls. No texts.
four
Just before Jess met Neil, before she found out the name of his street and typed it into the map on her phone, there was San Francisco.
The route to Neil’s house, when she eventually traced it with her finger, reminded her of a child’s drawing of a staircase. Sitting in her silent bedroom, Malcolm at the bar, the novel she was trying to read winged over the arm of the chair, she thought how easy it would be to break off a little portion of herself and climb those crooked steps, see what might happen. It would only be a small detour from regular life. The thing between them, whatever it was, might be the kind of thing that vanished as soon as it was spoken aloud.
But before Neil came San Francisco, which arrived at the worst possible time. The bar was newly theirs, two months since Malcolm signed a sheaf of papers without bothering to let her know the details, without really understanding them himself—he was so goddamn cocky, everything he ever wanted in life he’d always just smiled and gotten. If he were the one who wanted a baby as much as she did, then they would have one. She was sure of it. But what he wanted most in his life was to own a bar, to be able to say, I have a place of my own over in Gillam. And not just any bar. Other places had become available over the years, but there was always something wrong with them. The light, he said. The location. A feeling he got in his bones. Hugh had been dangling the promise of his eventual departure for years; all Malcolm had to do was wait.
At some point after Hugh told him that the time had come and Malcolm was still pretending to be merely thinking about it, he started calling it a restaurant. “What restaurant?” Jess asked as she was filling the kettle. “I thought we were talking about the Half Moon.” Earlier that evening, when she was searching for dried oregano, she came across a half-empty bottle of FertilAid. It felt like running into an old friend with whom she had an unresolved disagreement. She went to throw it out but found she could not. Instead she fished out one pill, swallowed it, chugged a glass of water. And then she tucked the bottle way back in the cabinet where she found it.
“We are,” Malcolm said, and set his face in a way that told her he would not break, no matter what. Whether he was rebranding it for himself or for her, she couldn’t tell. Beller’s Steakhouse was a restaurant. The Half Moon was a bar that offered a glorified children’s menu just so it could keep its liquor license. Calling it a restaurant should have been her first clue. Her second should have been that he wore a jacket and tie to the closing. She’d just started a new position in the legal department of Bloom, a left-leaning media company that owned a suite of magazines and cable channels, totally opposite the conservative firm she’d just left. There were meetings she couldn’t miss, being so new, and as the mortgage loan officer from the bank pointed out, Malcolm could simply sign for her as proxy. She was just gathering her things for a lunch meeting when he sent a photo of himself standing in front of their bedroom mirror.
Aren’t you just meeting at the bar? she replied.
Yeah, he wrote. Wanted to look nice. Big day!
You look great, she wrote back and felt a sudden punch of guilt, considered coming down with a stomachache so she could hurry to Penn Station and make it to Gillam on time. He looked so happy. It was a big day for her, too, she supposed. Though everyone would describe the place as Malcolm’s, it was equally hers.
* * *
Jess preferred the work she’d been doing at Laborers’ International but switching to a private firm made more sense. The salary was better; she could keep up with her loan payments and save a little on top. In a few years she’d likely make partner, as long as she paid her dues, and like most firms they needed more women. At thirty-two, on their seven-year wedding anniversary, she threw her dial of pills in the trash and told Malcolm she was ready. He’d been saying all along that he was ready whenever she was, all she had to do was say the word.
Six months later she went to see a fertility doctor her gynecologist recommended, because of her age. By then she was thirty-three.
“My age?” Jess had said at the time, sitting on an exam table and thinking her legs needed to be moisturized.
“I know,” her doctor said. “Fertility has not quite caught up with modern life.”
At the first clinic, on the second page of the packet of paperwork they sent, was the usual trio of questions she dreaded: How many children did she have? Zero. How many times had she been pregnant? One. Age at the time of first pregnancy: twenty-five. That she’d miscarried was not worrisome, every doctor always said. The important thing was knowing she could get pregnant.
Jess’s insurance required four IUI cycles before each IVF. She was game the first time—who knew? She was willing to give it a whirl. She was far from panicked. A lot of women she knew had taken a while to get pregnant.