Something about the way Blair stands for a minute at the end of the Loverlys’ driveway makes Mara think she’s not supposed to be there. But she’s done this before, gone over when nobody’s home, let herself in with a spare key.
It’s nearly 11:30 a.m. and she hasn’t seen a soul at that house since yesterday evening, when Whitney’s car pulled in after work, just as the rain stopped. She hadn’t spoken to anyone all day, and nobody had spoken to her, other than Albert grumbling about the temperature of the house, the fridge smelling sour, the garbage truck being fifteen minutes late. But that was more like background noise she just happened to catch as she moved around him. She’d waved to Whitney as she got out of her car, tried to get her attention. It was only six steps, maybe seven, from her car to the front door, but the woman couldn’t take her eyes off that stupid phone.
There’d been noises last night, of course there’d been.
But that wasn’t all that unusual living in the city.
It could just as easily have been a dream, something from her past knocking around again.
* * *
? ? ?
As a girl, Mara had been a vivid dreamer. She paddled her legs through the night as she ran from the devil. Her sisters stuffed cotton balls in their ears so they weren’t woken up by Mara talking in her sleep. In the morning, she’d recount outlandish stories to her siblings as though what happened in her dreams was real, and they’d run to tell their mother she was fibbing again. And she usually was. But as she got older, there was more to the dreams than her overactive imagination.
When she was seventeen, she dreamed of handsome Albert the night before they met for the first time. He showed up at her family’s house with his father, the refrigerator repairman. He was supposed to be apprenticing, but he spent the whole hour leaning against the lime-green wallpaper in the hallway, talking too fast to Mara, who sat on the third step of the staircase with her legs politely crossed. She could see that he was trying to be charming. She’d never felt the power of making someone nervous until then. She noticed him tap the wall with the knuckle of his index finger to punctuate the end of his sentences, sometimes once, sometimes twice. The young man in her dream the night before had done the same thing. Tap. Tap, tap. She had been there, in that moment with him, before.
The morning after she got pregnant, she knew as soon as she woke up that she had conceived. They’d been married for a year and only just started praying for that miracle to happen, but she had dreamed all night of the baby floating in the blue of her womb, her lining white and soft and wispy, like blankets of stratus cloud.
After dinner, she poured Albert a drink and casually told him he’d better call the travel agent to book their tickets for the move. He’d jumped from the table and spun Mara around in the cramped kitchen of their apartment, her feet knocking over a stack of blue-glass plates. He put her down and dropped to his knees and cried into her apron, damp from the dishwater, as she rubbed the lobes of his ears between her fingers.
Like most of their friends dreaming bigger things for themselves, they always said they’d leave Lisbon to establish life somewhere with more opportunity. Mara insisted. Portugal had nothing but agriculture, no modern economy or commerce, no industry set to boom. Lisbon felt left behind from the prosperity happening in the world, stuck under the thumb of a government opposed to change. Albert couldn’t fathom repairing aging appliances day in and day out, not if his father’s dull life was anything to go by, so he’d gotten a job selling fishing equipment and surpassed his quotas for the year in three months. Mara knew he could make a decent living as a salesman somewhere in North America if he learned English. They both watched the affluent tourists from the rest of the world flooding their beaches for holidays. They knew there was another way.
Everyone told Albert to go alone to America, to find a job and establish some connections first, but he would never have left Mara, and she never would have let him. They’d go as a family. He’d already saved most of every paycheck, she’d cut every unnecessary expense, and they talked almost every night about where they’d go, poring over books and maps from the library. The West Coast. Or Massachusetts. Or Toronto. They’d learned common phrases in English, quizzing each other over late, boozy dinners that ended naked in bed. They were ready.
“What did the doctor say? Lots of rest? A baby. A baby.” He wiped his face with his hanky, chuckling at their unbelievably good fortune.
“I haven’t been to the doctor yet.”
“But then how do you know?”
“I dreamed about him last night.”
“Mara!” He threw his head back, covering his eyes. “For God’s sake, woman.”
“Just trust me, Albert.” She’d pressed her lips to the top of his head.
* * *
? ? ?
They decided on a patchwork pocket of a big city where they’d heard Portuguese were settling, where rent was cheap, and the houses were run-down, but there was talk of things changing with more families coming, people bringing siblings and in-laws, a restaurant and fish shop opening on the main street. Albert’s English had become good enough to get a job selling soda machines for an American distributor, and they gave him a company car, a shining red Ford. He asked Mara to take a picture of him leaning on the hood, with their new Kodak camera, and he mailed the photograph home to his parents. He opened a bank account and they started saving for their first home. They hated the cold, and they missed their families, but there was a sense of community sprouting around them, parish clubs, a bakery with a queue on Saturday mornings, copies of the Correio Português landing on their porch. Mara loved to find opportunities to speak the English she’d been proud to learn, although she rarely needed to in her new neighborhood.
Everything was happening as they’d hoped, as they’d planned for, until Mara was nearly nine months pregnant and had the first vivid dream since she’d conceived.
She knew something about the child would be different.
When she pushed her son into the world two weeks later, Albert pacing in the hallway, she closed her eyes and listened for the silence. Deafening silence. But he screamed. Frantic and healthily.
“Here he is, a perfect baby boy,” the doctor’s voice boomed over his wailing lungs.
Her head shot up to look for her son, but he was already wrapped in the hands of the nurses. She needed to see him with her own eyes to be sure. Sometime later, after she made enough fuss about it, they wheeled her down the hall to the nursery, to his spot in the rows of glass bassinets. She unfolded the blanket slowly. She put her hand on his pink chest and thanked God. She could feel there was something special about him.
Albert proudly carried Marcus to the church on the corner, showing him off every Sunday as though nobody had ever seen an infant before. He held the phone receiver to the baby’s tiny ear when his parents called to sing to him. Marcus was happiest when Albert held him over his head and whisked him around the room. He bought a vintage airplane from a secondhand store and hung it from the nursery ceiling with fishing string.
“He’s going to be a pilot, Mara. I’ll bet you anything.”
The milestone months came and went uneventfully, and so the doctor glossed over Mara’s concerns at Marcus’s three-year-old checkup. Marcus was increasingly less verbal around everyone but her. He feared other children in the sandbox. He covered his ears when delivery trucks drove by, when a door closed. He wouldn’t eat anything wet.
“Particulars, Mrs. Alvaro. That’s all. Every child has them, some kids are just more sensitive than others. Get him exposed to more, it’ll toughen him up.” The doctor had opened the exam room door while he spoke. “And try being more relaxed around him. Children can sense when their mother is nervous.”
As though it were her fault.
He was meant to outgrow it all.
There was an evening after she’d kissed Marcus good night that she worked up the nerve to ask Albert if he was ever worried about him. About how little his son spoke to anyone but her. About his anxiousness. His retreating. Albert didn’t know much about children, but the other kids at church who were Marcus’s age were climbing the back pews together. Their parents had to hiss for them to be quiet during the service and call for them to stop when they ran out the arched doors toward the road. Albert had to have noticed how their son cowered on Mara’s lap, buried his head into her neck whenever he was spoken to.
Marcus wouldn’t go to Albert at all.