Virginia carried this infuriating belief: no matter how bad things are, they might be made better.
I drove home in a state of disequilibrium. I kept turning the radio up to drown out my thoughts and then snapping it back off to hear myself think. Brian had once accused me of unconsciously orchestrating life as a single mother because I couldn’t believe, given my family history, that any man could be a safe father. When he said this we were in a Cuban-Chinese restaurant, I was pregnant, and he had just reiterated his intention not to be my partner or to father this baby in any traditional way. Then he had asked me to split the check. I was so enraged at him, for everything up to and including his refusal to pay for my half of a Cuban-Chinese chicken, that I’d shrugged off his accusation. I’d assumed it was just his way of making himself feel better about his decision. But now, driving down the mountain, slow turn by slow turn, it dawned on me that there might be the smallest kernel of truth in this. My mother had lived with three men during my childhood, and each one, in his own way, had harmed me. Not one out of three or two out of three, but three out of three. It’s hard to argue with those odds.
Had I entered into this unhappiness via my own unconscious imperatives? I had no idea. We act out of a Molotov cocktail of conscious and unconscious desires. And also, we just do stuff.
The next day there was another message from Brian: “Being apart while you were pregnant is the biggest regret of my life.”
I called him back. By way of answering the phone, he said, “Heather Harpham.”
“Hi,” I said.
He handed the word back. “Hi.”
And then we sat in silence. Not a silence from our typical repertoire of silences; not an angry or disappointed or repressed silence, infused with unexpressed resentments. This was a tensile silence, a charged silence. Possibility ran back and forth between us on the stretched, live wire of what wasn’t said. Erotic silence.
Who knew such a thing even existed? Well, someone. Not, until now, me. For a long time we continued saying nothing.
Finally I said, “OK, bye.”
“Bye,” Brian said, and we put down the phone, I hoped, at the exact same moment. A synchronized dance, with a continent between us. Five minutes later, he called back. “I keep thinking about when I can come see you both again.”
11
On Brian’s second trip out, Gracie and I visited him at the San Anselmo Inn, where he stayed. Gracie was now almost six months old and still waking up at night. I didn’t know how this was going to work, an infant at a small inn, but I wasn’t ready to have Brian stay at the studio, to broach the idea of a reunion to my mom. I knew she’d be supportive of whatever I decided. I knew she thought I’d been, at times, too rigid in not communicating with Brian while pregnant, unbending. I knew she wanted, more than anything else, for Gracie and me to be happy, and if that meant a reconciliation with Brian, she’d be the first to leap for joy. But—given how miserable she’d watched me be for the last year or so—this would take some getting used to. But more than that, I didn’t want to be subjected to the tide of her opinion when I wasn’t yet sure what I wanted.
And so we hung out at the inn. The room was dark, too precious, and smelled of tangerine air freshener. But Gracie thought it was great. A whole new environment in which to be frustrated! She had been lifting herself up onto her hands and knees for the last few weeks, flirting with crawling by rocking back and forth.
Brian set a bright blue glass bottle on the carpet, a few feet out of her grasp. Up she went onto knees and hands, and the rocking began, the heaving, the straining, the spurts and fits of ill-coordinated forward motion. She was reenacting the water-to-earth struggle, trying to get her knees to cooperate. She inched toward the bottle; locomotion powered more by will than physical ability. Gracie craned her neck to look behind her. Was I still there? Yes. Was Brian? Yes.
“Go, baby,” I said. “Go, Amelia-Grace.” Brian said nothing but pushed the bottle farther away. More effort, a shuffling of knees, a stretched and retracting neck, turtlelike. Was she trying to head-butt the bottle? And then her hand went out, fingers open, and the bottle toppled. She looked back at us. We beamed at her; approval and pride ran the circuit of our little triangle.
“The great bottle challenge,” Brian said. It was a garden-variety moment, first crawl, but it felt doubly sweet. Infinitely sweet coming from her in front of us both.
After her glass bottle success, Gracie and I packed up to return to the studio for the night. I leaned against the doorjamb, bags on an arm, baby on a hip. “Bye.”
Brian leaned into the doorway. We were just a few inches apart.
“You could stay,” Brian said.
At the end of our first date, two years and one child ago, we’d stood in front of my apartment on Twelfth Street, and Brian had declared, “I’m going to kiss you now.” I felt the same rush of excitement. Only now it was shot through with sorrow, worry, uncertainty.
“Not with her,” I said. “She’s still waking up crying at night.” It was a feint, a punt—we both knew that—but it bought me time to think.
“OK,” Brian said, “call me if you change your mind.” And he touched my shoulder. The first time either of us had reached for the other in almost a year.
*
That night I went for a walk up the fire trails with Gracie in the front pack and Lulu by my side. At the end of the paved road we walked past the metal gate that was never locked, past its list of prohibitions against fireworks, unleashed dogs, horses, cigarettes, open fires, beer bottles, and unaccompanied minors under the age of twelve. I’d been walking past this gate with contraband of one kind or another, including unleashed dogs and a defiant pony, since I was ten. Twenty-three years of hiking up this same hill, and it never got old. And now I had a companion.
Gracie kicked her legs and bobbed her head and made the loudest sound I’d heard from her yet. A piercing squeal of delight. What was exciting her? The fading light, the smell of eucalyptus, the two black labs running circles around each other at the top of the next hill? The fact that she was tucked against the mother ship and able to see a slice of world?
I tried to focus my thoughts on Brian, on what to do. What was best for her? Was she better off with just me or with a dad in the margins? What about a more central dad? What if that central dad turned inconsistent? Or harmful? Then what? Also, what did I want, and what were the forces behind what I wanted? Could I imagine something for Gracie beyond what I’d experienced?