“Have a baby, Clara,” Sunshine said. “Have a baby so we can baby-proof the house and sing her lullabies and read her picture books.”
“And stop the bullies,” Brown said. “And make her great Halloween costumes.”
They were joking, except they weren’t.
“Just do it?” I said. “Like the Nike ad?”
“Yeah,” Sunshine said, and Brown said, “Yeah. Do it for us.”
A tall boy appeared in the doorway, dark hair obscuring his eyes, one arm around skinny little Blue Mountain. An imaginary visitor from the parallel world, not allowed over the doorsill. A look passed over Sunshine’s face, as if she saw something too. Maybe her own parallel-world children, growing up there without her.
* * *
The bartender was telling me about his early days in Rochester, about his grandmother and his too-young, too-drugged parents.
“So your grandmother raised you?” I said.
“She did. From three on, anyway. After the DSS stepped in.”
It was a freak-cold day in late fall, colder than cold, the kind of cold that sweeps in upon the Adirondacks on gale-force winds from the Arctic north or the stormy Atlantic, precursor to the months of winter that will follow. The bartender and I had met at Walt’s for breakfast and now we were wandering the streets of Old Forge, if wander was a word used to describe two people hunched deep into their collars, gloved hands shoved into their coat pockets, hatted heads bent low against the gale, winter-booted feet trudging forward, ever forward. My hat was one of Sunshine’s, her very first scallion, an experimental hat far too big for a baby’s head. Or even my own head.
“Are you cold?” the bartender said. I could barely hear his words against the wind, the scarf, the hunched-collarness of the conversation.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Not at all. Who could possibly be cold in this balmy weather.”
If you take the question mark off the end of the question, it transforms itself into a sarcastic statement. You can do this with your voice or on paper. Either way, it works.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” the bartender said, “can we please go inside.”
The bartender knew the power of an un-question-marked question too, apparently.
“Apparently we will have to,” I said. “It’s either that or face the certainty of death by Adirondacks-in-winter-ness.”
I was consciously using the word apparently inside and outside my head as much as possible in an attempt at the reverse of aversion therapy. The more the Life Care people said apparently, the more I too said apparently. In that way I would grow accustomed to it and stop wincing internally every time I heard it. In that way I would stop associating the word apparently with everything that my mother had lost and everything that she would keep losing. That was my hope.
Into Adirondack Hardware we went. My feet, even in fake-fur-lined boots, were numb with cold. I stepped on my left toes with my right foot and then my right toes with my left foot, but nary a toe could be felt.
“Now would be an excellent time to amputate one of my toes,” I said to the bartender. We were standing in one of the far back rooms, by a display of Swiss Army knives.
“And why would I want to do that,” he said.
He was still un-question-marking his questions. The un-question came out slightly muffled, as if he had once had a speech impediment but long ago overcame it. I knew why he was talking that way, though. I was talking the same way. It was a form of winter speech impediment known to northerners the world over, the My lips are too cold to form words properly speech impediment.
“Because”—I was going to say, Because five toes are excessive, and who really needs that tiny one on the far end anyway, have you ever taken a serious look at a pinky toe—but instead I put my hands on his shoulders and leaned up, way up because the bartender was taller than me, and kissed him. It was a shadow kiss, a whisper of a kiss, a kiss that neither of us could feel because our lips were so cold from the cold Adirondack pre-winter. But maybe we could feel it, maybe we did feel it, maybe the bartender felt it the same way I felt it. As if an unseen someone had been collecting invisible tinder and invisible twigs and invisible small, perfect fireplace logs for years and years and years, and had built them into a perfect, invisible pre-fire. And our cold whisper of a kiss was a struck match, and now the fire was burning between us.
The bartender took off his mittens and put his hands on either side of my face. I could barely feel them because my cheeks were so cold and so were his hands, but I did feel them. I felt the bartender’s hands, holding my face steady.
“Don’t cry,” he said, because that was what his hands were doing to me, making me cry. “Or do cry. Do whatever the hell you want, Clara.”
I could have said, Apparently I am, or something else like it, and in that way be a smart-ass and also keep working on my reverse aversion therapy, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be a smart-ass. What I wanted had nothing to do with words at all. What I wanted was for the bartender to keep his hands on my face, for me to feel the slow burn of his palms, warming from within. What I wanted was the sound of his voice behind the words he was whispering to me, softly and slowly and over and over: I got you.
* * *
Genetic counseling was recommended if you had a family history and you were considering getting the test. Genetic counseling was strongly, strongly advised if you had a family history and you were a) considering getting the test, and b) considering having children, or c) falling in love with a bartender and projecting into the future by imagining him getting in his car and driving an hour south to visit you in the place you would end up living in sooner than you wanted, sooner than you ever could have imagined, unless a cure was found and found soon.
I made that last one up. It was fake.
But it was the one on my mind.
Because how could I put him through that? Over and over I imagined it: a winter night in January and the phone rang and he recognized the number and his shoulders sagged and before he even answered the call he was mentally preparing for the drive and for what awaited him once he got there. Clara’s agitated, the voice said. We’re having trouble calming her down. The usual tricks aren’t working. And he hung up and put on his winter coat and zipped it up and pulled on his boots and headed out to the frozen car and backed it down the frozen driveway and drove the dark, frozen roads all the way to Utica. Or Rome. Or Syracuse. Wherever I was living, in that faraway far-too-soon imaginary future.
He and Sunshine and Brown would come up with tricks for me. I could hear them now, brainstorming:
“Read to her,” Sunshine would say. “For sure read to her.”
“Read her what, though?” Brown would say. “The word ‘read’ is a very broad category when it comes to Winter.”
“Anything.”
“Not anything! For God’s sake, Sunshine, she is not a ‘read anything’ kind of person.”