“That’s just the point,” I said. “He’s forty-one years old! He should’ve done this when he was twenty-one! He shouldn’t be living his life on Facebook.”
“Does he even have health insurance?” my father asked.
“We wouldn’t know,” one of them sniffed.
I said I happened to know he did not.
Rebecca said, “Do you have to be engaged in order to live together? Couldn’t you just be companions?”
“Roommates,” said Iona. “Twin souls.”
I said, “We do not share souls, not even close. And why would I want a freeloading roommate?”
Even my father inhaled sharply at such unaccustomed rudeness.
But there was no sharp intake of breath from the unoffendable Rebecca. “I can tell you why. Because he’s good company! He’s smart. He’s got a big heart. He’s handsome. He believes in people—”
“What does that mean—‘believes in people’?” my father asked.
I said, “Please don’t explain. I’ve heard it a million times. I can recite it by heart.”
“Who but a lost soul walks across the country?” my mother grumbled. “A lost soul with no job and no money in the bank.”
I asked Rebecca if Stuart had sent them here as relationship missionaries.
“Would that be so terrible?” asked Iona.
“Are either of you Facebook friends with him?” I asked.
The two women exchanged questioning glances before saying, “No.”
“Well, you should be. Then you’d understand what put the final nail in the coffin—his arm around every woman between here and Illinois.”
“Hyperbole aside,” said his mother, “even if he is meeting a lot of women en route, he thinks of you as his anchor.”
“Anchor?” my mother said. “Or meal ticket?”
“I resent that,” said Rebecca.
“We both do,” said Iona.
“You know what’s missing?” my father asked. “And what may have been missing all along? I haven’t heard anyone mention love.”
If a subtitle had materialized beneath either of their ruddy perplexed faces, it would have read: Did you just hear what I heard? Did a male of the species just speak rather eloquently of love?
My parents stayed after the Stuart apologists left to explain that Rebecca and Iona had simply shown up at their door, trying to enlist the sympathies of Stuart’s once-future in-laws. When your father has spent most of his working life insuring people’s houses, he is in the habit of looking, metaphorically speaking, under the rug. It turned out that their visit wasn’t just to chaperone Rebecca and Iona, but had its own purpose. Wally the inspector had told my brother about the cradle in my attic, and Joel had casually reported its existence to my mother.
“I think it’s a sign,” she said.
“Nancy—,” my father warned.
“Of what?”
“Of a baby! One that will be born while you’re living here!”
“Don’t get your hopes up, Ma.”
“You could do it. We’re a modern family. We’d help. And you don’t need to be married to have a baby anymore. There’s no stigma. It’s even fashionable.”
“I’m aware of that. But I’m in no position to have a baby.”
“And you’re romanticizing a cradle that’s probably been consumed by termites,” said my father.
“Were there termites in Wally’s report?” my mother asked. “Because that’s something an inspector looks for.”
I said no, but—
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” my mother asked, with a happy nudge.
“I don’t know what—”
“Plan B: eBay! It could be a hundred years old, a valuable antique . . . Henry?”
“Henry what?” he asked.
“Go check it out. You’re good at that.”
“You haven’t seen it yourself?” he asked me.
“It’s in the attic. I haven’t ventured up there.”
“Jesus. I thought a daughter of mine would have more curiosity than that.”
Grumbling and outnumbered, he found the step stool required to reach the hatch door then lowered the attic ladder.
Several minutes passed without a report. We heard the creak of floorboards overhead but nothing else. Later I would marvel that he didn’t cry out in any fashion but rather calmly made his way back down the attic ladder. He was holding something wrapped in a flannel receiving blanket that may at one time have been pale pink. The bundle had the heft and shape of an oversize book.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“An album. A photo album . . .”
“Did you open it?” my mother asked.
He shut his eyes.
“I want a look,” said my mother. And as if he wasn’t standing between us: “Your father’s squeamish. You know he fainted when they cut Joel’s umbilical cord? I didn’t let him stay for yours.”
I did know; that was the delicate-Dad story she trotted out annually on the anniversary of either child’s birth.
“Henry,” she instructed. “Give it over.”
I said, “Maybe he should just describe what’s in there. I think it’s better to hear it—just words—rather than look at pictures.”
“Who said pictures?” asked my mother.
“It’s a photo album,” I pointed out.
“Are you going to faint?” my mother asked, then noted that this very sensitivity was probably what gave his paintings such Chagallness.
I repeated that I didn’t want to see anything that would forever taint my attic, let alone every square inch of my heretofore-beloved five and a half rooms.
“I need to sit,” he repeated. We followed him into my bedroom, where my parents sat side by side on the bed, and I sat on the lone chair, upholstered recently in a retro drapery fabric featuring oversize ferns of magenta and green. “That came out so nice,” my mother said. “Cora does such good work.”
“Nancy!”
“Tell us,” I said. “We’re ready.”
He cleared his throat noisily, once, twice, then said—the words separated by several seconds—“What I saw here . . . were photographs . . . of what appears to be . . . dead babies.”
My mother and I reacted differently. I let out a horrified squeal, whereas my mother asked, “How do you know they’re dead and not sleeping?”
“How do I know? Because someone wrote the dates of the births and deaths right on the bottom of the pictures!”
“What was her name, the owner? Lavoie? You’ll ask at city hall tomorrow,” my mother said.