Every year, on the anniversary of the night they met, Brian and Rachel returned to the RR and danced to “Since I Fell for You.” If it could be found on a jukebox these days, it was usually the Johnny Mathis version, but the RR’s jukebox had the original version, the granddaddy of them all by one-hit wonder Lenny Welch.
It wasn’t a love song so much as it was a loss song, the lament of someone trapped in a hopeless addiction to a heartless lover who will, there is no doubt, ultimately destroy him. Or her, depending on which version you listened to. Since their first dance to the song, they’d heard most of them—Nina Simone’s, Dinah Washington’s, Charlie Rich’s, George Benson’s, Gladys Knight’s, Aaron Neville’s, and Mavis Staples’s. And those were just the headliners. Rachel had once looked it up on iTunes and found two hundred and sixty-four versions, performed by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Captain & Tennille.
This year, Brian rented out the whole back room and invited some friends. Melissa showed up. So did Danny Marotta, Rachel’s former cameraman at 6; Danny brought his wife, Sandra, and Sandra brought a coworker, Liz; Annie, Darla, and Rodney, who’d all accepted buyouts from the Globe in the years since she’d left, dropped by. Caleb showed up with Haya, somehow dressed to lay waste in a simple black cotton sheath dress and black flats, black hair swept back off the curve of her elegant neck in an updo, and all of her made somehow earthier and even sexier by the baby on her hip. The perfect baby, by the way, the dark good looks of both parents fused into a child with the most symmetrical face, eyes of warm black oil, skin the color of desert sand just after sundown. Rachel caught Brian, usually circumspect in such matters, pushing his eyeballs back into his head a few times when Haya and AB passed by, like some fantastical ur-humans who’d stepped from a creation myth. Haya got some of the youngest guys—Brian and Caleb’s latest interns, no point in learning their names, they’d be replaced with new ones the next time she looked—to take long looks, even though all their female counterparts were blindingly pretty and flush with firm, unblemished early-twenties flesh.
On another night, Rachel might have felt a twinge of jealousy or at least competitive edge—the woman had just given fucking birth, for Christ’s sake, and she looked ready for the center spread in a lingerie catalogue—but tonight she knew how good she looked. Not in an advertising-of-the-wares way. But in an elegant, understated way that told everyone in the room she didn’t feel any need to trumpet what God had placed in good proportion in the first place and which genetics—and Pilates—were leaving, thus far, in place.
She and Haya caught up by the bar at one point as AB slept in the car seat at her mother’s feet. Because of the language barrier, they’d rarely spoken other than a few passing hellos and had hardly seen each other in a year, but Caleb had said Haya’s grasp of English was vastly improved. Rachel decided to brave the waters and found that he hadn’t been exaggerating: Haya now spoke well, if deliberately.
“How are you?”
“I am . . . happy. How are you?”
“Great. How’s Annabelle?”
“She is . . . fussy.”
Rachel glanced down at the child sleeping in her seat in the middle of a party. Earlier, while she’d been on Haya’s hip, she’d never once squawked or even squirmed.
Haya stared back at Rachel, her beautiful face a blank, her lips set.
“Thank you so much for coming,” Rachel said eventually.
“Yes. He . . . is my husband.”
“That’s why you came?” Rachel felt a small smile tug her lips. “Because he’s your husband?”
“Yes.” Haya’s eyes narrowed in confusion. It made Rachel feel guilty, as if she were bullying the woman over language and cultural barriers. “You look . . . very beautiful, Rachel.”
“Thank you. So do you.”
Haya looked at the baby at her feet. “She is . . . waking.”
Rachel had no idea how she predicted it, but about five seconds later, Annabelle’s eyes popped open.
Rachel squatted by her. She never knew what to say to babies. She’d watched people over the years interact with them in a way she found unnatural—jabbering in that infantile tone of voice no one ever adopted unless they were talking to babies, animals, or the very old and infirm.
“Hello,” she said to Annabelle.
The child stared back at her with her mother’s eyes—so clear and untainted by skepticism or irony that Rachel couldn’t help but feel judged by them.
She placed one finger on Annabelle’s chest and the child closed her hand around it and tugged.
“You’ve got a strong grip,” Rachel said.
Annabelle let go of her finger and looked up at the cowl of her car seat with a hint of distress, as if she were surprised to find it there. Her face crumpled and Rachel only had time to say, “No, no,” before Annabelle wailed.
Haya’s shoulder brushed Rachel’s as she reached for the handle of the car seat. She lifted the seat up onto the bar. She rocked the seat back and forth and the baby immediately stopped crying and Rachel felt embarrassed and incompetent.
“You have a gift with her,” she said.
“I am . . . her mother.” Again Haya looked a bit confused. “She is tired. Hungry.”
“Of course,” Rachel said because it seemed to be the kind of thing one said.
“We must go. Thank you for . . . asking us to your . . . party.”
Haya lifted her daughter from the seat and held her to her shoulder, the baby’s cheek pressed to the side of her neck. Both mother and daughter looked of a piece, as if they shared the same lungs, saw through the same eyes. It made Rachel and her party seem frivolous. And a little sad.
Caleb came over to gather the car seat and pink baby bag and white muslin blanket, then he walked his wife and daughter out to the car and kissed them both good night. Rachel watched them through the window and knew she didn’t want what they had. On the other hand, she knew that she did.