“Deirdre, you’re in front of the screen, I can’t see.”
She moved so that she covered even more of the television. She thought of the kids in the EANY materials, the undernourished, potbellied, huge-eyed creatures who numbered in the zillions. They all needed to be fed, every single one of them.
She said, “Maybe we could adopt a baby from Africa. A little African baby.” She’d want a little girl, girls had such a harder time of it in the rest of the world, there were terrible things awaiting so many of them. They should bring all the girls here, to Barton, where they could go to science camp and visit the dentist twice a year whether they needed it or not and get their eyes checked if they couldn’t see the last line on the eye chart. Yes, a little East African girl with a big gummy smile. She’d call her Asha, because that meant “life” and was a word Deirdre and the rest of the citizens of Barton would be able to pronounce without trouble.
“Deirdre, come on. You know we’re not doing that.” Brock’s tone was perturbed, but not angry, not yet.
Although presumably little Asha would come with her own name.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not. It’s not a realistic scenario.” Brock probably used phrases like realistic scenario at work all the time; he probably didn’t know that it sounded ridiculous in everyday conversation. “But if you want to fight about it, fine, let’s fight about it.” Now he was going a little bit beyond perturbed. Brock made a great show of sighing and switching off the TV—he really had to lean around Deirdre now, because she was blocking it almost fully, but somehow he managed to find a hole between her body and the television into which he could point the remote. The SportsCenter noises evaporated into silence, and the only sound remaining was Deirdre’s elevated breathing. Her eyes felt hot, and she tightened her hands into fists.
Brock said, “We made a decision to have one child.”
“We did not make a decision, Brock. You made a decision.”
He sighed again. “That’s not how it happened, Deirdre. You were as on board as I was, at the time. You know that’s true.”
“That’s not fair,” she said. It wasn’t fair, it really wasn’t!
The lyrics of one of Sofia’s favorites from the previous summer came to her then, unbidden but catchy as hell. Didn’t they tell us don’t rush into things? Didn’t you flash your green eyes at me? “Wonderland,” by the indomitable Taylor Swift.
“Life is not a Taylor Swift song,” she’d told Sofia recently. Wasn’t it though, sort of?
Or shouldn’t it be?
It’s all fun and games ’til somebody loses their mind…
It wasn’t fair of Brock, he’d caught her off guard when Sofia was tiny. There’d been the diapers and the middle-of-the-night crying and the way every part of her body seemed to be leaking something—tears, milk, blood. She’d been lost in Sofia’s confounding, round-the-clock neediness and a bit in her own despair and Brock had gone on a work trip just two weeks after Sofia was born and even though Deirdre’s mother had come from Darien to help out it had still been really, really hard and so when Brock said he had made an appointment at the clinic for (his euphemism) “the ol’ snip-snip” in two months she didn’t know or care enough to argue back.
“Okay,” she’d said, too exhausted to pull any additional words out of her mouth besides the irrevocable two: “Snip-snip.”
By the time she came out of it and Sofia had resolved into something wonderful the deed was done.
Oh, but it was hopeless. Even if they got a baby tomorrow (unlikely), Deirdre would be three hundred by the time little Asha was eighteen. Deirdre wouldn’t know where to get Asha’s hair properly braided—they’d have to drive into Boston, or Everett—or how to raise her in a way that respected both the culture she came from and the one into which she’d been placed. Little Asha would be the only person of color in Barton’s bright-white school system. Then she’d grow up and leave Deirdre too, just like Sofia was going to, and Deirdre would be left with the very same emptiness she was trying to avoid.
It was impossible, of course, to compress these thoughts and fears into one or two sentences. So instead she said ridiculously, “If Eliza wanted to adopt an African baby, Rob would let her.”
Brock said, “What?”
“He would. I know he would. And you never want to do anything, Brock. Anything.”
“You don’t mean that. Do you mean that?” The fact that his tone softened somehow made things worse instead of better: here came a pity party for poor little Deirdre.
“No,” she said. “I guess not.” Oh, hell. Maybe she was getting her period. Maybe it was early menopause. Maybe she’d simply had too many Saffron Coolers on the deck of that painfully gorgeous boat and hadn’t had enough food and needed to go to sleep.
“I’m going to bed,” she said.
“Okay,” said Brock. “Good idea.”
First she’d go upstairs to check Sofia’s Instagram feed—that feeble ligature tying her to her daughter.
Once she left the room she heard the television go back on.
Was this how it went, you knew every inch of your daughter, every book read and bowel movement produced and favorite television show watched, and then breath by breath she began to depart, leaving only vestiges, a lone soccer sock behind the hamper, an uncapped toothpaste tube in the bathroom, until eventually she was gone, a ghost sailing toward the ceiling, or (worse) toward a future that contained nothing of you?
“Oh, Deirdre,” said Eliza once. “It’s not all that bad, sweetie, you’re making it sound so dismal. It’s just life! Time passes.” Easy for Eliza to say, she still had sweet chubby Evie, who adored her, who almost never scowled, who didn’t yet own an iPhone, just an iPad. Evie was a true innocent: she could text only from a wireless zone! And Eliza had Rob, of course. She had Rob.
Rob, who had that blond lock of hair that fell impertinently forward. Really, it was ridiculous for a grown man, a man of forty, to have hair like that: so blond, first of all, and thick enough that there were actually locks to fall forward.
Brock wore his hair in a defensive crew cut.
There were things in this world that Deirdre didn’t trust. Dentists with off-white teeth. Her father-in-law after a martini. Her mother-in-law before a martini. Screw-top wine bottles. The backstroke.
But some kind of instinct made her trust Robert Barnes more than she trusted most. She’d follow him to the ends of the earth and back. If only he’d ask. If only he’d ask!
No, life was not a Taylor Swift song, she’d been right to tell Sofia that. Life was more like an Adele song: heartrending, wide-ranging, beautiful, sad, and painful, all at the same time.
18
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Eliza