The Good Father

  “Whew.” I leaned forward and Dale massaged the back of my neck. I was embarrassed. “I hope I didn’t scream or anything.” I tried to laugh. “Freak out the guests.” When Dale and I became lovers, we experimented to see how much noise could be heard from my room in the guestroom right above. Dale went upstairs and I stayed in my room and made erotic-sounding noises and rocked the bed to make it squeak. He promised me he couldn’t hear a thing, but the whole thing cracked both of us up. “Was I actually screaming?” I asked now.

  “No,” he said. “You were just whimpering and breathing hard.” He locked his arms around me and rocked me a little. He could be so sweet. “Tell me about the dream,” he said.

  I hesitated a moment but could think of no reason not to tell him. “I had a baby in the dream,” I said. “She was crying and I couldn’t get to her. I couldn’t find my way through the house to her. It was very… I just wanted to get to her.” My tears were a sudden surprise and I was so glad it was dark in the room. This wasn’t the first time I’d had a dream about my baby in the two weeks since Hannah was born. During the daytime, I was fine. No problem. But when I was asleep and had no control over my thoughts, there she was, crying for me from a distance and I could never, ever reach her. In one of the dreams, I was upset that I didn’t know the baby’s name, just as I didn’t know the name of my own child. What had Travis named her? Was she happy and healthy? I knew she didn’t have my heart problem. My father told me they checked her out right after she was born and she was fine, which was a miracle because of the medications I’d been on when I got pregnant with her. Most of the time, I could push that baby out of my mind. Now, suddenly, she was trying to get in.

  Dale laughed a little. “You’re spending way too much time with Alissa and Hannah,” he said. “Seriously, though,” he added quickly, “you’ve been such a help to her. She’s really… She’s not adjusting that well to motherhood, is she.”

  “I think her hormones are still screwed up,” I said. “Once she’s back in school with her friends, she’ll probably be fine.” I didn’t really believe it. Alissa was right to be nervous about her future. None of her friends would have to run home after school to take care of a baby.

  “You’re going to be such a great mother,” he said and I was glad it was so dark because I didn’t want him to see how I cringed. I’d told him I might never be able to have children. I’d been honest about it. The antirejection meds made it extremely risky. My doctor had said having children was “unlikely but not impossible” for me, and Dale seemed to have completely wiped the “unlikely” part of that sentence from his mind. “We’ll find a way,” he’d said, and I’d let it go, like I always let go of anything that might lead to conflict. I wanted children, but I would have been happy adopting. I knew from the way Dale and his parents reacted when Alissa said she wanted to place her baby up for adoption that it wasn’t an idea they’d take to easily.

  I thought I heard the baby again, way in the distance, even though I was now wide-awake. I leaned away from Dale to turn on the light on my night table. The darkness was getting to me.

  The light caught Dale’s gray eyes. They were a metallic silvery-gray, the color of the ocean on an overcast day, and they were suddenly familiar to me in a whole new way. I nearly gasped. I knew all at once why I’d fallen for him. I knew why, the moment I first saw him at my interview, I’d wanted to put my arms around him. I’d thought then that it had been love at first sight, but my subconscious had been messing with me. Suddenly I knew it had been Travis I’d seen in him. “What?” he asked, and I realized I was staring at him like I’d never seen him before.

  “Nothing.” I shook my head. “Just a little spaced out.” I shivered. Something was happening to me and I didn’t like it. Alissa’s baby was shaking me up in some strange new way and with all I had going on right now, I didn’t need shaking up. The very last thing I needed was memories of Travis and the baby tormenting me. What was that about?

  Your baby’s safe, I told myself. She has a father and mother who love her and she’s healthy.

  I hardly ever thought about her. I’d had a heart transplant and that was what defined me, not having a baby, who was nothing more than a footnote in my life. When I did think about her, it was with zero emotion. Tonight, I thought I understood why and it scared me. My brain had been protecting me from something that could rip me apart. Now with Hannah in my life, the seams were beginning to fray.

  “You ready to go back to sleep?” Dale rubbed my shoulder.

  I nodded, though I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sleep for the rest of the night. The dream seemed long ago now, yet it had left so many disturbing feelings behind that I was almost afraid to turn out the light. I did it, though, and snuggled close to Dale, trying to breathe in his scent, to remember who he was. Trying to think about how great my life would be when I was married to him. Instead, I heard my father’s voice in my ears.

  The baby never happened, he’d said. Put it all behind you, Robin. That part of your life never happened.

  I thought of the dream and my desperate need to reach my baby, and I knew in that instant you could love someone you didn’t know and never would know. You could love her with all your heart.

  10

  Erin

  Ever since the accident, I hated going to bed. As soon as my head hit the pillow I’d see the pier stretching out in front of me, so I’d never even walk into my bedroom until I could barely keep my eyes open. Then if I was very lucky, sleep would find me before the pier did. That was why, about two weeks after I moved into the apartment, I was still awake at 2:00 a.m. and caught the late-night airing of The Sound of Music on TV.

  I’d always been a night owl, but my job had forced me to go to bed no later than midnight. Now, though, with no job and no husband, I could stay up as long as I wanted. I’d sit on the too-hard sofa in the living room and watch something mindless on TV, like the home and garden channel or a classic movie, and I’d play solitaire on my iPad or check in with the Harley’s Dad group. Michael didn’t think much of solitaire and it gave me a perverse pleasure to play it. “It doesn’t connect people with other people,” he’d gripe. He liked games that tied people together, whether in competition or cooperation. Farmville and World of Warcraft, that sort of thing.

  I liked living alone as much as I was capable of liking anything these days. I didn’t have to worry about cooking a meal on time or what clothes I put on in the morning. A few nights, I actually slept in my clothes and just wore the same thing the next day. Michael would have been on the phone to Judith to report that I was spiraling down and needed more help than she was giving me. That was the best thing about living apart from Michael. I could do whatever I wanted and not worry about his reaction.

  The Sound of Music was Michael’s favorite movie. I always teased him about that because I thought it was sappy. I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually watched the whole thing, always busying myself with Carolyn or some home project when it came on. But Michael would watch it all the way through every time. Now I found myself caught up in a scene or two, finally setting my iPad aside to give myself over to the movie. For the first time, I thought I understood the pull it had on Michael. It was all the kids. Seven kids. He was one of seven, right smack in the middle, and when we were dating, he’d told me he wanted seven of his own. I’d thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. He finally told me he’d settle for as many as I’d be willing to have. I thought three would be just right, and he countered that four would be better so no child would have to suffer the fate of being the middle child alone. I’d loved that about him, the fact that he wanted a bunch of kids. That he was a family man. We’d been trying to conceive when Carolyn died, and although I’d been frustrated at our lack of success, I was so glad now that I hadn’t been pregnant. The timing would have been so very wrong. Michael didn’t agree. One night, only a couple of weeks after Carolyn’s death, we were holding each other in bed, both still caught up in raw sorrow. Back when we s
eemed to be suffering in unison.

  “If only you were pregnant,” he said then. “It would make all this pain a little more bearable.”

  I sat up, unable to believe what I was hearing. “She’s not replaceable!” I shouted.

  “I know, I know,” he said, pulling me back into his arms. “That’s not what I meant.”

  I twisted free and glared at him. “That’s exactly what you meant,” I said.

  Maybe that was the moment I first felt hatred toward him. It was definitely the moment the enormous wedge began forming between us.

  Now I looked at the TV. At those seven children, all lined up in their dirndls and lederhosen, happily singing Do-Re-Mi together. This was why he loved this movie, I thought. It represented what he longed for: a family, united.

  I used the remote to check the TV guide and saw that the movie was airing every night that week. I picked up my iPad and wrote an email to Michael letting him know in case he wanted to record it. Then I raised my feet to the sofa and wrapped my arms around my legs.

  I’d lost a child, I thought. Michael had lost a dream.

  11

  Travis

  Savannah put the empty container of potato salad back in the cooler next to her on the blanket. We’d eaten dinner on the beach—Bella, Savannah and me—and now we watched the tide rolling in.

  “What are those people doing on our beach?” Savannah had a snarky smile in her voice as she nodded toward an old couple strolling barefoot across the sand, the water rippling over their feet.

  “Trespassers.” I speared a strawberry from the bowl on the blanket between us.

  “What’s trespers?” Bella asked. She was curled up on my legs and I had my free arm wrapped around her. She felt skinny to me. We were definitely missing my mother’s cooking.

  “It’s only a joke, Bell,” I said. “Trespassers are people who walk where they don’t belong, but this is a public beach. A beach for everybody. So those people belong here as much as we do.”

  “Then why’d you say that word? Trespers?”

  “Trespassers. Because this time of year when there’s not many people on the beach, it feels almost like the whole beach belongs to us.”

  “You explain too much to her,” Savannah said. “She doesn’t understand.”

  “Yes, I do.” Bella understood enough to be insulted.

  Why did everybody want me to talk down to my daughter? Yeah, some of what I told her went over her head, but she took in a lot of it. I never knew which part would stick, so I said it all. Every once in a while, Savannah would do what she just did—criticize how I dealt with Bella. She did it often enough that I was going to have to say something to her about it if she kept it up. She was watching Bella for only fifteen bucks a day, so I figured I had to put up with some flak. I’d had a job building an interior staircase last week because the contractor’s regular guy was recovering from surgery, but now he was back and there was no more work for me. The wages had sucked, anyway, but at least I hadn’t had to worry about food. The phone and rent, though—I didn’t want to think about them. The phone company cut off my phone the day before yesterday. I decided not to take the signs off the sides of my van, even though the number wouldn’t do me much good. But maybe someone would see the sign while I was parked someplace and ask for an estimate. Dream on, I thought. It was a matter of pride, really. If I took those signs down, I was just another loser driving around in a dinged-up white van.

  I was late with the rent money. I had about half of what I needed and the old guy who owned the trailer was no bleeding heart. “All or nothing,” he said. “You have till the end of the week.” Savannah had money. Not a lot, but she had some decent things in her trailer and her nice little car and she never seemed to have trouble buying food and beer. I didn’t want to borrow, though. She wasn’t offering, anyway.

  I was grateful to Savannah, which was another reason I put up with any noise she gave me about Bella. She and Bella were doing well together. The two of them really seemed to hit it off, but when I got home from work at the end of each day, Bella just wanted me. Ever since the fire and losing her nana, she didn’t like to let me out of her sight. She seemed so relieved when she saw me, as though she was afraid that, even though I told her I wasn’t leaving, I might decide to go to heaven myself.

  I lay back on the blanket and straightened my arms to lift Bella into the air. She giggled, putting her arms out at her sides, pretending she was a plane. I’d done this with her since she was tiny and she was getting way too big for it. The other night, after I’d worked on that staircase, my arms hurt like a bitch when I lifted her in the air this way. It had felt so good. The kind of ache that let you know you’d put in an honest day’s work. Now I felt nothing. Just the light weight of my skinny little girl sailing through the air.

  “So, you didn’t say how the job hunt went today.” Savannah popped the cap on a bottle of beer and took a sip. She was right. I’d talked about anything I could think of other than the sorry state of my job hunt. Now, I sat up and lowered Bella to the blanket and watched as she got to her feet and ran toward the line of shells.

  “Zip,” I said. “There’s nothing. I bought a Wilmington paper and maybe I could use your phone tomorrow to make a couple of calls, but I’m not holding my breath.”

  “Maybe you need to get training to do something else, like I’m doing,” she said. “You might have to do a different kind of work.”

  “And how do I support Bella while I’m training? And training for what?” I knew I sounded angry. Feeling frustrated always put me in a shitty mood. I’d wanted to go to college. My grades had been okay, but not good enough for a scholarship and my mom and I didn’t have money to spare. Then Bella came along and that was that.

  “Well, like, what are you interested in?” Savannah asked.

  “I always wanted to be marine biologist,” I said. I didn’t tell many people that, and was sorry I’d told Savannah when she laughed.

  “You’d have to be really smart to do that,” she said.

  “Give me a break, Savannah.” I wanted to tell her my SAT scores, which hadn’t been half bad, but I doubted she’d even know what SAT stood for.

  “Sensitive, aren’t we.” She tipped the bottle back to take a long swallow. “Look,” she said, “I have an idea. I know where you can get work.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I didn’t want to tell you about it because I didn’t want you to leave.”

  “Leave…?” I wasn’t sure what she meant.

  “Leave here. Carolina Beach. But I know where there’s work that pays really well.”

  “I’m not leaving the beach,” I said.

  “What if it’s a choice between the beach or food on the table?” She nodded toward Bella, who was bending over to pick up something from the row of shells.

  I speared another strawberry, but didn’t put it in my mouth. “You know of a for-sure construction job someplace else?” I asked. “Like where?”

  “Raleigh.”

  “I don’t know anyone in Raleigh.” I popped the strawberry in my mouth. I wasn’t going to Raleigh.

  “Well, you will know someone if you take this job. I have a good friend there. Roy. Don’t be jealous,” she added quickly. “He’s not like a boyfriend or anything.”

  I wasn’t jealous. I didn’t care if she had a boyfriend. As a matter of fact, it might be a good thing. The heat I’d felt for her the first few times we got together was just about gone. Yeah, she was a knockout, but she was also an airhead, and her snarkiness could get under my skin. You couldn’t talk to Savannah about what was really going on inside you—it didn’t feel safe. I just hoped the occasional snarky attitude wouldn’t rub off on Bella. I needed Savannah’s help. She’d said she was falling for me—her exact words—so I was walking a fine line, trying to keep her happy without giving her the idea we could ever be more to each other than we were right now.

  “Why can’t he find somebody in Ralei
gh?” I asked. “People are desperate for work everywhere.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know all of that. All I know is I told him about you when I talked to him the other day and he said ‘Send him to me and I’ll fix him up.’ His exact words.”

  Whoa. I had to admit, that sounded tempting.

  “Is he a general contractor or what? Is it residential work? I was starting to do some fine carpentry before the fire. I’m not a master carpenter or anything like that, but I can do more than just general construction.” Was I actually considering this?

  “I’ll tell him that,” she said.

  “Where would we live, though? And what would I do with Bella? I don’t know anyone—”

  “You could leave her with me, I guess, though—”

  “Uh-uh, no way,” I said. Raleigh was only a few hours away, but it might as well be the moon if I left Bella behind. I might’ve considered leaving her with my mother for a couple of weeks just to get the bucks, but I wasn’t leaving her with Savannah. If Savannah’s feelings were hurt, she didn’t let on.

  “Well, like I told you,” she said, “I want to be able to get away sometimes, too, so it probably wouldn’t work leaving her with me anyway. Even though I love her to pieces.”

  “So forget the whole Roy and Raleigh idea,” I said.

  “He has to fill the job by next week,” she said, “so you have a few days to think about it.”

  “No. I appreciate it, Savannah. Really. But I can’t leave here. This is home. It’s Bella’s home. I can’t shake up her life again so soon after—” I watched my daughter playing tag with the waves “—after everything.”

  “I get it,” she said.

  “I’ll find something here. It’ll just take a little more time.”