Baby Proof

  “Why? Why does your heart hurt?” she asks me, now on the verge of tears herself.

  I can’t answer her—so she keeps asking the question. Over and over.

  Finally I say, “Because I love Uncle Ben.”

  “Why does that make you sad?” she says, her small hand darting out to take mine.

  “Because, Zoe,” I say, too defeated to spin the truth or try to protect her. “Because Ben is going to marry someone else.”

  “That girl doctor?” Zoe says, her eyes wide with horror.

  Through fresh tears, I nod and whisper yes.

  I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to explain to Zoe one of the very saddest notions in love and life: sometimes the timing is wrong—and sometimes you realize the heart of the matter way too late in the game. I tell her that it was a big mistake to divorce Ben. I wanted my life to look a certain way, and when Ben didn’t fit into that plan, I gave up on him. And now, the person I care about most is gone. Ben belongs to someone else now. Ben belongs to Tucker. The girl doctor.

  Maybe Zoe truly grasps what I’m telling her, but at the very least she pretends to understand, her expression becoming almost comically philosophical. I feel a bit ashamed for dumping so much on a child with a head injury and parents on the brink of disaster. But I can’t help myself. There is something soothing about her company and her innocent commentary.

  “Just be happy, Aunt Claudia,” she says at one point. As if it’s the easiest thing in the world to do.

  I smile and say, “I’ll try.”

  But inside I’m thinking, Never. I’ll never be truly happy again.

  Jess and Michael return home a short time later. As I introduce Zoe and Michael and they shake hands, I can see Jess registering my red-rimmed eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” she mouths over Zoe’s head, wrongly assuming that I’ve actually shielded my niece today.

  I say, “Imagine the worst.”

  Jess thinks for a beat and then pretty much nails it. “Ben and Tucker got married?”

  “Close,” I say.

  “Engaged?” she says, aghast.

  I give her a grim nod.

  Her mouth falls open and Michael busts out with a “Get the fuck outta here.”

  Jess glares at him and points at Zoe. I know Maura will get the curse-word report, although in the scheme of the day, one little F-word falling through the cracks doesn’t seem all that destructive.

  “Sorry,” Michael says to me with a grimace.

  “I’ve heard it before,” Zoe says, crossing her arms. She is definitely relishing her role in this adult drama.

  “Did he call you?” Jess asks. “Did Annie tell you?”

  “No,” I say, letting loose a bitter laugh. “We actually ran into Tucker in the ER.”

  “The ER?” Jess says. She and Michael look floored as Zoe and I regale them with the gory details of her accident and hospital visit. After Jess and Michael inspect Zoe’s stitches and give her a few props for being brave, Jess gets right to the point: What did the ring look like? Have they set a date? Do I think Tucker could be pregnant?

  I shrug three times in succession, and at her last question, I say, “It’s a moot point anyway.”

  “Oh, no, it’s not a moot point,” Jess says. “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

  “Heard that, sister,” Michael says, putting his arm around Jess.

  I stare back at the blissful couple in the throes of early passion—a couple who can’t fathom feeling differently than they do at this moment in time.

  “Oh, it’s over, guys,” I say, glancing at my sidekick for confirmation. “Right, Zoe?”

  She nods somberly and says, “Yeah. The timing was all wrong.”

  After Jess and Michael leave for dinner, Zoe and I curl up on the couch watching the original Parent Trap with Hayley Mills. It was one of my favorite movies as a child, and like the satisfying child she is, Zoe tells me more than once that she prefers this “old-fashioned” version to the one with Lindsay Lohan.

  When the phone rings, I glance at the caller ID. It is Maura. My heart seizes with the thought of more family drama. And aside from any report that she has for me, I positively dread telling her about Zoe’s accident.

  “It’s your mom,” I say as I hit the pause button on the remote control and answer the phone.

  “Hey, Maura,” I say gingerly. I’m going to have to ask cryptic questions with Zoe right next to me.

  “I wanna talk to Mommy!” Zoe says, her voice becoming babyish and whiny.

  “One sec, Zoe,” I say, and then ask Maura how she’s doing.

  “I’m fine,” Maura says, sounding stronger than I expected.

  “What’s going on? How are you?” I say.

  “I’m fine, but I can’t really talk now. He’s in the kitchen,” she says in a low voice.

  “Can you give me an overview?” I say while Zoe continues to clamor for the phone.

  “Well, in a nutshell, he’s crazy sorry. Like begging and crying sorry. He keeps saying that he doesn’t know why he does what he does. He says he needs help. He wants to see my therapist, Cheryl, something he was never willing to do before. He says he’ll do anything to keep our family together,” she whispers. “I’ve never seen this side of him. It’s not like before. I guess it’s because…I’m different this time. I haven’t cried once.”

  I glance at Zoe and choose my words carefully. “Is he trying to say he has some sort of…addiction?”

  “Well, he hasn’t said that exactly…I just think he’s…a very unhappy person.”

  That might be true, I think, but it doesn’t give him the license to run around all of Manhattan and make everyone in his family miserable, too. But it’s not up to me to make judgments—or decisions for my sister—so I just say, “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But I know I have the upper hand for a change…And that sure feels good.”

  There is a long pause and then she asks how Zoe is.

  “She’s sitting right here, patiently waiting to talk to you. I’ll put her on.” Then I inhale sharply and say, “But first I need to tell you something—”

  Maura interrupts. “Oh, God, what happened?”

  I am amazed at her mother’s intuition as I reassure her that Zoe is fine. Then I give her the least melodramatic version of the accident. I leave out the part about Tucker and finish by saying, “I’m truly sorry I let that happen.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Maura says, but her voice is shaking a bit. “Accidents happen. It’s not your fault…Lemme talk to her.”

  “Sure,” I say, handing the phone to Zoe, who promptly and predictably bursts into tears when she hears her mother’s voice. I guess it’s a natural reflex when you talk to the person you love most in the world. Which means I better not go through with my lunch with Ben. I can just see myself blubbering in our booth.

  After Zoe gives Maura her rendition of the accident, and the ride to the hospital, and Dr. Steve and her stitches, she launches into Ben and Tucker’s engagement. I don’t have the energy to stop her or intervene. Besides, her report is fairly accurate, right down to the “blond ponytail” and the “big, sparkly diamond ring.”

  When I finally take the phone back, Maura says, “Is that true?”

  “Afraid so,” I say. “Her imagination isn’t that good.”

  “God. I’m so sorry,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. “So am I.”

  In light of the accident, Maura decides that Zoe should return home tonight. “She needs to be here with us,” Maura says. The us is not lost on me, nor is the fact that Maura and Scott arrive together. I wonder if this means that Maura is going to give Scott “one more chance.” Or whether it’s her way of showing Zoe that both her parents love her very much even though they no longer love each other.

  What I am sure of, though, is that Maura looks much better than she did at Zoe’s drop-off a mere twenty-four hours ago. She looks strong—with perfect posture and go
od color in her cheeks. In contrast, Scott has a gray pallor and a scared, mealymouthed manner.

  It occurs to me that things could very easily have gone the other way. Scott could have responded with a cavalier, “All right, you got me. Now let’s get a divorce.” Or worse, he could have said, “I’m in love with this woman, and we want to get married.”

  At the very least, Maura gets to choose now. And being the decision maker is always empowering. I am happy for my sister for having at least that much. I wish I did.

  I kiss Zoe good-bye at least four times and tell her I think we need to have another sleepover soon so we can go to FAO Schwarz and have our carriage ride. “And maybe it will even snow the next time,” I say, missing her before she’s even gone.

  “Can I come back soon, Mommy?” Zoe asks, looking up at Maura.

  “Of course,” Maura says.

  As Scott scoops up Zoe in his arms, Maura takes my hand, squeezes it and quietly says, “Take care of yourself.”

  “You, too,” I say.

  When the door closes behind Zoe and her parents, I say aloud to myself, with as much sarcasm as I can muster, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” It’s a cliché I’ve always disliked—as much for the obvious truth of it as the pressure it creates to have a productive, fantastic day. So naturally, I decide to do the opposite. I throw in the towel and crawl into bed, not even bothering to take a shower first and wash the hospital and Tucker germs off my skin.

  Thirty

  Over the next three days I vacillate between numb disbelief and gut-wrenching misery. Work is slow, as it always is before holidays, so I spend most of my time editing at home—and much of that time in bed. Jess informs me that excessive sleep is a sign of depression—as if that is some kind of revelation. She gives me turbocharged, Richard Simmons–esque pep talks. I shrug her off, telling her that I’ll be fine. Even though I’m not at all convinced that I will be.

  My lowest point comes in the middle of the night when I wake up after dreaming the final scene in The Graduate. Everything is just like the movie, only I am Dustin Hoffman and Ben does not leave a very pregnant Tucker at the altar. Instead, he and his whole family just look at me like I’m crazy until Ray and Annie each grab one of my arms and cart me out of the church and stick me on that bus, all alone. I wake up, sweaty and teary and so full of fury that I scare myself.

  The next morning, I find Jess in her room, doing last-minute packing for her trip to Alabama with Michael. Against my better judgment, I tell her about my nightmare.

  She says, “Well. Fortunately, you will be reclaiming Ben prior to their wedding day.”

  I give her a blank look, and she says, “Like on Monday?”

  I shake my head and say, “There isn’t going to be any reclaiming…And I’m not going to go through with seeing Ben on Monday.”

  “What?” she says.

  “I’m canceling,” I say emphatically.

  “Oh, no you’re not,” she says even more emphatically.

  “There’s no point,” I say with a listless shrug.

  “There is too a point,” she says. “Look, Claudia. The fact that they got engaged doesn’t really change the analysis here.”

  “Yeah, it does,” I say.

  “No, it doesn’t!” she says. “If Ben can get a divorce from the love of his life, he can most certainly break off an engagement.”

  “How do we know that she’s not the love of his life?”

  “Because you are,” she says. “And you only get one of those.”

  “Since when do you subscribe to that notion?” I say.

  “Since I’ve finally experienced true love.”

  “Well. I got news for you, Jess. Ben loves her,” I say. “He wouldn’t propose if he didn’t love her. He wants a baby, but not that badly.”

  “Fine. Maybe he does love her in some narrow way. But he loves you more and you know it…He doesn’t have full information. He needs full information. Once he knows that you want children, he’ll have to break up with her.”

  “I don’t want children.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “No I don’t,” I say. “I would have been theoretically willing to have his.”

  “Same difference.”

  “Not really.”

  She zips up her red Tod’s bag with authority and says, “Well. I say we let Ben be the judge of that. Shall we?”

  Meanwhile, my own Thanksgiving plans are up in the air until the eleventh hour. Maura almost always hosts a dinner at her house, but for obvious reasons, this year is the exception. Daphne is the logical backup choice because my father, understandably, refuses to go to Dwight and Mom’s house, but when we tell my mother the plan, she gets on her soapbox about “you girls never coming over here.” And then shoots off on another tangent about how we’ve never really accepted Dwight. I am in no mood for her nonsense so I quickly squelch her spirit and say, “Listen here, Vera. We’re going to Daphne’s. You can’t even cook.”

  “We can have food brought in,” she says.

  “Mom. Drop it. The decision is made.”

  “Says who?” she says in the voice of a small child.

  “Says me,” I say. “So join us or don’t. Entirely up to you.”

  I hang up and decide that the only true beauty of hitting rock bottom is that nothing can really faze or rile you. Not even your mother.

  A few minutes later she calls me back with a conciliatory, “Claudia?”

  “Yes?” I say.

  “I’ve decided.”

  “And?”

  “I’ll come,” she says meekly.

  “Good girl,” I say.

  Thanksgiving morning is bleak and gray and drizzly, but also unseasonably warm, a depressing holiday combination. It takes every bit of will I have to get out of bed, shower, and dress. One of my mother’s life principles flashes in my head—if you dress up and look pretty, you will feel better. And although I basically agree with this, I discard the advice and settle on an ancient J. Crew rollneck sweater and a pair of Levi’s with threadbare knees. I tell myself that at least it beats sweats and sneakers, which I resist only because I can just envision “wearing sweats and sneakers on Thanksgiving” listed in a Suicide Warning Signs pamphlet.

  I can’t find a cab so I have to walk to Penn Station and barely make my noon train. I am stuck in a seat facing backward, which always gives me motion sickness. Then, about halfway to Huntington, I realize that I left my fancy twenty-eight-dollar pumpkin pie from Balthazar on the kitchen counter. I say shit aloud. An old woman across the aisle from me turns and gives me a disapproving stare. I mouth sorry, although I’m thinking, Mind your own business, lady. Then I spend the next twenty minutes worrying that I will turn into the kind of disgruntled person who dislikes old people. Or worse, I will become a bitter old person who hates the young.

  When my father picks me up at the train station, I tell him that we need to swing by the grocery store to pick up a pie.

  “Screw the pie,” my dad says, which I translate to mean, I heard about Ben’s engagement.

  “No. Really, Dad,” I say. “I promised Daphne I’d bring a pumpkin pie.”

  Translation: I’m a total loser. All I have left is my word.

  My dad shrugs and a few moments later we pull into the Waldbaum’s parking lot. I run inside, grab two skimpy pumpkin pies, already reduced to half price, and head for the express “twelve items or less” lane.

  Fewer, I say to myself, thinking of how amused Ben was when I corrected grammar on public signage. Twelve items or fewer, dammit. I truly hope that Tucker is a math-science girl in the strictest sense of things and screws up her pronouns on a daily basis. She is Harvard-educated, so I know her mistakes aren’t overt, as in, Me and Daddy are going to the store, but with some luck, she might be prone to making other sorts of mistakes—the kind intelligent people make while believing that they are being intelligent. Like failing to use the objective case for all parts of the compound object following
a preposition, as in: Do you want to come with Daddy and I?

  The beauty of this is that Ben will be forced to think of me every single time. Then, one day, he might break down and share with Tucker the trick I taught him so long ago: Try each part of the object in a separate sentence. “Do you want to come with Daddy?” “Do you want to come with me?” Hence: “Do you want to come with Daddy and me?” Maybe her eyes will narrow and a cloud will pass over her face. “Did your ex-wife teach you that one?” she’ll say with disdain born from jealousy and failure to measure up. Because she might be able to put people back together again, but she will never be able to diagram a sentence as I can.

  Then, as I’m paying for my two sorry pies and some Cool Whip, I see Charlie, my high school boyfriend, get in line behind me. I usually like running into Charlie, and other high school friends, but my divorce has changed that. It’s just not the sort of update you feel like inserting in small talk, but at the same time, it’s rather impossible to avoid mentioning. Besides, I’ve about reached my quota for chance meetings this week and don’t have it in me to be friendly. I keep my head low and slip the checkout girl a twenty.

  Just as I think I’m going to escape, Charlie says, “Claudia? Is that you?”

  It occurs to me to pretend that I didn’t hear him and just keep walking, but I like Charlie and don’t want to come across as an urban snob—something he once accused me of being—so I turn, smile, and give him my best impersonation of a happy, well-adjusted adult. “Hey, Charlie!” I say. “Happy Thanksgiving!”

  “You, too, Claudia!” he says, pushing forward his last-minute items: a gallon of whole milk, three cans of cranberry sauce, and a box of tampons. “How ya doin’?”

  “Fine!” I say brightly as I look down and see Charlie’s son shaking a pack of orange Tic Tacs. He looks exactly like Charlie’s kindergarten photo, which was framed in his foyer the whole time we were dating. The little boy looks up at his father and says, “Can we get these, Dad?”

  I anticipate a, No. Put it back, which is the standard parental grocery-store retort, but Charlie says, “Sure. Why not?” and tosses the Tic Tacs on the belt.