It’s instinctive, the way the blood coagulates inside me. It becomes thick and gooey so that I can’t move.
Someone was here.
My gut feeling is to hide. There’s a closet nearby, a catchall for coats and shoes. My eyes go to it. I could hide. I could bury myself in a dark nothingness and cower on the floor in fear. Because whoever opened the blinds might still be here. Inside the old home.
I listen for strange noises. For calculated footfalls coming for me. For the sound of restrained breaths, slow, repressed and controlled unlike mine. I listen for the groan of floorboards, but the only sound I hear is that of my own heartbeat.
I don’t hide.
I’ve never been a particularly courageous person. Mom always said to face my fears, to take matters into my own hands, to fight for what was mine. And so I make my way slowly through the home, searching for signs of life.
Much of the carriage house is easy to see from where I stand. But then there are those places I can’t see. An upstairs closet, the bathroom, under the eaves of the pitched roof where shadows make it hard to see. All of that is up another set of stairs, on the third floor of the home.
I ascend those steps on tiptoes, the arches of my feet beginning to burn. Convinced that if I walk on tiptoes, the intruder won’t hear me, that he or she won’t know that I am here.
Upstairs, I see a figure hunkered down beneath the sloped ceiling and my breath leaves me. It’s hidden to the side of the mattress, trying to hold still and yet moving in a gentle rhythm.
What I see is a man on bent knee, crouched down, waiting to lunge at me as I reach the top of the staircase.
I gasp aloud, attempting to brace for impact. But instead I lose balance, slipping backward on the top step and sliding downward the eight-or nine-inch rise to the step below. I catch myself there, gripping tightly to the stairwell banister before I plunge down an entire flight of stairs, head over heels over head. Breaking my neck.
My heart pounds hard.
I cling to the banister and realize that no one has lunged at me.
And this time, when I look again, there’s no one there.
It’s just the shadow of a tree streaming in through an open window. The leaves are hair, the branches arms and legs. The gentle rhythm, the movement of wind. No one is there.
I turn to make my way to the bathroom. It’s a small room, but as I come to it, I take note: the door isn’t pressed flush against the wall as it should be. Behind the open door, there is enough space for a body to hide.
I have to muster every ounce of courage I have to go on. It isn’t easy. My feet don’t want to move, but they do. It’s slow, deliberate.
When I reach the bathroom door, I don’t step inside. I don’t look behind the door.
Rather my movements are sudden and abrupt, an impulse. I kick the door as hard as I can, where it ricochets off the wall, the rubber stopper running headfirst into the baseboard, not bumping into a person first. Because there’s nobody there to slow it down. There’s nobody there at all.
As I make my way inside the bathroom, I find the shower curtain pulled tight, stretched from wall to wall. It billows slightly. Heat spews from a nearby vent, though that’s not the reason for the movement. Instead what I envision is a figure standing on the other side of the curtain, the breath from his or her lungs making the curtain move.
Someone is there, hiding behind the shower curtain.
I tread delicately. On tiptoes. Two steps, and then three.
I reach out a hand, aware that the blood throughout my entire body has stopped flowing. That I’m holding my breath. That my heart has ceased beating.
I feel the cotton of the shower curtain in my shaking hand, the plastic of its liner. I grab a fistful of it and pull hard, finding myself face-to-face with the white tiles of the shower wall.
There’s no one there. It’s only me.
The carriage home is empty. Whoever was here has gone for now.
I do only one thing then, and that’s check the fire safe box where I keep my money, to be sure someone hasn’t swiped every last penny from me. Because why else would someone break into the carriage home except to steal from me? I keep the box in the closet these days, hidden in the corner beneath the hem of a long winter coat where, God willing, no one will ever find it. I open the closet door, drop to my knees and gather the box in my hands. The box is locked. When I slip the key inside, I find every dollar accounted for. Whoever was here didn’t steal money from me.
I try not to let my imagination get the best of me, but to force logic to prevail. I tell myself that I never closed the shades in the first place. That I only thought about doing it, but never did. I think long and hard, trying to remember the smooth, woven feel of the white roller shade in my hand as I drew it southward and let go, watching it hold.
Did that happen, or did I only imagine it did?
Or maybe whatever springlike mechanism that makes the shades open failed to keep them closed. The ratchet and pin that hold them in place didn’t work. Simple human error or mechanical failure.
Or maybe someone was there, lifting the roller shades one by one so that when I returned, they could see me. I tell myself no. That the front door was locked. And that, as far as I know, only one person but me has a key. My landlord.
I step from the closet and make my way to a nearby window where I stare out and toward Ms. Geissler’s home. The room turns warm all of a sudden. Beneath my arms, I sweat.
There’s no one there, no one that I can see.
And yet, as it was last night, there’s a light on in the third-story window of the greystone home. The window shades are lowered, but not pulled all the way down. They don’t lie flush against the window sill. There’s a gap. Albeit a small one, only a couple of inches at best.
But still, a gap.
And as I stare at that gap for half the night, sometime around midnight I see a shadow pass by. Just a shadow, but nothing more.
eden
July 2, 1997
Egg Harbor
Be still my beating heart, it worked! We’re going to have a baby!
One single cycle of IVF and, as I sat on the toilet today after Aaron had gone off to work, the all-familiar pregnancy test cradled between my fingers, I spied not one single line this time, but two. Two! Two pink lines running parallel on the display screen.
My heart hammered quickly inside my chest. It was all I could do not to scream.
And still I had my doubts—after months of seeing only one line, it was easy to convince myself that I was imagining the second one there, that I had quite simply fashioned it in my mind. The one line was bright pink like bubble gum, the same dependable line that greeted me each month, bringing stinging tears to my eyes.
But the other, this new line, was a light pink, the lightest of light, the mere suggestion of pink, a whisper that something might be there.
I pray that it’s not a deception of my mind.
I went to the market wearing mismatching shoes. I drove above the speed limit with the window open, though outside it poured down rain. I ran into the store without an umbrella, saturating my hair. If anyone noticed my shoes, they didn’t point it out.
I purchased three additional pregnancy tests of assorted brands in case one had a tendency toward being inaccurate. I took them home and urinated on them all, every last one of them, and in the end, there were six lines.
Three additional pregnancy tests.
Six pink lines.
Aaron and I are going to have a baby.
July 5, 1997
Egg Harbor
For days we’ve been living in a constant state of euphoria.
I walk around the home, floating on air. I dream up baby names for boys and girls. I go to the hardware store and get samples of paint for the nursery room walls.
At home alone, I
find myself dancing. Spinning in graceful circles around the living room floors. In all my life, I’ve never danced before. But I can’t help myself. I can’t stop my feet from swaying, my arms wrapped around myself, holding on to the life within. Dancing with my unborn child. I find an old record and set it on the turntable. I carefully place the needle on it, and move in tune to the music as Gladys Knight sings a song for me.
The day I discovered the positive pregnancy tests, I phoned Aaron at work to deliver the news. He was euphoric in a way I’d rarely seen him before. He left work at once and came home earlier than ever before, pulling his car in to the drive minutes before eight o’clock.
He brought me ice cream in bed; he fed it to me with a bent-out-of-shape spoon. He lay in bed beside me and rubbed my back. He massaged my feet. He stroked my hair. He told me how amazing I was, how gorgeous, and how already I had that beautiful pregnancy glow.
He stared at me then, just stared, and inside my heart began to cantor, a kaleidoscope of butterflies flitting inside me. I knew what would come next and it was then that my body began to want him, to need him like it hadn’t for so long before. I soughed at his touch, my skin breaking out in gooseflesh as he ran a hand across my arm, lacing his fingers through mine. As he stared, he said again that if our baby girl looked anything like me, that she would be the prettiest thing around. And then he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and I knew that in that moment, I was the most beautiful girl in the world to him.
Our baby girl.
He held me tightly and kissed me like he hadn’t in months, slowly and deeply at first, growing ravenous, a starved man who hadn’t been fed in years, and it was then that I realized I too was empty and famished.
My breath quickened as he slid a steady hand up the skirt of my nightgown.
“You think it’s okay?” I gasped as Aaron withdrew my underpants and set them aside, though there was nothing more that I wanted in that moment than a fresh start for Aaron and me and our baby, to be able to erase all the animosity in a single moment, with a single deed.
“You think it’s safe?” I begged, and Aaron assured me that everything was okay, and, as we moved together there on the bed, I believed him. For the first time in a long time, I believed him.
July 14, 1997
Egg Harbor
An ultrasound with Dr. Landry confirmed the pregnancy, though there was no need for Dr. Landry’s attestation because I, for one, already knew that it was true, that the manifold of pregnancy tests didn’t lie. The battle with morning sickness had begun already, a misnomer if I’d ever heard one for it was morning, noon and night sickness. Not once did I complain, but rather welcomed the nausea and the fatigue as a gift.
Dr. Landry told Aaron and me that our tiny embryo is currently measuring one-half of a centimeter from crown to rump. As I lay on the examination table, feet in stirrups, for once not put off by the wand inside me, the complete invasion of privacy that I’ve come to accept as par for the course, Dr. Landry pointed out the gestational sac and the yolk sac, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that pint-size nub that would one day be a baby.
Aaron held my hand the entire time. He stroked my hair. He kissed my lips when the image appeared, dark and grainy and impossible to see were it not for Dr. Landry’s informative voice and thin finger telling us what was the gestational sac and what was the yolk sac, and where our baby was growing, and then, once I found it, the embryo—a half centimeter long with paddle-like arms and legs and webbing between its toes and fingers, none of which I could see for myself though Dr. Landry told us were there—the one thing in the world I loved more than anything else, I couldn’t divert my eyes.
There was a heartbeat. We couldn’t hear it yet, but we could see it. It was there, the movements of it on the ultrasound screen. Our baby had a heart and a heartbeat, and blood that coursed through his or her tiny body. Its heart had chambers—four of them Dr. Landry said!—and beat like a racehorse, a heartbeat that easily trumped mine, though it too was going at a steady gallop.
I’m six weeks along. And we have a due date now.
By May, Aaron and I will finally have a baby. We’ll be parents!
How will I possibly be able to wait that long to hold my baby in my arms?
July 16, 1997
Egg Harbor
I told my stepmother about the baby today. I didn’t mean to; it just happened. We were on the phone when she asked—as she had so many times in the past—“How much longer are we going to have to wait for you and Aaron to have a baby?” and it wasn’t so much that I told her, because I didn’t, but it was the lack of a response that gave it away, the silence, because I was too busy beaming behind the handset, trying to no avail to manufacture a lie.
If Nora could have seen me, she would have noticed the way my skin turned pink; she, like Aaron, would have seen the way I glowed. She would have seen me run a delicate hand across the cotton of my blouse—a link to the life inside—and triumphantly smile.
She said nothing at first, nothing in response to my nothing.
“When were you thinking you’d tell us?” she asked then with the slightest hint of malice—Nora, of course, needs to be the first to know everything—followed immediately by “Does Aaron’s mother already know?” and there was jealousy and skepticism in her voice long before she offered her congratulations and said how happy she is for Aaron and me.
I called Aaron’s mother next before Nora had a chance to call for herself, boasting that she knew a whole thirty seconds before Aaron’s mother did.
It was like a wildfire then, that instant burst of pregnancy news that caught quickly, spreading through the family from phone call to phone call like a raging inferno. By the end of the day, nearly everyone would know our news.
Miranda arrived as Aaron’s mother and I were saying goodbye, and catching a glimpse of my hand still situated on the cotton of my blouse, she said to me, “It’s about goddamn time, Eden.”
And then she hugged me, a quick, careless hug, sending her boys into the backyard to play alone so she could lie on my sofa and rest. Little Carter didn’t want to go; he, himself, was still a baby, and so she picked him up and plopped him in Jack’s arms and said again to go and we stood there, watching them walk away, listening as Carter cried. She was massive again, still months away from giving birth to baby number four, and the evidence of it was everywhere: in her tired eyes, her unwashed hair, her inflated legs.
Pregnancy did not suit Miranda well.
Her maternity shirts no longer fit correctly, leaving a fraction of her stomach exposed, ashy skin drawn tightly around her baby, a black, vertical line etched on her body from belly button down. Miranda herself didn’t have a pregnancy glow, but rather was covered in blotchy brown spots all over her skin; the hormones were not working in her favor.
“Just wait until you’re as fat as me,” she said, seeing the way I watched her drop onto the sofa, a giraffe making an ungainly attempt to sit.
“Well I have news too,” she said then, as if she couldn’t stand me being happy, as if she couldn’t take a back seat to my glad tidings for once. “We’re going to have a girl!” she screeched, clapping her own hands, going on to say how—though Joe didn’t know it yet—she’d had a peek at her medical file when the obstetrician was out of the room during her last appointment, and there, in the margins of the paperwork, saw the Venus symbol written with black ink.
“Finally,” she said, frowning out the window at her three boys, fifty-pound Jack lugging twenty-pound Carter around, Carter who still cried. “After everything I’ve been through,” she said, and I wanted to be happy for her, I really did.
But I couldn’t bring myself to be.
She didn’t deserve another baby any more than a murderer deserves clemency.
I was grateful when, an hour later, Paul wet himself and they had to leave.
Aaron had wanted to keep the news o
f our pregnancy a secret for a while longer, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops, to let everyone in the whole entire universe know that I was going to be a mother. “Why wait?” I asked later that afternoon as he prepared for work. I frowned at him, feeling punctured that he would want to keep our baby a secret. We’d spent a year trying to achieve this, watched our lives and our marriage flounder to make a baby, drained our savings and accrued mass amounts of debt on our credit cards.
And yet I couldn’t be happier. I couldn’t be more thrilled.
This was the one thing that I wanted more than anything. More than anything.
I wanted everyone to know about it.
“Just in case,” Aaron replied when I asked why we should keep our baby a secret, why we should wait to share the news.
“In case what?” I asked, provoking him, but he wouldn’t say the words out loud. He was being cautiously optimistic, I knew, but what I wanted was for him to be jubilant like me. He stood before me in the kitchen, slipping his feet into a pair of new shoes, waterproof, slip-proof black loafers that cost us an arm and a leg. But none of that mattered now, not trivial things like the cost of groceries, the cost of shoes.
We were going to have a baby.
He stood and came to me, wrapping his arms around the small of my back, and I breathed him in, the scent of his aftershave and soap because Aaron, of course, didn’t wear cologne. His hands were rough from years of hard work, the scrubbing of dishes, the scalding sauces that bubbled over onto his hands, burning them. The many near misses with a utility knife. The gashes and lacerations, healed now but always there. Aaron’s hands were rough and worn, but also the softest things in the world to me as they slipped under the hemline of my blouse and stroked my bare skin.
He wouldn’t say the words out loud, but he didn’t have to.
I knew exactly what he was thinking.