“Whoever it is, she’s going to make us better people, isn’t she?” Susan said. We never checked the gender of the baby. Susan knew it was a girl from the moment she learned she was pregnant.
“She is, Sue.” I started to try to say something to her about how I was sorry I wasn’t as good a husband as she deserved, or as good a partner, or as successful or ambitious. “Susie, you know, I’m sorry, sorry that—”
“Don’t, Charlie,” she said. “It’s funny and sad, and a little scary. But it’s okay, too.” She stopped walking. We stood where one of Enon’s oldest roads splits in two, one branch turning toward the center of the village, the other leading to the section called Egypt. Four small neat, old houses, each with a small barn, faced the intersection. A single streetlight stood at the divergence and moths and other insects swarmed around it. Susan took both my hands in hers. She leaned toward me and kissed me.
“I know I’m no bargain, either,” she said.
“Tut tut! Not another word yourself, my dear. I understand. Let’s just walk some more and be happy about the little cosmonaut on her way.” It felt like Susan had been just about ready to lie to try to make me feel better, and that seemed awful. She wished better for us and that was like a blessing, in that moment, like love itself, if a little sideways, but that was enough.
“My legs feel restless even when I’m walking.” She pressed the heels of her hands against the small of her back and arched and grunted. “Whew,” she said. “This is some thing, Charlie, having a baby. Let’s head home.”
We walked home and I held the door open for Susan and moths followed us in. I took two bowls from the cabinet and two spoons from the drawer. I grabbed a carton of ice cream from the freezer and scooped some into the bowls and we both sat at the table savoring the cold sweet sugary crystalline ice cream while the moths bounced and plinked against the ceiling lamp above our heads.
The summer grew hotter and Susan grew larger. We could practically see Kate in outline. Whenever Kate moved, her elbows and knees and head and behind projected themselves in relief against Susan’s stomach. Susan had a terrible time at night and could not get comfortable. I spent the last three weeks of the pregnancy sleeping on the couch in the living room. Whenever the box springs creaked more than once or twice or Susan groaned, I’d bring her a glass of ice water and see if she needed me to rearrange her pillows or get her a book or just stay with her for a little and sympathize. Sometimes I’d fall asleep sitting up and rouse to find Susan still awake, frowning and trying to settle into a comfortable position.
When Kate was finally born and Susan saw her for the first time, the faraway look in her eyes vanished. Kate brought Susan wholly and fully into this world. She made the tenuous threads that had held Susan and me together before obsolete. Kate’s birth seemed to stop our drift away from one another, a process I had often contemplated before the news of Kate’s arrival with the kind of melancholy one feels at an upcoming and inevitable sorrow. Kate bound us back together. Or, really, we were each separately fully bound to Kate and thereby to each other through our single, cherished daughter, and that was fine by us. After all, we did have a sort of real love for one another, or I did for Susan and she had a deep affection for me.
WHAT AN AWFUL THING then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other. Susan took her tea up to the bedroom. I went to the foot of the stairs and called to her. I said I thought it was a good idea that she go by herself to be with her family. I raised my broken hand and fit it to the hole I had punched in the wall, as if to insert a casting back into its mold. I withdrew my hand a few inches, imagining the hole filling back in and broken bones mending. Stop pretending, I thought. Face facts.
“Susan,” I said. “How does that seem to you, you going to see your family?” I lowered my hand. I felt like an actor in a play, the house a cutaway set, the first floor the living room and hallway and foot of the stairs, the second floor the bedroom. The husband stands at the foot of the stairs, calling up to his wife. The wife moves around the bedroom, putting piles of clothes away but also selecting pieces that she makes into a separate pile on a small armchair — a hand-me-down, clearly, upholstered in an old-fashioned pattern of faded pink and blue bouquets of hydrangeas and roses and leaves and branches of berries. As the audience watches the husband, the actor playing the husband, the actor playing the husband struggling to figure out what to say, as if he strains to author his own lines, as if he is struggling to compose his own words, it becomes apparent that although the wife does not respond to her husband, the clothes she is setting aside are all hers and are what she is packing, or thinking she’d pack, for going back to her family. The audience already knows she will go and some members already know or suspect she will not come back, but the husband and wife must play the full scene, of course. The audience already knows that she will pack the clothes into a suitcase, something she does not quite yet know; nor does he. They are a young couple who had a single child young and who lost the child in an instant of combustion and are straggling around their home in shock at the child’s death but nonetheless trying to spare each other in at least some slight degree the full blow of the end of their fragile marriage by acting as if it isn’t the end for just a little longer, by spreading the blow over just a little more time so it does not fall on them all at once.
Time is mercy, I thought. Knowing that did me exactly no good and there I was at the foot of those stairs, part of me wishing I could just say out loud, “It’s okay, Susan. You can go and I know it’s done and let’s just get it over with,” but the rest of me struggling with what I should say next, so that the inevitable would play out in the fullness of time. Even in the midst of so much pain, an impatience overtook me, and for the first time I imagined the cemetery, the headstone on the slope, the Norway maples and the granite crypts and the gravedigger’s shack and the spigot and plastic jug for watering the flowers, and sitting behind and above Kate’s stone and thinking about her, talking with her. I imagined the set of the house, with Susan and me moving around in it, revolving to reveal another set, of the cemetery. The actor playing the husband could go through a trap door in the set of the house, while it rotated, and up a narrow ladder, to a hatchway cut into the top of the cemetery set. He could open the hatch, climb onto the artificial cemetery lawn, close the hatch, and find his mark as the set turned toward the audience’s view.
“Sue?” I asked. “I don’t know. This is all so, so shit-ass crazy. But maybe it’s something you should think about doing.” Listen to the husband, I thought. Listen to the actor, how he takes the line and delivers it with a kind of strangled levity, imparting the truth that, even as he speaks the line, he realizes that the tone of his voice only intensifies the tragedy of what he says, rather than alleviating it, as he intended.
Susan left for Minnesota the next day. I was too groggy from the painkillers to drive her, so one of her coworkers from the school picked her up. Before she left, she went shopping and bought food she thought would be easy for me to prepare for myself, bread and cold cuts and jars of peanut butter and jelly and a dozen cans of soup. I told her to call me when she got there and to say hi to her family and to send my love and regrets, my embarrassment, at not coming along. We hugged each other and I kissed her on the forehead and said I was sorry. I said hi to her friend from work, whose name I didn’t know, and I put her suitcase in the backseat of the car. I kissed her again and she got into the car and the car pulled out of the driveway and drove off and that was the last time I saw her.