Maggie still hasn’t told him about being tested; she hasn’t even reminded him about her missing period. Until now she has thought it would be unbearable if he were to come back early for the sake of someone who isn’t born yet, a mere hypothesis, when he’s decided not to return for her.
“Fletcher, I got tested,” she says. “I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant.”
At first she wonders if he has hung up. Then his voice comes over the line again.
“Why only pretty sure?” He sounds anything but loving.
“It’s a long story. The results aren’t official yet.”
“Shouldn’t we wait until they are before we get worked up about it?” He says it as though the results are a credit card bill that doesn’t need paying until the end of the month.
“The doctor’s secretary said it was positive! I told you I was late three weeks ago, but you didn’t take me seriously. You just ran away.”
“It wasn’t like that,” he begins before cutting himself off. “All right,” he says in a clipped, low voice. “Tell me what you want to do.”
As the statement sits there between them, a buzzing starts in her brain.
“You think I should get rid of it.” Part of her is impressed that she can be so forthright. Fletcher seems surprised too.
“I didn’t say that, I just … It’s a bit of a shock, that’s all. We never talked about a baby.”
“What do you mean? We’ve both said we wanted a family.”
“Not this way.”
He doesn’t even ask her to come back to Boston anymore. He’d rather keep her hidden in this attic of a country. Suddenly she has never felt so dedicated to the place.
“I’m going to have the baby,” she tells him, “and I’m not leaving this house.” Before he can reply, she adds, “Thanks for the support.” After rushing the receiver back to its cradle, she goes to the living room and turns on the television.
It takes him an hour to call. When he does, he says he’s talked with his father and there’s good news: he and Maggie will be allowed to keep working the farm. He says he’ll be up in a week, as they planned. Sounding pleased with himself, he asks her when the results of the pregnancy test are going to be confirmed.
“They said maybe a week,” she mumbles.
“Okay.” He sounds unsure, as if it might be a point to argue. “Call me if you hear.”
She says of course she will. Then a thought occurs to her. “What if it’s negative? Will you still come?” He says he will, but she doesn’t believe him. “What did your father say about the baby?” He doesn’t answer. “Did you even tell him?” She isn’t playing this game right, slashing about when she should be conciliatory, but she seems impervious to her own good advice. “Fletcher, I swear, you leave me here, I’ll make this place such a success …”
“Jesus, you’re keeping the farm, you’re having the baby, I’ll be there soon. What else do you want?”
Isn’t it obvious? She wants him to want all these things too.
Afterward, she starts to see it in a better light. He’s coming back in a week, and if he wasn’t thrilled about the baby—well, she couldn’t expect that right away.
She imagines how it could be: the warm bundle in her arms, then eventually a walking, talking child. They’ll have a household of just three, with George Ray to help keep up the farm in the summers. She’ll paper the walls in the playroom to make a nursery but leave the white wall as it is, and one day she’ll screen her films again, this time for their child. Her father will return from Laos and visit them. Perhaps he’ll even stay for good. So taken is she by these thoughts that she almost doesn’t let it bother her when at dinner she and George Ray barely speak.
In the morning, she wakes up shivering and sees her breath in the cold air. Once dressed, she descends to the dirt-floor cellar and tries to start the boiler. There are minutes of silence, then a terrible clanking as if someone with a wrench is thrashing the pipes, before finally the radiators start to hiss.
Out among the cherry trees, she finds that overnight the landscape has transformed. The world is aflame with goldenrod in flower and bushes bearing red, poisonous-looking berries, while tiny butterflies swirl through the air like bits of paper and grasshoppers take wing to thwack against her leg. The earth seems sharper, more brittle than before, infested by burrs, thistle, and bone white twigs. The air is rank with the urine smell of rotting leaves. Abandoned ladders, scythes, and bushel baskets litter the ground, and a wagon lies covered in a black tarp that flaps in the wind like a sail. The creek is a trickle of water through scummed rocks and dried cress. She kicks through leaf drift worrying that when Fletcher returns he’ll expect her to have raked it all away. After lunch, driving past a yard sale on the way to Virgil, she spots an old-fashioned bassinet and buys it without bothering to haggle.
For the next few days, those times it isn’t raining, there’s a grey gloom that makes her wish it would. The house acquires a pervasive musty smell. When she tries to start a fire in the living room hearth, the room ends up filled with smoke, and there’s the sound of a bird panicking in the chimney. As she scrambles to open the windows, the creature flies into the room and darts about, leaving streaks of soot on the walls before escaping. In the kitchen cupboards she finds fresh mouse turds. She sets traps, and in the night the snap of their springing startles her awake. When she goes to check the next morning, she finds two tiny furred bodies pinned in the same mechanism, their necks broken and their noses touching.
There’s no more word from Gran, but every night Fletcher phones dutifully, and Maggie spends much of the days anticipating his calls, totting up the things she has done and seen, trying not to let it faze her that each night he asks about the test results. Finally she tells him about her father, and he reassures her it will turn out all right. He says he’ll see if his dad knows anybody over there who might be able to give them some answers. He tells her if she still hasn’t heard anything in a couple of weeks, he’ll fly over to Laos with her and they can go find her father together. It’s foolish bravado, and it makes her angry. Fletcher has spent all this time away, yet now he’s willing to travel across the world for her? He’s the same as Wale.
Each time she hangs up the phone, solitude hurtles in on her. After all the hours of keeping busy, the night undoes the work of the day. She retreats to the television and watches Truth or Consequences. She watches Search for Tomorrow and Mary Tyler Moore. She watches All in the Family. One afternoon, finding nothing on the Buffalo stations she can bear to sit through, she resorts to watching a hockey game on the Toronto channel. The Canadians are playing the Russians in Moscow, the last game of a series she hasn’t been following. It’s the final period and the game is tied. When one of the Canadian players scores, there’s jubilation among his teammates, but Maggie isn’t really paying attention to them. Her eyes are on the thousands of Russians in the stands, dressed in suits and ties or dark woollen jackets. The few times the camera shows them, their faces are unblinking and forlorn. They have the look of children at Christmas who were promised one thing and given another.
That evening, George Ray doesn’t appear in the kitchen to dine with her, and she doesn’t go to check on him. There’s a long list of things to do this weekend before Fletcher returns, but she can’t bring herself to start any of them. Instead, she watches TV and takes in the people on the local news crowing over the hockey win. One of them says God must be a Canadian. She shakes her head and watches late into the night, while the clay statue of Saint Clare stares back at her from the top of the set. The next morning, when Maggie passes by the living room, she glances in at the television with contempt, as if the two of them have shared an ill-advised tryst.