The Clairvoyants(75)

“Well, I’ll ask him if I see him,” I said. After Geoff left I stood listening to him cross the hall, open his door, and enter his own apartment.

I went downstairs and knocked on Del’s door. She opened it with her usual flourish.

“There you are!” she said. “Mother says she’s tried to reach you, and you aren’t returning her calls.”

“So?” I said. I walked past her into her apartment.

“She wants us to come home for Easter.”

I watched Del put her hand on her abdomen, though nothing yet showed beneath her oversized sweater. She saw me looking, and then pulled the sweater tightly closed.

“I know it’s surprising,” Del said, matter-of-factly. “But I saw a doctor in Milton, Alice took me, and it’s true. I’m due in September.”

I felt a lurch of guilt. Our mother would be furious. I could hear her accusatory voice now: “How could you have let this happen, Martha?”

“Were you going to tell me?” I said.

“I thought you already knew,” she said. “After what you said in Buffalo.”

I’d made a comment about Jane mistaking the Institute as a place for unwed mothers, but that could hardly serve as evidence that I knew about the pregnancy. “I didn’t know,” I said, icily.

“I was planning on giving the baby up for adoption,” Del said, “but I’ve been thinking, the genetic makeup might really predispose this child, you know, God, to any number of problems, and maybe someone else should take it, someone in the family who has experience and can show some compassion, and give it siblings and a nice bed to sleep in. Or crib. A crib at first, right?”

Del had scrunched her face, and her expression switched from wide-eyed to puzzled, and back.

Like a thrown switch she had gone off again. I suspected she had either stopped her medication or the doctor she’d seen had readjusted it.

“Who do you think will take it? One of your sisters?” I said.

Del sat down on her couch. Dust rose from the cushions into the slant of weak sunlight. “Eventually we’ll have to tell them.”

I noted her use of “we” with a feeling close to despair. I could easily pity her, with her soon-to-be-extending midsection full of something that stirred and pressed and made its presence known against her skin. I couldn’t help thinking of the movies with gestating babies destined to wreak evil and havoc on the world. She caught my expression and frowned. “You have to be a good aunt,” she told me. “Who else will it have?”

“All babies have a father,” I said.

Del pulled her sweater sleeves over her hands. “You’re so amusing.” Outside a car horn sounded in the street, and we both startled. “Does it really matter?”

“That sounds like your new phrase,” I said. “Does it matter?”

I told myself that the father might be Randy.

“Weren’t you using birth control?” I said. My anger must have shown on my face. Del folded her arms across her abdomen as if she were protecting the child.

“They tried to make me use an IUD, but I took the pill, and then I ran out,” she said. “Still, I honestly don’t know how this could have happened.”

She laughed again and looked up at me.

“Is it William’s?” I said.

Del looked even more confused. “No!” she cried. I had the feeling, as I had the day I told her William and I were married, that she was faking her exclamation, that her protest was a lie. Then she said something under her breath that I couldn’t hear, and I worried she was talking to herself.

“What?” I said. “What did you say?”

“‘Sun, Moon, and Talia.’ Remember? By the Italian author. It was in that book of tales Grandfather used to read to us.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I said.

Out the window and across the street, I saw a figure by the curb on the corner, watching the house. He lurked slightly behind a tree, almost leaning on it. Then he pushed himself off and moved away slowly down the sidewalk. A glint of sun caught in his copper hair. His shoulders were broad in his coat. He moved away with a distinct limp, a drag in one leg. I didn’t think I could take a breath. My head filled with ringing. Del was asking me something, and I couldn’t make out what she was saying—my head was so full of sound.

“What did you say?” I turned my back on the window.

“What is it? What’s out there?” Del came to the window, but I moved away and she followed me across the room to the door.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

“Will you come with me?” she said. “For Easter?”

In the vestibule, William’s father’s hat hung from the coatrack.

“We should get rid of that,” I said.

I went out onto the porch, but the figure, William, had disappeared. Had I experienced enough grief to summon him? Or was it his love for me that brought him around? I clutched the porch railing, faint and confused. His ghost might be undertaking unfinished business, but what use would the portfolio be to him now? This life and its ordeals were erased. The dead clung to a tether of love, drawn back by a loss that tormented them, and I felt my knees weaken with my own desire, and the impossibility of ever being with him again. Del, beside me on the porch, pressed her hand to her stomach. If Del was pregnant with William’s baby, he might have another reason to be watching the house. I felt a fresh surge of anger. And Mary Rae was back beneath the elm.