Trespassing(14)

She’s been gone so long, but sometimes her absence is bitingly fresh. Sometimes I miss her as if she died only yesterday. On those days, Micah helps. He makes everything better. He doesn’t know about everything I went through with my mother, but he reminds me that the past is in the past. We’re the future, and I’m no longer alone.

I pick up the phone and dial him again. No answer. I have to admit that even if his phone had died, he would’ve called from his hotel room. Either he’s not calling because he’s doing something he shouldn’t be doing, or Nini is right.

For a split second, I find myself hoping it’s the latter. If he isn’t calling because he’s busy with another woman, I’d either die myself or kill him.

Both scenarios are preposterous. He’s fine, and he isn’t with another woman. He just forgot to turn his phone on. I kept him up late last night with what Micah calls saying goodbye with mind, body, and soul, and he left early this morning. He’s exhausted. That’s all. He didn’t get to take a long nap after the park like I did. Maybe he laid down, thinking he’d call later, and he fell asleep. Micah and I wouldn’t be trudging through fertility treatment if he were having an affair. He wouldn’t pretend to want a family with me if he were sleeping with someone else—

“Stop!” I say it aloud, as if it’s the only way to stop the thoughts racing through my head.

Bella stirs but rolls over and sighs a pretty little sound that further convinces me she’s nothing but angelic, despite the demon child in her imagination.

I put the phone and my laptop aside and tiptoe out of the room and down the hall to the blank slate of bedroom three of four, which someday will house our next baby. I’m hoping for a boy to carry on Micah’s family name. An only child, he’s the last of the Cavanaughs if we don’t produce one. Then again, considering Elizabella’s strong will, I’ll bet whomever she lowers herself to marry will be taking her name.

Twin boys again.

That’s what I want.

This time, we’ll name them.

I close my eyes and envision a pale-blue stripe racing around the beige walls. Two chestnuts cribs, with a changing table between them. Their names hanging letter by letter on the walls above the cribs: DYLAN and DOMINIC. We’ll have them both at the same time. We deserve it. We’ve worked hard. Done everything we’re supposed to do. We love each other, and we’re good parents.

Maybe the results of this IVF round are trying to tell us something. Don’t get greedy. Take what you have: a beautiful daughter and two frozen embryos at the lab.

But if the unthinkable happens again . . .

I lower myself to the plush carpeting, an arm cradling my still-flat tummy, ghost pains of miscarriage racking my abdomen. And the blood . . . so much blood.

It’s one reason leaving our condo in Old Town was acceptable. I never again wanted to sleep in that room where it happened, where my body ceased caring for the twins I was carrying, where they cracked free from their warm and safe station.

It won’t happen here.

A fresh start, a new beginning, a new life.

Micah promised.

No one can keep a promise like that. But if anyone can, it’s Micah. It’s why I believed him when he said it.

Standing, I walk to the window and gaze out at the eleventh fairway, lit only with the haze of the moon and stars. I remember Micah’s commentary the day we moved in: Guess I’ll have to start golfing again.

He’s next to me now, wrapping his arms around me in our would-be nursery, dreaming of tomorrow with me. I close my eyes and sink into the comfort of my imaginary husband.

Can’t live on the eleventh fairway and never land a ball there. You should golf with me.

“I’ve never swung a club,” I remind him, although I know he isn’t here to hear me.

I never danced before we took cha-cha lessons and look at me now.

“You still don’t dance,” I say, swaying in time with him.

It’ll be something fun for us to do together. I’ll sign us up for golf lessons in the spring.

“Unless I’m pregnant.”

Of course. Everything changes when you’re pregnant.

I lean against the window, trying to believe. It’ll happen. The lab will call tomorrow with miraculous news: the embryo will have survived another night, and maybe we’ll have another couple after the next round of batching. I’ll be pregnant by the new year. Micah will golf without me. I’ll drive the cart, with Bella and her naughty imaginary friend coloring in the back.

An orange glow appears in the middle of the fairway. Just a dot in the expanse of blackness. I straighten and try to zero in on where I saw it, but it’s gone again. Out of the corner of my eye, I see it to the right, farther north on the fairway, but just like the first time, it’s gone again.

I open the window. Listen.

Nothing but the sounds of night insects and the mild breeze and—crack.

The snap of a twig.

There it is again: the orange glow.

The faint scent of cigarette smoke filters up from the fairway.

Someone’s walking the golf course at night, that’s all.

Smoking.

Probably some Shadowlands resident who’s lying to his wife about his habits, escaping in the middle of the night to indulge.

But it’s a strange, if not random, place to stop. Why stop at all? Why not walk the streets instead of the course? Who would do such a thing?