When the Lights Go Out(40)

“What’s so wrong with that?” he asked. “Do you have any idea how stressful it is for me at work?” but I had a different thought then, one that went back to money. Not only was Aaron coming home later each night, drinking after work with friends—female friends? I wanted to ask, but couldn’t do it quite yet, too afraid to know the truth, that Aaron was throwing back shots of vodka with the pretty cooks and waitresses while I sat, a prisoner in my own home—he was blowing our money on booze. Money that could otherwise be saved for fertility treatments. For a baby.

“You don’t need to be wasting our money like that,” I said. “We hardly have enough as it is.”

And then I did ask him who he was drinking with and he rattled off names. Casey. Riley. Pat. Names that were all conveniently unisex. Names that kept me up half the night wondering if they were male or female.

“Who’s Casey?” I asked, censoriously, and when he didn’t reply I created her in my mind’s eye: tall and svelte with long butterscotch hair and pecan eyes. Flirtatious and tactile, predisposed to standing too close and touching so that I envisioned her, this make-believe woman, with her nimble hand on Aaron’s arm.

Perfect teeth.

A flawless complexion.

An effortless laugh.

I’ve gained ten pounds now due to the many months of fertility treatments. I’m bloated all the time, in addition to moody and upset. The water retention has made my fingers grow fat. Most days my wedding ring barely fits with the water weight and stays hidden at home in a dresser drawer.

And then Aaron asked, “What happened to you, Eden? You used to be so much fun,” while pulling the blanket from me. His final hurrah.

I lay there in the dark, completely exposed.

There was a part of me that remembered that Eden, the fun Eden, but in the moment she seemed so far gone, she was hard to remember anymore.


April 14, 1997 Egg Harbor

Today I watched a mourning dove in the gutter of our home get pelted with hail. She was female, a mother-to-be, beautiful with delicate beige plumage, perched on three oval eggs in the aluminum gutter. She’d spent days with her man friend, methodically assembling the nest of twigs and grass blades—while I watched on from the second-story window as they scurried back and forth from tree to trough, collecting materials and sticking them flimsily together—not thinking once of the rainwater that would soon stream past her shanty or the pellets of frozen ice that would one day take her life.

It was golf ball–size hail, a fusillade of machine-gun fire streaming down from the pale green sky. I’ve never felt so helpless, watching as she sat there, hunkered down over her eggs, protecting them until the bitter end. It went on for six and a half calamitous minutes, and when it was through she lay there, unmoving, folded lifeless over the eggs like a hooded cloak and I didn’t know what to do. There was no blood. I would have expected there to be blood, and yet the internal damage was no doubt worse than that which I could see from the outside, evidence of the great lengths some mothers will go to protect their children. She could have flown away, sought shelter beneath the elm or cottonwood trees that crowded the yard, diminishing our view of the lake.

But she didn’t. She stayed.

The storm passed. The clouds drifted away and the sun began to shine. A rainbow appeared in the sky. The hail melted. Rainwater evaporated. The only sign of the storm was the dead bird.

Aaron watched on as I schlepped the old wooden ladder to the back of the cottage and began to climb. He asked what I was doing as I shimmied up those steps in bare feet, the shaky ladder teetering on the lawn. At the top rung I saw her, splayed sideways, head lolling over the edge of the gutter. I pressed a single finger to her chest, feeling for a heartbeat and, at finding none, removed her body from the trench. Beneath her corpse, the eggs were still intact.

She died a martyr.

I buried her beneath the trellis, which the snowdrift clematis had overtaken at this time of year, white flowers powdering the wood.

They say that mourning doves mate for life. As far as I could tell, her man friend never returned to grieve his loss or to check on the eggs.

Sometimes this is the way it is with men.


April 24, 1997 Egg Harbor

I can’t trust myself to stay at home all day anymore.

All too often, I drive into town and park outside the dance studio, watching the little ballerinas come and go. It rains many days now, this time of year, and so they come toting umbrellas, skipping over puddles, walking faster than ever before, though always, always, does little Olivia lag behind, and on the most inclement of days, when no one else wants to be outside, I am sure that she will be forgotten. It makes me sick to my stomach to do so, to watch the ballerinas in their leotards and tutus and tights, a Peeping Tom by my own right; it isn’t perverse, there’s nothing depraved about the thoughts that run through my mind, and yet I know in my heart of hearts that it’s unhealthy, pining this way for someone else’s child.

And so, against Aaron’s will, I found a job. Some useful way to spend my days other than keeping vigil of the ballet studio, watching the ballerinas come and go.

We rarely talk these days anymore, other than that time spent in limbo each month, while they wash Aaron’s sperm before injecting it inside me. Then we talk. About what, I don’t know. About nothing. When I ask him questions, I’m astounded by the brevity of his replies, one-or two-word responses that leave no room for dialogue. He doesn’t make eye contact. He asks me nothing. We kill time in the lobby of the fertility clinic before my name is called and only then am I granted amnesty, a pardon, a reason not to have to sit in the lobby and speak to my husband.