When the Lights Go Out(51)

Pregnancy did not suit Miranda well.

Her maternity shirts no longer fit correctly, leaving a fraction of her stomach exposed, ashy skin drawn tightly around her baby, a black, vertical line etched on her body from belly button down. Miranda herself didn’t have a pregnancy glow, but rather was covered in blotchy brown spots all over her skin; the hormones were not working in her favor.

“Just wait until you’re as fat as me,” she said, seeing the way I watched her drop onto the sofa, a giraffe making an ungainly attempt to sit.

“Well I have news too,” she said then, as if she couldn’t stand me being happy, as if she couldn’t take a back seat to my glad tidings for once. “We’re going to have a girl!” she screeched, clapping her own hands, going on to say how—though Joe didn’t know it yet—she’d had a peek at her medical file when the obstetrician was out of the room during her last appointment, and there, in the margins of the paperwork, saw the Venus symbol written with black ink.

“Finally,” she said, frowning out the window at her three boys, fifty-pound Jack lugging twenty-pound Carter around, Carter who still cried. “After everything I’ve been through,” she said, and I wanted to be happy for her, I really did.

But I couldn’t bring myself to be.

She didn’t deserve another baby any more than a murderer deserves clemency.

I was grateful when, an hour later, Paul wet himself and they had to leave.

Aaron had wanted to keep the news of our pregnancy a secret for a while longer, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops, to let everyone in the whole entire universe know that I was going to be a mother. “Why wait?” I asked later that afternoon as he prepared for work. I frowned at him, feeling punctured that he would want to keep our baby a secret. We’d spent a year trying to achieve this, watched our lives and our marriage flounder to make a baby, drained our savings and accrued mass amounts of debt on our credit cards.

And yet I couldn’t be happier. I couldn’t be more thrilled.

This was the one thing that I wanted more than anything. More than anything.

I wanted everyone to know about it.

“Just in case,” Aaron replied when I asked why we should keep our baby a secret, why we should wait to share the news.

“In case what?” I asked, provoking him, but he wouldn’t say the words out loud. He was being cautiously optimistic, I knew, but what I wanted was for him to be jubilant like me. He stood before me in the kitchen, slipping his feet into a pair of new shoes, waterproof, slip-proof black loafers that cost us an arm and a leg. But none of that mattered now, not trivial things like the cost of groceries, the cost of shoes.

We were going to have a baby.

He stood and came to me, wrapping his arms around the small of my back, and I breathed him in, the scent of his aftershave and soap because Aaron, of course, didn’t wear cologne. His hands were rough from years of hard work, the scrubbing of dishes, the scalding sauces that bubbled over onto his hands, burning them. The many near misses with a utility knife. The gashes and lacerations, healed now but always there. Aaron’s hands were rough and worn, but also the softest things in the world to me as they slipped under the hemline of my blouse and stroked my bare skin.

He wouldn’t say the words out loud, but he didn’t have to.

I knew exactly what he was thinking.

“We saw our baby,” I told him, whispering the words into his ear. “We saw the heartbeat. Everything is fine.”





jessie

I’m out the door early, hurrying to the side of the carriage home to collect my bike, but when I arrive, I see that she’s gone. That she’s not there. That the spot where I left her last night is completely empty.

There’s a moment of panic.

Someone has stolen Old Faithful from me.

My heart picks up speed, my face warming with frustration and anger and fear. I look up and down the alleyway as my heart sinks. For a minute, tears well in my eyes. I could cry.

But then I remember leaving Old Faithful tethered to the bike rack outside the Art Institute. No one has taken her from me. I left her there.

I take the Brown Line out to Albany Park, getting off at Kimball. From there it’s a walk to Mom’s and my old home, a classic Chicago-style bungalow that’s boxy and brick with a low-pitched roof on a street where every single home is a replica of the next. The desperation has gotten under my skin now, a do-or-die need to find my birth certificate, to find my social security card, to figure out who the hell I am. I need to make a final sweep of the home to see if there’s anything there, anything I may have missed. Because the estate sale will kick off soon, and then it will be too late. Everything that was once mine will be gone.

I’ve only been gone a couple of days. But as I make my way down the sidewalk, I feel homesick. I miss Mom more than ever. I miss my home. The sight of the for-sale sign plunged into the green grass makes my stomach churn, my Realtor’s pretty face smeared across the corner of it. I’d picked her, this Realtor, because I saw her face and name on a similar sign somewhere down the street. There was a number to call and so I called it. And like that, the house is on the market and soon, any evidence of my time with Mom will be gone.

The house looks different than it did before. The only thing still here are the ghosts we’ve left behind. Aside from our house, the rest of the block looks annoyingly the same, as if no one noticed that I’d left or that Mom died, which most likely they didn’t. The only person I see outside is our neighbor Mr. Henderson from next door. There he stands on his own front porch, thinning hair standing vertical, a cigar in hand. Smoke billowing around his head. Mr. Henderson wears corduroy pants, slippers, a fisherman cardigan. Though as far as I know, he doesn’t fish. Instead he teaches English lit at a local college and is pretentious as all get-out. Mr. Henderson couldn’t be bothered to help after Mom’s cancer spread to the bones, leaving her far more susceptible to fracture. She fell one morning when I was at school, shattering a hip, lying there on her back, calling out an open window for help.