The Backup Plan

Chapter 9: Two Lines on a Printout

The last call from him had been two weeks ago, and she'd taken it in the kitchen with the door shut. This one came while we were in the living room with the TV on mute and a bowl of apples in front of us. I heard it buzz. She looked at the screen, then at me, then she answered and hit speaker and set it face down on the cushion between us.

He wanted to see her. She said no. He said he'd been doing a lot of thinking, that he wanted to say it in person. She said okay, the way you say it to a meeting you're not going to reschedule. Then she said the thing she'd had ready for two years, the whole thing this time, in her regular voice, the one she uses when she's tired of a meeting and wants it over.

She finished with: "You were sitting right there. You didn't say one word. So don't call me to feel better about yourself."

There was a pause on his end, and then a sound, the one she'd described once, a wet inward breath like he was going to say something and thought better of it. Then the line was empty.

She picked up the phone. Not fast. She tapped the screen a few times and set it back down.

"Blocked."

"Okay."

She picked up a piece of apple and ate it. "He'll ask somebody to pass a message. Or he won't. Doesn't matter."

She was steadier than I was. That's been true since the first week. Not that she doesn't feel it — she does. It's that she'd already done all the feeling a long time ago, in a car in a driveway with the engine off, and she wasn't going to do it twice.

I took the bowl to the kitchen and cut another apple, because she'd eaten most of the first one.

---

The throwing up started eight days later. She was cutting her own apple this time and I was at the counter with the knife, and she went white, and she was in the bathroom with the door shut before I could ask.

She came out holding the door frame, hair stuck to her forehead, still chewing on nothing.

"Food poisoning?"

"No." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "I'm late."

"How late."

"Nine days." She said it looking at the floor. "I thought it was the move. The job. The family stuff."

I didn't say anything.

The next morning we were at a walk-in clinic at 8:10, and they sent us across the parking lot to the lab, and by the afternoon a nurse called and told us to come in for an ultrasound, and by four o'clock we were sitting in plastic chairs watching a woman in glasses read a printout with two thin lines at the bottom of it and two numbers she circled with a pen. She had Norah's old folder open on the desk next to it, the lab slip from two years ago stapled to the back, and she kept one finger on it while she read.

She turned the paper around.

"Intrauterine pregnancy. About six weeks. Everything looks normal on the scan."

Norah didn't move for a second. Then she said, "I'm sorry, can you say it again."

"Pregnant. Six weeks."

"But I had a workup. Two years ago. They said I almost certainly couldn't —"

The doctor looked at the old slip again, and she didn't like it, you could see that. She had the pen cap between her fingers and she turned it once.

"Whoever read this at the time read too much into one number," she said. "Your AMH was on the low side. Low isn't zero. And the FSH on the same slip was elevated, and that happens when a body's been under stress for a long time — it's a snapshot from a bad month, not a fixed verdict."

She set the folder down.

"Whoever told you couldn't was going off one bad morning. They shouldn't have."

She handed over a strip of sonogram pictures and said the next appointment would be with the OB in three weeks, and congratulations, and we were in the hallway again.

Norah held the strip up to the light in the elevator. There was one small pale comma on the third image. You could cover it with your thumbnail.

"Look at that."

"I'm looking."

"That's a person."

"That's a person."

She started crying somewhere between the second floor and the first, and by the time we got to the car she was folded over the steering wheel with her forehead down and her arms around it, and I stood next to the open door with one hand flat on her back and didn't say anything, because there wasn't anything to say. The lot smelled like rain and asphalt.

After a while she sat up and wiped her face with her sleeve and turned the key.

"Call your mom."

"You call yours."

"I can't. I'll do it at home. I need to sit down."

She called her mother from the kitchen. I heard "Mom," and then a long high sound from the other end, and clicking boots, and her father in the background, who, who is it. I went outside and sat on the step and called mine.

My mother said "oh" three times, and then said "honey" four times and could not get through a sentence, and hung up to call back, and did the same thing again. She said she'd come up Saturday with a pot. I said okay. She said "not to help, just to be there." I said okay.

---

Renee came over Thursday with a lasagna in a foil pan and stayed an hour. Most of it was about work. Then, on her way out, in the doorway, she said it.

"Hey. You know Justin got married, right?"

"I heard something."

"Three months ago. April. Some girl from his parents' church." Renee pulled her keys out. "She had bloodwork done for a preconception thing, and it came back with all kinds of stuff. Polycystic, on the severe side. They told her if she gets pregnant at all it'll be a long road. Maybe five percent. Maybe less." She shrugged. "Trish heard it from her cousin, and Trish heard it from Justin's mother at a shower where she was telling everybody and crying."

"Okay."

"Not my business. I just thought you should know before somebody else brings it up." She looked at me. "Also his mom threw a lamp at the TV. That part's from Trish's cousin, so, you know. Grain of salt."

She hugged Norah by the door and left.

Norah went into the kitchen. She pulled a pot down and set water on to boil because we'd eaten almost nothing all day. I got the chicken out and started cutting ginger.

And I stood there at the cutting board for two seconds. Two seconds, with the knife on the board and the smell of ginger on my fingers and the water starting to move in the pot. I wasn't sure what I felt. Not happy — it wasn't happy. It was flatter than that. Closer to tired. Like setting down a thing I'd been carrying that was never mine to carry.

I finished cutting the ginger and put it in the pot.

Norah was watching me from where she stood with the lid in her hand.

"Say it," she said.

"Nothing to say."

"Ethan."

I wiped my hands. "It's not mine to say."

She looked at me a second longer, then put the lid on and turned the heat down and went out to the porch, and when I looked through the window a minute later she had the phone at her ear and her free hand flat against the railing. Her father's number. She was doing the talking.

I didn't hear what was said. She came back in with red eyes and said, "Your mom doesn't know about any of this. I want her to hear it from us, not from somebody."

"She will. Saturday."

"Good." She picked the spoon back up. "I'm not going to give him something to be hurt about in front of a group of people. I'm done with it."

She said it in her regular voice, the meeting voice, the one she uses when she's tired and wants the conversation to be over. She meant it. I didn't argue.

---

Justin's calls stopped after that. Two came in the following week — one to her phone, one to mine. Both went to voicemail. Then nothing.

The third week, on a Sunday, the shop number showed on her phone, and she stepped into the hall.

She came back and sat on the arm of the couch.

"He called the shop. Dad picked up."

"What did he want."

"He said he was wrong, and he wanted to see me."

"And?"

"Dad told him no. Then Dad asked him one question." She was looking at the wall over my head. "He said, 'The morning you brought the ring and the check back. Did you think you were wrong then.'"

"What did he say."

"Nothing. Dad said it was quiet for a while, and then he hung up."

She got up and went into the kitchen and filled a glass and stood at the sink with her back to me, drinking it the way you drink water when you want your hands busy.

The phone didn't ring again after that. Not that week, or the next.

---

The year got quiet, in a way. The kind you don't appreciate while it's happening, where you stop counting the weeks because nothing's pending.

We bought a place in the spring. Three bedrooms, south-facing, fourth floor, with an elevator and a real balcony. Norah planted two kinds of mint in pots before any of the furniture was in, and a tomato plant in a bucket next to them, which I said would die and did not die, mostly because I watered it twice a day out of spite.

My mother moved into an elevator building in July. She fought me on it for two weeks. She said she didn't need an elevator, said she wasn't that old, said she'd been in the building on Route 9 since before I was in high school and there was a woman downstairs who checked on her. I said fine — then I'd put the money into a scholarship at the community college with her name on it. She called me a jackass. She called back an hour later and said fine. The first time the doors closed on the two of us going up to see it, she put her hand on the rail and watched the numbers change and didn't say anything. On the fifth floor she said, "It's faster than the stairs."

Her father's shop closed in August. He sold the cart and let the lease go, and the last morning there was no line out front because there was no opening time. He stood in the empty front room with two cups of coffee, and when I got there he held out his hand and I shook it, and he held on a beat too long and then let go. He said one word to me. We went and got breakfast somewhere else. That was the end of twenty-two years and a stretch of curb.

Steve cornered me in the elevator on my second-to-last week at Harlow. There were two other people in there and he said it anyway. He said he was sorry. He said it the way people say it when they've been thinking about it in the shower for a month and are finally getting it out. I said it's fine, and it was. The doors opened on the fourth floor and he got out and I went up to my desk.

Dan I saw in the parking garage at the end of that same week. He saw me coming, glanced at me, looked at the wall like there was something on the wall, and got into his car and backed out without turning his head. He was let go in October. I heard it from Renee, and she said it in a way that told me she didn't want me to say anything, and I didn't.

Aunt Frances introduced Norah at the family thing in the fall. "This is my niece. She does consulting on her own now. Very selective." She said it proudly, with her hand on Norah's elbow, and Norah said hi, and Aunt Frances got her a glass of wine. It doesn't fix anything. It doesn't have to. She doesn't know.

Chloe's wedding was the same weekend as the fourteen-week scan, so we sent a gift and said we couldn't make it. Derek left a voicemail on the studio line two days later about a software thing. Norah listened to it standing at the kitchen counter and deleted it without calling back. "He can email if it's real." That was all. It was hers to do and she did it.

Justin's name came up once, on a couch somewhere, in somebody else's mouth. Renee, or Trish's cousin, or whoever was carrying the news that month. He'd been let go in the spring when his group got cut, and the marriage had gone to paperwork, and his mother had been over at the apartment most weeks. Two sentences, in somebody else's voice, while I was putting my jacket on to leave. I didn't ask. Nobody offered more.

I got to the doorway before I noticed I'd stopped moving, and then I got my keys out and kept going.

---

The baby came in May.

Fourteen hours. I wore a path in the hallway. I kept my phone in my pocket so I wouldn't look at it and then kept taking it out anyway, and by the time the nurse pushed the door open I'd lost count of the laps and was doing math in my head about whether the number of laps was a sign, which it is not.

"Mom and baby are fine."

My knees went. Just the once. I put my hand on the wall and got down and sat on the tile with my back against it and looked up at the nurse.

She said, "You want to come meet him?"

My mother was already pulling at my arm. "Get up. Get up, go in there."

He was seven pounds three ounces. Norah was flat on the bed with her hair pushed back and wet at the temples and no color at all in her lips, and she turned her head when I came in and did the thing with her eyebrows.

"You look like hell."

"You look worse."

"Rude."

"He looks like a potato."

"He looks like you," she said. "Don't argue with me."

She wouldn't let go of him. She let me sit on the edge of the bed with them and put one hand on the top of his head, which is small, and soft, and there's no way to describe it that doesn't sound like a greeting card, so I won't.

"Ethan."

"Hm."

"You remember what you said at the courthouse."

"When."

"When you signed the paper. You said you were doing it for your own reasons."

"I remember."

"What were the reasons."

I looked at the two of them.

"One of them," I said, "was that I wanted to watch you keep going. And I didn't want to be the guy watching from the parking lot."

She didn't say anything for a while.

"You picked a hell of a way to get out of the parking lot," she said finally.

"Yeah."

"You could've just asked me out."

"I didn't think that was going to work."

"It wouldn't have." She shifted the baby in her arm. "You were doing the face then too. The one where you're not saying it."

"I was doing the face."

"Go get me soup. There's a place on Ninth."

"Now?"

"Not now. Tonight. There's a takeout place on Ninth with the dumplings. The noodle ones, not the ones from the freezer. I want the noodle ones."

"Okay."

I stood up. She looked down at him and put the side of her finger against his cheek, and he turned his head toward it the way they do, and she made a small noise, the good kind, the one she doesn't make in public. I stood in the doorway a second longer than I needed to.

I don't know why I asked her. I've never once, in four years, been able to put it in a sentence that holds. I was a guy with a thing for the woman in the next cubicle, and she got dropped by the person who was supposed to pick her up, and she didn't fall. That's all that happened. She didn't need me. She stood there. I got there first.

I went out to the hall. My mother was on the bench with her mother, the two of them passing a box of tissues back and forth and remarking, in whispers, on how he did not look like either of them. Her father was at the end of the hall by the window with a cigarette he'd been chased out of here for twice and was about to be chased out for again.

I walked down and stood next to him and held out my pack.

He looked at me. He looked at the pack. He took one and put it behind his ear and didn't light it and clapped me on the back with a force that did not match the rest of him.

He didn't say anything. Neither did I.

There wasn't anything to say.