S
am has never had this problem before, not once. Not the first time when he and his high school girlfriend, Catherine, groped and clawed and finally, finally made love in the back of his pickup parked under the stars on the first day of summer. Not ever with Anna or Paige, the girls he dated in college. Not with the others, the ones he didn’t love but who offered themselves up to him in a way that made his indifference to anything but their bodies irrelevant. Not with Mena. Never with Mena. Not even when they were trying desperately to get pregnant and sex, for the first time, had a higher purpose.
The twins did not come easily.
They got married a year after they met, in Flagstaff in a field of wild sunflowers behind her mother’s house. By then the film was finished with production, and they were both finished with Los Angeles. Mena had dropped out of CalArts by then; she was ready to just get on with her life, she said. She wanted to be an actress, but she also wanted to be a wife. A mother. Sam suggested they move to Mexico. He thought that with the money he’d made selling the film rights and the advance he’d gotten for his second novel, they might be able to live forever on some beach in Baja. Raise little suntanned babies. He could write and she could go to LA for auditions whenever the spirit moved her. Mena’s mother was sick though, just diagnosed with MS, and she didn’t want to be that far away from her. And so the compromise was San Diego. They bought the bungalow perched on Sunset Cliffs with cash. He finished the second novel in that house, pounding out the words at the dining room table where he could be close to Mena, who was experimenting in the kitchen. He remembers that time in a hazy way, as if filtered through a thick marine layer.
Mena was still acting a little then, but mostly just at the smaller fringe theaters in San Diego, and she had decided to start up a catering business to fill in the gaps. He would spend all morning at the typewriter, sometimes not even bothering to get dressed, and she’d bring him plates toppling with the rejects: overstuffed mushrooms, miniature triangles of spanikopita, melon balls wrapped in prosciutto. At noon, they’d retreat to the bedroom where they spent entire afternoons making love, trying to make a baby. Exhausted, hopeful, they would emerge again just as the sun was softening over the horizon. Sam would go back to work, and Mena would take off for whatever event she was catering.
Never, not in all that time, did he have this problem.
But despite his vigor and their persistence, after two years without any luck, Mena was defeated. Desperate. They were both still so young, but there was an urgency about Mena. She had such intense desires. This was something Sam loved about her.
“What’s wrong with me?” she had asked.
The idea that there might be something wrong with either one of them had not really crossed Sam’s mind. He’d chalked it up to bad timing, to bad luck. But now he quickly realized that this actually might be his fault; that maybe
he
was the reason why she wasn’t getting pregnant. It made him feel terrible. He quickly scheduled an appointment with a fertility specialist. They endured the usual tests: his embarrassing, hers painful. And, to his relief, his sperm count was just fine, and they believed that everything might be solved by giving Mena some chalky white pills. Magic pills. There was hope again, and about three months after she started taking the Clomid, she was pregnant with not one, but two babies.
They’d fallen into bed after she came to him with the positive pregnancy test and made love for the first time in two years without an agenda. Not once, not then and not later, did he have this problem.
He drives into town and finds a computer at the Athenaeum that is tucked away where no one can see what he’s doing. He doesn’t even know what to look for. He rarely uses the Internet.
Performance enhancing pills
, he types. It makes it sound like he’s some sort of athlete. Is this cheating? Is it legal? He Googles Viagra and finds 63,600,044 sites. He’s pretty sure he’s going to need a prescription. A doctor. More embarrassing tests.
But he needs to do this for her. For them.
M
ena wakes up on Thursday morning with a headache, but she gets up anyway and makes breakfast for Sam and Finn: homemade oatmeal with bananas and real maple syrup. Fresh carrot juice. She drinks coffee. She concentrates on the news coming from the little radio Sam brought home for her a few days ago. But by the time they have devoured the food and retreated to their separate corners of the cottage, the distant rumbles in her head have become seismic.
She tries to ignore the migraine, will it away. She takes a Motrin and walks to the boat access area. She slips off her shoes and rolls up her cuffs. The water is clean and cold. She watches a pair of loons make their way across the water. Still, despite the quiet calm of the water, the headache persists. She’s ready to vomit from the pain by the time she gets back to the cabin.
“I’m going to lie down,” she says to Sam. “I took the phone off the hook.” She is standing at the foot of the ladder, looking up at him in the loft. He is clicking away at his laptop.
“Okay,” he says.
He’s not listening.This may be a good sign, she thinks.When he’s writing, really writing, he can’t hear anything. She cracks open Finn’s door, but he’s not there.The surfboard he insisted on dragging across the country leans against the wall. The world’s biggest security blanket.
“Where’s Finn?” she asks, trying not to sound panicked.
Tap, tap, click, tap.
“Bike ride,” he says without stopping. “I told him to be back in time for lunch.”
She squeezes her eyes shut, sees Franny riding, wobbly, on the pink one-speed beach cruiser Sam bought her. Thinks of the white plastic basket and snap-on flowers. She remembers Franny’s tan feet, her long fingers and toes. Mena remembers those monkey feet in her lap as she painted her toenails bright pink for her.
Her vision blurs and she stumbles down the hall to the bedroom. She’s in too much pain to worry about Finn. She clicks the light switch off, pulls down the blinds. It is coming now, in waves of pain. She lies down in the bed, pulls the covers up over her head. The sheets are cool against her skin, and she tries to imagine that she is in the ocean, swimming in the salty sting of water. Each time a wave of pain comes, she lets her body be carried by it, lets it wash over her.
She remembers doing the same thing when the twins were born. They came a month early. They were supposed to be Christmas babies, but an hour after they finished Thanksgiving dinner, as she was picking turkey meat off the bones to save for soup and stew and sandwiches, her water broke. She remembers the empty turkey carcass, the cranberries splattered on the wall behind the stove, and the warm liquid pooling around her feet. The pain had come then too, and outside, the tide was crashing against the shore. As Sam drove her to the hospital in Coronado, across that endless bridge, she’d concentrated on the ebb and flow. She’d insisted that she could do this alone, that she didn’t want medicine. No drugs. And so at the hospital, she’d closed her eyes and pretended that she was only swimming, only caught up in the ocean’s arms. She fell into the pain, let it enclose her.
Franny.
Finn came first: six pounds plump and screaming. Franny followed three minutes later and three pounds lighter: blue and silent. The neonatal nurses whisked Franny away, and there were several awful moments as they sucked the mucous from her lungs, rubbed life into her, when Mena wondered if they would lose her. She was so small, not much bigger than a Cornish game hen, a good-sized London broil. Mena remembers imagining Finn in the womb, greedily sucking the nutrients from her body: iron, calcium, blood and marrow. She imagined him licking his fingers, the faint sheen of grease on his lip. From the beginning, there was barely enough left over for Franny; she came into this world starving.
As soon as the nurse finally put Franny to her breast, she bit her, as if she were trying to devour her. Her hands, as small as dried apricots, grabbing at her skin, her milky eyes wide.
“Slow down, sweet pea,” she had said, wincing as Franny finally latched on, her gummy grip like a vice. “There’s plenty for both of you. It’s okay.”
Mena would spend the next sixteen years making sure that Franny was never hungry again, that she and Finn were both fed. Nourished. Full.
Franny.
Mena’s body rocks with this imagined ocean.With the pain of her headache. With the pain of everything that she keeps captive inside that cavern in the back of her brain.
D
ale Edwards read her first Samuel Mason novel when she was thirteen years old. Her parents were driving a rented RV up the coast of California for their summer vacation, and she found the book stuffed into a cupboard in the tiny bathroom stall. It was a paperback copy of
Small Sorrows,
and the pages were yellowed and warped. She remembers she looked at the author photo first; funny, she still does that—she won’t read a book if the author doesn’t look kind. But Samuel did. Look kind. He looked like a good guy, a happy guy, and she fell in love with him a little, in the way that she loved the man who ran the Circle K down the street, the way she loved her eighth-grade social studies teacher.The biographical notes said that he lived with his wife and their twins in San Diego. She imagined their family on a picnic blanket on the beach: Mrs. Mason in a yellow bathing suit, an umbrella shading her as she read a book, and Mr. Mason building sand castles with the twins. She bet the Masons never spent their summer vacations stuffed like anchovies in a metal box on wheels.
She didn’t know it then, but her parents were on the verge of a divorce, and this ridiculous vacation was her mother’s attempt to give fifteen years of a pretty miserable marriage one last shot. Her mother couldn’t accept failure, and certainly not a failure of this magnitude. Her father, who was an unwilling participant in most things having to do with their family, agreed to the trip on the condition that he would not have to drive. He must have figured that this would make her mother relinquish the idea; she hated driving and so spent most of her time within walking distance of their one-story house on the west side of Phoenix. But she was hell-bent on making this trip happen, making this marriage work, and so while he sulked, reading the newspaper in the passenger seat, she drove. Perched like a nervous bird behind that giant wheel, she was determined.
They were driving from Phoenix to San Diego, and then the plan was to drive that beastly RV up the coast all the way to the redwood forest. Dale thrilled at the idea that they would be driving right through the very place where Samuel Mason lived. As she curled up in the compartment above the cab, reading the novel, head resting on a fuzzy pink pillow she brought from home, she fantasized that she might escape at a rest stop, look Samuel Mason up in the phone book, and that he’d invite her to join his family for dinner.
Dale did know her parents didn’t love each other anymore. She didn’t want it to be true, but it was. It was one of those facts she put in a small, quiet corner of her mind. But it was like putting an animal inside a box, which she supposed would probably work better with a smaller animal. A turtle, for instance, would probably sit in a box all day long without trying to escape. But this was no turtle. This was like trying to stuff an elephant into a shoe box and expecting it to keep quiet.
A few months before her mother announced that they would be spending three weeks in an RV together, Dale had been snooping around in her mother’s closet. It wasn’t really snooping, because she was actually looking for something. There was a stupid seventies dance at school, and she remembered that her mother had a pair of clogs that she could wear with the thrift-store bell bottoms she’d found. When she was little she had clomped around the kitchen in those clogs, banging a pot with a metal spoon, until her father yanked them off her feet and threw the pot in the sink.
Her mother’s closet was not like a regular closet, not like the ones at her friend Marissa’s house where you slide open the doors and everything is hanging nicely where you can see it—with drawers and hat boxes and shoes lined up on racks on the floor. A “walk-in” closet, her mother called this. “A damn mess,” is what her father said. This closet was like a cave, a catacomb of forgotten things. Her mother’s actual wearable wardrobe had dwindled in the last couple of years. The clothes that hung inside were relics of a thinner time.
The closet was dark too. Dale had to bring in a flashlight in order to see. Inside, she dropped to her knees and crawled along the floor, over twenty pairs of old shoes and fallen dresses, when the yellow beam of her flashlight illuminated something she’d never seen before. It was a prissy sort of box.
Decoupage
. That’s what those paper roses glued on were called. Like the plaque she made for her father for Father’s Day in the third grade, the one that said,
GONE FISHIN’
with a picture of a rainbow trout she had clipped carefully from an old issue of
Field and Stream
. The plaque that her father promised he’d hang up, the one he put on top of the fridge where it sat until, she’s pretty sure, her mother finally threw it away.
She knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t resist lifting the lid. She half expected that she might find hidden treasures inside: jewels, pearls, cash. Her mother’s stash. But it was simply filled with a stack of five-subject notebooks. Probably her mother’s community college notes; she’d been taking classes since Dale was three years old, and still hadn’t gotten her degree. Indeed, when she opened the first notebook, she saw her mother’s curlicue handwriting. But it wasn’t sociology or child development notes inside.
I hate him,
it said.
He’s a goddamn cheating bastard
. There were lists of women’s names, frantic barely legible notes citing dates and places. Suspicions.
And so as much as she wanted to believe that this trip might restore her family, she also knew that even though they would be together for the next three weeks, hurling along the asphalt ribbon that teetered along the edge of the world, her father was already gone. And her mother knew it.
So each night, as her mother drove steadily on, the smell of 7-Eleven coffee wafting up to where she lay above their heads, Dale climbed inside the pages of Samuel Mason’s book and tried not to listen to the silence growing louder between her parents below. Sam’s novel saved Dale’s life. She wonders now what would have become of her if she hadn’t found that tattered copy of his novel that day in the RV. She wonders what would have happened to her if she had found something else abandoned in the john instead:
Anne Rice, V. C. Andrews, Jackie Collins,
God forbid.
They didn’t make it to northern California; they didn’t even make it past San Diego. While Dale and her mother were sleeping, the RV parked in a grocery store parking lot, her father packed a bag and disappeared, leaving only a credit card behind, tucked into the driver’s side sun visor. As her mother pulled out of the parking lot that morning, the air thick with fog and smelling of salt, Dale tried to picture him walking across that dark asphalt expanse, rolling his suitcase behind him.
“Motherfucker,” her mother said, pulling out into oncoming traffic. Her face was red, her thick tanned arms trembling as she drove back out to where the freeway started.
“Where did he go?” Dale asked.
Her mother had looked at her then like she was an idiot. “You think I know? How would I know?”
“Are we just going to leave him?” Dale had asked, trying not to cry.
“He left us, Dale. And don’t you ever forget that.”
The drive back to Phoenix only took five hours. The RV’s air-conditioning broke in Yuma. It was 106 degrees, and Dale remembers that she was worried her mother might have a heart attack. She was sweating and breathing hard, trembling as she sped across the desert. She must have been going a hundred miles an hour.
“Ma?” Dale said.
“Can we not talk about your father?” her mother had said, not taking her eyes off the road.
“Do you want to hear a story?”
“What?”
“Do you want me to read to you?” And suddenly Dale was overwhelmed by a memory of her mother sitting next to her bed when she had the chicken pox. She stayed with her all night, applying thick pink lotion to her skin, reading books to her to take her mind off the itching.
Her mother softened, and still staring straight ahead, nodded.
And so Dale read, Sam’s words liquid in her mouth like medicine. For five straight hours, in the unbearable heat, she read the novel to her mother. When they pulled into the driveway in front of their house, her mother put her head down on the steering wheel and cried.
“It’ll be okay, Ma,” she said, touching her back, which was soaking wet with sweat.
“I know,” she said.
Her father came back and got his stuff a week later, moved in with his girlfriend in Scottsdale. Dale went to the library and took out every one of Sam’s novels, and at night, she and her mother would sit in the backyard, listening to the cicadas, eating Del Taco, drinking Diet Cokes, and Dale would read aloud to her. Two years later her father left Phoenix, and they never heard from him again.