Amanda Bright @ Home (27 page)

Amanda signed the slip, and the saleswoman thrust the package at her.

“Have a nice day.”

Amanda thought it best to leave her new purchases in the trunk. She assumed Bob and the children would still be at the museum, and was surprised to find the front door unlocked.

“Hello?” she called into the house.

There was no answer.

“Bob? Ben? Hello?”

The back door was open as well, but the yard was empty. Was it possible Bob left the house this way when he went out? No—a floating bucket in the wading pool indicated recent activity. Amanda, worried now, returned to the front hall and stood by the staircase.

“Hello?”

She heard the muffled sound of a man’s voice in a room upstairs. Amanda crept up to the top of the stairs to listen. The voice was coming from behind their closed bedroom door. The children’s rooms appeared empty.

She edged toward their door. It sounded like Bob speaking to someone, but the conversation was one-sided—there was no other voice. She opened the door.

Bob was sitting on the end of the bed, talking on the telephone. He was still wearing his robe and boxers. He looked at her but did not hang up.

“Uh-huh. I realize that, but listen—”

“Where are the children?” Amanda whispered.

“Huh? Could you hang on a moment?” Bob covered the bottom of the receiver. “What are you asking me?”

“The children—where are they?”

“They’re playing outside.”

“No they’re not.”

“They were a minute ago.”

“They’re not,” Amanda insisted. “The doors are wide open and no one’s there.”

“Just a moment.” Bob returned to the phone. “May I call you back in a few minutes? I have to deal with something here.”

Bob rose and retied his robe.

“You’re not even dressed!”

Bob walked past her without answering and began calling for the children. She followed him to the backyard.

“They were right here.”

“You left them
alone
—with a wading pool?”

“There’s only a little water in it.”

“Bob, children can drown in
one inch
of water! You know that!”

“I just stepped away for a second!”

Amanda was growing hysterical. “Where the fuck are they, Bob?”

Bob searched among the scrawny bushes as if they might be hiding behind them. Amanda ran to the front walk.

“Ben! Sophie!”

Bob joined her. He looked worried now too but was trying not to show it. “They can’t have gone far.”

“You’ve lost them! You’ve lost our children!”

“They’re
not
lost. Look, you go that way.”

They jogged up and down the short block calling out the children’s names. When there was no answer, they returned to the driveway of their house.

“I’m getting in the car,” Amanda said frantically. “I’ll drive around the streets. Do you think we ought to call the police?”

“Not yet.”

They heard the phone ringing inside. Amanda dashed ahead of Bob to answer it. It was Marjorie, who lived three doors down and was the mother of Hannah.

“Amanda—you’re there!” she exclaimed. “Ben and Sophie are at my house. I’ve been trying to reach you, but your phone has been busy for the past hour. I even sent Hannah over to knock on the door, but no one answered. Is everything okay?”

“Yes. Oh, Marjorie, thank you.” Amanda was breathless. “I’ll be right over.”

She hung up and turned to Bob. “They’re at Marjorie’s.”

He raised his hand as if to say he had known that all along; the gesture had the same effect as if Bob had just casually tossed a match into a pile of oil-soaked rags.

“How dare you!” Amanda erupted. “How
dare you
act like that! You didn’t leave them for ‘just a second’! You were on the phone for a whole hour!”

“It wasn’t that long.”

“Yes, it was—Marjorie just said so!” Amanda grabbed up her purse and keys. “And who the hell were you talking to anyway? Grace Bertelli? I can’t take this, Bob. I just can’t take any more of this.”

The children were sitting in front of Marjorie’s television set sharing a huge bowl of popcorn.

Amanda practically fell upon them and held their bodies tightly to her. Ben squirmed.

“Mom—it’s
Space Rangers
.”

“I’m sorry for this, Marjorie,” Amanda apologized. “Bob, he’s … home sick today. I went out to do some shopping and, well … he must have fallen asleep. Thank God they’re okay.”

“They rang my doorbell and said they were explorers from another planet,” Marjorie said, amused. “I’m just glad I was home.”

“So am I.” Amanda clapped her hands together. “Okay kids, time to go.”

“But
Space Rangers
isn’t over yet!”

“Who wants to go to Burger Chalet?”

“Me!”

“Me too!”

Amanda hustled them down the sidewalk and into the car. Through the screen door, she saw the shadow of Bob in his bathrobe, waiting for them. Go to hell, she thought.

Chapter Seventeen

THE NIGHTMARE WAS indifference. It was always indifference. She never dreamed about divorce, or illness, or death. Instead her life would be shown exactly as it was, except that Bob no longer cared about her. This time she came home and found Bob speaking on the phone to Grace Bertelli. He didn’t bother to hide the fact from her. He said, “May I call you back in a moment, Grace?” and when Amanda confronted him—“Why?” she yelled soundlessly, “why?”—he merely shrugged. “I just got bored.”

Amanda awoke with the terrible sense that there was no division between the nightmare and her real life. Bob was not sleeping beside her. She opened her eyes, instead, to the sight of the living room, and the bed she had made for herself on the pull-out sofa. In the past, when they had fought, it had been Bob who slept down here; Amanda had always claimed the territory of their bedroom. Last night, Bob seemed determined to punish her for taking the children out rather than bringing them home directly; in his mind, Amanda’s defiant act trumped his negligent one of losing them in the first place.

“I did a stupid thing,” he’d argued, “but you were deliberately cruel, taking them away before I could see them. You had no right to do that. Didn’t you think I was worried, too?”

“No,” she’d replied, “no, I didn’t think you were worried, because I didn’t think you cared—I don’t think you care a damn about any of us.”

“You really think that? You really think that, don’t you?”

Amanda could not remember Bob being so furious with her; and yet the argument that ensued—as explosive as any the two had ever engaged in—lacked the heat of the others, as if all the sparring and fighting of the previous weeks had brought them to the critical final round, but neither had the strength to deliver the knockout blow.

Instead, Amanda struck out at him wildly—“I do think that—in fact, I’m surprised you haven’t left us. I’m surprised that you haven’t left us … for Grace Bertelli.”

The moment she said the woman’s name she saw that she had miscalculated: rather than crumpling, every fiber of Bob’s body seemed to rebound. He stood up from the table in the kitchen—for that’s where the fight took place, after Amanda had put the children to bed, without so much as a good night to their father—and crossed the room to the doorway, moving, it seemed, with great effort to control the anger coursing through his limbs.

He fixed her with a look of such disgust that Amanda wished desperately to recall the words out of the air. She could not, though, so she blundered on, hoping to justify herself. “Well, why wouldn’t you? She feels free to call here.”

“And why wouldn’t she—unless she had something to hide?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“Okay, I will. She provided expert testimony for our case, and she had a question. I couldn’t talk to her when she called me at the office, so I told her to call me later at home, when it would be quiet. Anything else?”

Amanda could not refute the devastating logic of Bob’s answer so she tried swinging from another angle. “Okay, maybe not Grace—maybe not anybody. But you’ve been so angry with me I
am
surprised you haven’t walked out. Really—what’s stopping you?”

“This, for one, is stopping me, Amanda,” he said, holding up his left hand and pointing to his wedding band. “I don’t know about you, but I plan to honor the promise I made.”

“That’s what men always say,” she said, more bitterly than she felt, for the truth was, she was weary of fighting, she was weary of everything, she just wanted this whole damn business to end. “And then they change their minds.”

“I’m sorry you think I’m like that.”

“I’m not saying you’re like that. I’m saying that people don’t always know—look at Hochmayer—”

“I’m going to take a shower,” he said curtly.

Amanda did not follow him upstairs. She didn’t know what to do. She knew, simply, that she had begun the evening in the right and had ended it feeling miserably in the wrong. And as she lay there the next morning, the sunlight spilling onto her spare set of floral sheets, the sheets she had bought for their first double bed together, that feeling of wrongness had not gone away.

She would have to begin her day conceding this much to Bob—that her accusations last night had been unfair. But how much would he be willing to concede to her? And as she churned this over, and all the other things she had to make right
(I’ll make those calls about finding work in September; I will restart my life!),
Amanda remembered something else, something that had been pressing at the edges of her mind, something that she had kept pushing away during the turmoil of the past few days, something she should not put off any longer …

No one else was up yet. Amanda was able to dress, slip out of the house, and return less than half an hour later from her errand. By the time she heard the first stirrings of the others, she was locked securely in the bathroom, grasping a slim litmus wand and following the progress of a spreading stain.

According to the instructions on the box, the liquid would reach first an “indicator” line, then a “test” line. If this latter line turned pink, however faintly, she was “to assume that you are pregnant and contact a medical professional as soon as possible.” The result could take as long as three minutes.

Amanda had held these wands many times before. She had even saved the tests that had offered the first scientific proof of the existences of Ben and Sophie, putting them in a keepsake box along with other odd mementos that were not exactly “album” material and yet she could not throw away: their locks of baby hair, their first teeth, the tiny woven caps the midwife had pulled on their heads within moments of their emergence from the womb.

This test she approached in quite a different frame of mind. She held the wand away from her, her whole body tensed.

After a few seconds, there was no doubt. From the very instant the liquid touched the strip, the pink raced forward. The first line was crossed and reddish tinges almost immediately revealed the second line.

Amanda sat upon the closed toilet and cradled her face in her hands.

When she came downstairs, Bob was in the kitchen, reading the newspaper. It was him Amanda had heard rising; the children, apparently, were still asleep.

If Bob remained angry with her, he did not show it. He was absorbed in whatever article he was reading but not so absorbed as to avoid looking up when Amanda entered. He greeted her with a mixed expression—one that could easily swing between friendliness, if she were to encourage it, or hauteur, if she decided she was not speaking to him. She knew Bob well enough to see that he was praying for the former, but a slight stiffening of his jaw told her he was also preparing himself for any fresh blow Amanda might land.

She placed the wand on the table and sat down opposite him, saying nothing. He folded down the edge of his newspaper, glanced at her again and then at the little stick. His eyes returned to hers, inquiringly.

“Look at it,” she said hoarsely.

Bob knew what it was, but he seemed unable to fathom it. He picked up the stick and examined it carefully. Then, like an expert witness about to pronounce himself baffled by Exhibit A, he placed it back on the table and began to say, “I’m not sure what—”

“It is what. It’s exactly what. I’m—” She found she couldn’t say
pregnant. “—it’s
… positive.”

“You’re?…”

“Yes. Seems so.”

“But we haven’t … in ages!” he managed to say, and Amanda was grateful that he restrained any hint of resentment. “I don’t understand—how could it have happened?”

“I don’t understand either.”

“Sophie took four months of trying,” he added, almost wistfully. “And I just assumed you were using your—”

“I must have forgot. Don’t ask me how I could forget. I’m not like that—but maybe that time, when you just …”

“Yes.”

“… it’s possible I forgot then. I’ve been so distracted with everything.” Amanda rubbed her eyes. “Dammit! Why don’t I use the pill?”

“You hate the pill.”

“I know, but—”

“It makes you sick.”

“Yes, but—”

“And moody.”

“I feel so stupid! Like a goddamn teenager—” Amanda wiped away a tear and rose to pour herself a cup of coffee. She did not want to fall apart in front of Bob—the fight of last night still hovered between them, and if only out of pride she wanted to hang on to her composure—but the moment she stood up, Amanda burst into tears.

She felt his arms around her immediately, and she sobbed and sobbed, clutching him back, crying out, “It’s so awful! It’s just so awful!”

“Shh. There we go. Let’s sit down.”

Bob guided Amanda back into her chair. When her crying had subsided, he got a cup of coffee for her. The shoulder of his robe was soaked.

“So what do you want to do?” Bob asked gently, sitting down with her and refilling his own cup.

“What do
you
want to do?”

“It doesn’t really matter what I want to do.”

“Why do you say that?” Amanda said, looking up with surprise. “Of course it matters. Three children to support—and God, this Megabyte business.”

“That at least is all over.”

“What, the scandal? Yes, I suppose there can’t be much more of that now that the hearings are over.”