Amanda Bright @ Home (28 page)

“I don’t mean the scandal. I mean everything.”

“I thought you still had the whole antitrust case to pursue—”

“Not me.”

Amanda stared at him. Bob reacted by returning his attention to his collapsed newspaper, which he’d thrust down when she’d fallen apart. He folded it up carefully, smoothed it, and pushed it aside. The stick still lay on the table, radiating its two irrefutable bright pink lines.

“Look, I didn’t want to tell you this,” he said, “and it sure isn’t the moment to tell you—I was waiting to see what Frank was going to do. But basically, before Frank sent me on this little ‘vacation,’ he told me that it was possible he would have to call in the division’s ethics officer.”

“What does that mean?”

“That someone would be brought in to investigate my relationship with Hochmayer and, you know, to determine whether I had acted improperly.”

“Does this mean you’ve been fired?” Amanda asked, stunned.

“No—not yet. They don’t fire you until you’ve been found guilty. I’d probably be transferred or suspended while the investigation was taking place. But even if they find me innocent, my career at Justice—well, it’s pretty much over.”

“Bob, I had no idea. I had no idea it was this bad.”

“I know.” He got up and wandered over to the counter, mostly, she sensed, because he felt too ashamed to face her directly. “And I know I’ve been acting like a jerk. I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to do.”

“And now … this,” Amanda replied sadly.

“We have a little time, right, to think about that?”

“I guess so. I was planning to go back to work next month. I could have helped us—I could have taken some of the load off you. But if I go ahead—if
we
go ahead—with this …”

She let the sentence die.

The morning turned into one of those August days in which it was too hot to go outside but too stuffy to stay in. The gray sky was bloated with moisture, but for all its threatening rumbles, it didn’t rain, and the air grew heavier each hour. Their window units choked and gurgled, and their house felt cast in funereal gloom. Bob was too preoccupied to do anything but sit on the sofa with a magazine, halfheartedly supervising the children and replying to their constant questions with a distracted, “Sorry—what did you say?” Amanda absorbed herself in housework and tried to take comfort in the fleeting satisfaction provided by a swept floor and freshly wiped counters; yet everywhere she looked she envisioned a baby—eating in a high chair, plopped down in the hallway, napping in a crib in their bedroom. When Amanda was not imagining a baby, she was visualizing Bob testifying in a government committee room before a tribunal that included Frank Sussman. What would the punishment be if Bob were found guilty? Amanda was afraid to ask. She passed by the living room on her way upstairs with a basket of clean laundry.

“Would you like anything?”

“No, thanks. You?”

“No, thanks.”

The anger, at least, was gone.

In Ben’s room Amanda knelt to collect a mess of plastic figures and blocks before running the vacuum over the floor. She rearranged them in a little city upon one of his shelves, something for him to come across as a surprise. For all Ben’s “issues,” Amanda found her son much easier to deal with at five than as a baby. She had not been much good with babies. She could not decipher the language of their cries, nor did she ever master the schedules of their sleep. At ten months old, Ben had still awoken two and three times a night. Amanda consulted an array of child development manuals and did what they told her to do. She took Ben for walks, she dangled new objects—mixing spoons, black-and-white shapes—over his crib, she played classical music while he slept, she charted his month-by-month progress. But she rarely felt confident she was doing the right thing, and it had been a great relief when her maternity leave ended.

When Sophie came along, things went a little easier. Amanda might not know how to amuse her, but Ben did, and Sophie was one of those babies who figure out how to sleep through the night on their own.

It was only recently that Amanda had begun to enjoy her children. The pleasure of their company was gradually exceeding the labor they exacted. When they left the house together, they no longer resembled a Himalayan expedition, bulging with knapsacks, water bottles, and emergency food supplies. But, Amanda told herself, switching on the vacuum, if she were to proceed with—with
this
—she would be yanked back to those burdened, sleepless days. They had all advanced so far up the ladder. Now she was about to be sent plunging down the chute.

Amanda did a quick calculation. The baby would be due sometime next spring, after she turned thirty-six. She would be forty-one by the time the child would be ready to start school full-time, forty-nine when it entered high school. It would not be ready for college until Amanda was … fifty-four! She and Bob had hoped to travel. They had hoped to do so many things. Would it really be another decade before they would be able to enjoy even a night out without racing home to a sitter …

Amanda stopped cleaning and hunted for one of the old pregnancy books she stored on a high shelf in her bedroom. She sat on the edge of the footstool and thumbed through it. Gosh, how it all came back to her! And the book—it was so relentlessly upbeat, illustrated with drawings of earthy mothers cradling their wrinkly newborns. Amanda turned to the diagram that showed the growth of a fetus during the first trimester. “By the end of the first month,” it read, “your baby is a tiny, tadpolelike embryo, smaller than a grain of rice.”

This grain of rice had the power to upend her whole life.

Amanda stroked her abdomen and returned to the vacuum.

Later in the afternoon, Bob volunteered to take the children to fetch milk. The moment they left, Amanda phoned her friend Liz.

Liz had her mouth full of nails. “I think it’s fantastic news.” Actually, this came out more like, “I thimk ith vamtathtic newth.”

“Hold on a second.” (“Helld un unthecond.”)

Amanda heard banging, and Liz returned to the receiver with her mouth empty. “Fixed it. It was a loose step on the back porch. I had to get to it before one of the kids broke their necks.”

“I’m just miserable, Liz. I don’t know what to do.”

“What
can
you do?”

“I—I don’t have to go through with it.”

Amanda waited for Liz’s usual outburst of advice, but it did not come. Instead Liz asked, with uncharacteristic diplomacy, “What does Bob think?”

“I’m not sure. I think he’d support whatever I decided to do.”

“Huh.” It was a noncommittal
huh
and Amanda grew vexed.

“Well, what would you do?”

This elicited a chortle. “You know what I’d do. That’s why I have four of them.”

“That’s why you have
one
of them,” Amanda corrected. “The other three were by choice—or so that’s always been my understanding.”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“Look, I really need help figuring out what to do. I need
your
help. Talk to me, Liz! God knows you used to be so outspoken about this—”

Boy, had she. A dozen or so years ago, Amanda and Liz had stood outside a clinic near their college, linked arm-in-arm with hundreds of other students before a tiny knot of anti-abortion protesters. She remembered the protesters’ inflamed eyes and the way their mouths twisted as they yelled their slogans, “It’s a child not a choice!” and “Murder!” and the gruesome pictures of dead fetuses they held aloft, cardboard crucifixions stapled to plywood. Liz had grabbed the bullhorn and shouted back, “Get your laws off my body!”

“I don’t know,” Liz said. “I guess I’ve gotten older.”

“That hasn’t stopped you from having opinions.”

“True, but this is different.”

“Why does it have to be different?” Amanda prodded. “Can’t you just look at the situation objectively for a minute—or at least from my point of view? Let me spell it out. Liz, I am
pregnant.
I don’t know how pregnant, but probably just a week or two. All I know is that it couldn’t happen at a worse time. Bob may be out of a job thanks to this Susie business—”

“Shit. Really?”

“Yes.” At last Liz seemed to be getting the seriousness of the situation. “That makes the need for me to find some sort of job in the fall more urgent.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So it really doesn’t make sense, does it, for me to go ahead with—this?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is that a yes ‘uh-huh’?”

“Oh, Amanda, please, don’t ask me to decide this for you.”

“Objectively speaking, what is the right thing to do?”

“I can’t speak
objectively
about this,” Liz said. “It wouldn’t matter what else was going on in my life. I’d have the baby.”

“You would?” Amanda was astonished.

“I would.”

“Even if—you didn’t want it?”

“Even if I didn’t want it.”

“Well, that’s a hell of a change. What happened to all that ‘every child a wanted child’ business we used to chant?”

“I’m not saying, you know, there aren’t circumstances when a woman might need an abortion—
should
have one,” Liz said, uncomfortably. “I’m not saying what other women should do. But come on, Amanda, let’s be honest. You and I—we’re not twenty years old anymore. We don’t sleep around. We’re married. We’ve been through pregnancy. And frankly, I can’t regard it as blithely as I used to.”

“
Blithely?
No woman undergoes an abortion
blithely.
We always understood that it wasn’t an easy choice.”

“No—no we didn’t. We
said
we did, but how could we possibly know? Having a baby—it was so abstract. We couldn’t even imagine getting ourselves knocked up. We were so bloody knowledgeable. Hell, my own mother got me the pill when I turned sixteen.”

“Mine took me to Planned Parenthood at fifteen. You’d think I would have learned something by now.”

“So you’ve been stressed lately. You forgot. It happens. But what happens if you don’t go ahead with it?” Liz continued. “Let’s say you do have an abortion. Are you certain you will feel afterward that it was the right decision? Years from now, will you look back and feel confident that you did the right thing?”

“Maybe—I don’t know.”

“All I know is that if I were to have an abortion now, well, I’d be haunted by it. I’d feel like there was this missing piece in my family, this lost child. Zoe, Sarah, Rachel, Zak—I mean, they were all clumps of cells once. Wait, hang on a second.”

Amanda clutched her end of the receiver while Liz shouted “No, not another!” and a cry erupted in the background.

“Sorry,” her friend said, returning to the conversation, “but one of my clumps wanted a second Popsicle.”

“Mine are at the store getting milk.” Amanda felt her eyes burning. It all seemed so hopeless. She was hopeless. Her life was hopeless. Amanda swallowed. “It’s just so much to get through again. Honestly, I don’t know that I can face it.”

“I know, hon. I wish I could be there. It must be terribly difficult for you,” Liz said soothingly. “But listen, one of these days, you’re going to realize that motherhood is not something to be
gotten through.
It is not some fleeting phase of life—it
is
your life, and it will be, for a long, long time, whether or not you choose to have this third baby. The sooner you recognize that, the better it will be.”

Bob suggested they go to the Sheik Kabob for dinner.

“I think we all need to get out of this house.”

“Can we afford it?”

“This week we can. Maybe not next week.”

Amanda had not yet had the courage to tell Bob about her shopping blowout the day before. She had waited for everyone to fall asleep to carry the department-store bag in from the car. By night’s end, it all seemed like such a folly, and she had taken soap to her new face and stripped it off.

Now Amanda went quietly to the secret stash of cosmetics she had hidden under the bathroom sink and began applying them the way the salesclerk had showed her. She tied her hair back and dressed in the same black skirt and blouse she had worn to Jack Chasen’s cocktail party.

Bob seemed slightly bewildered by her appearance. “You look—nice.”

The restaurant was packed even in August, when everyone who could had fled the capital. The waiter showed them to a large round table for six—the only one left—at the back of the restaurant. Amanda sat next to Bob with one child on either side to minimize the potential for mischief. Ben immediately started fishing for the ice in his water while Sophie struggled to turn the pages of the menu.

“Chianti?” Bob asked.

“Yes. Actually, no.” She glanced down at her belly.

“I’ll just have a beer then.”

Amanda gazed around the room, remembering the last time they were here—the night Bob had announced his good news about the Megabyte case. It had felt then as if something magical was about to transform their ordinary world. Tonight there was no fairy-dusting to coat the dusty paper lanterns and startled mounted fish. The Sheik Kabob had all the atmosphere of a lodge dance hall at the end of a long, hot summer. The tables sagged under their layers of stained cloth, and the waiters sweated through their red vests even through the air-conditioning was turned up so high as to leave most diners shivering.

“Ben, please, get your fingers out of your water, okay? You’re just going to spill it.”

Bob, too, was idly fiddling with his glass. When the waiter appeared Bob seemed momentarily confused, as if he was unsure which of a hundred questions running through his head he was being asked to answer.

It was the same waiter as before. He acknowledged them with a brusque smile before asking his usual question, “Vat is your choice thiz ev’ning?”

After they had given their orders, Sophie reached for a sugar packet and poured its contents down her throat.

“C’mon, Sophie, stop it,” Bob snapped, taking the empty packet from her.

“I want one!” Ben complained.

“Both of you,” Amanda muttered. She rummaged through her purse and handed them each a pen and a small pad of paper.

“Here, draw Mommy a nice picture.”