Ask Again, Yes (25 page)

The studio apartment she found was small, and the two single-paned windows were no doubt drafty, and the rent would eat sixty percent of her income, but she didn’t need much. A yogurt for breakfast, an apple for lunch. Often, she was able to take food from the nursing home. The cook was always giving away the stale bread, the milk that had reached its date but was perfectly fine. Fruit cups full of sweet syrup that would have to be thrown away after they reached a resident’s tray, even if the resident hadn’t so much as touched the tinfoil tab of the seal. The studio was walking distance to her doctor’s office, though it meant a longer commute to the nursing home. A long commute seemed like something other people would mind, but Anne really didn’t. The drive to and from work gave her something to do, and it was a way of filling more of the day. A television would help but it seemed extravagant. She would wait.

Dr. Oliver was no Dr. Abbasi, but Anne liked him okay, and he said she was doing very well. Since arriving at Eirene she’d been going for a blood draw every week to make sure she wasn’t toxic, and only one single time since being discharged from the hospital, after a brutal stomach virus that left her dehydrated and weak, did she feel the familiar agitation
bearing down on her. Margaret found her in the common room at three o’clock in the morning. She’d been watching a game show on TV, and when the players buzzed, Anne slapped the particleboard coffee table and shouted the answers. When Margaret appeared, Anne commanded her to watch closely and tell her if it seemed as if one of the contestants was cheating. Margaret led Anne to her room and said good night, but the next morning, bright and early, she was knocking on Anne’s bedroom door. “Get up,” she said. “Get dressed. You’re going to see the doc.”

Once Anne and Dr. Oliver were alone, something told Anne to keep her lips sealed until she was out of there, to refuse to say a single word. They stared each other down, and then Dr. Oliver told her gently that she’d be admitted to the local hospital for just a few days until the adjustment he was about to make leveled out.

Anne thrust her wrists out to be cuffed.

“No, no cuffs, Anne,” he said. “You haven’t done anything wrong.” She’d keep her job, he promised. She’d be okay. There was no reason they shouldn’t keep this one challenging week private. She’d been doing remarkably well.

It occurred to her as she jiggled the lock of her new home that somewhere not terribly far away Peter was likely graduating from college. She hadn’t taken comfort in the idea of him living with George, but at least she knew where he was. When he went to college he felt farther away because he was in a different state, but again, at least she knew where he was. But now that he was graduating—it was May, cherry blossoms coated the sidewalks of Saratoga and felt like velvet underfoot—she imagined him like a top spun loose across a board, zigging and zagging wildly across the contiguous United States, Canada, Mexico. She studied the college students on the streets of town, walking billboards for Colgate and Bucknell and Syracuse, home on break for summer. She studied
the boys in particular and tried to make herself understand that Peter was now as old as these boys, these young men. He was the same age as his father had been when Anne met him.

By September 1999, not knowing where he lived felt like an itch she couldn’t scratch. Maybe he’d gone to Dubai or Russia or China. She’d read that a lot of businessmen had to be willing to travel and put in their time in foreign countries these days. Maybe he was somewhere on the other side of the world, speaking Japanese. She could call George. He’d tell her anything she wanted to know.

“Why don’t you?” Dr. Oliver asked.

Because it would be one more thing, she wanted to shout. One more goddamn thing! All this weekly talking and it was as if he’d never heard a single word she said.

“I miss Dr. Abbasi,” she said instead of answering his question, hoping to stir some professional jealousy.

In mid-October of that year, the doorsteps of Saratoga County made festive with pots of mums and jack-o’-lanterns, Anne stopped at the same gas station she always used, but on this day, hanging in the window of the small storefront catty-corner to where she was standing, was a sign: “Private Detective, Discretion Guaranteed.” At different times that same storefront had housed a psychic, a therapist, a tax preparer. Now this. She jogged across the road while her car was filling and just walked by, at first, taking one quick glance at what was within. She turned and passed again. By her third pass a man had opened the door. He barely came up to her nose and had a paper napkin tucked into the collar of his shirt. She just wanted to know, was all. She wasn’t ready to hire anyone or anything. How much did it cost, anyway? Just an address would be fine, she said, in case there were different prices for different levels of information. If she were handy with the internet like the young nurses at
the home, this might be something she could find herself. One of these days Anne planned on asking the nice one, the fat one named Christine, how to open an email account.

Anne told the little man everything except the reason she didn’t know where her son was. She wrote him a check for one hundred dollars because it seemed safe enough; the balance wouldn’t be due until he got her the information she wanted, but almost as soon as she was back in her car, driving off to work, she began to feel like a prize idiot. He’d probably collect one hundred dollars from one hundred idiot women that week, and then he’d pack it in and take off for a new location. But she didn’t call the bank to stop payment on the check.

It took him only two days to get back to her, and the price was far cheaper than she’d braced herself for. He told her that if there was anything else she needed, anything else she wanted to know, to just be in touch. But what she wanted to know was whether he was doing okay, whether he was happy. If he wasn’t happy, if he wasn’t doing okay, what would she be able to do about it? Take him back to her three-hundred-square-foot apartment to live with her? These were things the man couldn’t answer. He handed over a manila folder, and she took it home and left it in the middle of her bed and avoided looking at it as she heated soup for dinner.

Finally, when there was nothing left to do, she opened it. On top, a typed address. Info about the building, how much his apartment cost to rent. The name and phone number of the management company.

After that, a photo of the building.

After that, a photo of him, walking. Something in his hand. A backpack on one shoulder. The photo showed Peter from a distance of maybe fifty feet. Zoomed from an even greater distance. Anne brought her nose to the photo, tried to see him more closely, tried to breathe him in, this young man who was the baby she’d pushed out nearly twenty-two years ago. He was silent, too, at first, like his brother, and after one second of silence, two seconds, three seconds—the nurses huddled over him, their
faces screwed tight as they handled him with alarming bluntness—four seconds, five seconds, six seconds—she let her head drop back to the pillow and accepted what she felt sure they were going to tell her, that this one would end like the last, only more cruelly because last time they’d been warned, at least, had time to prepare.

But then he’d arched his back and cried, his face purpling with the strength of his howls, and they placed him on her chest, pale from whatever viscous material was inside her, whatever he’d lived on those forty long weeks. When she touched him, his body tensed against her hand.

“You see that?” the delivery nurse said. “He’s already trying to lift his head.”

“A strong baby,” Anne said, and realized the vibrations she was feeling weren’t coming through the bed but from her own body, which was sobbing, heaving. She gritted her teeth to stop from shivering.

“A very strong baby,” the nurse said.

She thought she’d be able to make it until that Friday, when she had off, but just an hour into her shift she knew there was no way she could wait that long, so instead she started feigning illness. It was a plan that took shape as she was making it happen. She coughed into her fist a few times. Third and fourth graders from local schools had been trickling in all morning to make small Halloween parades for the residents. They answered questions about their costumes and held out their bags for candy, which they realized quickly came from the nurses’ station and not from any of the ailing souls who seemed perplexed by the small ghosts and skeletons, the witches and vampires. Anne put her palm to her own forehead when she felt sure people were looking. Eventually, she got noticed, and the charge nurse sent her home. She raced to the apartment to change, to brush her hair, and then she made straight for the thruway. It took three and a half hours to get there, Amsterdam at
103rd Street. A yellow brick building. Six steps up to the door. A broken light outside.

What did she expect to see? Him, she supposed, more clearly than in the photo, perhaps sitting on the stoop just as she pulled up. Perhaps he’d come walking down the street at the perfect moment, from the perfect angle, and she’d know by the set of his shoulders how he was. When he was a boy—nine, ten—that age when boys are dying to be older than they are, he suddenly stopped crying when he was upset and instead would set his shoulders like he was pushing them apart to make them seem broader than they were. He’d put one foot after another in a way that scared her, that determination to keep going, that determination to not cry, no matter what. And while she knew his intention was to seem older, he always, always, seemed younger instead. It should have been enough to draw her out of herself, seeing the extraordinary effort a boy made to be okay, but it wasn’t enough. Some days she could put her hands on those small shoulders and steer him around to look at her, to make him understand that she was his mother and she loved him, even if she didn’t always say the words. But other times, times when he’d all but press his face against hers to get her attention, times when he’d kneel on the floor beside her bed and hold his grubby finger beneath her nose to check for breathing, it was impossible for her to even so much as open her eyes. But the worst times of all were when she punctured his strength on purpose just so she could see whether it was possible for those shoulders to wilt, to see if there was a limit to what he could handle.

“I regret having a child,” she said to him once, for no reason at all, as he was doing his homework. “Greatest regret of my life.” It was quiet in the kitchen, just the two of them, Brian on an overnight tour. There were two potatoes baking in the oven, the house full with the earthy scent of roasting skins. Peter was about ten at the time, maybe eleven, and still, a decade later, she could see the way the white oval of his face had snapped up in surprise. He’d looked right back down at his
homework page as if it hadn’t happened, but she could see in his posture that she’d thrown him, that where before he was concentrating in earnest, now he was just pretending. The tips of his fingers were white where he was gripping the pencil. The lead point hovered above the page.

It had taken her a long time to tell Dr. Abbasi about that moment, her absolute worst, worse even than the times she smacked him, worse than shooting Francis Gleeson in the face.

And whenever she glimpsed that moment—it came to her at any time, without warning, and always felt like a punch in the mouth—she wondered if it was possible that she had none of these things the doctors said she had, paranoid personality disorder, schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, the diagnosis changed and morphed every year, new names for the same symptoms, but whether, in fact, she’d tricked them all, in a way, by going along, by taking the meds, by going to the sessions, tricked them the way Brian used to say she’d tricked him into getting married, into having a second baby, having Peter, when he’d never gotten over losing the first. She wondered if she was simply very, very mean.

“I’ll clean up,” Peter said that long, terrible night, May 1991, looking around at the mess she’d made of the house. He was fourteen already. Who could have predicted how that night would turn out? Five more minutes and she would have been too deeply asleep to hear the racket of Lena Gleeson pounding on the back door. She’d taken a sleeping pill, a half dose. She’d cracked the pill in two by pressing it hard into the palm of her hand. It would have been Brian’s problem to deal with and they probably wouldn’t have even told her about it. But when she walked to the window and looked down, there was Francis and Lena Gleeson and their daughter standing in the light of the Stanhopes’ back step. There was Brian’s long arm, holding the screen door open. By the time she got
downstairs the Gleesons were gone, and Brian was telling Peter that he shouldn’t have snuck out like that, but he was so half-hearted about it, so damn soft about it like he always was, and so Anne had walked up and belted Peter across the face.

“That’s for hanging around with that brazen girl in the first place,” she said. “And that’s for sneaking out.” She tried hitting him a second time but he dodged her, held his cheek, half turned to the wall like a child sent to the corner for punishment.

And then she caught a look on Brian’s face. Disgust, yes, but also a confirmation of the thing he’d announced already, but was maybe still unsure about. So although her head was splitting and she felt so unbelievably tired, she turned to him and started up once again with the argument they’d been having for weeks. He wanted to take a break. He wanted to do some thinking, alone. She thought of the morning she told him that the baby was dead. She hadn’t seen the doctor yet. She just knew. No movement at all for more than twenty-four hours. A dull ache across her back. She knew in the shower. She knew as she sipped her tea. She knew as the wind stirred the odors of the sidewalk below their first floor window—they were still in the city then—and blew them into the room where they were standing, getting ready to head out to work. So she told him what she knew, told him how she knew it. But Brian poured cereal into a bowl, told her she didn’t really know, no, not really, only the doctor could tell them. And then, a few hours later, when the doctor did tell them, Brian had looked at her like he was looking at her now, like she’d done it, she’d made it happen, by just saying the words out loud.