Cutting Teeth: A Novel (43 page)

When he didn’t get the joke, Melanie had said, “It’s like tanzanite or something, Ricky. Not a
real
diamond.”

He looked at the diamond tennis bracelet that seemed to glow against Grace’s bronzed skin, at the two-carats glimmering in her earlobes. All jewelry she had bought for herself.

But she’d never stopped wearing his fake diamond ring.

“Yes,” he finally answered. “I’m okay.”

They sat on the bed, and the kaleidoscopic shapes he’d seen with his eyes closed slowly faded. They kept holding hands as Hank played on the floor with his plastic animals. It was one of those sets Rip brought on car trips—an emergency tantrum antidote, a plastic tube that held three of each kind of animal. Small, medium, and large. Hank named them Hank, Mama, and Daddy.

The princess dress was too large. One side of the lace-trimmed collar slipped down Hank’s shoulder. The skirt covered everything but the scuffed toes of Hank’s sneakers. He’d have to get it shortened, Rip thought, or do it himself.

“Waah, waah. I sad,” Hank said in a soft voice, as the baby elephant hid its trunk under its mother’s wide belly.

“What’s wrong, baby?” the medium-sized elephant asked the littlest in a mommylike falsetto, tipping its trunk.

Then Hank’s face crumpled so completely, so authentically, it nearly drained Rip’s breath. “I miss my mommy and daddy,” the baby elephant squeaked.

“Don’t worry,” boomed the biggest elephant in a Papa Bear bass. “We are here. We will take care of you.”

“Hug. Hug. Hug,” Hank said in each of the voices, delicately tipping the elephants’ trunks so they touched in three quick kisses.

Rip stood, his hip bumping the night table.

He wanted to turn to Grace, take both her hands in his, imprison her in his desperation, plead, How can we not have more children? How can you not want to freeze this time in life? These oh-so-brief sweet years when we are so adored, so loved, that all sadness relates to one thing—the absence of us!

Rip knew he would have that urge again, and again, that it might never leave him.

Fuck it, he thought. I’m good at this. At being a parent. At unconditional love. Just as Allie had told him the day before on the beach. No one—no daddy, no nanny, no mommy—could squash a tantrum as quickly as Daddy Rip. Tomorrow, he would call Ruth, their couples’ therapist, and make an appointment. There was a lot to discuss, although there were also secrets he knew he would keep from Grace. Forever, if it meant keeping his family, and helping it to multiply.

He was hungry for time to pass, eager to return home, unpack the car, carry the flush-cheeked and sleeping Hank from the car to bed—one of Rip’s favorite rituals. He would set up the kitchen for the next day’s breakfast, two big bowls and one small for cereal, coffee in the filter, timer on, Hank’s clothes unpacked, refolded, and put away, an outfit laid out for Hank to wear to his soccer class tomorrow. He would log onto TryingToConceive.com and consult with his girls. He would start researching the sperm bank Allie had told him about.

He and Allie had really bonded, he thought as he rubbed his phone in his pocket where her contact info was held, like a tiny little present.

promise the moon

Allie

That morning
, after Susanna had wept over the dew, she continued to behave like a child. Sulking. Whining. Nagging Allie, while not helping her pack. As Allie stuffed clothes at random into their bags, trying to keep the peace between Dash and Levi (
no TV when we get home if you don’t cut that out, no iPad if I see you hit your brother one more time
), Susanna droned on weepily about the stench of Brooklyn, about the inadequate life they were giving their children, alternating her lamenting with her usual trips to the bathroom.

Allie was sure the rest of the house could hear Susanna’s pleading. She wouldn’t let up: Couldn’t Allie just
think
about leaving the city? Couldn’t she just
entertain
the idea? Finally, when Susanna asked for what felt like the hundredth time—“Couldn’t you just say
maybe
? Not yes. Just maybe?”—Allie had stuffed the rest of the boys’ clothes in the suitcase, pulled her leather boots on over bare feet, and said, without looking at Susanna, “Okay! Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Susanna croaked.

Allie wondered where that firecracker of a girl with her cocky little ponytail had gone.

“Maybe,” Allie repeated, though she knew, and she sure as hell hoped Susanna knew, that maybe, in this case, meant never. She (
they,
she corrected) needed to go back home. Because that’s what it was, she thought. Their home. Even the stench of garbage simmering in the late-summer heat, the cockroaches that skittered across the sidewalk on humid nights, the sirens and the exhaust and the dog shit that made every stroll with the boys feel like a booby-trapped obstacle course.

Allie waited until noon to leave, certain the other kids were down for their naps, a few of the parents bound to be indisposed, fallen asleep at their children’s sides. She wanted to suffer as few good-byes as possible, not wanting to go through the whole mommies double-cheek kissing/waving ta-ta to each other’s children routine.

Susanna started the engine and tugged the seat belt over her belly.

“You sure you’re okay to drive?” Allie asked from where she sat in the back between the sleeping boys. The front seat was stuffed with the bags of produce, and the car smelled like damp earth and overripe strawberries.

“Please say maybe,” Susanna said quietly. “Please?”

Allie sighed. “I already did.”

“Again? Please.”

“Okay,” Allie said to the swollen face of the woman looking at her from the rearview mirror. A face she barely recognized. “Maybe.”

Allie tugged on the sleeping boys’ harnesses one more time to make sure they were secure. The boys’ heads had fallen forward, their chins touching their chests at an awkward angle that looked painful. She lifted one boy’s head, and then the other, her fingers gripping gently as she held their heads upright.

She would hold them like that for the rest of the trip, she told herself, even after her arms began to shake and her muscles began to burn. She would never let go.

Her fingertips rested over each boy’s artery. The thrum of their even pulses became a chant.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

ever after

Nicole

Nicole rearranged
her mother’s Madame Alexander dolls for the third time. Had Marie Antoinette stood next to Little Bo Peep, with her dust-crusted curls, or had Scarlett O’Hara, in her sun-faded green gown, stood between them? Nicole had to get it right or her mother might suspect that ten adults and a gaggle of children had stayed there for the weekend. Then her mother would have questions and ask in that voice full of suspicion, the one that had always made Nicole confess,
What have you been up to, Nicole Marie?
No matter how hard she tried, she knew she’d spill over and the fear and shame would cascade over her lips and she would tell all; the Web bots and The End and her selfish lies, and her mother would admonish Nicole in her Queens-tinged sneer,
Snap out of it, Nicole. Get ahold of yourself. You’re a mother now, for Chrissakes
.
Your children need you!

Her mother was right, Nicole thought as she looked out the tall windows of her parents’ bedroom. A storm was coming and the sea reflected the dark gray clouds above. The white-capped waves flung themselves at the seawall, a concussion that made the floor under her feet shudder. She flinched as a spray of frothy seawater smacked into the windows of the ground floor.

She heard shouting and Wyatt appeared on the deck below, his too-long brown hair bouncing, followed by Chase and Hank, all of them half-naked and squealing with glee as water leapt over the seawall.

“No,” she said, her breath catching in her throat as she slammed an open hand against the thick glass. Didn’t they know how dangerous it was?

She banged the heel of her hand against the window until her palm stung. The sea roared and the waves rocked against the boulders.
Dear God,
she thought, knowing there was no way they’d hear her.

She didn’t sense Josh until he was just behind her, his warm breath on the back of her neck. She lowered her heels and let her arms fall at her sides in surrender. She rested her forehead against the cool glass of the window, fogged by her handprint.

“Ha,” she said weakly. “You caught me. I guess some things never change.”

“They’re okay,” Josh said. “You’re okay.”

“No, I’m not.”

She was looking at him now and felt her eyes squinting and knew she looked mean. “You don’t understand what it’s like. To be so fucking scared all the time.”

Josh gripped her wrists, and she imagined she heard her bones crunching. He shook her, hard enough that an earring flew from one earlobe and landed with a
ping
on her mother’s lacquered dresser.

“Don’t you think I’m scared, too?”

He held her wrists apart, and she thought he might lift her off the ground.

“One day,” he said, “you wake up, and your kid’s anxiety is giving you anxiety. But—you say fuck you to your own fears. Now, you are a grown-up.”

She saw the lines around his eyes, the sagging skin under his jaw. She smelled beer on his breath.

He pulled her into his arms.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“No,” she murmured back. “Don’t say sorry.”

She would try harder to be a better wife and mother, she thought as she unfolded herself from his arms.

She asked him (sweetly, she hoped) to go get Wyatt dressed.

She had just a few more things to tidy up here, she promised, and she would join them downstairs.

“It’s time to go home,” she said.

*   *   *

Nicole lit her last joint and stood in front of the windows, which were thick with gray-veined storm clouds. She watched the children down below on the deck, the muscles under their browned skin tensing as they anticipated the waves.

She was waiting, too. What for, she did not know.

It was true, what the experienced mothers at her tea party–themed baby shower, almost four years ago, had forewarned, with what, at the time, had seemed like kindheartedness. And just a dash of sarcasm.

Life will never be the same,
they told her.

Now, in her own life after children, she wondered if there wasn’t a hint of something spiteful hiding behind those mothers’ chuckles. Her aunts, her older cousins, all of whom had birthed children, and who had brought her gifts of bottle warmers and onesies and diaper genies, who had oohed and aahed at unwrapped gifts with gasps that had seemed like nostalgic longing, but, Nicole knew now, were more the satisfied sighs of retribution. They were the toothless stepmothers and aging queens of fairy tales, envious of the virginal princess’s beauty.
It’s your turn, sweetie.

Nicole had brushed off their warnings (
Sleep now, while you still can!)
with a complacent smile, as if their prophecies were the hyperbole of old women, as if they were just remembering motherhood wrong. As her body had swelled with Wyatt, she’d created a dream collage of motherhood, pasted together with snippets from the natural birthing class she and Josh joined, the parenting books she read, the mother characters who had populated the movies and television shows she’d consumed in the last two decades. It was all the maternal material she had to learn from, after all. She hadn’t known any young mothers. Her aunts and older cousins were spread out across the East Coast. She saw them and their babies once a year at Christmas dinner. She’d never seen a baby latch on to its mother’s glistening nipple. Or projectile vomit. Or have its fingernails clipped. She knew nothing of the how-to of little children. Thirty-one when Wyatt was born, she had been the youngest mother she knew, the first of her friends to give birth into a world populated with ambitious women, for whom career was priority, a choice bolstered by their knowledge of the if-all-else-fails backup of fertility treatment. All you had to do was look around at the many sets of twins, and even triplets, whose SUV-like strollers crowded the sidewalks, and you felt certain that practically anyone could have a baby at any time if they wanted one.

Those women at Nicole’s baby shower had been telling the truth. She knew that now. How had she been such a fool? Why hadn’t she been able to imagine the coming challenge? The foresight would have helped her prepare, maybe lessened the shock that was their first night home with Wyatt, when the baby cried hour after hour, despite the fresh diaper, the full bottle, the offered breast, the perfect swaddling technique, the shushing, rocking, and lullabies. She had listened to him cry while she stood in the hot shower, blood dripping down her thighs, blood that would drip out of her for six weeks after the birth. She remembered wishing she could stay in the bathroom, that she could lock herself in there. Forever.

After three sleepless nights, she’d been delirious, and had said to Josh, as if it were a new revelation, “We can’t do this!”

“We don’t have a choice, Nic,” Josh had said. “We can’t return him.”

It was a story they now told to their friends, most parents to little children, chuckling at their naïveté over a bottle of wine, on a night they’d booked a babysitter. They could look back on the terror they had felt (this tiny little life in
their
hands) and laugh because there had been so much to love since that first night. The warm doughy smell of Wyatt’s newborn scalp. His first belly laugh. The satisfied flutter of his lashes as her milk let down ten seconds after he latched on to her breast. The way he lifted his chin and closed his eyes when she buckled his scooter helmet, an invitation for a kiss she could not resist. The first time he had looked at her, and said, “You my best friend, Mama.”

There were the nights she had watched him fall asleep, his eyelids like a shade slowly drawn. When he slipped into slumber, his breath deepening, diminishing, she tortured herself with the thought that he was gone forever—all for that moment of ecstasy when she thought,
no!
he was still with her, and they had so many years ahead. They—the new life that was their little family—had just begun.