House Arrest (12 page)

15 ~ Sam

“Goodnight, Poose.” Sam leaned down to kiss her forehead.

“Sit with me, Papa?”

“Just a few minutes.”

Anna wouldn’t approve. Sam pulled the guest room door mostly closed, letting in just a sliver of light from the hallway. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he rubbed Zoe’s back in a figure of eight pattern, the way she liked it. This was Zoe’s bedroom, her special place in his apartment, but he had learned not to name it out loud because Anna hated that. Even though Zoe was hardly a guest, and she was the only one who ever slept there. Even though whenever Anna asked if Zoe could stay over he always agreed, like tonight when Anna and Emily wanted to get on the road to Maine before daylight. Even though she slept in this bed, in this room, every other weekend and every other holiday, and sometimes more if she was sick and Anna had to work. Even though he kept the top drawer in the dresser stocked with her neatly folded t-shirts and overalls and catheterization supplies and extra Velcro for her braces. But Anna made it absolutely clear that she was the only parent whose home was allowed to have Zoe’s room.

Sam couldn’t really blame her. When Zoe was born, he took one look at that shiny red bag of insides sticking out through the skin of her back, and thought he’d puke. Then he felt rotten; how could he react that way to his own kid? The whole first year he was confused, and Anna always seemed to be so damn okay. If only she’d cried just once, if only they could have cried together, maybe things would have turned out differently.

Zoe’s breathing slowed and deepened. Sam smoothed the sleep-damp curls away from her forehead, trying to visualize the plastic tubing inside, shunting the extra fluid away from her brain and safely down to her belly. Emily liked to joke about him being a bumbling father, but he paid close attention to his kid. Especially to her shunt.

When Anna brought Zoe upstairs that evening with enough paraphernalia for two weeks instead of four days, she didn’t mention anything about how Zoe was talking, but Sam noticed it right away. Zoe was quieter than usual and her speech was slower. But the big thing was the spoonerisms. When Sam started towards the guest bedroom with her duffle, Zoe followed with her backpack, steadying herself with one hand along the wall.

“Sting your bricks,” he said. Anna hated that too. They’re crutches, not sticks, she insisted.

Zoe didn’t even smile, didn’t turn back for the crutches.

He dropped her purple duffle on the bed and tried again. “Stump your duff.”

Zoe tilted her head slightly to the right, looking perplexed.

“Stump your duff?” he repeated.

No response. His heart forgot to beat.

“Dump your stuff on the bed.” he said.

She did.

Her shunt. That was the thing that scared him most about spina bifida.

After the ultrasound when they first found out about Zoe’s spine, Sam couldn’t talk about it. He had escaped to his mother’s apartment, to fix her broken ceiling fan. His mom talked nonstop about spina bifida. “Cousin Millie had a baby like that. Skinny, limp legs. His head was huge, and his shunt kept clogging up and getting infected and Millie would rush him to the hospital for more medicines and surgery. After each operation, he got stupider.” Mom was not one to mince words.

Zoe’s shunt had failed once, when she was three. Sam had been taking care of her that night too. She had seemed okay before she went to bed. Maybe a little sad and tearful. Looking back, she had been unusually quiet that evening too, but he didn’t realize it then. In the middle of the night she started throwing up and she didn’t seem to recognize Sam at all. That was the scariest part. Luckily Anna and Emily were downstairs and came right up when he called and they all went to the hospital and sat together in the family lounge while she had the CT scan and then surgery. And she wasn’t any stupider afterwards. Still, Sam paid a lot of attention to Zoe’s shunt.

Zoe mumbled something in her sleep. Sam leaned down to listen, then pulled the blankets to cover her shoulders and stood up. He didn’t think he could concentrate on his mystery novel. He sat instead on the soft cushions of the rocking chair by the window and twisted the stick to open the blinds. Lines of moonlight spilled into the room, painting ghostly bars across Zoe’s bed and chest of drawers.

One stripe illuminated the framed photo on the dresser. Sam had handed their camera to a couple from Ohio who they’d met on the trail up Mt. Tom. Anna squinted into the sunlight. Six-month old Zoe was in the baby carrier on Sam’s back, peeking over the ledge made by Anna and Sam’s shoulders pressed close together. Poose, they had called her.

Deep in his nightstand drawer he had hidden the very first photo of Zoe. Her ultrasound.

•

Much as he hated hospitals, even Sam had been able to see how much the ultrasound tech loved her job. Her perfect purple fingernails guided the probe in lazy pathways in the gel on Anna’s belly. Her left pointer finger traced landmarks on the monitor screen, showing Sam and Anna the kind of details they’d later want to decipher for their friends on the fuzzy photo. “Your baby is so smart,” she said. “She’s already found her thumb.”

The probe froze somewhere along Zoe’s spine.

The details of what came next played in slow motion in Sam’s memory. The tech halted the guided tour. She stopped joking and punched a green button on the wall. The doc came in and steered the probe around for a few more minutes, staring at the screen.

Finally the doctor spoke. “Sometimes, in the third week of gestation, there is failure of neural tube closure.”

Sam didn’t understand. He looked where the doctor pointed, at the spot on the back of the fishy thing on a color poster scotch-taped to the wall.

“Your baby’s defect is here.” The doctor’s right index finger touched the ultrasound monitor, tapped the white bumps. A string of pearls. Except the necklace wasn’t perfect. Three pearls were misshapen, wrong. The doctor kept talking, protracted sentences that loop-de-looped in the air. When his words finally stalled, Anna dropped Sam’s hand and shuffled in the rustling paper gown to the bathroom. She was in there a long time.

His butt felt glued to the metal chair. He stared at the blank monitor and tried to summon back the squiggly gray and black shadows that the tech described as their baby’s heart, beating safe inside her rib cage. But he couldn’t see very well. Even after blinking his eyes, the room seemed hazy. He couldn’t remember what the doctor said. He just knew the probe stopped and the happy talk stopped.

•

Sam squatted next to Zoe’s bed. He slipped his hand under the blankets. The plaid wool one was his favorite when he was a boy. The quilt was from his mom, for Zoe’s first birthday, the day Sam moved out. He fingered the delicate row of bumps along his daughter’s spine. Her broken necklace. Pearls splayed open, letting her insides spill out.

Before the ultrasound, Sam had never heard of spina bifida.

Anna didn’t tell him that she had a friend at work whose son had it. She tricked him into meeting her for a picnic at Forest Park the next afternoon after work. When he got to the playground, the first thing he noticed was the green metal sticks. This little guy, maybe six or seven, used green crutches to propel himself to the end of the line at the slide. The boy coming up behind him hung way back. When it was his turn, the crippled kid climbed the ladder, crutches dangling from the wide metal bracelets circling his wrists. At the top he pushed his sticks down the slide. He waved to a woman sitting at the closest picnic table, then launched himself down the slide after them, then scurried back in line, legs barely keeping up with crutches. Watching him, Sam’s heart beat so fiercely it clogged up his throat. He sat next to Anna on the picnic table bench, tugging on his mustache and drinking his beer. He and Anna, each of them sealed in an envelope of their own silence.

The woman from the picnic table had hefted the little boy into a molded bike seat, sized for a toddler. The crutches snapped with a popping sound into plastic clips on the handlebars. The girl at the top of the slide yelled “Bye Noah” before diving headfirst down the chute. Noah grinned, with a grape juice mustache, before he buried his face in his mother’s shirt. She pushed off and steered the bike in a slow half moon. She doubled back past the picnic table where Sam sat with Anna.

“Hi, Anna,” the woman had said.

“Hi, Susan, Noah. This is my husband. Sam.”

Sam said hello. He looked at Noah, trying to see inside him, to his broken necklace of pearls. Then his mother waved and pushed off and pedaled away. Sam watched the sneakers dangling on the boy’s thin legs.

“Who’s he?”

“Susan and I teach together. Noah’s her son.”

“You knew they were going to be here?”

Anna nodded.

“You asked them to come?”

“Yes.”

That’s when Sam had realized that he and Anna were going to have this baby. No matter how uncertain he was. No matter what his mother said. No matter what he wanted, when he figured out what it was that he wanted.

•

Sam left the bedroom door open behind him. Zoe liked the light from the bathroom down the hall, and Sam wanted to hear her if she woke up. He knew he would be checking on her constantly during the night. He liked it when Zoe stayed over with him. It made him feel like a dad, even though maybe he hadn’t been the best one ever. He liked Zoe safe with him, protected and secure, in his apartment. He wished that Anna and Emily were sleeping downstairs though. Just in case.

16 ~ Emily

Anna and I bickered all the way to Maine. I picked most of those fights.

“No way I’m driving through Worcester,” I said, scowling at the green exit sign. A pre-dawn gloom hovered over the Mass Pike. I knew I was being crabby and contradictory. I wasn’t eager to get there, but was in no mood to dawdle either.

Anna rarely challenged my cranky moods. “It’s more direct,” she said, her voice even. “Quicker too, except at rush hour.”

I stared straight ahead, hands at two and ten on the steering wheel.

“It doesn’t really matter.” Anna’s voice softened. “Gorgeous morning, huh?”

It was. Dawn ignited the charcoal horizon. But I wanted daylight already, easier to drive. I wanted to turn north, away from the hopeful sunrise. I wanted to get this trip over and done with. When we brought Zoe upstairs an hour earlier, Anna told Sam we would be home to pick her up by the weekend. That was too long for me.

“Listen,” I had insisted. “Today’s Tuesday. Tomorrow is the funeral. We can drive home on Thursday and roast a turkey on Friday. Celebrate Thanksgiving with Zoe, just one day late.”

“Zoe doesn’t care about Thanksgiving. Besides, she’ll have a great time with Sam. Let’s wait and see what Aunt Ruth has planned before we decide.”

Sometimes Anna was so damn stubborn, it drove me crazy. Besides, she was wrong. Zoe was old enough to appreciate Thanksgiving, and even help stuff the turkey this year. Sam would probably take her out for fast food for the holiday dinner.

Speeding past the exit to Worcester, I glanced over at Anna, but neither of us spoke. Guess I won that argument, but the victory gave me little satisfaction. Had she always been so bossy? We never used to argue, when I first moved in.

When Anna had a good idea, not about driving through Worcester, I didn’t mind admitting it. Like about cutting my hair. Daddy used to say my hair was the exact color of bittersweet chocolate, and he would make me giggle pretending to munch my braids. Once I mentioned my chocolate hair to Chad, but when he tried chewing my braid, it just seemed pathetic.

“Gorgeous hair,” Anna had said on the day I moved in. “Too bad no one can appreciate it,” she always added, since I confined it every morning in a thick braid that hung heavy along my spine. Anna was right; the headaches pretty much disappeared after she cut my hair to swing just above my shoulders. We let the long snakes fall onto the newspapers on the kitchen linoleum.

“Beautiful,” Anna said, always trying to pump up my confidence, as if I were one of the at-risk teenagers in her Life Skills class. Telling me to go out more, join social groups, meet men. She was persistent. Interfering. She meant well, and I loved living with her and Zoe. But sometimes I wished that my cousin would just butt out.

Somewhere between Lowell and Lawrence, Anna’s voice broke the stormy silence in the car. “Let’s sing.”

No way. Folk songs were a running joke between us, but today it wasn’t funny. I could never remember more than six words to any song. Compared to my father, who rarely forgot a phrase. He could recall even dense lyrics like “Violets of Dawn,” a song he knew from his college career as an Ann Arbor hybrid of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. But that didn’t mean it was a genetic trait. My approach was more fluid, like the time I substituted “floating in the breeze” for “blowing in the wind.” The folk process. There had been plenty of opportunity to make jokes about my faulty memory, because Zoe begged us to sing in the car, even driving ten minutes to the grocery store. Just like I had done at her age.

Anna didn’t push the singing. We rode in silence until she pointed to the bridge. “Maine.”

The sun rising over the steering wheel reminded me of Pippa’s spiky sunray hair. I wondered if the Family of Isis celebrated Thanksgiving. If I were doing her home visit this week, I would ask her about that, and maybe learn something about her religion. I hoped Gina wouldn’t be too hard on Pippa tomorrow. I would miss seeing Josué practice walking with a brace instead of wearing—what did Pippa call his external fixator?—the Eiffel Tower. I started to chuckle, then remembered Anna was sitting next to me and cleared my throat instead.

I tried to banish Pippa from my mind and concentrate on the road. Finally I gave up and pulled off at the Kennebunk service area to let Anna drive. Another long silence, until ten miles after turning north onto coastal Route One, Anna’s voice reached into my dark thoughts.

“We’ll make the 10:30 ferry easy,” she said.

“We could grab an early lunch in Rockland, take the noon boat instead.”

“Wouldn’t you rather eat at Aunt Ruth’s?”

“I’d rather not go to Aunt Ruth’s.” My voice was sharper than I intended.

Anna smacked the steering wheel. “Stop being a baby. This trip isn’t about you. Besides, you’re not the only one who lost family.”

I felt my face flush, hoping it wouldn’t show in the dim morning light. Anna had had her own island tragedy, even if I had been too self-absorbed to be sympathetic at the time.

“Sorry,” I said, then added, “How can you bear to go back?”

“I still miss my parents, just like you do. But I don’t blame them for dying.” Anna paused for a moment before continuing. “If I wanted to blame someone, I guess it would have to be your dad.”

That was a stretch, but maybe it made some sense. Anna’s mother was my dad’s sister. Her father was his friend from college. They met at my parents’ wedding.

“If Uncle Arnie hadn’t introduced my parents,” she said, “they wouldn’t have been on that sailboat and they’d still be alive.”

Her logic was flawed. “If your mom never met your dad, you wouldn’t exist.”

Anna pretended to laugh. “True.”

“Anyway, it was a storm, an accident. How could you blame them?”

“How can you blame yours? That was an accident too.”

I shook my head. “You don’t understand. It wasn’t only what they did. It was that they didn’t tell me anything. Didn’t talk to me about it.”

“So you repeated the pattern, right? Don’t talk about it. Didn’t write to your father in prison, or visit?”

Anna just didn’t get it. Her parents had been ordinary people, living regular lives. Not fanatics setting fire to draft board records, as if two people could change the world. As if strangers fighting a war half a world away were more important than me, the daughter they would create just a few years later.

“Besides,” Anna said. “I love the island, even with all the sad memories.”

Maybe living on the island wouldn’t have been so bad, if the first ten years of my childhood hadn’t been so good. My parents were odd by some people’s standards, but we fit right into our Portland neighborhood. Old apartments clustered around my alternative school, which was kept barely solvent with bake sales and spaghetti dinners. I had thought I knew who my parents were—warm and funny folks who would always be there to protect me.

•

The ferry scraped away from its berth. Anticipating the blast of frosty wind, I pulled the hood of my parka tight around my face and leaned over the rusty front rail. Three seagulls hovered. In the heated passenger cabin, Anna was deep into Fury, even though she kept complaining that Rushdie should stick to Indian settings. After one glance at the tables in the cabin—the place we sat when Momma explained why Daddy was arrested—I chose the bitter chill outside.

The ferry pushed into the growing waves past the harbor lighthouse, connected by an umbilical cord of rocky rubble to the land. I inhaled deeply, almost tasting the brine. My knees found the rhythm of the swells. My pores and lungs remembered the sodden wind, its promise of wood smoke mixed with the dregs of rotting shellfish. I pictured the map of Penobscot Bay, with the Three Sisters Islands clustered like poison ivy leaves smack in the middle. Then the cold pushed me back into the small protection of the doorway.

I thought about the phone conversation with Pippa the evening before. When my beeper had gone off, and I saw Pippa’s phone number on the display, my stomach clenched with a sick worry. Maybe something was wrong, maybe she was bleeding, losing the baby. What was she supposed to do in an emergency, anyway? Go to the hospital for help, and get arrested at the emergency room door for violating house arrest? I made a mental note to ask Nan about that on Monday.

And what about Pippa wanting me to help her escape for solstice? It was astonishing that she would ask such a thing. And even more astounding that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was breaking the law. And what about our therapeutic relationship? Would it help Pippa, or land both of us in adjacent jail cells? What would happen to her baby if Pippa went to jail?

For just a moment, before I banned the image, I pictured myself taking care of her baby while Pippa served her sentence.

•

An hour later, the ferry neared the entrance to the channel between the Sister Islands. Bundled with scarf and hat and heavy winter coat buttoned up against the fierce wind, Anna came out to check on me, frozen in my doorway.

“You okay?”

My shoulders felt heavy with the weight of Anna’s concern. As the ferry veered into the narrow passageway between the islands, I turned away from her. The lobster markers were scattered like spent confetti across the tinsel tail of the boat’s wake.

“Aunt Ruth said everyone is coming to dinner tonight.”

“Hmmm.” My reply merged with the deepening engine noise as the ferry slowed for the final approach to the terminal.

The town had changed in fourteen years. There had always been a faded pageantry in the harbor village. The new bright colors crowded along the water took me by surprise. Buildings were stacked like child’s blocks every which way, as if the object of the game was to see how many pieces could touch the water without tumbling in.

Anna pointed to the pier. “There she is.”

Aunt Ruth waved and called our names as the ferry docked. Her raspy voice hadn’t changed at all. I followed Anna down the plank walkway.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured into the vicinity of my aunt’s shoulder. Aunt Ruth and I had shared so many deaths, but this time the loss was hers and I didn’t know how to console her. I could comfort a patient, or Gina mourning Max, but my own family was different. Aunt Ruth ushered us to the old Buick in the ferry parking lot. We all fit across the front bench seat, Anna in the middle and me against the window.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Aunt Ruth said. “Thanks for coming.”

Driving through down Main Street, Aunt Ruth’s left hand greeted each approaching car with the island wave, a spare lifting of fingers off the steering wheel. Uncle Mitchell said that off-islanders never got it quite right, the precise nonchalance of the wrist movement. When Anna asked about Marilyn and Carla, I tried to visualize the holiday cards with family photographs that arrived every Chanukah—a husband and three kids each, stair-step sizes. I leaned forward, across Anna’s relaxed talking, to peek at my aunt. When had her cropped hair silvered?

In response to Anna’s question, Ruth swung her right arm across the long front seat to display her Grandma bracelet. Each child’s picture dangled in a gold-plate frame, connected to the chain with a tiny Star of David. “There’s room for Zoe’s photo, if you have one to spare,” Aunt Ruth said, then turned to me. “Space for your future babies, too.”

Aunt Ruth had always been kind. All through high school, she greeted me cheerfully with “So early?” when I came straight home after school, instead of staying with my cousins for basketball team practice or tryouts for the Miss Three Sisters Islands pageant. One year Ruth offered a birthday trip to the mainland for a haircut and makeover. I sensed her yearning, her wish that I would enjoy the social success of her girls. But I could never forget that my father was in prison long enough to focus on my classmates. They left me alone, too.

My chest tightened when we crossed the one-lane bridge onto Saperstein Neck. Then Aunt Ruth turned the Buick into the first driveway on the right. On the rocky hillside stood the old white house, tilting slightly towards the shoreline.

Anna followed Aunt Ruth into the kitchen, but I stalled in front of the piano. My eyes couldn’t help it. They went right to the photo in the lopsided terracotta frame I had made in third grade. It was a Mother’s Day gift. My father’s best friend Abe came over to take the photograph. Daddy with electric curls, grinning so hard his cheeks pushed up and squished his eyes closed. Me cradled inside the armor of his hug. My hair as dark as Daddy’s but straight, bowl cut. Everyone in Portland used to say that I looked just like him and that I had his fire, too. I figured they meant his courage. Now I knew I didn’t have it and wasn’t sure I wanted it anyway.

Momma stood behind us in the photo, leaning over Daddy’s shoulder to hug us both. Steel wire-rim glasses framing robin’s-egg blue eyes. Freckled cheeks. Right after Abe snapped the picture, Momma took off her glasses and sat me on her lap for a butterfly kiss to say thank you. Her eyelashes brushed my cheek, soft like wings. Barely touching my skin, but the safe feeling danced all the way down to my belly.

•

Anna opened the door to the back bedroom. “The clan’s gathering.”

“Who’s here?” Would I recognize them?

“Carla and Marilyn are helping Aunt Ruth fix dinner. Which is what we should be doing also, by the way. And the other cousins,” Anna ticked off on her fingers, “Sarah’s flying up in the morning. Laura came over on the early ferry.”