Sisterland (29 page)

Immediately, I knew where this was headed, and it wasn’t because I was psychic. But I tried to form a good-natured expression.

“I think we’re a great couple,” he said. “And we’ll make each other really happy.”

If he was underestimating what I was trying to convey, he was also being sweet. It was time to let the conversation end.

After a silence, he said, “That’s not the kind of premonition you mean, is it?”

It was true that he had disappointed me, possibly for the first time. But the fact that he knew it had the strange effect of negating the disappointment. I said, “I realize this is really weird.”

“Well, I probably wouldn’t use the word
psychic
, but I’m sure we all subconsciously pick up on cues about situations.”

“Right,” I said. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. I have dreams about things, and a lot of the time I don’t understand what they mean, but then the things I dreamed about happen. It’s like I saw a scene from a movie, and only later do I watch the movie from start to finish.”

“I’m still confused about how ongoing this is for you.”

“It’s as much in the past as I can put it,” I said.

“Because of middle school?”

“Having senses just isn’t necessary,” I said. “It’s not even practical.” I was looking out the window at the farmland on our right. “It’s okay if you don’t believe that people can be psychic.”

“Whether I believe it is immaterial,” Jeremy said. “What you’re telling me is part of who you are, and I believe you.” The distinction he was making in this moment—it didn’t seem like it would come to matter as much as it did. “Anyway,” he continued, “as personal confessions go, you have to admit this is of a different order than ‘I’m not a natural blonde.’ ”

“I
am
a natural blonde.”

“Phew.” Jeremy grinned. “Because that might really have been a shock to my system.” Then he said, “So the stuff that happened in middle school—when you said it’s a long story, did you mean one you do or don’t want to tell? Because no pressure, but we are on a long drive.”

For several seconds, I considered the question. From the vantage point of Jeremy’s passenger seat, beside this man who had grown up in a different state from me, who was five years older and a science professor and absurdly kind, middle school finally seemed like a long time ago. I said, “I could tell you.”

It was around
the time of the trip to Kansas City that we started talking about marriage—fleeting references at first. Once, as I flipped channels on his TV while he made dinner, he came into the living room when I was stopped on a program about animals on the islands of Fiji. “Look how pretty that is,” I said, and he said, “Should we go there on our honeymoon?”

On an evening during which we’d eaten next to a large family at a pizza restaurant and were in the car driving back to Jeremy’s, I asked, “Can you picture adopting kids from another country?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Can you picture adopting them from China?”

Again, as easily as if I’d asked if he could turn up the radio, he said, “Sure.”

In a rush, I said, “In high school, I used to babysit for these people who lived on my street, and they had really cute daughters from China, and ever since then, I’ve wanted to do that. And that way, they wouldn’t be psychic, because I think it comes from my mom’s family.”

“Wow.” But Jeremy said it calmly. “I do want biological kids, but I don’t see why we couldn’t do both. You’re sure having senses is hereditary?” It was weirdly endearing to hear the phrase “having senses” come out of Jeremy’s mouth—it had been such an intrafamily reference that it was as if he’d prepared Wonder bread toast with cinnamon sugar for me while we watched Rob Lowe in
Class
.

I said, “I’ve always thought so. Do you feel like in order to be happy in life, you have to have biological children?”

“I don’t know,” Jeremy said.

The subject came up again from time to time—if we were out somewhere and saw white parents with a little Asian girl, I’d nudge him and murmur, “Look.” One Sunday morning after we’d slept in and then had sex, he said, “Here’s the thing. I just think you and I would have really great kids. They’d be part Kate-ish and part Jeremy-ish and part just themselves, and it’d be fun to watch them grow up.”

This was not so different from the argument Ben had once made, minus the part about squinty eyes. I said, “But what if they have senses?”

“What if they’re nearsighted? What if they can’t carry a tune?”

“Those aren’t the same.”

“What if we adopt kids with serious behavioral problems?”

“That’s more common in children from Eastern European countries than China. Anyway, even if we’re imperfect parents and our kids are messed up, their lives will still be better with us than if they were in an orphanage. But if we have kids and they’re messed up, it’s our fault.”

“Of course we’ll be imperfect parents. But do you really believe if we provide biological children with anything less than ideal lives, then it’s better for them not to exist?”

“Sort of.”

“Do you wish
you
didn’t exist?”

“At times.”

Jeremy laughed. “You usually do a good job of hiding your bleak world-view.”

“Thanks.”

“Can I just make one point? I know having senses has been a burden to you. But from my perspective, it doesn’t define who you are. If I were describing you to someone, it wouldn’t be in the top ten of your personality traits. It might not even make the top fifty.”

The following week, Jeremy flew to Vancouver to present a paper on biogeochemical iron cycling, and while he was gone, I spent the nights at the apartment I still, technically, shared with Vi. On the third morning of Jeremy’s absence, I woke up and thought,
I’ll have two white babies
.

It was still true that I didn’t see how having children was anything other than a roll of the dice; what was different was that being with Jeremy made me feel like perhaps luck was on my side.

I waited until it was seven
A.M.
in British Columbia, called his cellphone—I had no idea if the call would cost either or both of us a small fortune—and when he answered, I said, “I’ll have two white babies.”

He laughed. “With anyone in particular?”

“I’m serious. But we shouldn’t wait too long, because I don’t want to be trying to get pregnant when I’m, like, thirty-nine.”

At the time of this conversation, I was twenty-seven, and Jeremy laughed again. He said, “Is that an invitation to leave Vancouver early and come knock you up?”

“You don’t seem very surprised. Did you think all along I’d give in?”

“I’m happy,” he said. “This is exciting news. It’s just that I woke up about three seconds before you called.”

As it turned
out, Rosie was born when I was thirty-one, and Owen when I was thirty-three. And really, it wasn’t that Jeremy had convinced me. It was that he’d been smart enough to let me convince myself.

On Friday, October 9, a week before the day of Vi’s
predicted earthquake, a man in O’Fallon waited until his wife and children were sleeping, shot them in their beds, then turned his gun on himself. He’d done it because he’d wanted to save them from the impending destruction, according to the initial news reports, and I thought,
No, no, no, no, no
. It wasn’t in the morning paper, but there was an article on the
Post-Dispatch
’s website that I read on the small screen of Jeremy’s phone as soon as I came downstairs in the morning, while my stomach churned.

My impression was that Vi’s prediction was mostly considered ridiculous and not credible; certainly it was seen as such by people outside St. Louis. Within St. Louis, as far as I could tell, people who’d admit to being nervous would then express embarrassment at their nervousness. St. Louisans weren’t evacuating the city. And yet, as with the warnings of doomsday cults, even if you didn’t buy the claims, you’d still breathe a sigh of relief when the day in question passed without event.

I took Owen for a walk in the stroller, and when we returned home, Jeremy waved his phone at me. “There’s all this stuff coming out about how the guy had lost his job months ago, he was mentally unbalanced, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Obviously, he was mentally unbalanced,” I said.

When Vi called that afternoon, she said, “People are so fucking nuts,” and I could feel her refusal of culpability.

“And you still think the earthquake will happen?”

She sounded impatient as she said, “If I get word to the contrary, you’ll be the first to know.”

The next evening,
Jeremy and I were sitting on the couch in our living room, watching the episode of
Saturday Night Live
we hadn’t stayed up for the night before, when we heard a whimper from one of the two monitors set on the coffee table. I said, “Is that him or her?” Jeremy paused the TV, and there was a silence and then another whimper—a whimper of bereftness, it seemed to me, of desolation even—and I said, “It’s her. Should I go up?”

“She’s probably not even awake.” Jeremy hit the Play button on the remote control, and I set my hand on his arm.

“Hold on.”

“You’ll hear her.” But he’d frozen the screen again; he was indulging me.

We were quiet for a minute—Jeremy pulled his phone from his pocket, presumably to check either his email or football scores—and I sat there listening. After another minute, I said, “I might go sit upstairs in the hall.”

He looked up from his phone. “Seriously? For how long?”

I gestured toward the television. “You can keep watching.”

“If she needs us, she’ll let us know.”

“I won’t go in her room unless she makes more noise,” I said. “But I just want to be up there if she does.” It wasn’t that I thought I was being rational; it was that something about hearing that whimper had triggered anxious heart, and I knew I couldn’t sit and chortle at sketches featuring men dressed as women. This was a difference between Jeremy and me, that he probably thought men dressed as women were the perfect cure for what ailed me.

Upstairs, I took a seat on the bare wooden hall floor; I could have gotten a magazine, but I didn’t. It would in my life then have been impossible for me to feel bored by doing nothing. To do nothing was a rare treat, almost like taking a nap.

Rosie didn’t make more noise, and after five minutes, contrary to what
I’d promised Jeremy, I opened her door and crept into her room. She was lying on her stomach, her palms and knees beneath her and her little butt bunched up in the air. Her face was turned away from me, toward the wall, but I could hear her rhythmic breathing. This wasn’t, I was fairly sure, a night on which she’d get a fever, though I knew those nights well: After we gave her medicine, as she rolled around and mumbled, I’d keep getting up to check on her, and at some point, I’d just give in and lie down on the floor next to her crib.

But no, I had to remind myself. Not tonight. Just because I knew how to slip into these nervous patterns, just because the idea of her having a fever was in my head, it didn’t mean she had a fever. I was barely psychic anymore, and moments like this were the reason why.

When I went downstairs, the television was still paused at the same sketch, and Jeremy was reading an issue of
Journal of Geophysical Research
. As I reentered the living room, I said, “Sorry. You could have kept watching.”

“I was waiting for you.”

“I want to try getting the stain out of Rosie’s pink sweatshirt. I’m not in the mood for TV anymore.” What I really wanted to do—I kept meaning to do it while Jeremy was at work—was to remove everything hanging on our walls. But I didn’t have the nerve to do it in front of him.

He nodded in the direction of Rosie’s monitor. “She’s been totally quiet.” Had he heard me go into her room?

We looked at each other, and I said, “I think everything will be better when we’re on the other side of Vi’s prediction.”

“When Kendra comes this week, you should go get a manicure and try to relax. Call tomorrow and schedule one.”

“Maybe,” I said. Apart from the fact that I no longer had manicures from one year to the next, there was a secret I kept from Jeremy, a stupid secret, which was that when Kendra babysat, I left only Rosie with her. Running errands was far easier with just Owen than they’d have been with both children, which meant that Kendra’s hours were in fact a break for me, if not exactly the one Jeremy believed I was getting. But so greatly did Rosie relish Kendra’s company, and so rare was it these days for Rosie
to receive the undivided attention of any adult, that it didn’t seem like such a sacrifice on my part to permit her this treat. I didn’t tell Jeremy because, in the abstract, I always planned to leave both Owen and Rosie with Kendra the following week, and it was only when Kendra showed up and Rosie went berserk with excitement that I reconsidered.

Jeremy was still watching me, and he said, “I know we haven’t talked about this for a while, but you remember I’m leaving Thursday for the conference, right?”

Did I remember he was leaving Thursday for his conference? I remembered that that had once been the plan, but I had convinced myself that he would stay—that he’d canceled his reservation already, because surely he wouldn’t get on a plane to Denver with everything that was going on.

“I realize this conference is big for you,” I said. “But since it’s annual, if you miss one in your whole career, it probably doesn’t make a difference.”

“I thought our deal was that if I postponed my Cornell talk, you were okay with me going to Denver. Does that ring a bell?”

“A lot has happened since then,” I said. “Anyway, now that you have tenure, don’t you not have to do as much stuff like this?”

“Kate, I’m delivering a paper on Sunday morning. And I have meals and coffee scheduled with literally twelve different people.”

“Other professors have families, too. If you say an emergency came up, I’m sure they’ll understand.”

Jeremy sighed. “Let me put this in perspective. Courtney is still going to the conference, even after last week.” He meant after her abortion, but if he thought this was a persuasive point, he was mistaken.