Sisterland (56 page)

Vi kept tracking Ginette, she told me—she meant through either visualization or communicating with Guardian, not through the newspaper, because no other articles about Ginette ran—and she thought that a distant family member had come to collect her, then sold her as a servant. After that, Vi couldn’t locate Ginette anymore. She said, “What do I do now?”

It was an unusually warm February day, and we were in our yard; I was blowing bubbles, which Rosie was chasing, and Owen, who had begun walking the week before, took halting steps across the grass. I dipped the plastic wand back into the jar of soap. “I don’t know,” I said.

Six weeks after
the earthquake in Haiti, there was an even stronger one—magnitude 8.8—in Chile, and though it caused serious damage, there were far fewer fatalities and much less destruction because the quake’s epicenter was in a small town. Later in the year, major earthquakes occurred in Indonesia, China, and Turkey. In March 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake killed more than fifteen thousand people in Japan. Did this mean that in fact there
had
been a kind of earthquake season that started in September 2009? A geophysicist—Courtney Wheeling—would say no. On average, an earthquake of magnitude 6 or greater happens somewhere in the world every three days. Mostly, they happen underwater, and we hardly take notice. It is only when the earthquakes come to us, upending the streets and houses and trees we think of as ours, that they command
our attention. But the earth, as Courtney once told a local TV reporter, is always busy.

Jeremy had been
offered and accepted the Cornell job at the end of January. During his spring break, we flew out with the children to look at houses, and I met with the obstetrician whose name Jeremy’s adviser’s wife had passed along. My due date was July 3, and we’d move in May, as soon as Jeremy finished teaching. What we didn’t say, what we didn’t need to, was that it seemed wiser for me to have the baby outside St. Louis.

Jeremy’s accepting the job—our shared understanding of the move as my punishment—was another thing that eased the lingering tension between us. Though we didn’t acknowledge such distasteful facts, the earthquake in Haiti had also made things better between us, as had my father’s death. These global and personal tragedies made us glad not to be alone, glad to still be moving forward together as a family. Even so, I sometimes thought of what Jeremy had said to me the night we first slept together—
There’s nothing you need to be sorry for
—and of how it was no longer true. It would never be true again.

We saw Vi and Stephanie frequently that spring. In their presence, it could almost seem as if I hadn’t fucked up as colossally as I had. The irony was that the two of them—I assumed Vi had told Stephanie—were the only people other than Jeremy and me who knew that the baby I was carrying was Hank’s. But maybe we nevertheless found them comforting because Stephanie hadn’t been part of our lives before Vi’s prediction and was therefore a change for us, but not a bad change; enjoying her company didn’t represent pretense or loss.

Stephanie moved in with Vi in March, and when Vi told me she was about to, she said, “Don’t even make the joke.”

In April, at Owen’s first-birthday celebration, for which we invited over only Vi and Stephanie, Vi declined both cake and ice cream, and I was incredulous. “If you must know,” Vi said, “I’m doing Weight Watchers. And no offense, but that cake doesn’t look good enough to be worth the points.”

“You know, I was thinking you were thinner,” I said.

“Really?” Vi looked unabashedly thrilled. “I’ve lost six pounds.”

The next weekend, when they came over on Sunday so Stephanie and Jeremy could watch the Cards play the Cubs, I said, “Do you guys want to stay for dinner? It’s vegetable stir-fry, so it’s healthy.”

“Thanks, but Vi has promised to make me her famous herb-encrusted salmon tonight,” Stephanie said.

“Herb-encrusted salmon?” Jeremy turned to my sister and said, “She has you by the balls, Vi.”

There was a silence, and I wondered if Jeremy’s remark, which he’d meant as a teasing compliment to Stephanie, had come across as equating lesbians and men. And then, with complete aplomb, Stephanie said, “Jeremy, my hands aren’t that big.”

This wasn’t the only time I thought it, but it was the first time: that it was all right for me to leave St. Louis, because now there was someone there who loved Vi as much as I did. Before they went home that day, I said to her, “I think you’ll be okay after we’re in New York.”

“No shit I will.” Vi looked amused. “Please don’t tell me you’re getting sentimental about moving. Don’t you remember what you wished under the Arch? It’s finally coming true.”

“Well, not quite like I pictured.”

“Of course not.” Vi shrugged. “Not for me, either. No Peace Corps and no”—she held up her fingers—“ ‘husband.’ ” Then she patted my hand. “But don’t worry, Daze. It’s not like you can escape me. Whatever happens, wherever you go, you’ll always still be living in Sisterland.”

One Saturday morning
when Jeremy had taken the children to the zoo and I was running errands alone, I stopped at the Schnucks on Manchester, which I hadn’t been to since my father’s death. The store was crowded, and I didn’t realize until I was loading my food onto the conveyor belt that the cashier was an older woman with heavy makeup who’d helped us many times before.

She gestured toward my belly. “Honey, you’ve been busy!”

I smiled sheepishly. There was an embarrassment I now felt when Owen and Rosie were with me, which was most of the time, as if people were thinking,
Why doesn’t that woman stop having children?
Perhaps they assumed I was a member of a religious sect determined to build its population.

“Your dad’s not with you today?” the woman said.

I shook my head.

The woman smiled. “What a nice man he is.”

On a Monday
in mid-April, in the middle of story hour at the Richmond Heights library, I received a text from Hank:
Heard you’re expecting again. Congrats!
I was by then in the beginning of my third trimester, and I was huge. I was standing behind the group of children at the librarian’s feet, following Owen as he toddled among the shelves.

Just as jarring as this unexpected contact with Hank was the realization, as evidenced by the time stamp on the screen of my phone, that six months had passed since his previous text. He’d sent that one the morning after we’d had sex:
C coming home at noon. We should talk
. And to think that there had been a time I’d felt impatient on the mornings Amelia attended preschool; those few hours had seemed too long to wait before reconnecting with Hank. All this time later, Hank as a notion, an idea, made me feel a reflexive queasiness, as I might if thinking of Marisa Mazarelli, but when I actually recalled the hours we’d spent together at parks and in each other’s yards, it was hard not to miss him.

In the library, I was preoccupied enough, caught off guard enough, not to be gripped by nostalgia. I texted back,
Thanks
. He could ask, but I wouldn’t initiate the topic.

His next text didn’t arrive for several minutes:
Just want to confirm there’s nothing we should discuss
.

Thank God for texting, I thought. Because how capacious that single line in its invitation to lie without officially lying.

Nope
, I wrote,
nothing to discuss
.

Wow three kids
, he wrote back.

I know!
I wrote.
Hope you guys are well
. Which was as bland, as innocuous, as what I might have told a former co-worker or a person I’d known distantly in college. Five weeks later, on the day we left St. Louis, I still hadn’t seen Hank again.

For the most
part, the movers packed us. I insisted on transporting only our most fragile items: the antique perfume holder Vi had brought to the hospital when Rosie was born, a platter Jeremy’s brother and sister-in-law had given us that was painted with our names and the date and place of our wedding. The week before departing from St. Louis, after Jeremy did due diligence with
Consumer Reports
, we traded in both our cars and bought a minivan, a purchase Jeremy had mentioned first. We’d use it to drive to Ithaca, where it would become mine, and Jeremy would buy a sedan with snow tires.

Gabriel—Gabe—was born four days before his due date, on June 30, and we gave him the middle name Earl, after my father. Gabe’s skin at birth was only the slightest bit darker than Rosie’s and Owen’s had been, though he definitely had more hair, and even a few curls, to the delight of the nurses. He’s over two now, and he does have a different complexion than the rest of us; perhaps I think this only because I’m his mother, but I’d describe it as a golden glow. I can honestly say that he reminds me less of Hank than of Owen and Rosie when they were toddlers—Owen is now three, and Rosie is five—though sometimes Gabe makes an expression that causes me to gasp with recognition. At such moments, I wonder about my obligation not just to Hank but to Amelia as well. But I still believe that, at least for the time being, it’s best to do nothing. It would be foolish for me not to realize that the older Gabe gets, and the further he ventures into the world without us, the more likely he is to be perceived, accurately, as half black. I think, of course, of Dr. Jeff Parker—Scary Black Man—and I worry for Gabe; there are so many large and small uglinesses around race, and how can I realistically expect other people to be better than I myself have managed to be?

But for now, Gabe is just a toddler. He loves singing “The Itsy-Bitsy
Spider.” Outside, he passes me leaves and says, “Thank you.” In one of his books, there’s an illustration of a scarecrow, and he always points at it and says, “It’s Mama.”

Around Jeremy, I’ve always been more careful with Gabe than I was with Rosie or Owen—careful not to complain, mostly. Sometimes when Rosie and Owen were really tiny and waking up eight times a night, if I couldn’t take it anymore, I’d pass them off to Jeremy, telling him to go downstairs with them, or anywhere—I just needed to sleep. I never did that with Gabe, even when he and I were both in tears. When he was a newborn, I slept with him in my arms—not between Jeremy and me but between my body and the mini-crib we’d pushed up against our bed. I knew Jeremy didn’t consider this safe, so I did it without mentioning it to him, though surely he must have noticed. But Gabe was soon a better sleeper than Owen had been, and when Gabe was six months old, we moved him into his brother’s room. Jeremy is warm with Gabe, he is patient and silly and boisterous, and perhaps the fact that I detect the slightest withholding on Jeremy’s part, the absence of a reflexive rather than a decided love, is only my imagination; perhaps I am seeing what I’ve primed myself to see.

I wondered if Jeremy would want us to have another child, if he’d decide it could be a further means of chipping away at my infidelity, reinforcing the balance of our family as our family. I didn’t think I could stand it, but what could I say if he insisted? And so at my six-week postpartum appointment, I requested an IUD. But Gabe was only four months old on the autumn evening when Jeremy said he’d been thinking that over Christmas break, he should get a vasectomy.

This past spring, while I was changing Gabe’s diaper, he looked up at me, smiled, and said, “Mama’s other name is Daisy.” Vi and Stephanie have visited us a few times, so it’s not impossible that he’d heard Vi call me Daisy, but I don’t believe this is how he knew; when he spoke, my heart clenched. “Mama’s other name is Kate,” I said firmly. “It used to be Daisy, but now it’s Kate.” And then, a few weeks later, while the children and I were in the playroom off the kitchen, he turned to me and said, “Daddy is Rosie’s daddy.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“And Daddy is Owen’s daddy.”

“That’s true, too,” I said.

He said, “Who’s my daddy?”

I swallowed. “Daddy is your daddy. Daddy is all of your daddy.” I didn’t say anything to Jeremy about this specific comment or its larger implications—time will tell if I’m overreacting, though again, I don’t think I am. If it were to be only one of them, I’d have guessed Rosie, maybe because she’s a girl like me. But I have guessed wrong about many things.

My father had left no will, and after his estate went through probate, Vi and I received nineteen thousand dollars each. I had indeed ended up paying Emma Hall with a credit card—two credit cards, actually—and I used the money from my father to pay off the balances. I suspect Vi would have chipped in if I’d asked her to, but it felt like another kind of penance, given my complicity in everything, not to ask.

When people here in Ithaca learn where we moved from, they often mention Vi’s prediction, not knowing that Vi is my sister. They don’t remember her name, but they say something friendly and derisive, like “Ah, St. Louis, where the earth didn’t shake.” And though it feels slightly cowardly or dishonest, I merely nod and change the subject. I feel that Vi’s prediction is past and has concluded; I don’t want to mock or defend or explain it, not to anyone, not ever again.

How peculiar, that
morning we pulled out of our driveway on San Bonita Avenue for the last time, to think that Rosie and Owen wouldn’t remember living in this city, this house; if Rosie did remember, it would be only vaguely. There are, I have learned, so many gifts of motherhood, and so many sadnesses, and one of the sadnesses is the asymmetry of the family experience: that in spite of all the daily nuisances, and in spite of the unforgivable way I transgressed, these years of the children being little are the sweetest time in my life. And yet, for Rosie and Owen and Gabe, these won’t be their best years. They’ll grow up and go away, they’ll find spouses and have sons or daughters, and no matter how much we loved
them, they’ll probably recall their childhoods as strange and confusing, as all childhoods are. The happiest time in their lives, if they’re lucky, will be when they’re raising their own families.

Shortly before we left St. Louis, the day Jeremy cleaned out his office at Wash U, he came home from campus and passed me an envelope, saying, “I took this from your dad’s apartment that day.” He meant the day my father had died, and I must have made an alarmed expression because Jeremy added, “It’s nothing bad—just pictures.”