The Hunger Moon (23 page)

She was staring down at the baby, waiting for Bryan to speak, to ask her what the baby had been doing with Eleanor, to ask her what was the meaning of this baby, anyhow? When he didn’t, she raised her eyes to look at him. He was watching Charlie nurse, a look of soft amazement on his face.

“Can I sit over there, closer to you two?” he asked. “I just want to look at him.”

She nodded.

They sat there like that for some minutes, Charlie drinking, Renata and Bryan looking down at him. When Charlie had begun to get his fill, he broke off nursing and smiled at his mother.

“Hi, baby,” she said back.

Then Charlie nursed again, stopping to smile, and to twist his head to look at Bryan. Finally he offered him a smile, too. When he was looking around more than he was nursing, Renata took him off the breast and pulled her shirt down. She held him up for Bryan to see. Charlie put his hands together at his mouth, looking solemnly at Bryan and suddenly belching hugely. They laughed.

“My God, he’s beautiful, Renata.”

“I know.” She still waited for Bryan to begin asking her questions she couldn’t answer, or to start berating her. Instead, he seemed content just to look at Charlie.

“Do you think I could hold him?”

Renata put the baby in Bryan’s lap, and he adjusted Charlie so that he straddled his knee, facing him. He began gently bouncing the knee, saying, “Hey, Charlie, you riding a horse?”

Charlie laughed out loud. Bryan was encouraged, and started spouting nonsense in that singsongy register that adults automatically use with babies. The baby chortled and waved his hands in
circles. Then Bryan played a game of offering his hair to the baby, which was as blond as Charlie’s and just slightly longer than Renata’s. Charlie grabbed fistfuls and tried to stuff it in his mouth. Renata watched them play, and began to relax. Bryan didn’t seem to be coming on strong. She was surprised at how good he was with the baby, and how interested he was in him. Finally, curiosity got the better of her.

“Why did you come?” she asked.

“I figured out I probably had a kid with you, Renata. That’s pretty big news to just ignore.” He looked up at her from playing with the baby. “It’s true, isn’t it? I’m the father?”

“Of course.”

They stared at each other for a moment. All her emotions were busy with the information that he might be here to interfere with her and Charlie. Her defenses were on high alert.

“When did you know?” she asked him.

“I’m not sure. It came in stages. When you wanted to break up, I thought you were just freaking out a little, a delayed reaction to your dad’s death. I was sure you just needed time. Then you moved, and it blew me away.”

“You didn’t act too upset when we broke up.”

“I wasn’t going to beg you to stay with me. I couldn’t see that working with you, anyway. I was going to give you time, see where you were at, and where I was at. But you didn’t tell me you were leaving town—you just left, and I had to hear about it from the people you worked with.”

She shrugged.

“After you had gone, all I could think about was why—what had I done to you? Things had been great—at least I thought so—and then you said you wanted to split up. I started going over everything. Like how your whole behavior seemed to change at the end—all the sleeping, the not eating. You quit smoking cold turkey, even though you had never talked about wanting to before. You made excuses for why you didn’t want to have a drink. And I couldn’t remember you having any periods at the end.”

“So, you knew I was pregnant when I left?”

“No, after. And I didn’t know for sure. It was a hunch. 1 kept thinking I’d drive up to Oregon and find your sister’s place, but the next thing I knew, I ran into Rick and he told me you moved to Boston. I couldn’t believe it.
Boston
. Totally the last place I would expect you to turn up.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Renata Rivera? Who turns on the heat if it’s fifty-five degrees outside? Who doesn’t own a single coat, or any shoe that’s not a sandal?”

“I own a coat now.” She knew it was a stupid remark. “So, Rick told you about the baby,” she said.

“Yeah. He called me up and said his friend Theo mentioned your cute baby boy, Charlie. Rick called
me
asking for details about the baby. Imagine how I felt telling him that’s the first I’d heard about him.” He looked at Charlie, who was hanging on to his finger, bending it back and forth with a furrowed brow of concentration. “Why, Renata? Why didn’t you tell me? What were you afraid of?”

Renata was waiting for this question, the one she didn’t know the answer to.

“I wasn’t afraid of anything. I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

“That’s such total bullshit. Did you think I wouldn’t have wanted you to have it?
Him
,” he corrected himself.

The answer was just the opposite. When she became pregnant, Renata had not only been sure she wanted to have the baby, but her intuition had warned her that Bryan would want the baby, too. And that frightened her. They hadn’t ever said what they meant to each other, or if they wanted to stay together. She remembered almost telling Bryan, and then thinking about all the choices and decisions they would have to hash through, and how, from Renata’s viewpoint at least, there were no satisfactory outcomes. She didn’t want to get married because she had to, like her parents did; nor did she want Charlie to have a father she wasn’t married to, and have her son always yearning for his father’s presence. Telling Bryan was irrevocable. She needed the
safety of her sister’s house to think things through, but by the time she got to Oregon, the distance back to her life in Venice seemed impossible to bridge. The weeks turned into months, and the letter she had toyed with writing was forgotten.

“Renata?” he prompted.

“No, Bryan, I thought you’d probably want me to have him. But I didn’t want to share him.” There. She had said it.

She expected him to get angry, but instead he looked as though he had received a blow.

“Do you have a choice?” he said quietly.

The challenge of this took her breath away.

Bryan started to say something, but shook his head in a disgusted way and stopped. Charlie released Bryan’s fingers and started to cry. Renata made a move to get him, but Bryan raised him upright against his shoulder, where Charlie promptly stopped crying and started looking around, grabbing a little bunch of Bryan’s shirt fabric to suck on. She was starting to be annoyed at how much authority Bryan was assuming with the baby in her own living room. She wished Charlie would really scream so that Bryan would have to hand him back, but the baby looked content, his head resting on Bryan’s shoulder.

He’s a total stranger to you, Charlie
, she told him telepathically, but Charlie just looked back at her and smiled.

“Renata, I’m not here to make your life miserable, or to harass you, or threaten you, or propose to you.” She snorted.

“What, you
want
me to propose to you?” he asked her.

“You just said you weren’t here to do that.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

“Fine. But Renata, for Christ’s sake, I’m a father. You didn’t decide to make me one, and maybe you wish I wasn’t, but I am. You can’t change that. Do you think Charlie wants you to change that? Have you for one second thought that he might like to know his father?”

“Of course I have,” she said scornfully. “It’s just that I wanted him to have someone he could depend on.”

“What do you mean by that?” he demanded.

She was silent.

“Renata, you can’t just drop these bombs and get away with them. Why don’t you think he could depend on me? What gives you the right to judge?”

“I can judge. It fell to me to judge. I carried the baby, I had him, I’ve been nursing him and caring for him, and it’s my job to judge.”

“All right, Your Honor. Why don’t you think I’m fit to be this baby’s father? In practice, I mean. Not you or anyone can change the fact that I’m his natural father.”

“For God’s sakes, Bryan, you were dealing cocaine behind the bar when I left Venice. You think that makes you a fit candidate to be a father?”

“A couple of times I did a guy a favor and made a few hundred bucks. That’s not exactly hard-core dealing, Renata. Besides, I don’t use it anymore. Not that I ever was into it heavy. You know that.”

“And you drink too much,” she said.

“So do you,” he countered.

“I don’t. I haven’t been drunk since—”
last night
, the sentence ended. Mercifully, he didn’t press.

“What else? That’s not it, and you know it, Renata.”

“I just wanted it simple. I was pregnant, fine. I was actually happy about it. It didn’t mean I wanted to be in a family.”

“Renata, you don’t get it. You and Charlie
are
a family. And even before I knew I had a son with you, he and I were family to each other. That’s the way it is. It’s what he deserves.”

“You didn’t know your father.”

“And you think I liked it that way? You think I would have chosen that?” Bryan’s expression was incredulous. “I don’t care who my father may have been—not knowing is the worst thing. My mother didn’t tell her relatives who my father was, and she didn’t
stick around long enough to tell me. If she had, I might at least have had one parent.”

“Well, what about your mother?”

“What about her?” He suddenly had a little of the hurt, child-like expression that she knew.

“She tried to kill you,” Renata said, her voice breaking. It didn’t matter to her if what she said made sense. The image of his mother jumping off the roof represented a curse to Renata, and she was afraid that the seeds of its craziness or evil were tucked into Bryan’s even row of stitch marks.

“My mother was sick, Renata. She was a manic-depressive.” Bryan looked patient.

Renata watched the baby play with the sofa pillow over Bryan’s shoulder.

“How do you know you’re not like her,” she said, her voice a near whisper.

Bryan stared at her blankly.

“How do you know you won’t be bad for him, even if you don’t want to be?”

Bryan looked at her helplessly for a long minute. “How does anyone know? How do
you
know?” he said.

Renata felt a chill, as if someone had suddenly opened all the windows in the apartment. She didn’t have a scar, a place for the curse to raise pink welts that someone else could trace with a finger. But did she have the seeds of her parents’ black disease? Frank and Mary Rivera had nurtured decay and chaos. They loved pain. They didn’t grab hold of her and Marcia and jump out of a window, but in a sense they should have. Because it would have been quicker.

But all she said was, “Because I know. Because there’s no way on earth I could ever harm him. Because I’m going to try to be good for him.” By the time she finished saying it, her voice was trailing away, her stomach turning with the memory of last night.

“Let me try, too,” he said.

W
HEN
E
LEANOR GOT BACK
to her own apartment, it was as if years had passed. She looked with disbelief at the unmade bed from which June had roused her. How long ago had that been? An hour and a half? She shook her head. Incredible. She had been somewhere in that time, somewhere distant and inviting. She couldn’t recollect it, as you can’t get back to a dream, but she knew that she had traveled somehow.

She had had that baby with her, and then something had come over her, another life, and through it all she knew she must hold on tight to the child. But it had been a mistake to take charge of him in the first place. About herself she had no worries. She even welcomed the travel, the falling back through floors of time. But she mustn’t put herself in that position again. She must be careful of forming ties that would hold her responsible to the young. Something was receding in her, like a tide backing away from shore, and she didn’t want to be held back by any responsibilities. She had fulfilled her duties: a career and a marriage; three children launched into their lives.

She was tired, so tired. And her head was pounding. And then there was the nausea, which had come upon her so suddenly when she was in the car.

Eleanor removed her shoes and crawled into bed without undressing. She needed to rest. Gradually a tingling spread through her, a very pleasant sensation. Then the lightheadedness again, but she was in bed now. She could release herself to the spinning, whirling her through time. Scenes floated in her mind. Helen and Janice and Peter would be coming today. She hoped not to disappoint them, to be well enough to leave her bed, but there was this spinning, this irresistible spinning.

When she gave in to it, the paper dimensions of chronology disappeared as if eaten by flame. Faces and conversations buzzed in her head—her mother, Charlotte, teasing her for her narrow hips when she was thirteen as the cotton slip brushed down over her face and shoulders, falling straight. Her father, marching around the house with Eleanor at five on his shoulders, singing, “Hey Boom Bah! We are a parade! Hey Boom Bah! Let’s drink some lemonade!” Her sister, whispering to her in their dark bedroom after she had received her first beau in the parlor, a grown-up visit, with Hetty bringing in cordials and leaving the door half-open behind her, as their mother had instructed. Isabel telling Eleanor every detail of how she had been kissed—furtively, as the young man took his leave, his mustache and wet mouth, his hands gripping Isabel’s shoulders. How Eleanor had rubbed her hands over the flannel of her own nightgown sleeves, imagining it. Then Grandmother Donleavy’s frightening face framed with a black crepe bonnet. Then Hetty rolling out circles of dough for Thanksgiving pies. Then the faces of her own children, turning toward her as they woke, blank as pools of water. Then Robert’s face, saying something she couldn’t make out because of the sudden humming in her ears. She strained to hear him, but she could only read his lips mouthing the familiar syllable, “El,” his nickname for her, before it became darker and she could barely make him out—he was fading so—but he extended his hand. Could she go to him, could she really go?