The Other Life (12 page)

Quinn took a deep breath, put her key in the lock, and opened the door.

“Mom?” she called weakly.

No answer.

She left her handbag in the drop spot by the front entry and wandered from the foyer to the kitchen. Empty. A copy of
The New York Times
, open to the crossword, was on the table, a pen lying across it. Quinn glanced at the page. The top half was completed in the familiar block letters of Nan’s handwriting.

She went into the dark family room, which had an open view of the sunlit studio behind it, and froze.

There, silhouetted by the sun, was her mother.

Nan was working on a painting and lost in the process, applying long, arching strokes to the right side of the canvas. Her dark, wild hair, pulled back in a clip, was longer than it had been the last time Quinn saw her. Soft music was playing, and Quinn spotted something new—an iPod nestled into a speaker. But everything else was so familiar, it was like . . . Quinn paused to finish that mental sentence. It was like coming home.

Unable to move or speak, she watched her mother work. Why had she never noticed her grace before? Had she always been this profoundly beautiful? Or was this love welling from a place so deep it seemed to come at Quinn from every angle?

Nan put down the brush and took a step back to look at the painting.

“Mom?” Quinn said. Her voice sounded so young to her. Like a child’s.

Nan turned around. She smiled and pushed a lock of hair from her face with her wrist. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

Quinn stepped forward into the studio. Clearly unruffled, Nan picked up a tube of paint and squirted a dab onto her palette.

“Give me a sec,” her mother said, as she dipped her brush into the dime of bright yellow paint. Nan didn’t usually object to being disturbed while she worked as long as she was allowed to finish whatever artistic thought she was expressing. She mixed the yellow with a smidge of brown until it turned an even mustard shade, then looked back at the painting and added the new color in short, pretty strokes. She stopped to assess what she’d done, added one more small flourish, and put the brush down. Quinn stood by, silently. Nan picked up a rag and wiped her hands, then leaned in to kiss her daughter on the cheek. She smelled of acrylic paint and her favorite scent, Shalimar.

“I was on my way to the mall,” Quinn said. She was suddenly nervous her mother would somehow intuit the truth about this visit, and it was something Quinn couldn’t possibly reveal. Telling her mother there was another reality in which she’d committed suicide was simply not an option.

“Coffee?” Nan asked.

Quinn exhaled, relieved. Her mother didn’t even sense her agitation, and Quinn realized it was a good thing she’d caught Nan in the midst of a creative flow, when her powers of maternal intuition were turned off.

“I don’t want to bother you,” Quinn said.

“I could use a break.”

She stared hard at her mother’s face. The flecks of amber in her green eyes made Quinn weak with longing. I need her, she thought, and she fought back tears.

“I’ll make the coffee,” Quinn said. “Finish what you were doing.”

Nan agreed, and Quinn hurried into the kitchen to compose herself. She splashed cold water on her face, coaching herself to get it together, then went through the mechanics of boiling water and counting scoops of ground coffee into her mother’s French press.

While she waited for the coffee, she sat at the table and stared at the crossword puzzle. It was such a familiar marker in the daily landscape of her life—those black and white squares with Nan’s artistic handwriting marching across and down, and always in blue ink—that in years past it had become practically invisible. Now even its ordinariness felt extraordinary, and it made Quinn’s throat swell.

She brought two cups of coffee into the studio—with sugar and milk for herself, black with sugar for her mom—and sat on the white futon sofa while her mother worked.

Quinn had thought she would find herself aching to talk to her mother about the baby, to cry on her shoulder about this thing that was just too big for her to handle alone. Instead, she just wanted to be near her, having a cup of coffee together, breathing the same air.

Quinn watched Nan work on the background of the painting, creating mood. She tried to discern the subject of the painting in the foreground, though it was still only a sketch. It looked to Quinn like a young woman sitting in a chair reading, her head down so that her hair covered her face. Quinn wondered if it was a self-portrait of the artist as a young woman. It did look as if it could have been Nan, though the figure in the sketch seemed to have straight hair, not a full frizzy mop, as her mother did. It occurred to Quinn that it could have been a portrait of her, but she didn’t want to ask. Her mother would tell her if she was so inclined.

“What did you need at the mall?” Nan asked, as she continued to work on the horizon.

“Um . . . just underwear for Eugene.”

Nan paused and looked over her shoulder at Quinn. She wasn’t buying it. “They don’t sell underwear in Manhattan?”

Quinn shrugged.

“You don’t need an excuse to come visit me.”

“I know.” It came out as a whisper.

Nan wiped her brush with a rag and dropped it into a can of water. She approached her daughter. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I just . . . I missed you.”

“We saw each other two nights ago.”

Quinn closed her eyes. She remembered it—the dinner she had missed because she wouldn’t leave Isaac. The memory was now perfectly clear. The restaurant was dark. She’d had tilapia. Her mother wore a blue peasant blouse and a handmade necklace of hammered brass. Hayden showed up late, without Cordell, and told Quinn he was “this close” to breaking up with him.

“I guess I just needed to get out,” Quinn said.

“You know what you need?” Nan asked.

“What?” Quinn said, happy to feed her mother the straight line. She was sure a sexual innuendo was coming.

“Boots,” Nan said.

“Boots?”

“New boots. There’s a sale at Nordstrom.”

Quinn smiled. This was exactly what she needed—a perfectly ordinary day out with her mother. Bliss. She stood. “You know, I probably
could
use new boots.”

“Then let’s hit the mall. And while we’re there maybe we’ll stop at Frederick’s and pick up some crotchless panties for you. You need to get laid, kiddo.”

Quinn laughed, and knew that Nan’s vitality would keep her so grounded that she would truly enjoy this outing. Her mother’s pull was just too strong for Quinn to float away and feel as if she were experiencing the shopping trip as an outsider looking in.

At the mall, they bought boots at Nordstrom and earrings from a kiosk. As they pored over the racks in the mall bookstore, an infant started to wail, and Quinn instinctively turned to look. The young mother tried to comfort the baby by rocking the stroller back and forth, but Quinn recognized the sound as a hunger cry and it created a knot of concern in her belly.

Nan looked at her daughter. “You okay?”

Quinn nodded.

“There’s something different about you today.”

“What do you mean?”

The infant continued to cry, and Nan followed her daughter’s eyes from the baby and back again. “Are you pregnant?” she asked.

“No!”

“Don’t lie. You can tell me to mind my own business, but don’t bullshit me.”

“Okay,” Quinn said. “Mind your own business. But I’m not pregnant.”

“You’re trying, aren’t you?”

“Mind your own business.”

“I knew it! You and Eugene are trying to get pregnant. You should fuck every other day all month. I read it in a magazine.”

“Mind your own business,” Quinn said again, laughing.

Nan grabbed her daughter and embraced her. “I never said this to you before, but if you make me a grandmother I’ll die happy. Oh, Quinn, my sweetheart, have a baby. Make me a grandma!”

A grandma, Quinn thought, and remembered those heartbreaking moments—usually around the anniversary of her mother’s death—when she would fall apart with longing. She wanted so badly for her mother to know her boy that she would cry and say to Lewis, “She would have loved him so much.” And he would stroke her gently and whisper back, “I know.”

Later, when they were having lunch in the food court, the woman with the hungry infant passed right by their table. Quinn could see now that it was a little boy, dressed in a tan stretchie with a blue train on the front. He was happy now and had pulled off one of his socks, exposing his fat little foot and kernel toes. Quinn thought she felt her womb contract.

She broke from her reverie and looked at her watch, realizing she had nearly forgotten she had another life to get back to.

“I have to go,” she said to her mother.

Nan was still working on her salad. “Right now?”

“Yes.”

“I thought we could stop at Betsey Johnson. Did you see that crazy purple thing in the window?”

“I don’t have time,” Quinn said. “I didn’t realize how late it was.” She stood.

“What’s the hurry?” Nan asked.

“Mom . . . please. Let’s go.”

“Can’t you tell me what the big rush is?”

“No.”

“Is this another ‘mind your own business’ moment?” Nan asked.

Quinn nodded. Nan stared at her daughter’s face for a few seconds, then picked up a napkin and dabbed her mouth. “If I didn’t know better,” she said, “I’d think you were about to turn into a pumpkin.”

 

 

BACK IN THE CITY, Quinn filled the bathtub and lowered herself into it, preparing for the trip back to her other life. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and submerged, counting backward from ten. Quinn waited to feel the familiar tug, but nothing happened. She came up for air, took a big gulp, and went back down. Nothing. A rising panic formed in her belly. Why wasn’t this working? She went down again, holding her breath as long as she could. This time she thought she felt a push, but it wasn’t strong enough to take her.

She sat up.
Think.
Quinn sensed that there was something she needed to change, something about the condition of the water wasn’t quite right. Was it too cool? Too warm?

She was already getting uncomfortably cold in the sitting water, but wondered if that push she’d felt was the result of the dropping temperature. Perhaps it just wasn’t quite cool enough. She turned on the cold water tap, shivering as the tub chilled even more. She shut off the water, took another gulp of air, folded her arms across her chest, and submerged. Almost immediately, she sensed it, and in another moment she was sucked into the dark journey back.

Like last time, she sensed a musty smell just before seeing the light of her laundry room through a fissure ahead. Was it her imagination, or had the opening gotten smaller? Quinn squeezed through, trying hard not to scratch herself again, but it was impossible. There was simply no way to get through without sustaining a wound. It didn’t matter, though. She had made it. She was back.

QUINN’S OBSTETRICIAN WAS PART OF A BIG OB-GYN PRACTICE, so the waiting room was always crowded with women. Most of them were pregnant, making Quinn’s heart feel heavier than her womb. The contrast between her despair and the genial bliss of the others was overwhelming. The women smiled at one another, some softly chatted. It was a cheerful sisterhood Quinn had belonged to just a few short weeks before. But now she felt isolated. She was living everyone’s worst nightmare.

A woman carrying a diaper bag and holding an infant car carrier entered and checked in at the desk, then took a seat next to Quinn. The baby nestled inside the high-tech basket was swaddled in a flannel receiving blanket with pink stripes. She looked about four weeks old, which meant that this was her mother’s postpartum checkup. At the end of the visit the doctor would examine the woman’s episiotomy, if she’d had one, and tell her she was ready to have intercourse again. Quinn remembered that examination after Isaac’s birth, and the fear she’d felt about how painful sex might be. Now it seemed such a quaint concern.

The baby fussed and the woman put down her magazine, unbuckled the infant’s strap, and lifted her from the carrier. With one hand, she opened her blouse and put the baby to her breast. Quinn was close enough to hear the newborn suck, swallow, suck, swallow in a rhythm so steady it was almost a purr.

Quinn fought the swell of self-pity that rose within like a tide and crashed in angry peaks. But at whom could she direct her fury? It wasn’t as if she could throw a tantrum that would convince the doctor to reverse her diagnosis.

After nursing the baby, the woman laid the tiny girl on her shoulder and rubbed her back, trying to coax out a burp. It was exactly what mothers did. They took care of their babies. If they were hungry, they fed them. Gassy, they burped them. Dirty, they changed them. Sick, they made them well.

Except Quinn might never be able to make her baby well. How could she possibly deal with that? A mother was supposed to fix things, to make everything right. It was a drive Quinn had felt even before becoming a mother. Now it was a force so powerful she couldn’t imagine being helpless in the face of her child’s suffering. How was it possible that Quinn didn’t have the resources to fix what was wrong with her daughter?

When she interviewed for her job at Baston’s Books, the human resources person had asked Quinn a number of standard questions designed to uncover personality traits. When she asked, “What is your biggest regret?” Quinn answered that she didn’t believe in regrets, explaining that she always learned from her mistakes. It was the correct response, the one outlined in all the books that coached on proper interview techniques, and Quinn really believed it.

Now, though, she had to ask herself whether she regretted leaving Eugene. Had she made a mistake? Was that the life she was supposed to have? Had choosing Lewis been some misguided decision she had made simply to prove her mother wrong? Maybe her baby’s deformity was the universe balking at her refusal to accept her true destiny.