The Stuff That Never Happened (10 page)

We were the helplessly proud but humble parents, beaming when, alone in our bedroom at night, the pillow talk turned to our children’s accomplishments. Sure, there were Sophie’s successes, but also Nicky was showing himself to be quite a sportsman, if not the scholar she was—and I remember how it would sometimes feel like we were so lucky that our DNA, mingled together, had done more than either of us could have done separately.

And then, during her senior year, Sophie met Whit. He was from a wealthy family in New York, a film student and photojournalist, the kind of fast-talking, all-balls-in-the-air kind of guy who had so many plans and dreams and ideas it was as though he couldn’t hold them all in his head. Grant, with his more plodding, deliberate way of going about life, disliked him almost immediately, but I knew my daughter, and I could tell that Sophie was determined to get this guy, that there was something about his wild-eyed fascination with everything that called to something deep inside her. And almost immediately she did get him. By Christmas of her senior year, they had fallen in love, and he came to stay with us through part of the break, and then she went to New York to meet his family—and then suddenly, by summer they both had managed to get jobs at a magazine in the city.

“Next target: the Big Apple,” I said. “Move over, Rhode Island. She’s working her way west.”

Grant pronounced it a disaster.

“God damn it. She can’t go to New York with him. She barely knows him,” he said, and he didn’t even laugh at the irony of the thing when I reminded him that had been exactly our situation. Hadn’t we—I—come from even farther away, from across an even greater cultural divide, to show up in New York back in the seventies?

He just pursed his thin lips and made a weird noise in the back of his throat.

“Hey, don’t you think she can hold things together better than
we
did?” I said. “And look at us today—still here!” The only way I knew for sure that Grant had heard me was that he so studiously pretended that he had not. The little vein pulsing madly right at his temple was the only outward sign. I recognized that vein from previous encounters with unpleasant truths.

But then New York wasn’t even the worst of what he was asked to accept. Whit wanted to do documentaries, and by the following fall, Sophie told me he had lined up a film crew and equipment and financing and was planning to do a film about an orphanage in Brazil. This was a place his roommate had told him about, a one-of-a-kind institute where volunteers could come and help the third world street children who find their way there, throwaway kids who otherwise would have died on the streets. Whit wanted to do a film about the way this orphanage had changed lives—both those of the kids and of the volunteers from high-income families in the United States who had had their eyes opened to poverty.

And Sophie was going with him. She told us she would write stories about the place and the people, and he would film the journeys of the volunteers and how the experience had changed them. They’d live on the property, writing and filming for at least six months; the directors were psyched about the publicity, and Whit had gotten backing from some real heavy hitters his father knew. Everything was happening fast, things were just falling into place, she said, and from the tone of her voice, I could tell that she was overexcited and scared out of her mind and also that nothing was going to stop this.

“There are way too many exclamation points in all our conversations about this,” I told her calmly. “Can’t we take it down a couple of notches and just talk about it realistically, problems and all?”

“The only
problem
, if you must know, is that Dad doesn’t want me to do it. He’s e-mailing me every day telling me that I shouldn’t just go along on Whit’s trip, that it’s not really my project because I didn’t think it up, and that I’m getting in way over my head, and I need to think smarter.”

I sighed. That was always his mantra for the kids:
Think smarter
. I’d hear him shouting it at them out in the driveway the year he was coaching the basketball team, and then again when he’d review their history assignments with them, or test them on physics questions or algebra equations, or when they were ice-skating on the pond or downhill skiing.
Think smarter
. What the hell does that really mean, anyway? Why is
that
the thing to send children out into the world with? If I were summing up my worldly philosophy in a two-word command, it would most likely be,
Be real
.

Naturally Sophie wanted me to run interference for her and Whit with Grant. As if I could convince him of anything. He and I were already arguing about the trip and what it meant. I accused him of wanting everybody he ever loved to stay in New Hampshire, close by where he could keep an eye on them; he said I saw romance in even the most wrongheaded and dangerous schemes, and that I would think it was equally perfect if Sophie had insisted on signing up for the space program or joining the circus or—or taking a time machine back to the Stone Age. He said she’d never shown the slightest inclination to go make documentary films in Brazil until this guy came along, that it wasn’t her project, and that she was just an appendage. Is that what I wished for our daughter’s life, that she would become an afterthought or an appendage to some man? And how were we supposed to believe that Whit even knew what he was doing? He was a spoiled rich guy who’d never been told no, and this wasn’t even his money he was using—and on and on and on.

And then suddenly one day, in the middle of the fight, he cleared his throat and announced he’d feel better if they at least got married first. It would prove Whit’s commitment or something like that. I knew what he was doing: throwing down the gauntlet, putting everything he had on the roulette wheel, sure that Whit and Sophie weren’t that serious. I did not approve.

But they said yes. I’ve often wondered why they listened to him; after all, they were already living together in New York, and they were both old enough to do as they pleased. Sophie told me on the phone one day that her father had been right to insist on this, and that they were going to do it.

“If this is just to get your father’s blessing for the trip, you do not have to get married,” I whispered into the phone, which was subversive of me, but I thought it needed to be said. “I hate to think of you tying yourself to this guy just because your father says you have to. That is not a good enough reason to start your life together.”

I couldn’t believe how much I sounded like my mother. Or how much Sophie sounded like me.

“No, no, of course that’s not the
only
reason,” she said. “God, Mom. It’s the reason we’re doing it now, but I know we would have eventually gotten married anyway. Besides, I
want
to get married! I think it’s a great idea. I want to have a wedding in the backyard under the rose arbor and I want to invite everybody from high school and make it a big party, and I want to wear a dress that has lace and pearls on it and a big veil. Okay? I want a really, really big veil.”

And so that’s how it happened that we had a big wedding last June—backyard reception, everybody from high school, everybody from
elementary school
even, and a huge white dress with pearls and lace and a big, big veil, father giving her away, flower girls, ring bearer, the whole bit. And if Whit seemed a little less than excited over all the wedding details, if instead he concentrated exclusively on the details of their Brazilian venture and had to be reminded to go out and buy rings and rent a tuxedo and line up a best man—well, I figured it was just the way his personality worked. He was a documentary man and had a lot on his mind, was the way I saw it.

But then—in September, just when we were all used to the idea of the marriage and the trip and the prospect of doing without Sophie for months on end—there was another surprise.

“I don’t want you to tell anybody, but I started a baby,” she said to me on the phone one day.

“You what? Wait.
You
started it? Did you have Whit’s help at least?”

“Well, you wouldn’t think so, the way he’s acting about it.”

Then it hit me. I sometimes have a nine-second delay, like all your better talk shows. “Oh my God. Sophie! You’re pregnant?”

“Apparently I am.”

“So then this wasn’t … planned?”

“No, of course it wasn’t planned,” she said, and laughed. I couldn’t get over the laughter. “It was a complete and total failure-of-birth-control surprise.”

“But I thought you were on the pill.”

“Well, sure, I
was
on the pill, but I was having some side effects, so my doctor said she’d give me a different pill, and then she called the wrong pharmacy for me, only I didn’t know, and when I went to my own pharmacy, they didn’t know what had happened but they said they could get it, and then I had to work late every night because the magazine was shipping and so I missed, like, just the first week, but I thought it would be all right, but then she said—”

“Sophie. Sophie. It’s okay. I get the idea. An administrative failure of birth control.”

“And totally not my fault.”

“Well …”

“Mom! It was not my fault.”

Except, darling, that there are other forms of birth control besides the pill. There are condoms, you know
. But really—what’s the point in lecturing? Instead, I said, “So. What does this mean for the trip?”

“Well, I don’t want to go to South America and have a baby there,” she said. “At an orphanage? Are you kidding me?”

“And what about Whit? What does he think?”

“Well,” she said. “I don’t really know yet, because we haven’t talked about it. I think maybe he’ll want to postpone the trip until next year, and we can take the baby along, too. Then I think it would be fun—living in South America!”

“Are you going to propose that?”

“Propose what?”

“Waiting. For a year.”

“I think it would be better if he came up with that idea. Don’t you? Since he’s the one who hired the crew, he’s the one that’s going to have to figure out what everybody is doing next year. Don’t you think this is enough advance notice that they can change things? I mean, the trip isn’t for three months.” Then she got quiet for a few long moments. I could hear her sucking in her breath, the gravity of the situation hitting her. Then she said, “If he does have to go, that’s perfectly fine, too. I’ll be very mature and understanding.”

So that’s how it happened that she stayed in New York, turning down our offer to come home and wait in New Hampshire for the baby to be born. And that’s how Whit took off for South America with his film crew and his father’s friends’ money, a married man determined to follow his plan despite all the obstacles that had been put in his path.

I don’t say this to too many people—especially not the people in my family—but I feel some admiration for a person who can do that, who can be unwavering in the face of plans changing and people screaming and crying and threatening and acting as though everything has gone totally to hell.

And then I remember that it’s my daughter he’s disappointing, and I feel a little less sure.

SOPHIE AND I snuggle down under the covers and watch the last hour of
Sleepless in Seattle
, and then later we’re hungry so I get up and make us some soup and more tea. I’ve no sooner gotten in bed than my cell phone rings, and it’s Nicky with, “Hey, Mamalu. I just called home and Dad told me you’re with Sophie. He said there’s some kind of emergency. What’s going on?”

I fill him in, and he says, “So why isn’t Whit going to come back and take care of her?”

“He will when he can,” I say, and Sophie looks at me.

“Dad’s really pissed at him, you know.” He’s eating something crunchy while he talks, as usual. “I think he’d like to put a contract out on him.”

“It’s going to be fine,” I say. “Nobody’s going to put a contract out on anybody.”

“Yeah, well, he’s in some kind of sucky mood. I told him about the hiking I’m doing this weekend up in the White Mountains, and he said he doesn’t want me to go—get this—because he can’t have two children in mortal danger, especially when you’re not even there to do half the worrying for him. So what’s up with that? I can’t live my life because Sophie’s baby is giving her trouble?”

“Oh, Nicky. Just cut your father some slack. He’s working on his book and he’s crabby right now.”

“Yeah, he’s like, ‘Why is it always about life and death with you?’ He has no trust in me, Mom. He thinks I don’t have any sense.”

“He knows you have sense.”

“That’s what he
said
. I’m just going by what he told me. I’m supposed to sit in my dorm room until this baby gets born, apparently. Maybe I shouldn’t even eat these pretzels, ’cause you know, what if I choke on them, and then Dad would have a tough time.”

“Nicholas, let me just ask you something. Does everything have to be right on the edge for you? Could you maybe just do some winter hiking that doesn’t involve ice and mountain peaks and going out all alone to prove you can do it? Just for a bit?”

“I wasn’t going to be all alone anyway. Christ! What do you people take me for?”

“You forget that we’ve known you your whole life.”

“I think this is displaced anger because Whit won’t come home.”

“Displaced anger?” I can’t help but laugh. “Where did you get that from?”

“Psychology class. I
do
learn stuff here, you know.”

“I know you do. Listen,” I tell him. “I’ve gotta go help Sophie. You take care of yourself and try not to slip through the ice, okay?”

“You either,” he says.

AT SOPHIE’S insistence, I sleep in her bed next to her that first night instead of going to the living room ten steps away, but truthfully, I’m glad because it turns out that once the lights are off, I discover that I need to watch her every second. I don’t get much sleep at all; the radiators, controlled by some mysterious cold-blooded building superintendent who must think everybody is freezing, keep letting out blasts of suffocating heat and then making high-pitched clanging sounds, like Chinese gongs at the new year. The bed is small and hard and unfamiliar, and a slice of bright light from the street falls right across my face. But mainly I stay awake because I can’t seem to stop my mind from racing, and besides that, I just need to stare at Sophie’s face, which is as white as the moon, with dark smudges under her eyes. Even in sleep, she looks worn out. How can you be both tired
and
asleep? At one point I get so neurotic that I reach over and take her pulse while she sleeps, just for information’s sake.