We Are Here (22 page)

So instead she walked down the avenue, dawdling at each street crossing, and bought an Americano from the kiosk at the corner of Bryant Park. She kept her eye on the smeary plastic window between her and the server as she waited for her change—just as she’d kept glancing in the windows of stores and banks for the last four blocks—but saw nothing behind her except solid citizens going about theirs and other people’s business.

She took the drink down one of the plaza’s side paths, under the trees. She found one of the small, rickety metal tables and sat down at it.

She waited and she watched.

And began to feel foolish. Nobody came into the park that looked like the figure she’d glimpsed. Just office workers with deli boxes, tourists, and some middle-aged guy ten feet away, sitting holding a Kindle that didn’t seem to be commanding his full attention. Otherwise it was just a park, and not very warm.

Eventually she pulled out her phone and discovered there was a message on it—left forty minutes before, when she’d been hurrying out of the alley. It was from John, asking where she was and if she wanted to have lunch. She was about to call back when she realized something had changed in her environment.

Someone had sat on the opposite side of the table.

A young woman, tall, with dark hair, wearing a dark coat with a red dress underneath. She had high cheekbones and a strong nose, red lips, and big, dark eyes.

“You can see me, can’t you?” the woman said.

Her voice was soft, a little fuzzy around the edges, as if made up of facets of background noise.

Kristina stared at her. The girl seemed curious, but also wary, as if it was Kristina who’d been following
her
. “You can, can’t you?” she insisted, still quietly.

“Yes. Of course.”

“But … you’re real.”

“Well, yeah,” Kristina said, with no idea what she was agreeing to. “Who … are you?”

The girl made a puzzled face, as if unwilling to let the first matter go. “I’m called Lizzie.”

“I’m Kristina.”

“I know.”

“How … how do you know?”

The girl looked sheepish. “I heard your boyfriend call you that. He is your boyfriend, yes? John?”

“Yes. But
when
did you hear this?”

The girl seemed more nervous, glancing over Kristina’s shoulder, and didn’t answer.

“When?” Kristina pressed her. “Were you on our roof? Why are you following Catherine?”

The girl stood up. “I’ve got to go.”

She walked quickly away without looking back.

Kristina jumped to her feet to follow but realized someone else was now standing by the table. It was the man she’d noticed earlier, reading a Kindle.

“Hey,” he said.

Kristina glared at him. “Yes, what?”

He smiled. “Saw you sitting by yourself, wondered if you might like a little company.”

“No,” Kristina said.

“You sure?”

Kristina took a couple of steps past, trying to see where the girl had gone. She thought she got a glimpse of a dark coat at the top of the steps at the back of the library, but it could have been the shadow of the trees. The man was still standing by the table hopefully.

“What do you mean ‘by yourself’?”

“Hey, it’s fine,” he said. “I do it all the time. A bit of peace is good for the soul, right? Just, sometimes it means people might want to hook—”

Kristina threw a look that made him take a hurried step backward, and walked away dialing her phone.

“Hey,” John said, when he picked up. “Fancy some—”

“They just made contact,” she said.

David and Dawn held hands in the middle of the couch. Dr. Chew sat on the other side of the desk, peering over his glasses at a scattering of papers across his desk. There was silence. David was reminded of the judges on reality television shows and the insufferable way they milk the moments of truth in which (according to prearranged and carefully constructed narratives) one hapless individual is eliminated from the competition, removing them forever from the hungry gaze and fickle affection of millions of box-watching morons. David
thought
they’d been given the news during the ultrasound itself, but now he wasn’t sure. He could feel Dawn’s fingers gripping his, and forced himself to breathe.

He didn’t need this.

Not this morning. Not ever. They’d sat on this couch in exactly this position eight months before and been told that the woman wielding the ultrasound probe had misread the grainy black-and-white images on her screen—whoops!—and the little blob she’d cheerfully pointed out as showing clear indications of life had in fact been manifesting signs of being rather dead.

Did Chew remember that meeting? Presumably in a technical sense—it must be there in his notes—but did he recall it emotionally, the impact it’d had on this particular couple among the hundreds he saw? No. That style of remembrance wasn’t the physician’s job. For Chew, news was a subset of uninflected information. Somewhere in his mind there would probably be a formalized distinction between “good” and “bad” types of news—so he could differentiate when events occurred to someone within his own family or tribe—but he evidently didn’t allow this to unbalance a dispassionate attention to whatever facts happened to obtain at any given moment. This doubtless made him an excellent physician.

It made him a mighty crappy news bearer, however.

Eventually he raised his head and smiled.

Even this wasn’t enough to break the tension or give a clear indication of the direction in which the sheet of glass between their ignorance and his knowledge was going to break. The smile could equally have been one of affirmation of good, or soberness before the delivery of yet more bad. It could betoken nothing more than a fleeting happy recollection of the fact that he was due to get steak for dinner.

David believed he’d give the man maybe three, four more seconds, and then he was going to let go of Dawn’s hand, leap over the desk, and beat the guy senseless with his angle-poise lamp.

“Everything’s fine,” Chew said.

Dawn remained rigid. David let out an explosive breath, and this time when Dawn gripped his hand it was to give rather than seek reassurance.

Having delivered his showstopper, Chew dispensed with the suspense and got on with it. “As I indicated during the ultrasound, it all looks good and there’s nothing in the numbers to make me think, ah, otherwise. It’s going to be hard for you, I know, with your history, but right now you should feel happy that things are going well. Really. Happiness and calm are very positive during pregnancy. I believe that.”

Dawn started thanking him profusely. Chew waved this off as if it was a common but regrettable misunderstanding of his power, and shuffled the papers into a neater pile. “Have you started thinking about a name?”

Silenced, Dawn shook her head, blinking rapidly. “Well, no,” David said for her, and with some surprise. “Not after what happened the last couple of times.”

“Of course,” Chew said. “Very understandable. And it’s early days. Always wise to remain poised in the face of fate. Actually, the question was my clumsy way of telling you something. The ultrasound was unclear, so the technician didn’t mention it until I’d had a chance to examine the still images properly. But it’s clear to me.”

He paused, frowning down at the pieces of paper in front of him, the very picture of someone witnessing a lack of clarity.

Then he looked up and smiled more broadly. “You’re going to have twins.”

They walked out of the hospital in a dream, still holding hands. After delivering the end-of-episode kicker, Chew had waxed cautious, warning that the passage of twins into the world was more arduous and uncertain and noting that—speculative though it could only be at this stage—though both showed a strong heartbeat, one of the fetuses appeared more developed, a common situation that would hopefully right itself.

This Columbo-style zinger had caused a familiar sinking feeling in David’s stomach (nothing was
ever
simple, was it) but he’d decided to take Chew’s businesslike delivery of this caveat as a good sign.

“I’m so glad you came home last night,” Dawn said, as they drew to a halt at the car.

“Me too.” And he was, though he felt bad about positioning this as a desire to make sure he was on time for the consultation. “I still can’t believe it.”

“Believe it, Daddio,” said Dawn. “I guess I’ll get back to school. Shall I drop you home?”

“Think I’ll stop by and get a coffee first. Not sure I’ll get much done for an hour or two anyway.”

Dawn started nodding, eyes brimming. David nodded back, equally senselessly, thinking how much harder it was to respond to good news. When they’d walked out of this hospital after the second miscarriage, it had been easy. They’d cried and held each other and said this wasn’t the end, that they deserved a child and it would happen somehow. With bad news the bad thing has already happened. Hearing something good, or its promise, leaves you out on a limb, even
more
at the mercy of fate. It would be that the Bad Thing is still out there waiting to happen, enjoying its own shitty piece of showboating, waiting for maximum impact before revealing that, I’m so sorry, Dawn and David are out of the reproduction competition for good, but please give them a big hand.

Then David reached out for her, and they held each other and cried. News is news, and our bodies and minds respond much the same whether it’s good or bad.

Dawn dropped him off on Main and then cruised off in the direction of the school, driving at about half her usual speed. David didn’t think this was conscious caution, more likely that she hadn’t stopped running the consultation over in her mind. He watched her to the end of the street and saw her indicate properly and was reassured she’d get to school without sailing serenely off the road into a house.

He hit the late-morning rush at Roast Me, and only as he waited in line did he realize he was going to have to say something to Talia about her book. He found it hard to remember much about it today, except that he’d been enjoying it. Hopefully that would do—along with something he recalled thinking during his last stretch of reading, after meeting Maj in Kendricks, which was that she could rein back on the fantasy elements and present it as something rather more edgy and urban, if she chose. Not that she’d be likely to, but saying this would at least prove that he’d been thinking about it.

When he’d arrived home at eleven the night before, Dawn was still awake. He’d warned her by text that he’d changed his mind and wasn’t staying in the city after all, and she evidently felt this constituted a sufficient reversal to require debriefing. She sat up in bed as he told her that he and his friend had had a great conversation and would keep in touch, but he’d decided it was more important to ensure he was there for the scan rather than taking a risk with a tight train schedule the next morning. She nodded thoughtfully, as if hoping he’d gotten enough out of the trip, but he could tell she was pleased.

His sleep was deep and dreamless. After breakfast, Dawn led him up to the third bedroom and showed him what she’d achieved. Just about everything in the room had been thrown away, put downstairs ready for transportation to Goodwill, or otherwise made to vanish. The only stuff remaining was a small pile of boxes holding things that David had never unpacked since he moved to Rockbridge. He’d agreed to perform triage on this as soon as possible—hoping that he wouldn’t be coming back to the house later in the day knowing it wouldn’t be necessary.

Now, he guessed, it really was.

“Hey, big-shot,” Talia said, when he got to the head of the line. “S’up? Finished your book yet?”

“Not so much. I’m enjoying yours, though.”

“Really?”

David wouldn’t have believed that Talia could look vulnerable. “Really. It’s very good. I mean, I don’t know the genre, but heck, I’m loving it, so that’s probably an even better sign, right?”

Talia tried to look like she didn’t give a crap but couldn’t pull it off. “Where are you up to? No, don’t tell me. Dumb question. It’s a big book, I know.”

“Dawn’s pregnant,” he said.

He’d had no idea he was going to say this. He wasn’t sure he’d have called Talia a friend, and certainly wouldn’t have pegged her as the first person with whom he’d share this news. As soon as he’d said it, though, and seen the look on her face, he realized that yes, she was.

“Fuck me sideways,” Talia said quietly.

“Yeah.”

“No way.”

“Way. It’s early days, but …”

She carefully put his cup to one side and then lunged across the counter to grab him around the shoulders with both arms. She was strong and heavy and her grip so fierce that she managed to lift both his feet clear off the floor. “Holy crap,” she whispered in his ear. “Chalk one up for the good guys, huh?”

Then she dropped him again, got businesslike with taking his money, and told off the guy in line behind David for grinning at them, though she didn’t manage to stop smiling during any of this.

As David turned from the counter and looked for somewhere to sit, he realized he was grinning too.

He chose a table by the window and flicked through the local alternative newspaper, remaining untouched by its demands for his attention and empathy. Usually he didn’t care about what the town’s handful of hippies felt, but right now he wouldn’t have minded a distraction.

He couldn’t ignore what had happened the day before, though it felt far less tangible now that he was back in Rockbridge. He remembered being in Union Square and in Dib’s. He remembered what happened in the church later, too. He’d barely been introduced to the priest before the guy in the coat had arrived and started shouting. When a
second
unpredictable-looking stranger breezed in, David decided he’d had quite enough weirdness for one day. Waiting for the right moment and then scooting out of the place and all the way to the station was, he believed, the most actualized thing he’d done in his entire life.

And yet none of it seemed real.

In his mind’s eye it felt like something he could have made up, a daydream or speculative plot line for which he had no idea of what-happens-next. And he was okay with that. Plot lines, he knew all too well, could be jettisoned. You could decide they led nowhere good and elect to strike them from the story.