Why had he done it? In Mary’s experience many people claimed to have epiphanies when nothing of the kind occurred—insight filled you slowly, like sips of water from a cup—but that is what happened to her, parked in front of the pink house. Her father had wanted her to know that he loved her, of course, but also what such love as his contained: that it was made of iron, and could work without ceasing or rest. Though he lacked the words to say this, he wanted to tell her it was all for her, everything he did in the world; whatever happened in her life, there had been one such person. She knew this, as she also knew that the pink house was a monument to this memory; that was why she had come. She hadn’t knocked on the door, or even gotten out of the car. The house was inside her, that place in her heart where she was still a tiny girl, and to enter it would have stolen this feeling from her.
Mary reached under the table and found O’Neil’s hand. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not really so bad to be here,” O’Neil said. “I only wish the food wasn’t so weird. I wanted you to have a nice meal.”
They managed to eat a respectable amount of salad before the entrée arrived: braised medallions of venison with cranberries and lemongrass, served on a bed of buckwheat couscous. After the pansies it was surprisingly good, and they ate hungrily, even O’Neil. By this time it was after ten and most of the other tables were empty. O’Neil began to talk freely about his memories of the house and the town, as he had not done since they’d arrived the day before. The stories he told were happy, and Mary understood then that part of his pleasure was his invisibility—it had been that way for her—and he would neither tell the owner who he was nor try to go upstairs. And yet she knew that was what he truly wanted: a few moments alone, in his old room.
They were the last to leave the restaurant. Outside, the winter sky was hung with a dense tapestry of stars. She waited until O’Neil was buckled in before she announced her intentions to return to the restaurant to use the bathroom.
O’Neil looked at her with a puzzled expression. How, she wondered, could he possibly fail to know what she was about to do? “The motel is only five minutes.”
“I don’t think I can wait,” she said, and got out of the car.
She found the dining room empty, as she had hoped. Their table had already been cleared and laid out with clean linen and silverware for the next night. From the kitchen she heard the sound of pots clattering in the sink and running water, and country music playing on a radio. She waited a moment at the door to see if anyone had detected her return, then stepped over the velvet rope and climbed the stairs.
The hallway was dark, but as her eyes adjusted she saw five doors, all closed. There were three bedrooms, she knew—O’Neil had given her the basic layout—plus a bathroom and a linen closet. Cardboard boxes were stacked along the wall, and at the far end of the hall she saw a small table with a telephone on it. It was an old-style rotary phone; probably it had been there since O’Neil was a boy. She had already guessed that the chef and his wife lived up here. Turned around in the darkness, Mary had lost track of which door was which, but she guessed and opened the second one on the left.
The room was small and square, and a night-light glowed on the wall above a baby’s crib. Mary stepped inside. The air was warm and sweet, like clean laundry. She saw a bureau and a changing table, and a bookshelf with toys—dinosaurs and trucks, a baseball glove, the kinds of things a boy would like. What was she doing in here? And yet she could not remove herself; the urge to remain was irresistible, as if she were soaking in a bath. She stood another moment, tasting the air, then approached the crib where the little boy was sleeping.
It was then that she saw the blinking baby monitor on the bureau. Mary’s heart froze with panic, but it was too late—she had been detected. She heard footsteps running up the stairs, and then a voice, slicing through the darkness.
“What are you doing in there?”
It was the woman who had served them dinner. She pushed past Mary into the room, placing herself between Mary and the crib.
“I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I was looking for the bathroom. Nobody was downstairs.”
“I thought you left,” the woman said sternly. “It says private, you know. Private means something to most people.”
The baby had begun to fuss in its crib. The woman turned away from Mary and bent over the railings to lift him into her arms. It was then that Mary saw that it wasn’t a baby at all, but a much older child—a boy in Barney pajamas, perhaps as old as five. His eyes were closed, but his mouth, which was large and wet, twisted with his soft cries. He laid his head over her shoulder; his bare feet hung nearly to the woman’s knees and made a series of jerky movements. Mary noticed things in the room she somehow had not seen before: a tiny wheelchair parked beside the bureau, a white box with tubes and dials that looked medical, a shiny chrome stand for an IV. Even the crib was different—much larger, like a raised bed with bars.
The woman smoothed the child’s hair. “Mummy’s here,” she cooed. “No bad dreams, no bad dreams.”
Mary stood in the doorway. “I truly am sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to wake him.”
“He’s deaf.” The woman looked at Mary then, fixing her with a firm gaze. “It’s not even words he hears, just a vibration.”
Outside, O’Neil was waiting in the Toyota, the engine idling. He was gripping the wheel tightly, as if he couldn’t wait to drive away.
“All set,” she said.
He looked at her as if he was about to speak, then put the car in gear. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime,” O’Neil said.
In the early morning, before O’Neil was awake, Mary rose from bed, seized by a turbulent nausea, and went to the bathroom to vomit. She managed to do this quietly, then rinsed her mouth out and returned to bed. But when the two of them awoke later, she found that the feeling had not passed.
“It’s that goddamn restaurant,” O’Neil fumed. “Pansy salad. And that awful soup. What the hell was that all about?”
They had planned to visit the cemetery that morning, but agreed this was now impossible, and O’Neil left the motel to find muffins and tea for Mary, to put something on her stomach before they attempted the drive back to Philadelphia. At the window Mary watched the car pull away, then put on her coat and walked into town. She had seen the clinic the day before, near the gallery where they had looked at pots; the sign had said it was open for Sunday walk-ins from nine to twelve o’clock.
The door was open and the lights were on, but the waiting room was empty. Mary sat down and thumbed through a needlework magazine, and a few minutes later a woman appeared, wearing a white coat and stethoscope.
“Ah,” she said, seeing Mary. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”
“Are you the doctor?”
The woman, who had short gray hair and a handsome heart-shaped face, held up the disk of her stethoscope and looked at it in mock surprise. “Now, who put this stethoscope on me?”
The doctor led Mary into an examining room, where Mary told her about the pansies and the soup while the doctor took her temperature and blood pressure and asked her about the pain. She eased Mary back on the paper-lined table and pressed her bare stomach here and there. Her fingers were pale and slender, yet eased into Mary’s flesh with surprising force.
The doctor stepped back. “Well, I don’t think it’s food poisoning.”
“The meal was strange but I’d have to agree.”
“I’ve eaten there. The duck is really what’s special.” The doctor furrowed her brow at Mary. “How late are you?”
“Ten days, give or take.”
“Have you ever been pregnant before?”
“Not in many years,” Mary said. “Has it changed?”
From a cabinet of supplies the doctor removed a square pink box with a picture of a daisy and handed it to Mary. Inside were a small specimen cup and a plastic wand, like an undersized thermometer, wrapped in cellophane.
Mary held up her bare wrist. “I don’t have a watch.”
The doctor unclasped her own—a Timex, with three hearts forming the first three links of the band on either side of the face—and showed Mary to the rest room. Mary squatted over the toilet and held the cup between her legs until she had filled it, and placed it on the toilet tank. The instructions on the box said the test would take three minutes, but the instant Mary dipped the wand into the cup, a turquoise ribbon shot up the blotter paper and filled the little window, resolving into a tiny cross. She counted off three minutes with the watch, waiting to see if there was some mistake and the blue cross would be retracted. When it wasn’t, she dumped the cup into the toilet, wrapped the wand in tissue paper to show O’Neil, and returned to the office.
“These tests are pretty accurate,” the doctor said, scribbling on a prescription pad, “but they’re not the real thing, so when you get home, you should go see your gynecologist.”
“Somebody told me this was going to happen,” Mary said.
“Well, they knew something.” The doctor put her watch back on. “If you don’t mind my asking, is this good news for you?”
Mary fingered the wand in her pocket. “It’s what I wanted,” she said.
On the way back to the motel Mary stopped at a Rexall to fill her prescription. It was an old-style drugstore with a lunch counter, and the air smelled of wet clothing and fried eggs. An entire aisle of the store was devoted to baby products—fat packages of diapers, cans of powdered formula, rattles and teething toys and little spoons with kittens or puppies on the handles, all sealed in plastic—and Mary paused to look it over, this vast, hopeful inventory she had never paid any attention to. She believed it was important now to stand before it—she felt as if she had achieved some final homecoming—and when she handed her prescription to the druggist, an old man with a shuffling step who took the paper from her without comment, he, like the wall of diapers and the well-worn light of the store’s interior and the lunch counter with its pies and cakes under elevated domes of glass, seemed somehow inevitable, like a figure from a dream she’d once had years ago.
The druggist handed the prescription to her in a stapled package, his face broadening with a smile. “Congratulations,” he said.
Mary thanked him, bought a carton of milk at the lunch counter, and stepped outside. O’Neil would be back at the motel, pacing with worry. Where had she gone off to? Had she gotten so sick she couldn’t wait for the muffins and the tea? Why hadn’t she left him a note? The air had warmed; a pale and ghostly snow was falling all around. Standing by the door, Mary opened the druggist’s package, which contained a bottle of prenatal vitamins. They were large orange pills that smelled like fish food, and the directions said to take one daily. The bottle contained forty pills, and the prescription could be refilled five times, for a total of two hundred—the number of days until the baby was born. Two hundred days, Mary thought, and removed her mittens to take the first pill, tipping her face into the falling snow and using the milk to wash it down.
LIFE BY MOONLIGHT
October 1995
FRIDAY, 9:31 P.M, a humid night in fall: Mary Olson Burke, age thirty-three—pregnant, pregnant, pregnant—pauses in the paint-rollers-brushes-dropcloths aisle of the Home Depot in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and knows that her water has broken.
The tear is tiny, high in her uterus; there is no splash, no bursting water-balloon of fluid, no great, embarrassing release. Mary bends to lift a gallon can of white latex semigloss from a low shelf, when suddenly her panties are damp, then wet, a release of amniotic fluid about a thimbleful; she drops her eyes to the pleats of her cotton dress and finds no stain, no mark to tell anyone what has happened. And maybe nothing has. But, no. It is six days since Mary passed her due date, silently and without fanfare, like a car crossing a desert border at night. Inside Mary the question blooms: Hello? And: Soon? Her water has broken. Mary knows.
Mary is enormous; she is a cathedral, a human aria, a C note held for ten minutes. She feels luminous, beyond gravity; she is gravity itself. Her husband, O’Neil, is crouched to examine a rack of paintbrushes. Like everything else in the Home Depot, the display is huge and confusing, like a menu that is ten pages long. There are thick brushes and thin brushes, sleek brushes and hairy brushes, brushes with tips so delicate they could be used to stroke liquid gold on Fabergé eggs. O’Neil is all details, a man overwhelmed by the tiniest purchases; it will take him an hour to buy a paintbrush, but thirty minutes to buy a car.
“O’Neil . . .”
He tilts his head to the sound of Mary’s voice. His face lights up in a grateful smile; she has broken his trance.
“Who cares, am I right? You were about to say I should just pick anything so we can get the hell out of here.”
Mary gently lowers herself onto the can of paint, perching like a child on a potty chair. “Roger wilco, honeybear.” Now that she is off her feet, exhaustion folds over her like a heavy cloth. Repainting the kitchen now seems like madness, the dumbest idea of their marriage. “Please, can we just pick something and go? Can you take care of this while I sit here?”
O’Neil rises. “We’ll need a cart.”
“Make it two.” Mary tries to smile, and when she can’t, she realizes for the first time that she is afraid. “Just dump me in and wheel me home.”
They push their purchases outside, into the soupy heat and the sound of traffic on the turnpike. O’Neil leaves Mary under the concrete overhang and disappears across the parking lot, still full of cars at this late hour. Mary stands, clutching her side; under her fingertips she feels the baby shift position, feeling this also inside of her, like the sensation of her lips and tongue when the dentist has numbed them with Novocain, woozy and not quite real. Then she sees it: in the sky beyond the parking lot, the highway, the roofs of the buildings, a fat, yellowish light is emerging. Mary thinks at first that it’s a helicopter, or a searchlight, but then she sees that it’s the moon—a full moon, a harvest moon. It creeps up the cluttered horizon with amazing speed, leaking its liquidy light on everything. She is still watching it when the car pulls up.
O’Neil stops loading the paint and supplies into the trunk and follows her gaze to the horizon.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says finally. “A moon like that. What else? It means you’ll go into labor tonight.”
Mary looks again. Somehow, the moon seems even larger than before, and weirdly bright. It is almost too bright to look at. She wonders why she hasn’t told O’Neil about her water yet, and then she knows. It is the last secret she has; she will not surrender it yet, though soon.
“There’s always a chance,” Mary says.
“Ten bucks you have this baby before breakfast,” O’Neil says.
In the passenger seat Mary dozes, and by the time they pull into their driveway she is surprised to look over the lights of the dashboard and find her own house. For a moment she thinks the baby has already come but then realizes this is a dream she has had—that she was breaking open a hard-boiled egg and found a tiny person inside. Mary climbs the stairs, undresses, puts on a nightgown, and washes her face. Below her she can hear their front door opening and closing and knows that O’Neil is bringing the supplies inside. She finds him collapsed on the sofa in the living room, drinking a beer and watching television, the sound turned off. On the screen a group of divers in yellow wetsuits are lowering a small submarine from a crane into a choppy sea. These are the kinds of shows O’Neil loves.
“And zo,” O’Neil says, “ze brave men of ze Calypzo dezend once more into ze inky deep.” He pushes his glasses onto his forehead and rubs a hand over his tired face. “I think they’re looking for the lost continent of Atlantis. Apparently, it iz near ze Canary Islands.”
Mary bends to kiss O’Neil; he returns the kiss, then puts his beer on the coffee table, takes the round mass of her stomach in his hands, and kisses that too.
“Let me know if ze brave men of ze Calypzo stop b
y to paint ze kitchen,” Mary says.
Upstairs, Mary lowers herself into bed, leaving the shades open to fill the room with the night’s strange moonlight. The clock says it is just past midnight; three hours have passed since her water broke, and still nothing. She finds the position she likes, on her left side with a pillow between her thighs to straighten her back, and remembers the dream she had in the car, replaying its images in her mind like a prayer, hoping that she can return to it. It is a pleasant dream, and this time it begins in her parents’ kitchen in Minneapolis. Mary is alone, seated at the table, and there is an egg in her hand, still warm from the boiling water. Mary taps it with a butter knife, pausing to scrape away the flakes with her thumbnail. Crack, scrape, crack, scrape. But something is wrong; the egg is plastic, a plastic Easter egg. She pops it open, and inside she finds a slip of paper, like a fortune cookie, on which someone has written the word Atlantis.
Then she is in a different house, not a house she has ever seen before. In one of the bedrooms a monkey is living, left behind by the previous owners. Mary and O’Neil discuss what to do about the monkey. Should they feed it? Is it their monkey now? In the fridge they find a wedge of cheese, and they put it on a plate and take it into the bedroom. The room is dark, the shades drawn tight against the windows, and Mary can hear the monkey moving around, scratching itself, making tiny monkey noises. “Here, monkey,” Mary calls softly. “Here, little monkey.” Then the monkey is in her arms. She is nearly weightless, clinging to her. She has a soft, human face, with green eyes like O’Neil’s. Mary is happy, very happy, holding her, and does not mind at all that the monkey has urinated, soaking Mary’s nightgown, her thighs, her bare feet on the carpet. They will have to get a diaper for the monkey.