The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [76]
“You do?”
“I know they don’t consider you high risk until after the third miscarriage. I know you think they should have done it before.”
“I’m thirty-seven,” I said. He had no idea.
Waking up from those long naps, I clung to that first, brief, wakeful moment of oblivion. Then I opened my eyes to the emptiness, the great cavern of . . . nothing. I forced myself up, to dress, to clean, to watch, because Brynne was coming home from school.
Some mornings my stomach was so queasy after my walk that I couldn’t sleep. Then, I sat at the bedroom window, staring out at the cul-de-sac below, my mind blank. I had a vague, ever-present sense that I was smothering. No matter how fervently I gulped air, I could never quite catch my breath.
There wasn’t much to see on weekday mornings on Lindenwood Court. Occasionally someone went out and then returned with groceries or a bag from Walmart. The only mystery was Eddie Logan, who’d pull into his driveway once or twice a week and disappear into his house for a few hours. I’d always liked a mystery. And this one struck me because I knew he ought to be working in the store.
Around noon he’d emerge from the house again, carrying a thermal lunchbox and a blanket. He would have changed from dress shirts into flannel, from pressed khakis into jeans. He’d look around—furtively, I thought—to make sure no one saw him. Then he’d walk quickly across the cul-de-sac toward the field behind the Honeywells, the field I’d come to think of as my own. Eddie was normally a pleasant-looking man, but not then. Sneaking across the street, carrying his lunch, playing hooky from work, he was a clown.
I watched him for weeks before curiosity cut through my fog. Why on earth would a grown man with a job have lunch in the weedy undergrowth of a vacant lot? Such a simple thing, curiosity. A knife of light burning the dullness from my eyes. I put on my jacket and headed for the field.
Eddie was sitting on his blanket under a tree, exactly where I’d thought he’d be, eating his lunch. His face lit up at the sight of me. When he told me he was working on his computer program secretly, I knew at once—I always know; if I have a talent, this is it—that he needed to let Ginger run the store. You could see that she wanted to. He needed to go back to computing. It was the perfect solution for them. The kids would be okay. The words I’d say to each of them came to me at once. Putting them on the right track seemed so simple. So normal. Like the promise of a future that had nothing to do with childbearing. It was no small gift, this sense of being alive and awake after so many months of sleepwalking. When Eddie asked me to help him name his program, I was flattered, excited, like a child. And like a child, when I told him about the miscarriage and its aftermath, I wept.
So when he put his arm around me, it felt natural. And when it stopped feeling natural, I allowed it out of gratitude. I’d seen Eddie looking at me, many times. I knew what he wanted. I’d been in such situations before. In a minute we would stop. I’d learned to be diplomatic. No one’s feelings would be hurt.
But that’s not how it happened.
When I was seven years old, I was nearly swept out to sea by a riptide. My mother and I had been holding hands, jumping the breakers. We hadn’t counted on the undertow. Without warning, a wave broke on the shore in front of us and rushed back with an angry, unexpected power. It pulled me under, pummeling me with pieces of debris it had collected from the ocean’s floor, leaving me unable to surface as I struggled for air. I fought and thrashed, to no avail. My mother, fighting to keep her own balance, somehow managed to keep hold of my hand. The pull outward, oceanward was enormous. Once, the violent rush of water nearly dislodged me from her, but she held on, clinging to me, a great force. Then I understood. She, and not the water, was holding me under. She was larger, stronger, more powerful even than