The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [77]
What happened with Eddie was like that. Powerful and unexpected: inevitable, somehow. A drowning and a saving, all at once. Eddie clawed at my shirt, fumbled with my jeans, a hasty, harsh disrobing. A dark wind blew through my head. A tumbling into depths.
Then we were a tangle of bodies, him on top, me below, our rough, needy coupling more fever than passion, less an act of will than urgent necessity, a fanatic zeal. Yet I wouldn’t have stopped it. Couldn’t.
Suddenly he turned me over, and I was on top, his strong arms lifting me to sit astride him, his fingers digging into the flesh of my arms, holding me there. His face boiled up below me, and in it I saw the shadow of his unbidden joy, unwanted joy, and slicing through the dark wind in my head, one cogent thought: he must have wanted this for so long. A gust of breeze blew. Out in the world were tall trees, an immeasurable swath of sky. I heard birds singing. Why, it’s not dawn and not sunset, I thought; birds shouldn’t be singing right now. I saw a person walk by. It did not seem real. But yes . . . yes. In the sweeping rush of the moment, I might even have waved.
The onrushing sea. Dark wind. Birds. The sky.
Then it was over.
Dazed, stunned, we sat up, half-conscious, who knows for how long. After a time I saw him next to me and recognized him not at all, not the longtime neighbor, not the rusty hair, the freckled skin. A stranger’s face. A voice: “Oh my God. We shouldn’t have . . . We shouldn’t . . .” It frightened me. Who was he?
Then his shame registered, and I knew.
“We can’t tell them,” he said.
“Of course not.” An awkward, graveled voice I barely recognized as my own.
“We can’t hurt them. It would make this . . . worse.” He didn’t look at me, nor I at him.
He dislodged his clothes from the pile and put them on. The crisp air smelled not of daylight or leaves, but of the rank musk of his shame.
For me, there was numbness instead of shame. No angst—at least not yet. He picked up his blanket, his picnic, his heap of belongings, and stumbled toward his house. I thought about the witness. What had the witness seen? Had I really waved? I told myself: no matter. This is someone who won’t tell. Later, I was haunted by that.
We agreed we’d never tell anyone, hadn’t we? Our families would never know.
Before that day, smarting from the fresh wound of hearing I wouldn’t have more children, I sometimes thought, I have done nothing wrong. If I’m going to be punished, I want to be punished for something. But then, to find out I was pregnant.
I did not imagine that.
Despite the circumstances, I wanted the child. I worried I wouldn’t carry it to term. I worried it would have rusty hair and Eddie’s lopsided smile. I made myself sick with that worry. But a fist of purpose settled in my chest. Mason would never suspect. Nor would the child. Or Brynne. We were a family. Whatever I had to do, I would.
I wanted to avoid the Logans, at least at first, but I didn’t. It had to be business as usual. I had one short talk with Eddie, during which I told him what I hoped was the truth: that I was pregnant, without knowing it, despite the doctor’s verdict, even before our afternoon in the field. He seemed enormously relieved. Embarrassingly relieved. I convinced Ginger she ought to take over the store. It wasn’t hard, talking her into doing what she wanted to do anyway. A good deed. Maybe it would be worth something.
Melody’s birthdate was auspicious. So was the cleft in her chin, Mason’s cleft, a vertical line with a deep indentation at the top, as if someone had taken the point of a pencil and pressed hard. Attractive, and certainly unusual. But not proof. It would have been easier to live somewhere else, not to have to face the other possibility just across the street.
Once, on what pretext I can’t remember,