After This (5 page)

 

She slipped her hand under her belly, shifted her weight on the
pillow, and looked up to see the boys returning, windblown, kicking
up sand. Her husband behind them, boyish, too, with the red flush
across his cheeks and the thinning hair scattered every which way
across his head. The baby rolled, roiled, beneath her ribs and the
beach grass shuddered in the wind. He sat beside her heavily, while
the two boys fell on the shoe box full of soldiers, carrying it off to the
foot of another dune—for this had been their plan all along, to restage
Okinawa or Omaha Beach, continuing the war game they had begun
last night in their room, across the sheets and blankets and pillows of
their twin beds, in one of those hours of grace when they had not
quarreled and their parents had not called to them to

 

put out the light. They had named each member of their platoon—
Murphy, Idaho, Sarge, Smitty—ambushed some Germans, and
collected commendations from Patton himself. This morning when
their father had come into their room to say, “We’re heading for the
beach,” the dissolution of the plans they’d made to continue the push
toward Berlin right after Mass was quickly compensated for by the
possibility of dune and sand—Okinawa, Omaha Beach, North Africa
and Rommel.

 

It was their father who had put the football in the trunk.

 

Now they scattered their men across the sand and among the
bending stalks of sea grass. Their sister heard the changed pitch of
their voices, the harsh and breathy pitch they used when they were
speaking for someone else in an imaginary game. She rose to join
them. The bear was still in her arms but once again forgotten.

 

“Can I play?” she asked finally, understanding, even at six, that
the timidity of the question invited a single reply.

 

“No.” Looking to each other, not to her.

 

She watched them. The orders they barked were low and intimate,
running under the sound of the wind.

 

“Can I have a man?” she asked.

 

“No,” again, but now their parents on the blanket together looked
toward them.

 

“Boys,” their father said, a warning. And a single green soldier
was plucked from the shoe box of reservists and replacements and
tossed her way, through the air. She picked him up from the sand. The
mold had shaped his features precisely, a strong jaw and a sharp nose,
the little combat helmet and a sash of ammunition across his chest.
Unlike the men her brothers preferred, this one had no rifle pressed to
its shoulder, no hand grenade about to be thrown, but stood instead
with his arms extended from his sides, palms out. His head was
slightly raised, as if whatever he confronted was still at some distance,
and was larger than just another man.

 

His name was Steve. Steve Stevens. And he was a scout, sent
ahead. Alone.

 

She moved him through the sand, up over the boulders and hills
that were the arms and legs of the bear.

 

John Keane, leaning over his knees, watched the children
carefully, seeing that they behaved and then, reassured, allowed
himself to lie back on the blanket. The sky was blue. They were nicely
out of the wind. He placed his fingertips on his wife’s back, just
lightly. The football had reminded him that he was not (he would have
said) entirely pleased with the behavior of his two sons. It upset some
notion he had of order, of rightness, that Jacob, the older, was the
smaller of the two, the lesser athlete, the lesser student. It made
something unkind, even cruel, about Michael’s efforts to outdo him.
Michael’s triumphs over his older brother—and the self-satisfaction
they brought him—came too easily. Jacob’s defeats seemed too
indicative of a certain kind of future.

 

He kept his fingers on his wife’s back and placed his forearm over
his eyes. The wind was just above them. It seemed to skim the tops of
the surrounding dunes, bending the grass. But here the sun on his
knees and on his forearm felt warm.

 

His love for his children bore down on his heart with the weight
of three heavy stones. There were all his unnamed fears for them, and
hopes for them. There was all he was powerless to change, including
who they were—one too mild, one too easily tempted to be cruel, and
the little girl (it was the weight of a heavy stone against his heart) a
mystery to him, impossible to say what she, through her life, would
need. And soon one more.

 

He hoped the fourth would be another boy—although he would
never say so to his wife. What he had in mind most especially was a
daughter’s wedding day and the pall an absent father casts on the
scene, that sad tincture of mortality that mixes with the bright day
when the bride appears at the door of the church on the arm of an
uncle (as his own niece had done) or an older brother—it would be
Jacob, of course.

 

No equal ghost appears at the ceremony, as far as he can recall,
when it is the groom’s father who is missing.

 

Enough reason, he thought, for a man his age to wish for another
boy. But it would be another stone, nonetheless.

 

He could hear the two of them now, softly crying orders to their
men, even as they interrupted themselves to provide machine-gun fire
and exploding hand grenades, the sound of the ocean and the wind
and the occasional cry of gulls lending a certain authenticity to the
scene with their steady indifference.

 

Then his wife’s voice, startingly close and yet oddly distant,
specked with disks of black and gray as well as gold. “Pick him up and
put him on the blanket,” she said to their daughter. “He’s full of
sand.”

 

And then she stirred, moving beneath the lightly placed fingertips
of her husband’s hand. The baby moving as well, roiling like a wave
under her skin, pressing an elbow into her ribs, a heel against her hip.

 

“Thank you,” she said to her daughter and took the forgotten bear
and shook it and brushed the sand from its worn fur and then set it
carefully beside her, against her hip as if to offer it comfort, as if it
were itself some spurned youngest child. The baby turned again even
as Mary Keane glimpsed the drama of Steve Stevens (he had gone
down on his belly behind a stalk of grass as Adolf Hitler drove by) on
her daughter’s small face.

 

“Is anyone hungry yet?” she asked, and only Annie, who was
never hungry yet, said No without raising her eyes. The boys, who had
heard her, she knew they had heard her, ignored the question. Michael
was crawling up the side of the dune, his plastic machine gun raised.
Jacob—how like him—was watching his brother’s

 

progress warily, his arms encircling his small platoon of green men,
protecting them from the sliding sand. They both had heard her.

 

She looked over her shoulder at her husband. His forearm was
thrown across his eyes, his mouth was slightly open. His fingertips,
lightly, were on her back.

 

She leaned down to the bear, or leaned as much as the hump and
heft of her belly would allow. “Are you hungry?” she asked it. Her
daughter, compelled as equally by whimsy as by drama, suddenly
straightened up and turned to her mother. “He’s not answering,
either,” Mary Keane told her daughter, and they both smiled.

 

“I guess no one’s hungry,” Annie said gently, and here the mother
glimpsed some future commiseration between them, some future
understanding they would certainly share of what passed between
women while the men in the world were distracted, unheeding,
unconscious.

 

She shifted again, leaning her weight onto one thigh and then the
other as the baby offered its own counterbalance. She moved her
hands inside her coat and grasped her belly, the way she might hold a
child’s face between her hands to silence tears, or to ask, What is it,
what’s wrong?

 

She stroked her sides, the loose knit of the cotton sweater she had
confiscated from her husband’s closet ten years ago, when she was
pregnant with Michael and could bear only cotton or silk against her
skin. She felt the baby ripple under her fingers. She felt a heel—surely
it was a heel here on her left side—press against her skin and then
dart away, going under, before she could quite gauge its shape.

 

It was possible it had something to do with the ocean, all this
activity. Something to do with the salt scent of it on the air and on the
wind. The tug of some ancient memory—didn’t they say life began in
the sea—or maybe some dawning hope that the what-do-youcall-it, the fluid the baby now floated in (which someone had told her
was also precisely as salty as the ocean), was a tributary, not merely a
pool.

 

She ran her palms over her taut belly, soothing the poor thing,
even as a swift kick under her ribs nearly took her breath away. Or
maybe, she thought, it was the hurricane down south, agitating water
everywhere—in oceans and bays, dog bowls and cisterns, in the bellies
of pregnant women all up and down the coast.

 

Mary Keane smiled and looked around because the thought
amused her, although she knew that in another minute she would not
be able to retrace it clearly enough to retell.

 

Michael had slipped beyond the crest of the dune. Jacob was lying
flat out now, on his stomach, his little men all before him, and Annie
had followed her single soldier up the dune to a grassy patch where
the wind whipped her dark hair and the blowing sand made her
squint, even as her lips kept moving—now a conversation between her
little army man and a headless creature formed by the two fingers of
her right hand. But Michael was out of sight.

 

She waited. Were it not for the ballast of her big belly, she would
casually stand, stretch a bit, casually stretch her neck until she got a
glimpse of him. Casually because her husband said she worried too
much, fretted too much, and would eventually infect their boys with
her fearfulness—had, perhaps, already, in Jacob’s case, infected them
with her fearfulness. So she waited, trusting, but feeling, too, the pinsand-needles prick of blown sand on her cheek and her forearm (was
the wind changing?) until, sure enough, there was the top of his head,
the tip of his plastic machine gun, just over the next dune.

 

She resisted calling to him, telling him to come closer. Her
husband was asleep beside her. She could hear the way he pursed his
lips with each breath, something like the soft sound of the football
against their palms (although it was softer still), something like the
thud of the ocean as it punctuated the rise and fall of the wind. He
deserved the rest, poor man. They were alone on the beach. They were
perfectly safe.

 

Michael’s head crested the dune again. Then his shoulders, the
rump of his blue jeans, the short barrel of his machine gun. He was
crawling on his belly along the top of the dune, crushing the sea grass,
filling his shirt and the pockets of his pants with sand. She would have
to remember to shake him out before he got into the car.

 

Down the path through the dunes she could see the pale expanse
of beach and then the place where it gave way to sky. She leaned
forward a little, toward it, resting the bulk of the baby on the edge of
her thighs. It was possible that the sky was darker, out there, to the
east. It was possible that they would catch some part of the southern
storm. She had an image of her unborn child, its head up under her
heart, its ear pressed to the wall of her flesh, treading water with the
flutter of its small legs, listening. It would hear the echo of the waves,
the whistle of the wind, the rise and fall of its father’s breath as his
lips opened and touched closed.

 

Mary Keane was more than certain (she would have said) that this
was her last pregnancy. These the last weeks she would live with the
toss and tumble of a child in her belly, with the unseen future a real
presence inside her; the unseen future actual flesh and blood inside
her, not, as it was for the rest of the population and would be for her
again once this child was born, merely imagination or hope or plan—
the man Jacob would become, and Michael, the woman
(commiserating with her mother while the men were turned away)
who would be Annie. What was moving under her hands, pressing
and turning under the taut skin, was the future itself, already formed,
pressing an ear to the wall of her flesh.

 

With a cry, Michael leaped down the dune above his brother,
charged, fell, rolled, collided with Jacob’s back and Jacob’s carefully
arranged soldiers, kicking up sand. He leaped up again and with his
machine gun drawn mowed down sister—who was already crying, her
fists to her eyes—brother, green army men, mother, father, and then
whatever other advancing hordes came at him from the sea.

 

John Keane was off the blanket in an instant, crying, “Michael!”
Jacob was stretched out on the sand, his legs straight before him,
crying, plaintively, “Michael!” Annie was heading toward her mother,
wailing, her fists—one of them still clutching Steve Stevens—to her
eyes. There was sand across her nose and in her hair. John Keane took
Michael by the arm and shook him. The boy looked up at his father as
if he were an utter stranger, materialized out of the salt air. Mary
untied her scarf and, pulling her daughter’s fists from her eyes, gently
brushed it over her face. Jacob, resignedly, perhaps, was lifting his
flattened men, smoothing an area of sand to his left, setting them
upright again.

 

“What is wrong with you?” their father was saying. “Why can’t
you behave?”

 

Michael—it was not fear on his face, only a kind of disbelief, as if
this tall, red-faced, shouting man had materialized out of the wind—
looked up to say, “Just playing. I was just playing.” But his father
shook his arm with the litany of his transgressions: “Hurt your
brother, hurt your sister, ruined the day.” He finally tossed aside the
boy’s arm as if it were something to be thrown away. “Why don’t you
use your head?” he asked him. “Why can’t you behave?” And felt the
pain of his own anger, in his chest, in his shoulder. He moved his hand
to his neck, moved his shoulder. It was the arm he’d used to throw the
football. He looked to his wife. Annie was now collapsed on the
blanket beside her, pressed into her side because she could not sit on
her lap, the bright scarf, now spotted