Desperate (11 page)

A
n hour and a half later the doorbell rang. There was Brad, standing on our front porch in a work shirt, work boots, and faded dungarees. I invited him inside as Anna emerged from the bedroom to join us in the hall. Whatever anger she’d carried seemed to be gone. Her face was cheery, eyes sparkling. Brad brought along his hefty toolbox, though all he would need to fix this little problem was his hand, to twist a knob clockwise.

“Heard you might be needing some water,” Brad said. His voice held a lilt, as if nothing fazed him. We could have roused him from a sound slumber on a frigid cold morning, begged him to fix a problem he wouldn’t make much money fixing, and that lilt would still be there. When you had a glimpse into the beyond, and saw something there, everyday problems lost their power to annoy.

“It’s in the upstairs unit where Lily, our . . . our tenant lives,” Anna said.

Anna and I exchanged looks. Brad and I did the same.
Lily, our tenant. Lily, our birth mother. Lily, the source of the growing animosity between Anna and me. Lily, the woman whose aura I suspected would be black, like the strange force following me.

If Lily were headed out for work, she’d have left by now. I knew a little bit about her schedule. After Anna had vanished into the bedroom, I’d waited a while, listening for footfalls, making sure Lily was sticking around the apartment before texting Brad to come over.

“Well, let me go downstairs and have a look,” Brad said.

The door to the basement was in the kitchen. I escorted Brad through the apartment and soon we were headed downstairs. We did the perfunctory, “How is everything?” chat, covering Brad’s girls, wife, flower garden, and latest cooking experiment all in a two-minute span. Our voices downstairs might carry upstairs so Brad’s visit needed to maintain the authenticity of being a real house call.

“Looks like I got the problem fixed,” Brad said as he turned the knob controlling water flow to the upstairs unit, which I had earlier turned counterclockwise.
Righty tighty, lefty loosey.
“Let’s go upstairs and see if that fixed the problem,” Brad said.

I was half expecting Brad to break character, whisper something about our plan.
Is Lily home? Do you think Anna suspects?
He surprised me with his commitment to the role of jovial and capable plumber.

Soon we were headed to Lily’s apartment, traveling up a narrow, twisting stairwell to the second floor. We made a brief pit stop at my place to ask Anna to call Lily so she could open the door for us. We came out into Lily’s kitchen.

Lily was dressed all in black. I wondered if her color choice in clothing would match her aura. Brad smiled at Lily and she smiled back, showing respectful appreciation for her knight in grungy dungarees.

I couldn’t help but take a look around the kitchen—looking for what, I couldn’t really say. Maybe I thought she’d have accidentally left her plans for me tacked up on the refrigerator with fruit-shaped magnets. Week 1: give him the present. Week 2: recover from crazy mama making crazy accusations about me. Week 3: take his necklace. Week 4: who knew what?

What I saw instead was a very clean kitchen, some containers from Whole Foods set about the counter in an orderly fashion, and Lily looking a little bit bigger in the belly than she had the day before. Maybe she was wearing looser clothing the night she dropped the medicine cabinet. I couldn’t remember.

“Thanks for coming out so quickly,” Lily said, bending at the hip in an oddly flirtatious manner as she tucked her hair behind her ears, giving us a first peek at the jangly earrings set on delicate lobes. Her unblemished skin looked white as fresh snow—a by-product, I was sure she’d say, of working nights and sleeping days.

She reached out and touched Brad’s arm, smiling at him as though the presence of a male was enough motivation to turn on the charm. Maybe it was the instinct of working for tips, or maybe she was just a touchy-feely person. She’d never been that way with me. Brad didn’t seem to mind, which made me wonder if he was still in character or pleased that an attractive and much younger woman was touchy-feely with him. Not that Janice had anything to be worried about. When it came to marriage and fidelity, Brad had the loyalty of a swan.

“I just want to take a look around, make sure the water is running all the places the water should run and none of the places it shouldn’t,” Brad said.

With toolbox in hand, Brad let Lily lead him on a quick tour of the apartment on her way to the bathroom—the only other place aside from the kitchen with running water.

For some reason, I expected the place to be in some disarray, a bit like Lily herself. I was looking for piles of clothes, food left out, anything messy (except, of course, for bottles of booze and cigarette butts, since that would be bad for baby). What I saw instead was a home. Lily had hung three framed posters up (one of Cirque du Soleil, an Ansel Adams print, and a framed movie poster for the film
The African Queen
). Who knew she liked
The African Queen
?

“That’s one of my favorite movies,” Brad said, stopping to admire the colorful representation of scenes from the film along with Bogart and Hepburn’s likenesses.

“Mine too,” Lily said, her voice rising excitedly, again touching his arm. “I got it at the COOP in Harvard Square. I’m a total old movie fanatic. I know, it’s so weird, but that’s me.” Lily smiled and shrugged. Once again she was the innocent and shy tree nymph from Greek mythology, unsure of each step, a sweet little fawn of a thing, too innocent to do me any harm. Brad gave me an over-the-shoulder glance, but his eyes cast no meaning.

“What other old films do you like?” I asked.

Our eyes met and Lily held my gaze, but not my elbow as she’d done with Brad. No, ours was apparently a deeper bond that required no physical contact to make a profound and very clear statement. She knew, from the moment we locked eyes, this was a test. What might have been the hint of a smile, a crease of sorts, just barely teased the edges of her mouth without ever fully materializing.

“Why, that’s a great question,” she said. “I guess when push comes to shove I’m
Gone with the Wind
all the way. But then there’s Brando—
On the Waterfront
, of course—and
Casablanca
, or
Grand Hotel
. How about Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford? My goodness, now
they
are movie stars! Oh, and can’t forget John Barrymore. Do you know him? I have a little crush on him. Believe me when I tell you there are no men like Barrymore shooting pool at Jillian’s, that’s for sure. You know something? You and Anna should come up and we’ll have a classic film marathon. I watch them all the time.” Here Lily set her hands upon her belly. “I wonder”—her voice trailing off—“if it’ll be good for the baby because of all the music in the soundtrack.”

She was good, but I didn’t believe her for a moment, and she knew it. Had she and Anna talked about old movies while they painted pottery, I wondered. I remembered her suitcase, the antique-looking green luggage carrier; it was sort of fitting with this old movie fanatic person. But there were incongruities as well: how she dressed, where she worked, those were truly modern designs. The mystery of Lily only deepened, and, as if she possessed hypnotic powers, Brad, it seemed, had fallen completely under her spell. Not one iota of concern registered in his eyes.

We finished checking the apartment and found the water was running just fine (surprise, surprise). Lily thanked Brad. She shook his hand and of course touched his arm again.
When did she become so touchy?

I walked Brad downstairs. He stopped to say good-bye to Anna. I had told him in the basement that today was Kevin’s birthday. On his way out, he gave Anna a hug, a quick kiss on the cheek, and a standing invitation to come over to his house for dinner.

“I wish I could connect you to him,” Brad said, pausing at the door. “Just so you knew he was in a good place.”

Anna put her hand to her heart.

“I know he is,” she said.

The night was pleasantly cool. I walked Brad over to his van, eager to hear his assessment. My Vegas line favored Lily’s aura being some shade of gray—something lurking below the surface.

“Well?” I asked. “What do you think?”

“Gage, I got nothing.”

“Nothing as in no blackness, no something following me?”

“Nothing as in nothing. I don’t know what it means, but it was like she was warm water. Not too hot, not too cold. She seemed just right to me. In fact, she seems really great, Gage.”

“What about Anna’s mother?”

“Late-stage Alzheimer’s is very unpredictable.”

“So you’re saying it’s all just a series of coincidences? The present, the necklace, the strange dark force, Anna’s mother, nothing is connected, no paths back to Lily, no hidden agenda here.”

“I’m saying, I couldn’t read Lily’s aura. That’s it. But as a friend I’d say you should let yourself relax and enjoy this experience. I think you and Anna are two very lucky people.”

Brad drove off, leaving me alone to wonder why I didn’t feel lucky in the least. I glanced up and saw Lily standing in the window, looking down at me from her vantage point above.

This time, I had no trouble seeing her smile.

M
uch transpired in the weeks following Brad’s visit, most of it at work. For reasons of great complexity, we were unable to reverse engineer the exploding battery. We did root cause analysis, but no one could figure out why it had caught fire. Subsequent builds of the battery, we found, worked fine. Something had happened to the big demo build, and my only conclusion was sabotage.

“Who would want to sabotage Olympian?” Patrice asked me in a private meeting after I’d flung my accusation.

I should have said “Matt Simons,” but thanks to Lily, who seemed to have wormed her way into my office life as well as my home life, I was gun-shy about making unsubstantiated accusations. So when Patrice asked the question, I gave no answer and the discussion ended as quickly as our big battery demo.

Meetings followed, many meetings, some in Patrice’s office, some in the large conference room, some in the demo lab, but none with the CEO. Apparently he was too busy visiting projects that actually worked. Even with all the uproar and chaos surrounding this significant setback, Adam kept his job, at least for the time being. However, it was clear to all that his tenure on the project was tenuous at best. Matt Simons was no longer shouting for his dismissal, probably because he’d already fired the bullet that would eventually be fatal.

It was Patrice’s job to break the news to upper management. We would need to conduct a full audit of our configuration management systems before we could demo again. These batteries were a big deal, and the testing had to be exhaustive. Bad press from a burning battery (hello, Boeing Dreamliner) could cost a company its fortunes.

While work continued on the battery—not business as usual, not by any means—my home life seemed to smooth out. I stopped doubting Lily, or more accurately stopped voicing my doubts.

Anna and Lily were growing ever closer. A bond had formed between birth mother and adoptive mother that I had inadvertently helped forge. My suspicions, my outbursts, simply drove the two together. There were shopping trips, lunch dates, and such. On one memorable afternoon, I came home from work to find Anna and Lily in the living room chatting like a pair of college roommates. Apparently, they’d just come back from the nail salon and were sitting on the sofa admiring their results.

“How’d you end up there?” I asked, slipping away into the kitchen to grab myself something cold to drink. Anna’s voice carried as I fished around for a Diet Coke in one of those pony-sized cans.

“Oh, we were just doing some window shopping and decided to pop in and get one.”

I offered them both something to drink, but they turned me down. I returned to the living room with my soda, wondering when, if ever, it would feel natural and normal to have Lily in the home.

“What did you talk about?” I asked.
What secrets did you share?

“Mostly we talked about shopping and read magazines,” Anna said.

“Or we fished our magazines out of the water,” Lily said.

They shared a laugh while I wracked my brain in search of the joke. Anna noticed I was on the outside looking in.

“I was getting my pedi done,” Anna said, “reading a
Cosmo
, some article about work mistakes to avoid like the plague, and it just slipped out of my hand and landed in the water.”

They laughed again, effortless, easy, and genuine. Then they took turns showing me the results of their mani-pedis. Anna went for a more neutral look—no surprise there—while Lily’s looked like the flag from some African nation.

“Mine is called Fiji Weejee Fawn,” Anna said, showing me the muted brown tones coated with a metallic sheen. “Do you think I should have gone more extreme?”

The subtext of her question was evident:
should mine have been more like Lily’s?
That was when I knew for certain they really had grown close. I hadn’t become a nonfactor, but clearly my role had been diminished.

Anna and I dropped in at Jillian’s to play pool when Lily was working. Naturally, Lily was our waitress, and she took great pleasure serving us fried mozzarella sticks and Diet Cokes. She also demonstrated some remarkable pool skills, sinking what to me was an impossible two-ball combination with fluid ease.

I wanted to change my tune about Lily. I wanted to embrace her and our future family with joy. But when I let my guard down, into my head popped all the various incidents, including Bessie and her accusatory rant.

You! I know you!

Anna and I visited Bessie again, but this time Lily didn’t come along. There were no incidents, no flare-ups, nothing to suggest Bessie had any memory of Lily from that day or before, for that matter. In truth, she had no memory of anything, not our last visit, not the sonogram. Anna broke the news about the baby again and she’d keep on breaking the good news until the baby was born. The other person Anna told was her mother’s cousin, Gladys, who resided in California and whom she called every Sunday night without fail. I spoke with Gladys on only a few occasions, and she always ended our brief chats by commenting on how handsome I looked in the pictures Anna had sent. During those calls, Anna would give detailed updates on her life and Bessie’s health and well-being along with some harsh words directed at Bessie’s errant sisters. If Gladys weren’t eighty-five and of bad health herself, she’d have come for a visit.

This was our life for the better part of a week or so. We were halfway through Lily’s fourth month of pregnancy: the sixteenth week of gestation. By this point, the uterus should have been around the size of a melon, but Lily’s could not have been much bigger than a navel orange. Still, she was rounder in the belly, though not round enough to assuage all of Anna’s concerns. There was a frustration for adoptive parents, I read, that had everything to do with control. A pregnant woman decided what she ate, when she slept, how she might exercise, while the mother waiting to adopt could only hope for the best. We were the navigators, guiding our passenger on a pathway to home, but we were not the pilots. Those controls were in another’s hands, and so Anna’s concern grew in reverse proportion to the size of Lily’s belly: the smaller the bump, the bigger the worry—simple math for a complex equation.

Anna showed me a website after we got home from playing pool.

“Do you think Lily’s gained five pounds since we met her?”

I read the post on BabyHelp.com. An expectant mother had expressed her concern about not showing at fourteen weeks.

“What did you search to find this thread?” I asked.

“Not showing at fourteen weeks,” Anna said.

Sure enough, I typed the words “Not Showing” into the Google search bar and got auto-complete results for not showing at twelve weeks all the way up to twenty weeks.

“If she’s gained five pounds, I think we’re fine,” Anna said, though her voice failed to mask a lingering concern. Anna looked me in the eyes and it broke my heart. “I just want this, Gage. I want this so bad.”

I felt her pull toward motherhood. It was strong enough to create its own presence. I remembered Karen’s pregnancy more vividly than I recalled Max’s infancy. I knew where Karen’s stretch marks were, what ointments she would rub on her expanding belly. I could tell Karen when she was hungry before she knew it herself. We did the music thing—little headphones on the belly playing intelligence-boosting classical music—even after reading articles that debunked claims of benefits.

“What if they’re wrong?” Karen had said.

Nodding in agreement, I’d turned up the volume on my iPod just a notch.

“They could be wrong,” I had said.

Perhaps sleep deprivation played a part in my fuzzy recollections of Max’s infancy. Or maybe it was this: a first pregnancy was when all the possibilities of the world drew parents closer, and then, after the birth, reality set in with feeding schedules, fumbling newness, constant uncertainty, and lack of sleep. With no control over the pregnant body, Anna and I were missing a component of this early bonding. Perhaps that was the dark energy surrounding me, pulling us apart.