Love Stories in This Town

“Okay,” I said. Four days before, a technician had moved her wand on my skin and looked at an image on the screen. The doctor was sure everything was fine. The ultrasound was just a precaution. Greg told me he could see the baby’s face—its eyes—but when the doctor explained that the baby had never grown more than a few weeks old, that it had no head, and no heart, Greg said he must have been wrong.

In two weeks, my baby, the mass of cells, would be analyzed and we would be told it was tetraploidy. The doctor wrote something on her rectangular pad, then handed it to me. The paper read, “Tetraploidy. 92, XX, YY.”

“Any questions?” asked the doctor.

I knew that to Greg, these symbols would mean something, bloom into a narrative. To me, they were cruel and unfathomable. “But why?” I said. “What did I do?”

She sighed, and said, “Nothing, Kimberly. It had absolutely nothing to do with you. It’s just…the way things work out sometimes.” She scribbled again, handing me a prescription for Prozac. When I got back to our apartment, I put both sheets of paper in my underwear drawer.

Outside the Houston airport, Greg waited, holding our bags. He stood, broad shoulders a little slumped, and watched me. I remembered the sweet shock I’d felt when I’d first seen him, in the audience of my graduation fashion show. Most of my classmates, like Greg’s sister, presented glamorous gowns, but I designed coats for little girls, swinging cape-style coats made of wool and fastened with vintage toggles. I knitted matching scarves and mittens. I’d worn only plastic parkas growing up—my designs came from my imagination, and a picture I’d seen once of a Parisian schoolgirl, standing in front of the Arc de Triomphe. Though the SCAD store had wanted to buy my whole collection, I saved one red coat, one scarf, one set of mittens.

“Have a safe trip home,” said Sally.

“Okay,” I said. I walked to my husband, and he folded me inside his arms. I wanted to say something, to fix something. He looked so young, and so bewildered.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “It happened so fast.”

“There will be another,” he said.

We looked at each other. There would be another, there would. But I wanted the one that was gone.

On Messalonskee Lake (#ulink_db02d72f-5948-5463-b223-b40066b9ab97)

ONE

A woman had drowned in the lake, but that did not make it any less picturesque. We hadn’t known her, after all; I had never met her, and my husband, Bill, was a boy when she died. She was Bill’s aunt Renée, married to his father’s brother, Gerry. She played the violin. This was all I could get out of my husband during our drive up I-95.

“So she fell out of the boat?” I said, waddling into the cabin, which smelled of either pine, Pine-Sol, or both.

“Yeah,” said Bill.

“When was this?”

“A while ago,” said Bill. “I told you, I was just a kid.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“We need some air,” said Bill. He was wandering around, opening doors and windows.

“Who falls out of a boat?” I said. “It’s very sad.”

My husband approached. He tried to take me in his arms, but I barely fit. “Here,” I said, pressing his palm to my stomach. His fingers were warm, and I leaned into him.

“What?” he said, into my hair. He moved his thumb along my neck softly; I kissed him.

“I think it’s hiccuping,” I said. There was a bubbling sensation inside me, not the kicks I had come to know, but something lighter.

“Maybe it’s laughing,” said my husband.

When we realized we would never be alone again, Bill and I had decided on a romantic week at his family’s Maine cabin. He had spent his childhood at Camp Snow Island, and I knew he wanted to move back and run it someday. Unless I was hit by a bus or got trigger toe, I wasn’t leaving the Boston Ballet, but I was happy to spend a week in the wilderness.

I asked for an economy car when I called Thrifty Rental, but when we took our key into the parking lot, there was a PT Cruiser in Slot A-8. “No,” said Bill, when he saw it.

“I think it’s cute,” I said.

“You cannot drive a PT Cruiser to Belgrade Lakes,” said my husband. “You can’t step out of that car and buy bait.”

“I’ll buy the bait,” I said.

“Lord help us all,” said my husband.

· · ·

I began putting away the groceries we’d bought on the way: jam, bread, milk, eggs. “Was Renée pretty?” I asked, opening the refrigerator.

“Sure,” said Bill. “I don’t know.” He motioned to one of the family photos placed around the cabin in tarnished frames. “There she is,” he said.

I peered at the photograph. Aunt Renée wore a bemused expression and a bandanna. She had her hand on the shoulder of a little boy. “Who’s that?” I said. “I thought you said they didn’t have kids.”

“That’s me,” said Bill.

“Oh,” I said. The boy in the picture—Bill—was smiling timidly. I wondered if our baby would be shy.

At Day’s General Store, we bought steaks and beer. I had gained eighteen pounds, but the doctor told me to eat even more. He wasn’t really worried, he said, but he was cautiously concerned. Jocelyn, who was in my company, hadn’t gained enough pregnancy weight, and her baby was born six weeks early. Little Allan was fine, but the story was scary enough to make me choke down a bunch of beef.

As Bill manned the grill, I sat on the deck overlooking Messalonskee Lake. Snow Island, where the camp was located, was faintly visible across the water. A green boat puttered by: a man and his young daughter. “Any luck?” called my husband, and the girl held up a fish.

“Goddamn,” said Bill. He was in his element here, a fact I tried to forget every morning as he set his jaw and stepped on the T, uncomfortable in a suit and tie. Bill didn’t like cities in general and Boston in specific. He loathed his job raising money for the Appalachian Trail Society. I had studied dance in Burlington, Vermont, for the first few years of our marriage. We had planned on a lifetime of dreaming big and working hard. When I actually made it, we were both ecstatic, but also stunned.

“I can’t wait to take the boat out,” said Bill.

“Is it the same boat?” I asked. “The one Renée fell out of?”

“What?” said Bill. “Maybe, but I doubt it.”

I hefted myself out of the chair—my balance was completely off now—and walked across the pine needles to take a peek. It was yellow, with a bucket in the stern.

Bill finished grilling, and we ate at a wooden picnic table. We made up two beds on the screen porch and lay in one. Bill pressed his ear to my belly, trying—but failing—to hear a heartbeat. I pulled my maternity tank top up, feeling his scratchy cheek against my skin.

For days, we napped and cooked and swam in the lake. I worked out regularly—I was expected back in the studio six weeks after the baby was born, so there was no time for a break. In my off-time, I constructed elaborate stories about dead Renée: a doomed affair, a clandestine meeting gone disastrously wrong. I pressed Bill for details, but he claimed to know nothing. Had he been there the night she drowned? He was asleep, he said. Was she depressed? How would he know, he said. He told me not to get worked up. Each evening, the man and his daughter floated past us, holding up lines of fish. Bill had some luck, and I even went with him a few times, though I joked I would sink the boat. I loved watching my husband paddle—the movement of his strong muscles.