Come Up and See Me Sometime

Horrified, I immediately lodged my fingers in my mouth. “Where?”

“Here.” He brushed my hands away and delicately stroked one of my front teeth. I felt the pressure and not the touch. I started to blush.

“There, it’s gone,” he said. He looked at me again, considering. I tilted my head. I wasn’t taken in. But I understood the appeal.

He ruined it by suddenly demanding, “How about a little compassion for me?”

“There is no such thing as compassion,” I said. He rolled his eyes, but I’m telling you. Nobody has it easy. Nobody gets anything they don’t make themselves.

I VISITED Mona at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon. She opened the door, still in pajamas. She said, “I’m watching a Natalie Wood movie. Wanna?”

The movie was about a pregnant woman who didn’t want to get married. Steve McQueen was the irritated father-to-be. She made him drinks and got mad at him, and he played the banjo in the street to make it all better. I didn’t really get it. I kept thinking about Natalie Wood falling into the water and never coming up.

When the credits started rolling I asked, “How are you doing?”

“I don’t know. I got rid of the fetus because I wanted a life. But now I’m just moping around wondering if I made a mistake. And I’ve started thinking about God.”

“God?”

“Yeah, and Hell. Like, what if it’s all true? Let’s take a cosmic leap into the possible. What if abortions really do send you to Hell? Then does motherhood make you a saint? Are men just pawns in this game of the afterlife, and women call all the shots?”

“No,” I told her, “men murder, rape, declare war. It seems that they have some stake in eternal damnation.”

“But abortions seem worse somehow. Because we’re impatient. We don’t wait to see what happens.”

“What would have happened, Mona?”

She shrugged. “I would have been a pissed-off mother who resented her kid. I don’t know. Maybe it’s like, you’re perfect or nearly so in the beginning and little by little your life becomes one long catalogue of mistakes.”

“Like bowling,” I said.

“So was it fair of me to deprive this fetus of its one shot at perfection?”

“Maybe you did the right thing by sparing it the rest. All those inevitable failures that make us human beings.”

“Maybe I should have let all that transpire. Who am I to say, Stephanie? Instead, I killed it. Those possibilities,” she amended when she saw my look.

“What about your own possibilities? Did you really want to trade your life for your baby’s? Isn’t that another kind of murder? Is that what you want?”

“No,” Mona said. “But looking at it now, wouldn’t it have been a relief? An awful relief?”

I LEFT town to camp alone at the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. As I drove south past Pueblo, the land flattened and rose like acres of brown bread. The high desert. Everything smelled of pinion sap and the things that flow in the desert but nowhere else.

I stopped to look at a roadside memorial. They were scattered all over the roads of southern Colorado, at every sharp corner where someone had perished in a car. This memorial was for an entire dead family—parents and kids. Someone had set up a life-sized nativity scene with gigantic crosses, candles, and silk roses. Strewn about were bandannas, key chains, rosaries, earrings. Plastic flowers in a yogurt container, a Christmas wreath, a macaroni necklace, a wooden cross dangling inside a spaghetti jar, a squash, a stuffed rabbit, a pack of Luckies, a photograph of the mountains, and a scrunchie. For the dead little girl.

I got to the campgrounds after dark. I set up my tent and lay down, but I couldn’t sleep at all. I kept wondering if someone would invade my tent with a knife, and imagining what I would do then. I listened to the rustling sounds of other campers, shushing their children or having muffled sex. Finally, I crawled out of my tent, grabbed a bottle of water and headed toward the dunes in the moonlight.

I took off my sandals to wade through the stream that separated the scrub from the sand, and then started hiking the dunes barefoot. At first it felt like I was just pushing sand around with my feet, but then I started moving in the shadows.

I climbed until there was nothing in any direction but hulking masses of sand. I sat on the ridge of a dune, hugged my knees and tried to decipher the shapes. I thought I saw my mother’s nose. I saw the shape of a dog I knew when I was small. I stayed there all night, listening to the wind smooth out the surfaces, breathing the smell of sand without ocean, without reason.

In the morning, I opened my eyes to the sun already midway up the sky. I sat up on the dune and brushed sand out of my hair. Everything had changed color now that it was light. Blue sky, yellow sand, and me between the two. I realized that I hadn’t been missed. Nobody had noticed me, alone on the dunes or anywhere else. Nobody was going to hurt me; nobody was going to do anything at all to me. I thought about the word nobody as I started back toward camp. It was getting hot already. The sand shifted through my sandals. It felt like the tips of matches just barely lit, then blown out.

I MET WITH Mona after I got back from my trip, my skin glowing and rubbed raw. We met at a diner and hugged across the table. She patted her short hair immediately afterwards. “You look gritty,” she said. We talked about her work.

After our food came, Mona leaned over her fluorescent grilled cheese sandwich. “We’re going to try to get pregnant.”

For a second, I thought she meant herself and me. Then, “Oh no, Mona. No.”

Mona pulled the paper napkin out of her lap and began shredding it on the table. “I told him everything. He was really hurt. It brought us, um, closer.” She turned red while I stared at her. Then she stuck her chin out. “He wants a baby with me. I’m keeping it, this one.” She nodded, as if it were merely a matter of will.

“But David? He’s ridiculous.” I threw my sandwich down on the plate. It made a flat sound.

Mona looked away. “Knock it off, Stephanie.”

“You don’t even like him that much. You make fun of the way he breathes, for God’s sake.” I mimicked her impression, this whistling, grunting thing that he does. She does it better.

“He’s going to be my husband.” The word was designed to stop all debate. I tried one more time.

“But the abortion …”

Mona held up her hand at the word. “Don’t want to think about that. It was a mistake.”

“You were so sure at the time.”

Neither of us talked for a while. I ate my tired roast beef sandwich, the meat dyeing the mayonnaise pink. Mona played with the napkin scraps on the table. I wiped my mouth over and over, for lack of anything else to do. Mona poked a hole in the crust of her grilled cheese sandwich.

“Mona,” I finally said. “You don’t even like children. You call them ‘yard apes.’”

“Well. I just got … so damn lonely, Stephanie. Besides, Jesus.” She looked up. “You can’t just walk through life like you’re a casual observer. I mean, you act like everything is a rational choice all the time, like there’s this layer of cellophane between you and the world. You have to engage. Engage.”

I snapped, “I am engaged.”

“It’s human. Everyone needs a family. You can adopt.”

“As a single mom? In debt?”

“You have choices. You can find a way to fill in that part of your life.”

“My life is good. It’s already complete.”

But here’s what I didn’t tell her: compare it to the sand dunes by the full moon, when the absence of light in the shadows is absolute, nonnegotiable. Floating upright and alone on top of the world. The way it feels to walk on such a surface.

WE LOST touch, Mona and I. I missed her wedding with David. The invitation came on a cream-colored piece of cardboard with the words, “It’s a Wedding!” embossed on the front. I had to leave town for a business trip that weekend. I sent a gift, something they had registered for—spoons.

Not much changed for me—some dates, a promotion, a new haircut. My grandmother died, I got a dog, and then a cat. The cat hated the dog. The dog liked the cat. That was pretty much my life.

It had been almost two years since I had seen her last when Mona called me at work to invite me to a housewarming party. I scribbled down her new address and said carefully that I’d love to come. Equally carefully, she said that she, David, and their one-year-old baby were looking forward to seeing me.