Rachel told Brian about the baby.
“I think it's a girl,” she said. “I just have a feeling.”
They lay side by side in bed.
“I want to keep it, Bri,” she said, then waited a moment. “I know it's going to be hard, but we won't regret it. I promise. It'll be worth it.”
He said, “If that's what you want.”
He put his arm around her and went to sleep, and Rachel stayed awake for hours, watching shadows and streetlights weave through the window. She waited for something else to happen, but nothing did.
She went to the doctor. Everything looked fine. She heard the baby's heart beating along with the pulse of her own blood. Brian acted kind yet impartial; when she talked about the baby, he listened. He said nothing against the baby, about the money or the apartment or how or whether they could live on just his paycheck. Rachel also avoided these subjects, knowing they were knotty, inviting danger. She kept her worries to herself. She tried to maintain the certainty she'd held in the pit of her stomach, the push of the extra life inside her, but somehow the energy of these feelings seeped away from her, more and more quickly, each day. In the mornings she felt nauseous, in the afternoons she felt great, and at night she was exhausted and went to sleep right after dinner.
One Saturday, at lunch, she asked Kevin if he understood what the word pregnant meant, and he said yes. She told him that he was going to have a little brother or sister.
He put down his forkful of macaroni and cheese and appraised her. “You don't look pregnant,” he said, and gestured a bulge over his stomach.
“It doesn't show yet. But it will soon.”
“Okay,” he said.
He started eating again, and Rachel felt herself plummet down into empty space. But then he said, with his mouth full, “Mrs. Tanizaki has a son.”
“She does?”
“He's fifteen,” Kevin said, and swallowed.
“Is he your friend?” Rachel said, not understanding.
He shook his head. “No. He sits in the room and eats sandwiches during my lessons.”
“Oh.”
“Lawrence is fifteen and I'm eight,” Kevin said. “When the baby's eight, I'll be sixteen.”
“Yes, that's right.”
“Sixteen,” he repeated. “I'll really play piano by then. I'll play for the baby.”
Rachel smiled. “That's right,” she said.
Mrs. Tanizaki loaned Kevin a book called Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student. When she presented it to him, the moment took on the aspect of a ceremony. Lawrence was not in the room, and it was very quiet.
Mrs. Tanizaki stood up, took the book off the top of the piano, and put it in Kevin's hands. “I'm going to lend this book to you, Kevin,” she said. “It's my book, and I want it back eventually. But you can use it for now. I'm going to assign you exercises from it each week, and you'll practice them. Every day.”
Kevin nodded and held the book loosely, afraid of damaging or marking the short, wide book with yellow pages, its cover already dog-eared and bent. He opened the cover and saw penciled handwriting on the inside: Anita Osaka. I-need-a, I-need-a, he said to himself, then looked at her.
“That was my name before I married Mr. Tanizaki,” she said. “I've had this book for a long time. That's why you have to be careful with it, and give it back.”
“Okay.”
“I trust you, Kevin. I know you'll take good care of the book, and practice every day.”
“Okay.”
“Do you understand? Say yes, Kevin, not this ‘okay’ all the time.”
“Yes,” he whispered. He was close to desperation. He had not told Mrs. Tanizaki that he had no piano to practice on, and was scared to tell her because she might say he couldn't take lessons anymore. Every two weeks his mother gave him an envelope with a check in it for Mrs. Tanizaki, and he brought it and laid it on the piano. It stayed there, undiscussed, until he left. They never talked about his family, or where he lived, or anything. The piano was their only shared element. Now he didn't know what to do. The book was ancient and valuable; he shouldn't have it. In his hands, as if by themselves, the pages flipped open, and he saw the long black lines stretching across the pages, notes rising and falling in small streams. As he looked, the notes wrapped themselves around him like ribbons of seaweed. He could not tell her.
He took the book home and laid it on his bed. Then he took his school notebook and ripped out three pages and fastened them side-to-side with Scotch tape. He took a pencil and drew middle C in the center of one page. It looked lopsided and thick and the bottom right side spread downward like something that had been left out in the sun and was starting to melt. He thought of Mrs. Tanizaki's face and Lawrence's chewing and the smell of food that laid itself over all his lessons, and he was angry then and ripped up the pages and threw them in the garbage can.
But the next day he started over and drew eight white notes and five black ones, enough for a scale and the simple exercises for the right hand, and in the bedroom he practiced from the book, his fingers rustling and tapping against the paper. Before figuring out that he needed to put the paper over a book from school, he broke through it twice and ruined it. Eventually he drew the best, longest-lasting one.
Rachel, cleaning out the garbage can a week later, found all his failed attempts. By this time she was showing, and although she wasn't too ungainly just yet, the consciousness of weight invaded all her actions, including the way she bent to pick up the garbage can or sat down on the couch to examine the piano pages. When Brian came home from work and turned on the news, she brought him a beer.
“Brian,” she said, “we need to get Kevin a piano, so he can practice. Maybe we can find him one of those — what are they, like a synthesizer? Those little flat things that shouldn't be too expensive?”
He looked at her, but not in the face. Lately she'd noticed he wouldn't meet her eyes; instead, he looked at her stomach or his gaze seemed to fasten on her neck, not quite making it any higher, as if seized by that weight she carried, her additional gravity.
“You want to buy a goddamn piano?” he said.
“Not a real piano,” she said. “Just something for him to practice on. He loves it, Brian. It's really amazing. He could turn out to be a genius, I mean who knows?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Or maybe if we gave Mrs. Tanizaki a little extra money, she'd let him go over there and practice on her piano. She can't use it all the time, can she? I bet she'd do that. I think she would.”
Brian put down his beer and held her hand and looked at her lap. When he spoke, his voice was tender and soft. “Rachel, I don't know how to tell you this, but I want you to listen to me. I think you're losing it. I think you really are.”
The next morning she got a call from Brian's boss asking if he was sick, which he wasn't. When he didn't come home after work, she didn't call Steve or his parents. She wasn't going to ask anybody else where her own husband was, not in this lifetime.