Gently, I touched his cheek to make him see me. I squinted in an effort to see him. “It was only the silly infection,” I said, and moved closer. I felt the ache in my abdomen, the muscle closing up around the ragged scar. “Next time I’ll know better,” I said. “I’ll bring my own ether.”
I began to unbutton his shirt. “Everyone says the second baby’s easier.” Put my lips to his bared throat—was there any place on a body more lonely and vulnerable? “A girl next time,” I said. “One of the nurses told me to have a girl next time. Someone to take care of me in my old age.” But he was still shaking his head.
“I’m not afraid,” I told him. I wasn’t. I had conceived our first child without any notion of the suffering involved. Now that I knew, desire—which was still there, of course—seemed small enough incentive to conceive again. It was courage now that was delightful to me. I was a bold piece. I had stood at death’s door. I had withstood pain. I knew I could make a stand against it, against time, bold and stubborn, a living child in my arms.
When he ran his fingertips over the scar that split my belly, he paused. I heard him catch his breath. “This is foolish of us,” he whispered.
I said, “I suppose it is.”
THREE
The first strange thing was that Tom brought him in through the front door, which we never used. I had been sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the shadow to cross the lace curtain over the window in the back door, the shadow that meant the car had been pulled into the carport, when I heard instead the rattle and bang and then the odd wheeze of the door at the front of the house. I heard Tom’s voice—loud and buoyant. “Come in, come in,” a jovial innkeeper—and another series of small crashes that was my brother’s suitcase being wrestled into the narrow hall.
Susan was at the sink, making something complicated out of the simple task of brewing iced tea—there was wild mint involved, weeds from the yard, as far as I was concerned, honey, and lemon rind—and the two of us glanced at each other at the sound of the front door opening, the sound of the storm door clutching at the threshold, with the same surprise we might have shown if Tom had led Gabe in through the drier vent. “What in heaven’s name?” I said.
Gabe was standing alone in the middle of the living room. He had his hands at his side. Even as a boy, he had sometimes stretched his smile too wide like this. Conveyed, all inadvertently, the effort he was making to express a pleasure that was, nevertheless, authentic and sincere. It was a shy, dutiful boy’s picture-taking smile, held a beat too long. “Hey there,” he said.
He had lost weight. Something of his natural color had left not only his face and his hair but also the backs of his long hands, his polished dress shoes, the clothes he wore—a white polo shirt buttoned to the neck under a blue Windbreaker, despite the heat, and a pair of gray dress pants. Meticulous as always, yes, his broad long face was clean-shaven, his fair and graying hair carefully combed, but altogether less vivid than he had been, less present, somehow, in the world. I crossed the living room to him, Susan behind me, Helen following. Tom was already halfway up the stairs with the suitcase, and he called to Gabe over the banister. “Look out,” he said, “the gang’s all here,” as if to remind my brother that the women must be humored.
I reached up to put my palms to Gabe’s hollow cheeks. His skin was prickly, glazed with perspiration. He raised both his hands to my elbows. For a moment, we brought our faces together in the modern way, but then we stepped back, into the more comfortable distance we had known growing up. There was the scent of the institution about his clothes: cafeteria food and hospital disinfectant under his aftershave. “How was the traffic?” I said, and Gabe said, “Fine”—even his eyes had lost some vividness—while Tom cried out from the top of the stairs, “Southern State backed up through Hempstead going out. Poor fools won’t hit Jones before sunset.”
I turned to the girls behind me. I hadn’t intended it to, but it felt like a turning away.
“Here’s Susan and Helen,” I said brightly. The two girls had paused just inside the arched doorway of the living room. Each of them raised a hand and wiggled its fingers, Helen ducking her head as she did so, lifting her shoulders shyly—she was a hunchback of shyness in those years—and Susan showing in her smile that she knew she could, if she wished, unmask us alclass="underline" her jovial father, her cautious mother, her uncle just out of Suffolk—the mental hospital out east that had been the stuff of childhood insults for as long as she could remember:
Where do you go to school, Suffolk?
Hey, Suffolk called, it’s time to go back.
The men in the little white coats want to give you a free ride to Suffolk.
He was, perhaps, the first adult about whom she knew something she was supposed to pretend she didn’t know, and I understood then that this set her well above us all in those first hours of Gabe’s return.
Tom came tapping down the stairs again, his hand hovering over the banister. “You wanted to tell the poor P.R.s,” he said, loud and jovial, perspiring as well, his broad face and bald dome flushed pink, “to take their coolers and their transistor radios and head back to the Bronx.”
Now he was at the foot of the stairs, in the small foyer where the front door—the door we never used—was still open. He pushed it closed, and a measure of sunlight fell away from the foyer, from that end of the living room as well. We all stood there for a moment in the dimmer light, sealed in together by the shut door.
Although the house was small enough, we didn’t use the living room much either: we opened Christmas presents here, and took Easter photos, and when we entertained, we sat in here with cocktails and bowls of salted peanuts. There was only one double window, dressed with white, crisscrossed sheers and venetian blinds that were closed now against the morning’s heat. There was the sturdy upright under the stairs, the gold brocade sectional along the far corner, a coffee table, a pair of Waterford lamps. At the beginning of every summer, I rolled up the good wool rug strewn with roses that had been my mother’s, sent it off to storage, and left the wood floors bare until September. My voice echoed faintly, then, as if on a stage, when I said, “Come on in, Gabe. Make yourself at home.”
I led him back through the dining room and into the kitchen. It was a pass-through kitchen, aqua and pink, a narrow, impractical space, catty-cornered between the dining room and the hallway that led to the two downstairs bedrooms. There was only a small table with two chairs, and Helen darted in and took the farthest one, sitting on one folded knee as she liked to do, as if folding in on herself and yet ready to spring. Susan went back to the counter where she’d been assembling her iced tea. I followed and then turned to my brother. Gabe stood in the doorway, reluctant and uncertain—a good foot taller than Tom, who was behind him, still talking about the drive, the beach traffic this morning going out, the relative ease with which they’d gotten home. “Please,” I said, indicating the chair, “have some tea.” I blushed at my own awkwardness. “Or do you want to wash up?”
Gabe said, “I might do that.” And I showed him to the small powder room, as politely as if he had been a stranger.
In the kitchen, Tom slapped his pockets and asked loudly what he had done with his car keys, and then—“Here they are”—held them up between his thumb and forefinger, laughing as if he had conjured them. He said he really should go right out and move the car out of that hot driveway and up under the carport so the seats won’t melt and the paint won’t fade in this heat. He’d been telling Gabe, in fact, he said, telling him on the drive back, how well the old Belvedere was holding up and how cautious he was about keeping it in good repair.