Sean was in the kitchen, banging things around and singing — bellowing — along with one of Wagner’s operas, the only music he ever listened to. And which one was it? — she’d heard them all a thousand times. There it was, yes, Siegfried going down for the count: Götterdämmerung. Sean was making his famous shrimp and avocado salad, and he was in the throes of something — Wagner, Theory, some sort of testosterone rush — and he barely glanced up at her as she trudged into the bedroom. Her mistake was in taking off her shoes, the flats she wore for the sake of her feet while propping up an automatic smile behind the reference desk, because once her shoes were off she felt out of balance and had to rest her head on the pillow, just for a minute.
The gods of Valhalla had been laid to rest and the house was silent when she awoke to the soft click of the bedroom door. Sean was standing there framed in the doorway, the tacky yellow globe of the hallway light hanging over his shoulder like a captive moon. It was dark beyond the windows. “What,” he said, “are you sick or something?”
Was she? Now was her chance, now was the time to tell him, to share the news, the joyous news, pop the cork on the bottle of champagne and let’s go out to a nice place, a really nice place, and save the famous shrimp and avocado salad for tomorrow. “No,” she said. “No. Just tired, that’s all.”
At dinner — Sean and Lacan and a scatter of papers, the shrimp salad, lemonade from the can and an incongruous side dish of Ranch Style barbecue beans, also from the can — she did tell him about the man at the door that morning. “He said he wanted work,” she said, waving a forkful of shrimp and beans in an attempt to delineate the scene for the third time, “and I told him I didn’t have any work for him. That was it. The whole thing.”
Sean had begun to develop a groove just over the bridge of his nose, a V-shaped gouge that might have been a scar or the mark of a hot branding iron. It vanished when he was asleep or sunk into the couch with a beer and the New York Times, but it was there now, deeper than ever. “You mean he was Mexican?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “he was a Latino. I was scared. He really scared me.”
There was a long silence, the clock her mother had given her ticking dramatically from atop the brick-and-board bookcase in the hall, someone’s sprinklers going on outside, the muted rumble of Jessica-something’s TV seeping down through the ceiling — Melanie half-expected to hear the blast of the train’s whistle, but it was too early yet. “It could be,” Sean said finally, “—I mean, why not? You’re right. The guy takes a train, he could be anywhere. And then there’s the aleatory factor—”
She just stared at him.
“Chance. Luck. Fate. You can’t buck fate.” And then a look came over his face: two parts high seriousness, one part vigilante. “But you can be ready for it when it comes — you can be prepared.” Suddenly he was on his feet. “You just wait here, just sit tight”—and his voice had an edge to it, as if she’d been arguing with him, as if she had to be restrained from running off into the night like one of the screaming teenagers in a cheap horror film—“I’ll be right back.”
She wanted a glass of wine, but she knew she couldn’t drink anymore, not if she was going to keep the baby, and if she hadn’t known, the doctor had taken her down a smiling anfractuous road full of caveats and prohibitions, the sort of thing she — the doctor — must go through ten times a day, albeit tailoring her tone to the educational level of the patient. Outside, the sprinklers switched off with an expiring wheeze. She could hear Sean in the bedroom, rummaging around for something. Tonight, she would tell him tonight.
Because the knowledge was too big for her to contain, and she wanted to call her mother and have a long, confidential chat, and call her sisters too — but before that, before there could be any possibility of that, she had to tell Sean, and Sean had to say the things she needed to hear. During her five o’clock break, she’d confided in one of the girls she worked with, Gretchen Mohr, but it did nothing to reassure her. Gretchen was only twenty-three, in no way serious about the guy she was dating, and Melanie could tell from the way she squeezed her eyes shut over the news that the idea of a baby was about as welcome to her as paraplegia or epilepsy. Oh, she tried to cover herself with a flurry of congratulations and a nonstop barrage of platitudes and one-liners, but the final thing she said, her last and deepest thought, gave her away. “I don’t know,” she sighed, staring down into the keyhole of her Diet Coke can as if she were reading tea leaves, “but I just don’t think I’d be comfortable bringing a baby into a world like this.”
When Melanie looked up, Sean was standing over her. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Freud on it, over a legend that read “Dr. Who?” His hair was slicked down, and the left side of his face, up to and encircling the ear, was inflamed with the skin condition he was forever fighting. But that was ordinary, that was the way he always looked. What was different were his eyes — proud, incandescent, lit up like fireworks — and his hands, or what was in his hands. Swaddled in coarse white cloth that was stained with what might have been olive oil lay an object she recognized from the movies, from TV and pawnshop display cases: a gun.
“What is that?” she said, edging away from him. “What are you showing me?”
“Come on, Mel, give me a break.”
“It’s a gun, isn’t it?”
“We’re on the ground floor here, and we’re going to lock the windows tonight, even if it’s hot, which I doubt because already the fog’s coming in, and we’re going to keep this by the bed, on the night table, that’s all.”
She’d drawn up her legs and hugged them to her, as far away from him on the couch as she could manage to be. “I don’t believe you,” she said, and she could hear the thin whine of complaint in her own voice. “You know what my father would say if he saw you now? Where did you get it? Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded, and she couldn’t help herself — her voice broke on the final syllable.
He drew the thing back, took it from its cradle and raised it up in one hand till it grazed the ceiling. The muscles of his forearm flexed, the soiled rag dropped to the carpet. “Son of a bitch,” he said, “son of a fucking bitch. Tell me this,” he said, “would you rather be the killer or the killee?”
—
She was asleep and dreaming the image of a baby floating in amniotic fluid, the cord attached, eyes shut tight — a big baby, an enormous glowing baby floating free like the interstellar embryo of 2001—when a sudden sharp explosion of noise jolted her awake. It took her a moment, heart pounding, breath coming quick, to understand what it was — it was a scream, a woman’s scream, improvised and fierce. The room was dark. Sean was asleep beside her. The scream — a single rising note tailing off into what might have been a sob or gasp — seemed to have come from above, where Jessica-something lived alone with her potted plants and two bloated pampered push-faced cats that were never allowed out of the apartment for fear of the world and its multiplied dangers. Melanie sat up and caught her breath.
Nothing. The alarm clock on the night table flashed 1:59 and then 2:00.