21. Allison
ALLISON
Rebecca Kendall pulls into my loading yard on a gray Tuesday in January, in a rental car.
The Rebecca I know wouldn’t be caught dead in a silver sedan. Luis sees her first. He’s out by the dock breaking down pallets, and he stops with a board in each hand and looks over at the retail house to find me.
My mother has Henry upstairs for his nap. I’m at the potting bench with dirt up to my wrists, repotting a customer’s dying fiddle-leaf fig that was murdered by love and overwatering, and I don’t bother washing my hands before I go out.
She’s in a camel coat and boots with no heel at all, and she’s thinner in the face than she was at the gala. She looks at my hands, then at the soil on my apron, and one corner of her mouth goes up.
“You look good,” she says.
“I look like somebody who sleeps in pieces.”
“It suits you. You look like you could fire a person.”
“I’ve never had to. My people don’t delete my phone calls.”
That lands. She takes it without blinking, and I have to admit that’s impressive. She doesn’t pull anything out of her bag. She doesn’t need to. Rebecca’s always carried the important things in her head.
“I’m not here to fight with you,” she says. “I’m here to ask you for one thing.”
“You can ask.”
“Tell him the truth about September.” She says it evenly. “Tell Gavin I came here, and I saw you, and I told you to call him. Tell him I said ‘You should tell him,’ standing right there in your office, and you didn’t. He thinks I’m the only one who kept it from him. You know I’m not.”
I don’t answer right away. The cold gets into my wet hands.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I tell it myself. Not to him. He won’t take my calls.
” Her voice doesn’t change at all. “I know a reporter at one of the papers that’s been printing your landscaper’s picture.
She’d love the rest of it. The wife who knew for months.
The wife who got told, face to face, to call her husband, and sat on it all fall.
The dates. The test. The phone call where he asked you if there was anything he needed to know.
” She tilts her head. “Your son’s going to learn to read someday, Allison. The internet doesn’t forget anything.”
For a second I can’t move. The fear goes through me in one long shiver, because she’s right. It’s a real threat. She’s thought it all the way through, the way she thinks everything through.
“You want me to go tell my husband you were the honest one.”
“I want you to tell him what happened.”
“You did tell me.” I wipe my hands down my apron, slowly, because I want her to wait.
“You stood in my office dripping rain on my floor and said ‘You should tell him.’ And then you got in your car and went to the airport, flew back to London, and sat across a table from him for weeks without saying one word. You had his phone in your hand in April. You had the pilot’s warning in your hand in November.
And you want me to go tell him you were the one who wanted everybody to be honest.”
“I wasn’t the one keeping his child from him.”
“No. You were just the one who knew about it.” I point back at the glass office.
“You drove an hour to cancel a courtyard order you could’ve canceled with an email.
You walked in here to cancel some ferns, and you walked out knowing about my son, and you kept it to yourself so you could use it later. ”
She doesn’t answer that.
The anger comes up from low in my belly, right where Henry used to kick.
“Do you know where Gavin was when Henry was born?” I ask her.
“He was sitting in an airport office in Farnborough, because you decided a first baby would wait an hour. I had him on the phone for one call, and a landscaper’s hand for the whole rest of it.
For five years I got whatever was left of him after you were done with him, and I never asked you for a thing.
I asked for one day, Rebecca. One. I finally asked him to come home, and you sat on that warning and let the plane stay on the ground, and you took that day too. ”
She’s gone pale under the careful makeup, but her voice doesn’t move. “Then I call the reporter.”
“Call her.” I hear myself say it, and it’s the easiest thing I’ve said in months.
“I lied to my husband with a positive test in my hand. I kept his son from him all spring and summer and fall. You told me to tell him, and I didn’t.
I’m going to say all of that myself, out loud.
I’m going to say it to Gavin tonight, and to my mother, and to anybody with a notepad who wants to hear it, and to Henry the first time he’s old enough to ask me.
And I’m going to say it before you ever get to sell it.
It’s my lie, and I’m the one who tells it. ”
For a long moment she just looks at me. When she finally talks, it’s quiet and almost friendly, which is how I know she’s saved the sharpest thing for last.
“London’s already coming apart without me. You know that, right? Crews are quitting. He’s running it from his car.” She pulls her keys out of her coat. “When London’s in trouble, he’ll call me. He always has.”
She gets back in the silver sedan and drives out of my yard. It takes her two tries to find reverse.
Luis wanders over with a bag of rock salt on his shoulder and watches her taillights turn onto the road. “I can salt where she parked,” he says. “Or I can not salt where she parked.”
“Leave it.”
“That’s what I figured,” he says, and goes back to his pallets.
My hands don’t stop shaking until I’ve finished the fiddle-leaf fig.
Gavin comes for his evening visit, and the heater in the glass office quits halfway through, and the metal around the windows gets so cold I don’t want the bassinet anywhere near it, so I tell him to carry Henry upstairs.
He takes the narrow stairs sideways so Henry’s head stays tucked against his sweater.
My kitchen smells like milk and coffee, there’s a drying rack full of bottle parts taking up half the counter, and a thyme plant is slowly freezing to death on the windowsill because I keep forgetting to move it.
He lays Henry down in the crib on his back, rests one hand on his chest for a couple of breaths, and takes it away.
I tell him before he’s even sat down.
“Rebecca came here today.”
He stops with one arm still in his coat.
I tell him what she wanted and what she threatened, and that I said no.
Then I tell him the part she wanted me to tell him, because it’s true.
“She did say it. In September, in my office, she said ‘You should tell him.’ And I didn’t.
I had weeks, and I didn’t.” He listens with his hands in fists at his sides.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
“I’m mad. I’m fine.”
“Do you want me to call her?”
“No. I’m not telling you so you’ll handle it. I’m telling you because I’m not keeping anything else from you.”
He nods slowly. Then he sits down across from me at the little table, with the monitor hissing softly between us, and he doesn’t get up to leave even though his visit’s over.
“What was it like?” he asks.
“What was what like?”
“Being pregnant with him.” He keeps his voice low. “Those phone records told me what Rebecca did. They don’t tell me anything about what Henry was like before he was born.”
That gets under my anger before I can stop it, and my eyes go hot. He isn’t asking why I did it, or how to make the missing months fair. He wants to know what our son was like.
I go get the envelope out of my dresser drawer. It’s soft at the corners from being opened too many times. I sit back down and put it between us.
“Don’t touch them until I say.”
“Okay.”
The first one is twelve weeks. A gray curve, a round head, one little arm up over it like he’s hailing a cab. I lay it on the table and Gavin looks down at it with both hands flat on his knees.
“He had a nose,” I tell him.
“I’d hope so.”
“That’s what my mom said, after I stopped acting like he’d invented noses.”
He laughs, and it breaks in the middle.
I turn my phone over. The recording of his heartbeat is still there, saved in a message to Gavin I never sent. I switched phones once over the summer and checked over and over to make sure this one file came with me. The title sits under the little audio bar, and I watch him read it.
For Gavin.
I press play, and my kitchen fills up with it, that fast, galloping sound.
For a moment I’m back in that exam room with my shirt pushed up and my mother crushing my hand and blaming the air conditioning for her face.
My breasts tingle and let down at the sound, which is ridiculous, because it’s a recording from before he was born.
Gavin leans in over the table. When the recording stops, he puts a hand over his mouth and cries into it, and the tears run down between his fingers.
I want to touch him so badly my hands ache. I stay in my chair. I don’t tell him it’s all right, because it isn’t, and he doesn’t need me to lie to him about that. I pull the paper towels off the counter and hand him the roll.
He tears off one sheet.
“Very dignified,” I say.
“I lost my dignity in a plastic chair at the hospital.”
It lets both of us breathe.
I put down the twenty-week pictures next. “He wouldn’t turn over so the tech could measure his face. She printed extras out of spite. That’s the day I found out he was a boy, and I cried in the parking lot, because you told me once you wanted a daughter who looked like me.”
“I wanted any baby with you.”
“You didn’t know you had one.”
“No.” He doesn’t ask me to soften it.
So I tell him the rest. The kicking, mostly in the middle of the night, right up under my ribs on the right side, and how later I could see his foot push out against my skin and I’d push back on it.
I tell him I talked to Henry, mostly to inform him that two in the morning was rude.
I tell him about the names on my bad list: Oliver lasted a week, and my mother said Samuel sounded dependable, which made him sound like an accountant, and Henry just kept coming back no matter how many times I crossed it off.
“Why Henry?”
“I don’t know. It sounded steady.”
He looks at the anatomy scan nearest him and doesn’t say anything. One small foot, one bent knee, a baby neither of us had held yet. His hands still haven’t moved off his knees.
I’ve got two copies of that one.
I slide it across the table to him.
“You can keep this one.”