“What a handsome young man,” Dick agreed, shaking his hand. “Very impressive.” For Ellie’s parents this was an outpouring of emotion.
Toby smiled self-consciously. “We have snacks.”
Maureen was easily charmed by her grandson. “For us? You shouldn’t have.”
“Hi Mom and Dad.” Ellie hugged her parents. “Come on in.”
Sean grabbed a wine bottle from the kitchen and twirled it nervously. “Hey.” Sean gave a wave. “Great to see you. How about some wine?”
“Here.” Dick plucked the corkscrew from the coffee table. “Let me.” He popped the cork and poured. Sean handed the glasses around.
“Ellie, honey,” Maureen said examining her glass. “Didn’t you get a nice set of crystal for your wedding?”
Ellie ignored the comment. “We’re glad you could come over,” she said and put a hand on Sean’s leg, like they were a real We. She took a sip of wine. He saw her recoil ever so slightly and put down the glass. He wondered if the wine had turned or if it had been crappy to begin with. Either way, bad wine wasn’t going to go over well with Ellie’s parents. He took a sip to see how bad it was. He took another. He didn’t know much about wine, but it tasted fine to him. He checked Dick’s glass, which was almost empty.
“You don’t like it?” he whispered to Ellie.
She shook her head. “You can have mine.” It was not like Ellie to pass up wine or anything that might numb her to a visit with her parents.
“Next time we’ll cook for you,” she went on. “But we’re seeing old friends tonight for dinner.” She was good. He almost believed her. He almost believed they were a We.
Dick poured himself another. Maybe Ellie wasn’t drinking because of the health kick or maybe she was coming down with something. She’d been sleeping so much. He found himself staring at her chest. It wasn’t just the dress. Ellie’s boobs were bigger, he was sure of it.
Panic flashed through him when he put it together. His eyes went to her belly. She didn’t look pregnant. But she was breaking out. She always had perfect skin. Except when she was pregnant.
Maureen was saying something, but he couldn’t focus. He was doing math. Forget the fact the doctors said it wasn’t possible. She had to be pregnant. But they hadn’t even had sex since she’d come back. How long had it been since she left?
“Dick and I are planning a golf vacation in Palm Springs,” Maureen repeated cheerfully. “We’ll be going for ten days at the end of the month.”
Dick smiled.
“You should all come with us!” Maureen said. “We’ll have a family vacation!” She was excited as the idea formed. “Remember when we went to Bermuda when you were a teenager and we swam with the dolphins?” she asked Ellie.
Ellie smiled and reached for the wine, but then reconsidered. “The doctors want to make sure Toby is okay to travel. As soon as we get the go-ahead, we might go on our own vacation,” she vamped. “Just the three of us.”
He counted on his fingers: September, October, November, December, January. Could she be almost six months pregnant? He couldn’t think straight. He began to sweat, but made sure to keep Ellie in his peripheral vision, looking for evidence to prove he was wrong. He tried to get a better view of her stomach.
“Oh, that sounds lovely.” Maureen smiled at the idea of their happy family. “Doesn’t it Dick?”
“I’ve got to hand it to you,” Dick said, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe it. “You two really came back from the edge of the abyss. Most people can’t do that.” He raised his glass and drank to them.
Ellie reached for Sean’s hand and his entire life flashed before his eyes.
“Toby, I’m going to teach you how to play golf this summer,” Dick announced.
“Okay,” Toby said. “That sounds cool.”
“I’ll get you some clubs and we’ll go out to Wapatuck. This summer it’s you and me on the course.”
Another baby would mean he’d be trapped with Ellie, with a baby, with a life he didn’t want. His pulse quickened. Didn’t anybody else notice the room was stultifying?
“Why don’t we all play Sorry?” Toby said, carrying over the box.
“What a wonderful idea,” Maureen said.
Dick raised his empty glass. “Is there more wine?”
Ellie hopped up to get it, and Toby slid into her seat.
“Move over, Grandma.” Maureen scooted over and shifted uncomfortably. She reached behind the pillow and pulled out the foreign object that had been bothering her: a balled-up sheet.
Maureen raised her eyebrows accusingly.
Ellie was back with the wine. “So,” she said, nervously. “Who wants more?”
“That’s a funny place for a sheet.”
“This is like my dad’s bed.” Toby rolled the dice. “I go first.”
Maureen turned to Ellie. “He’s sleeping on the couch?”
“Mom,” Ellie said. “It’s really not a big deal.”
She pressed her lips. Toby handed her the dice and she rolled them without another word.
After the game, Ellie said they had to get going.
“Oh,” Maureen said, disappointed.
“Let’s do it again soon,” Dick said. He looked more than ready to go.
“Next time I’m sure it’ll be longer,” Maureen said.
“Dad, can I ring the bell for Grandma and Grandpa?” Toby was shoving his feet into his slippers.
“Sure, I’ll come with you.”
“I’ll start cleaning up,” Ellie said, and kissed her mother and father. “See you soon.”
When they’d successfully deposited Dick and Maureen in the elevator and returned to the apartment, the cheese plate and wine glasses hadn’t been touched. Ellie was nowhere to be found. The bedroom door was closed. He peeked in and saw Ellie napping. Again.
She used to nap all the time when she’d been pregnant with Toby. He began to pace the length of the living room. On his second or fifth or tenth lap, he stopped. The baby wasn’t his. Obviously. He was sleeping with someone else; why wouldn’t she be? A jolt of something like jealousy shot unexpectedly through him.
Toby looked up from the floor where he was playing with a rubber band he’d found down there. “Why are you doing that, Dad?”
“Doing what?”
Toby rolled his eyes. “Never mind.” He sat up. “What’s for dinner? I’m hungry.”
There was no way he could cook now. He wasn’t sure he was even capable of boiling water for pasta. “Chicken fingers?”
“Yes!” Toby exclaimed.
Sean dialed the Metro Diner. When the food arrived twenty minutes later, he took the top off the plastic container and brought it to the table.
“Can I have one?” he asked, lifting one from the box.
“Okay,” Toby said, grudgingly. “One.”
Ellie was not waking up. It was the longest nap ever. A pregnancy nap. He gnawed on the chicken finger. Maybe the baby was his after all. It was possible. And if it was, what would that mean for them? For him? He didn’t remember what to do with a baby. It would be years before a baby could talk or walk or even eat real food. There would be years of changing diapers.
“Dad, leave some for me.” Toby moved the last three pieces onto his napkin.
“What?”
“You’re eating them all,” he said, accusingly. “And they’re my favorite.”
“I know,” he said, ashamed that he’d scarfed his child’s dinner. “They were your first favorite food.”
“Can we watch me in the movie?”
In her Super Mom phase, Ellie had burned their home movies onto discs that stayed in a file box on a high shelf in the kitchen. “Why not?” It would give him something to focus on other than the end of life as he knew it. He climbed on the counter to reach the box, then flipped through the volumes of their life until he found the one Toby wanted to see.
He opened the disc on his computer. The first entry showed Toby, wailing at his third birthday party.
“Why am I crying?”
“You got a blue balloon.” Sean smiled, remembering the crisis. “You wanted the pink one.”
Toby’s eyes widened and then pinched into a frown. “But pink is a girl color.”
Sean shrugged. “You wanted pink.” He fast-forwarded to Toby in water wings, held afloat in the ocean by Ellie in a bikini he hadn’t seen in years. He wondered when she’d stopped wearing bikinis. She was smiling, encouraging Toby to kick. He wondered when she’d stopped being happy.
Finally, he found Toby’s favorite part, his moment at the Metro Diner. The Toby on the screen had rounder, less defined features. His limbs hadn’t unfurled yet. In only a matter of years, Toby had changed dramatically. “Chicken fingers are my first favorite food,” three-year-old Toby announced to the camera, with a hint of a lisp he’d lost long ago. He took a bite. “Delectable.”
“You and Mommy look different,” he said, watching.
Younger, was what Sean had been thinking. They looked open, happy, in sync. They looked like they were in love. He tried, but couldn’t remember who had filmed them that day.
Ellie finally emerged from the bedroom in sweats, squinting at the light.
“That was a long nap.” Sean checked obsessively for signs of pregnancy through the sweats.
She nodded groggily and sat next to Toby to watch the familiar clip, a wan smile on her face. “Look at you.” She kissed the side of Toby’s head. “You were so little!”
Toby rested his head against Ellie’s shoulder.
“Come on, sweetie,” she said. “Let’s get you to bed.”
He followed Ellie toward his room, then twisted back around. “After Mom puts me to bed, can you read to me?”
“You bet,” Sean said, wondering if Ellie had been hurt that he’d been chosen as designated reader.
A few minutes later, he settled in next to Toby to read, but Ellie didn’t leave. Instead, she curled up at the bottom of the bed and listened. He couldn’t remember the last time the three of them had been on a bed together like this, and it felt familiar, warm, confusing.
After Toby had been tucked in and kissed and tucked in again, Sean followed Ellie into his bedroom.
“Ellie.” He sat on his bed.
The fact that he’d come in the bedroom wasn’t lost on Ellie. She looked worried. “What’s wrong?”
There was really no leading into it well. “Are you pregnant?”
“I knew I shouldn’t have worn that dress. It made my boobs look huge.”
He could hardly breathe. “So you are?”
She sat next to him heavily. “I’m not,” she said. “I gained some weight. It always goes straight to my boobs. You know that.”
He wasn’t sure if he did know that. Or if he believed her. “But you’re tired, you didn’t like the wine. Your skin …”
She touched her chin where she was breaking out. Her eyes flitted away from his to the other side of the room. “I took a test yesterday.”
“A pregnancy test?”
“No, a driving test.” The sarcasm was fleeting. “Yes, a pregnancy test.”
“And …” He held his breath.
She shook her head, a little sadly. “Not pregnant.”
“But … the naps. The wine …”
She looked him in the eye now. “Definitely not pregnant.” She paused, as if deciding whether to add more. “I was … I was late so I thought maybe … but a few hours after I took the test I got my period. So I’m definitely, you know, not … pregnant.”
A rush of relief was quickly followed by the realization that she was testing to see if she was pregnant with some other guy’s baby. His initial reaction had been knee-jerk jealousy, but now all he felt was a current of sorrow somewhere deep inside him. None of it was reasonable. But there it was.
She smiled but not because she was happy. “That would be pretty ironic, wouldn’t it? If I were pregnant?”
“That’s not the word I would have picked.”
“Yeah, more like tragic.”
There was nothing to say for what felt like a long time. “I remember that day in the Metro Diner like it was yesterday,” she said, her face softening at the memory. “We always did make the best of naptime.”
At the mention of naptime, it all came back to him: They’d had two hours of hot afternoon sex before taking Toby to the diner that day. “We certainly did.”
She reached out and rested her hand on his chest. “I think about you,” she said. “About us.”
“Me too,” he said, but instantly regretted it.
In slow motion, she took his face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth. Gently, testing the waters, seeing how he would react. He thought about pulling away, telling her to stop, but his body was switching on and he wanted her, suddenly and completely. He reached for the side of her waist and pulled her toward him.
She was pulling his shirt over his head, kissing his shoulders, his chest. His body surprised him by responding the way it always had. Her mouth tasted familiar—sweet and salty at the same time. He tugged her hair away from her face the way she liked and she moaned a little. Her neck was warm and she smelled like the ocean, which brought back Ellie in the bikini. He wanted that Ellie again and held on tightly. She was holding on tightly, too. When he pulled off her sweatshirt, he took a moment to admire his wife. He knew her body inside and out. He couldn’t have imagined that she could still excite him this way. He pulled off her sweatpants and she glowed in the moonlight. He leaned in to kiss her again, but Ellie had another idea.
She pushed him back on the bed and ran her hands down his stomach, then unbuttoned his fly and worked off his jeans and his boxers. Before launching into her trademark move, she gave him a look that could have preceded jumping out of an airplane.
When he’d first encountered it, the move had seemed impossible. It was nothing short of awe-inspiring. And after more than a decade, he still wasn’t sure exactly how she created the swirling effect. He peeked from his prone position and watched her head bob up and down and from side to side between his legs. Watching her used to excite him. Now he studied her with the interest of an academic researching a paper. He lay back and stared at the ceiling, wondering what the hell he was doing.
The excitement from a few minutes before had drained away. His body was on autopilot. He knew all the steps by heart. After she completed the virtuoso performance, she’d expect him to return the favor before they’d be allowed to move on to the main event. He wondered if all couples who’d been together a long time had checklist sex. He tried to imagine checklist sex with Jess but it was impossible. He kept drifting back to the Blue Moon motel. There had been nothing rote about what had happened there. He needed to stop comparing the two separate events, which, unfortunately, were separated by a very small window. It was a mess he’d single-handedly created. One more to add to his growing collection.
He decided he had to see it through, now that they’d made it this far. The truth was, he could do this in his sleep. He had on many occasions.
He was close, though he knew there were more steps to check off. Before the next sixty seconds were up, she’d pull back and it would be his turn. But he didn’t want to go down on her. He’d made the commitment to have sex, but hadn’t agreed to follow the steps. He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t. She traveled back up on cue and he reached between her legs and found the spot. She moaned and gripped his arms the way she always had. Desire, love, intimacy—those things had nothing to do with what was happening, he realized now. He had to end this sooner rather than later. Ellie lay back, ready for him to follow protocol. She pulled him toward her, but the last thing he wanted to do now was kiss her. How could she not know that?
Instead, he rolled her over on her stomach and pulled up her hips, figuring he could get the job done most quickly this way. She let out a groan. He knew she didn’t like
this position. I like looking you in the eye, she used to say. He tried to remove himself from the reality of what his body was doing. This was just a dream, one he wanted to wake up from soon. When she grabbed his balls, he knew she wanted it over too. All it took was a few strategic yanks for the whole God-awful experiment to be over. The results were conclusive.
Ellie pulled the covers over herself and they lay awkwardly next to each other. He wanted to explain, but there was no good way to do it. “I …,” he started. “We need to …”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Ellie offered.
“I do. I have to say something.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Ellie …” He propped himself up to look at her. “We can’t be married anymore. I don’t want to be married anymore.”
She nodded and tears welled behind her eyes.
He thought about putting his arm around her, but didn’t. “It’ll be better for both of us.”
“I just … I wanted us to be okay. For Toby.”
“He’ll be fine,” Sean said. He would make sure of it.
“Toby would have been the happiest kid in the world.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “If we could have stayed together.”
“He can still be happy,” he said, quietly. “He has two parents who love him.” The unspoken truth was that they no longer loved each other. He felt a deep, unshakable sadness at the finality of it.
“Poor Toby,” she said, her voice cracking.
It was unbearable to think about the pain he was about to inflict on his son. “Kids get through these things,” he said, knowing this had to be true. “We’ll be there for him.”
The words hung between them in the quiet room.
“So …” She was trying to pull herself together. “What do we do now?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SHE PACKED A BAG THAT NIGHT AND IN THE MORNING SHE KNELT in front of Toby. He’d grown since the last time she perched in front of him like this, and now she was eye level with his shoulder. “I’m going away for a while,” she said. “To Montauk.”
“No!” Toby threw his arms around her. “Don’t go, Mommy.” He held on tightly. “Stay.”