meant, I can’t wait for us to have our baby, cross the finish line, and be out of this psychotic parallel universe.”
Eva is silent, the car filled with the sound of her breathing. She yawns open her mouth and wiggles her lower jaw back and forth like an anxious mare, and while Paul knows she is so congested she is trying to clear her ears, he feels a deep stab of annoyance. He keeps going.
“I’m just so sick of talking about birth mothers and agencies and caseworkers and babies and birth and placentas—”
“Nobody said ‘placenta’ tonight.”
He pulls into their driveway and they sit in the running car, neither one making a move to get out.
“I just remember that night when we were in Costa Rica at your brother’s and we went outside, and the sky was thick with stars. Remember? Everything seemed so clear, so simple. I felt like you and I were all that mattered in the universe, and I wonder, sometimes, how we went from that to this.”
Eva doesn’t respond. She takes her index finger, slightly greasy from turkey skin, and traces her signature swirls and paisley doodles on the condensation of the passenger-side window. Months later, after the unthinkable has happened, before the police impound her car, Paul will sit in this same seat, in his own driveway, nowhere to go but desperate to unzip out of his skin, his life, and the morning dew will make the pattern reappear. He will wonder how he ever thought things were anything but perfect on this Thanksgiving night.
But now Eva breaks the silence and says, “Rock paper scissors for who gets to give Henry his shot.”
They both throw rock, three times in a row, and then simultaneously, five pairs of scissors.
“Great minds…” Eva giggles.
“I’ll stab the cat.” Paul sighs, and she tips her head onto his shoulder, and they laugh, friends again, one of a hundred, a thousand, little repairs they do to the fabric of their relationship.
Earlier that month, Eva had told him she was doing an evening prenatal yoga class at their gym, when out of the corner of her eye she saw a man reflected in the studio mirror, coming in from the parking lot through the gym’s glass doors.
“And I got this incredible rush of, of attraction just from this partial glance, and it was so strong, so visceral.”
“Uh-huh,” Paul had said, shoving his hands in his pockets in an attempt to be casual but thinking, Why are you telling me this?
“I was almost embarrassed to look, but the feeling was so intense that I couldn’t not look, so I turned all the way around, and it was you.”
PAUL UNLOCKS THEIR FRONT door, his hand on her elbow as she goes over the threshold in the dark. They are greeted by the tangy stench of cat piss—Henry, the diabetic cat, is ruining their hardwood floors, one dark stain at a time. Paul tells her to go to bed, he’ll handle it, but then he can’t find either the tabby or the puddle.
Upstairs, Eva is sitting up in bed trying to hold her nostrils open with her fingers. Paul suggests a Breathe Right strip, and she nods. He brings her one, and she tilts her face up to him like a little girl, asks him to put it on while she holds her nose in the right position. Afterward, he kisses her forehead.
“Okay?” he asks.
“No, I’m miserable!” She starts to cry.
Paul opens his hand, lets the heavy boots he is carrying crash to the floor from hip height. He undresses slowly, debating if he should ask what’s wrong. He does, thinking, Ticket for one on the Hormone Coaster, please.
“It’s Amber. And the baby. I wonder about them.”
The baby that had almost been their daughter, a year earlier. Amber, a pudgy thirteen-year-old birth mother, her own mother only twenty-eight, had chosen the Novas as the adoptive parents for her baby. Chloe Pinter had arranged their first meeting at a Red Lobster, an obese pair of slow-blinking, loud-chewing women. Paul’s tongue-tied comment, “You could be sisters,” had offended them equally. They had strung the agency along for six months, huge expensive meals, dragging Chloe through the grocery store for hours. Chloe told Eva and Paul that Amber and her mother had each pushed a cart filled with Doritos, jumbo boxes of Froot Loops, doughnuts, crumb cakes.
“Doesn’t the agency do nutritional counseling, or anything?” Eva had asked, and Chloe had sighed, said it was a really delicate situation.