my head on Joe’s bare chest, listening to his heart like it was the only sound in a still and quiet universe.
And then we did it all over again because when you’re young and crazy in love, the body has a way of resetting itself as many times as it wants to or needs.
In September, I went back north, driving my little VW Rabbit, missing the hardness of the Mustang and the hardness of Joe’s body. And now I was here, in a subway-tiled bathroom holding a pee stick with its accusing blue cross. If I turned it, the cross became an X, and I imagined it was my entire life that was being crossed out.
I threw the testing stick into the trash bin, pulled up my pajamas, and climbed back into bed, thinking I’d call my mother. As I reached for the phone, it rang. The caller ID announced Malcolm. I let it go to voice mail and fell asleep.
Three hours later, I played the message.
He was driving up for the weekend.
He was taking me to the Cape.
He wanted to ask me a question.
On the first Saturday of October, I’d taken care of things. It was easier than I thought, allowing myself to stretch out on that gurney in the student clinic, watching the anesthesiologist as she gazed into my eyes and said something that sounded vaguely like She’s nearly under. Not worrying anymore about what kind of child a mechanic and a college dropout could possibly raise.
Joe never knew about any of it. He knew only what I wrote him in my letter, the one he never answered.
I’ve decided to marry Malcolm. I’m so sorry. I love you, Joe. I love you crazy. But I don’t think we have a future.
I tore the sheet up and rewrote it, leaving out everything after “sorry.”
TWELVE
“Freddie kicked me out,” Anne says when I meet her in the hallway, halfway between her room and her sister’s. “What’s up with that?”
I want to tell her what’s up with that is her father’s empathy deficit, but instead I tell her to help Malcolm with the dishes and go down the hall myself. The sight in my daughter’s bedroom stops me short.
Freddie is packing a suitcase.
It’s the old green one, the hard-shell Samsonite that O.J. used to kick around on television, the one Malcolm and I took on our honeymoon to Bermuda. I don’t know where Freddie even found it.
Her room, usually arranged with the help of a T square, has morphed into a disaster zone. Think New Orleans after Katrina. A few patches of shag carpet peek out through gaps in underwear, jeans, hair scrunchies, winter socks, and almost everything else that used to live in a drawer or a closet or a hamper. I’m ready to call in FEMA.
“Freddie?” I say, careful to keep my voice steady. “What are you doing?”
As if I need to ask.
She sits on the floor and starts a process of unfolding and refolding, getting the creases in pants’ legs exactly right, measuring the distance between T-shirt sleeves until she’s satisfied they’re symmetrical. All the while, she’s rocking to some inaudible rhythm. It isn’t really inaudible; there’s music going on inside Freddie’s head, in a dark space I can’t quite reach. The best thing when she’s like this is to sit down across from her.
So I do that. And I start rocking, matching her time, being a mirror image metronome of Freddie. After a few minutes, she’s back with me, back in the now.
“I bombed,” she says in a flat monotone.
“You can’t know that, honey.”
Someone knows it, though. While we gorged on Chinese food in our dining room, a machine, or a bank of machines, in the Department of Education tallied thousands of scores. Qs are being adjusted at this very moment, matched with student ID numbers. Soon, phones and tablets will start pinging. Some families will celebrate. Others will be shopping for new uniforms over the weekend. Still others will make last-minute plans to visit relatives, pack favorite items of clothing in old suitcases,