15

Amy had a new book on her coffee table: photographs of unborn babies. At every visit, Maddie would leaf through it, sometimes reading the brief text, always studying the images that glowed yellow and orange against a black ground. Baby after baby—or maybe it was all the same one—photographed over the course of nine months’ gestation. Maddie was fascinated by the images, the tiny fingers and tiny toes, the translucent skin, the sealed eyes.

The baby in this photo was very young, hardly human. The curved head was elongated in its extension from spine to forehead, and then came the bulge of the nose. Veins traversed the skull, thin red lines that branched and extended like roads on a map. The ribs were regular pleats along its side but not nearly long enough: they came to a stop just at the rise of the abdomen, looking more like gills than protective bone. The fingers and toes were stubs; the appendages of hands and feet drifted in front of the baby on foreshortened arms and legs, unused or useless.

Several pages further and here was a baby farther along. The fingers of an open hand extended toward the camera, attenuation evident in joints and fingernails. The thumb rested just inside the mouth, as though pressed against the upper gum. Maddie could see downy hair on the baby’s face, thicker at the eyebrows, and the indentation at the center of the upper lip.

What was it like in there, she wondered, before knowing began? All sounds would be muted in the water. Floating like that, there might be no sense of gravity, no necessary sense of direction. All motion would be comfort, a kind of rocking, and the darkness would be absolute.

In that case, Maddie thought, these pictures must have been stunning to the unborn baby: the obligatory use of light, the intrusion of the camera. How to take pictures like these? How to ensure that it was safe?

Any baby she had ever known would be frightened by something like that. Such a surprising experience would be sure to bring terror and tears. But the babies in these photos seemed unamazed. Their expressions were the picture of peaceful calm and uninterrupted repose.

Or were these expressions of dismay and fear? And if that were the case, Maddie wondered, then in the moments just before the camera’s flash, what had the peacefulness looked like?

Vincent teased her about the book. He said she was obsessed.

“Looking at it again, huh?” He sat down close beside her and grinned.

“It’s a beautiful book, is all,” she responded, and turned the page.

“I wouldn’t call it beautiful,” Vincent said. “That book is plain weird.”

“Why do you think it’s weird?” She didn’t look up at him, but continued leafing through.

“That doesn’t even look like a baby. Look at it!” and he pointed to the five-month-old fetus with stubby fingers and eyes tightly shut.

“Yes it does, Vincent.”

“Not like any babies I’ve ever known.”

Maddie laughed. “You generally don’t see them when they look like this.”

“And why is that?” Vincent straightened, mocking interest in a spirit of “now-we’re-getting-somewhere.”

“Because when they look like this, they aren’t born yet.”

“Ex-ACT-ly,” Vincent said, and relaxed his posture: he rested his case.

“What do you mean, ‘exactly’?”

“I mean, you’re not supposed to see babies when they look like that, and that’s why that book is weird.”

“I think it’s weird, too,” Nicky said, coming in from the kitchen. He tossed Vincent a bottle of Gatorade. “Amy!” he was calling to her in the other room. “Vince thinks the book is weird, too!”

“You two are peas in a pod,” Amy answered. She was laughing.

Maddie didn’t try to explain or defend her fascination. She didn’t fully understand it herself, but knew that Vincent’s comment hit close to home. The secrecy of it appealed to her, that sense of spying. There was pleasure in this circumvention: through these pictures, she gained a view onto something that, until recently, no one had ever seen.

Moreover, here was an education, something that made high school biology concrete. She had not remembered much from that brief introduction during her sophomore year to the mysteries of the reproductive system. How seriously could she be expected to take into account a body’s biologically driven urge to further the species? What, to her, were mitosis and meiosis? What were those winding ribbons of DNA?

And what, in truth, was pregnancy to her but a happy announcement made about someone else? It was something to be observed from a distance, a mystery responsible for the steady population of the church nursery, of the world.

But this book—and Amy’s pregnancy—cast all of it in life-sized terms, making imaginable not only the Tedescos as parents, but also, somewhat more remotely, herself. Now Maddie realized she would likely someday become a mother, and that she wanted to be one. As she leafed through the book’s glossy pages, she imagined a new life taking shape within her. She could almost conjure inside herself the sensation of what, for now, she felt only by stretching a palm over Amy’s abdomen: the gentle pressure of a knee, a foot, an elbow. This child, as yet unseen, gaining life in the dark.

Yet all of these revelations seemed formalities in light of what she had been learning already for some time, those ways of her body taught her by Vincent. Those ways, she now knew, were the reason for the swimming pool conversations, the warnings about sexual purity and the temptations that would assert themselves against it. Maddie now understood that one had to construct the boundaries before the fact, because when the passion came—those biological, natural, primal, and necessary urges—it was nearly impossible to withstand them. Her own body, Maddie realized, was truly a force of nature.

What flummoxed her was that these impulses should somehow be wrong. Confronting them for the first time in her life, she was hard-pressed to accept that acting on them was sin. Why should it be? She could discern no practical reason. The fortress she had so carefully built against fornication was, it turned out, nothing more than chicken wire. She found she could deconstruct a fence in so small a gesture as an unbuttoning.

And yet there was Vincent, resistant. Closing buttons again, returning her hands to his waist. Experienced and also opposed to this sin. If anyone could instruct Maddie in the mysterious ways of God, it was Vincent—and in this regard, Vincent stood firm.

Except, of course, when he didn’t. Increasingly, he didn’t. Incrementally, by degrees, they moved together past the fence’s boundary, dipped their toes in the pool’s shallow end. And always it ended—without real satisfaction—in Vincent’s call to repentance.

He held Maddie in a grip lacking all sensual tenderness, her face pressed to his arm, his chest, and in a broken voice or one filled with confidence, he called on God to forgive them of their sin and strengthen them to withstand further temptation. He might pray it in a whisper, he might—with tears reminiscent of that night at the altar—plead in a choked gasp. And if Maddie was certain of anything, it was that Vincent was convinced of their sinfulness, of their need for God.

In light of this, she found herself consistently relieved that their relationship should persist. After all, she had lured him into sin (wasn’t it always at her initiation?) countless times. Her knowledge of the Bible implied—if it didn’t directly mandate—that their best course of action would be to break up. How did the passage go? “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off,” or some horror equally conclusive. And yet, post repentance, Vincent could look at her clear-eyed, could—and did—tell her again that he loved her. The adequacy of his contrition or, more distantly, God’s forgiveness, seemed absolute.

And Vincent would occasionally remind her that his faith was planted in the school parking lot, where, Vincent said, God had made it clear that he had chosen them for each other. “He gave us a miracle,” Vincent chuckled, “as if he wanted to be sure we’d notice.” As if Vincent wouldn’t have noticed and loved Maddie otherwise, Vincent would say. And Maddie would add that she had noticed Vincent before that.

They talked about temptation, of course. There were moments of objective discussion, merciful moments when, somehow, they had circled wide of the danger and could again assert their posture of purity. They could stand circumspect and thoughtful, together studying the landscape of temptation, the swimming pool behind its concrete and barbed wire. They could laugh at the lie of stolen intimacy, that the union of their bodies would mean anything other than the potential destruction of their souls. They could affirm in blind faith that God’s plan for sex only within marriage had ramifications beyond what—so limited, so young—they could be expected to understand. Maddie affirmed all these things with Vincent, reciting by rote what she had been told all her life, what he had only so recently and so fully adopted. If Vincent believed it—Vincent the miracle-worker, newborn child of God—then Maddie was sure it was right.

But there were those other moments, too, when Maddie knew they were pitted against forces beyond their strength or comprehension. At those times, even what Vincent said he wanted was not reflected in his behavior. Who was to say whether, in his car on this abandoned street or in that empty parking lot, Vincent would draw them to prayer or instead to the marvel of skin on more skin—each experience bearing something of the holy about it, something indefinably beautiful.

But no, the skin was better. Who could argue that anything but skin was better?

And then Maddie was again in Vincent’s grip, her face pressed into his chest, the tears of his remorse dampening her hair. Vincent prayed aloud and then fell silent, continuing to hold her, and Maddie wondered if he was waiting for her to say something, to join her words with his in looking to God for help.

Always she was silent, listening—for what, exactly? For God to move her, to bring her, like he had Vincent, to an attitude of remorse? But if God was speaking, then she never heard him, hearing instead only Vincent’s breathing, that gentle pressure which moved her with the rise and fall of his chest.