CHAPTER 18

Maybe it was cruel to ask Daniel to spend the afternoon at the beach, like she was punishing him for refusing to believe her when she’d said she needed to leave. Maybe the only way to keep herself from falling into his arms and daring to believe he could solve all her problems was to be cruel even if she couldn’t keep it up for very long.

At the beach, it was difficult to find a spot with a good view of the competition zone. Daniel explained that it was finals day. Each winner of the quarter finals would advance to the semis, each winner of the semifinals would advance to the final, and then a champion would be crowned.

The crowd was alive with anticipation. After a few tense minutes, Jane forgot Daniel was supposed to be uncomfortable. His explanations came effortlessly, his break-down of the scoring system transformed what had seemed to her an arbitrary and subjective guessing game into a quantifiable rubric where even she, after a bit of practice, could estimate how a ride would be scored.

As the heats passed and surfers were either eliminated or advanced toward the final, Jane and Daniel exchanged bets on who would win the comp. They decided the loser had to buy the other ice cream. Jane forgot about Seth, forgot about Daniel’s brand. The world beyond the beach became irrelevant.

Jane’s surfer won the competition on a buzzer-beater ride. She jumped up and threw her hands into the air as the audience rushed towards the water. The surfer, a rookie who had never been expected to make it to the quarters, let alone win, was chaired up the beach on the shoulders of his friends. His victory felt personal, as though Jane’s belief in him had somehow made the win possible, the same way Daniel’s belief in her music career had once made it seem possible.

They moved up to the boardwalk and sat together on a bench outside the ice cream store while the awards ceremony closed out the competition on the beach. Daniel still seemed happy, no hint of trauma. It felt safe to ask a dangerous question.

“Are you angry at the people who took your leg?”

“The doctors?”

“The uh—the Vanguard.”

“Sometimes, I guess. But it’s hard to be angry at a faceless organization. I don’t remember a lot of what happened so it’s not like I can point to a voice or an impression of them and have an object to focus on. Instead I’ve been angry at the doctors, at my shrink, at Steve.”

“He makes that easy.”

“That he does. But I think when the Vanguard—whoever they are—are finally caught, then I’ll be angry. It scares me sometimes, what I might do once I know who they are. They’ve taken everything from me and I have no idea why.”

“Maybe it’s good you don’t remember.”

“It’s like walking around with a jigsaw puzzle in your head. Five thousand pieces and you’ve lost the picture. Some of the pieces just don’t match any others. My two clearest memories are of these really fat hands grabbing and hitting me. That person was so angry I thought he was going to tear me to pieces just with his hands. But then I remember someone else coming to bring me a drink of water. That person put their hand on my chest, like this,” he reached over and pressed the heel of his palm over Jane’s heart, “like they were trying to help me be calm. It worked actually. I thought I was going to be okay. And then other people came in and dragged me out. Everything gets dark and scattered after that.”

The ice cream turned sour in Jane’s stomach.

Tell him.

He’ ll hate me.

You’re being selfish. It will give him peace.

Daniel’s voice broke through her thoughts. “It bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“It doesn’t make sense that they’d attack you. They’re not violent.”

Except maybe Tommy.

“There could be others like me. Private trials.”

“Or it could’ve been personal.” Jane’s voice came out in a whisper. She held her breath as Daniel shrugged, making an effort to push the conversation away.

“We should be getting back.” When he stood up, he did not offer her his hand. Jane told herself it was her imagination, but it felt like he knew what she couldn’t tell him.

During the day, a cleaning service had erased all signs of the party from Rhea’s house. When Daniel and Jane arrived, Rhea was supervising Riley at the grill on the main level deck. Steve sprawled on the couch in the living room frowning at a script. He wore glasses that were probably real, but Jane couldn’t help but feel they were a prop for a role he was preparing. Poppy was in the front room at the piano feeling her way through London Bridge.

Steve set down his script. Looked at them over the rims of his glasses. “Where have you two been?”

“Finals day,” said Daniel. Jane thought he sounded proud. “Jane is now an expert judge of surfing.”

“Of watching surfing.” She laughed. “The next step is actually doing it.”

This piqued Steve’s interest. “You’re going to teach her to surf?”

“We thought we’d go out to Oahu early, get her going before the big winter swells start showing up.”

Jane put on a mock terror. “I only want baby waves.”

Steve didn’t look convinced. “Since Dan hasn’t been on a board in almost a decade, you’d better start in a pond.”

“Is that possible? To surf in a pond? I’d rather do that.” Jane grabbed at Daniel’s arm and looked desperate.

“Don’t listen to him. He’s just being an ass.”

Riley poked her head through the kitchen archway. “You’re here, good. Dan, come look at the chicken and tell me if it’s done. Your mother says yes, but she eats everything half raw.”

Daniel leaned over and kissed the side of Jane’s head. “Back in a minute. Play nice.”

Steve’s eyes narrowed. He waited until they heard the screen door bang shut before he said, “I’m glad you’ve decided you can live with a cripple.”

“He’s more than that.”

“Uh huh. Tell me, what’s he like in bed? Does he hold himself up with that stub or does he lay on his back and make you do all the work?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Seems like just yesterday you were in the clinic losing your mind.”

“Why is it so impossible for you to believe someone might like him?”

“You mean besides being a cripple with chronic mental health issues? Let’s see—”

“I think the idea that someone might want him is threatening to the idea that you can have any woman you want.”

“Who said I wanted you?” Steve’s eyes glittered with the same dark look she’d seen that morning.

Jane backed into the hallway and blew him a kiss as she turned the corner and walked into the kitchen. Her pulse pounded in her ears. Her cheeks felt flushed. When she walked out onto the deck, Rhea looked her over and said, “Jane, I believe you’re glowing. Or are those my meds?”

Riley also took notice. Jane saw her catch Daniel’s eye and wink at him.

At dinner, Poppy dominated the conversation. She complained that the mushrooms had touched her pineapple. When Rhea started talking about their upcoming trip to Hawaii, and Daniel questioned whether or not she could travel with her leg in a cast, Poppy interrupted with a story about a dead fish she’d found and how she needed to take it back to Hawaii where it had been born.

Jane tried to listen like Poppy was just one of the adults, but whenever she looked at the girl it was hard not to imagine her as Leah. They would’ve been about the same age, though of course Seth’s strict discipline would’ve never allowed a child to challenge what she ate for dinner or stand up on her chair to reach across the table for the honey to add more sweetness to the huli huli chicken. Riley and Steve mostly ignored her, which made it harder for Jane to ignore her. She imagined what a family dinner would look like now if she’d stayed with Seth. The three of them around the small square of the kitchen table, or perhaps at a more formal setting in the dining room. Everything Leah would say Seth would find some way to turn it into instruction. Everything about Poppy’s exuberance, her energy, her enthusiasm for describing the world as she saw it, seemed ripe for stern correction, which of course was one of many reasons why there was no Leah.

“Jane, you okay?” Riley waved her fork across Jane’s field of vision.

“Sorry. Just tired.” Jane drew herself up, put on a smile. “The food is excellent.”

Riley beamed.

Jane focused her attention on Rhea who sat at the opposite end of the table from Poppy. “So I’ve only heard pieces of the story from Steve and Daniel. You started out in Hawaii but now you’re here? Is that just because of Steve’s career?”

“It’s because she knows if she moved home, I wouldn’t pay for her life anymore,” said Steve.

“I grew up here actually,” said Rhea. “But then my husband finished his PhD and he took a post doc fellowship on Oahu at the Oceanic Institute. And then he got a job, so we stayed.”

“I like the ocean,” said Poppy. “Grandpa says there’s so, so many things in it, like this many things,” Poppy spread her hands so wide she almost smacked Daniel in the face, “and some of them we can’t even see.”

Jane kept her attention on Rhea.

“Steve started acting so young, we didn’t really know where it would go. I moved here with him and Daniel stayed in Hawaii with his father. And then, when Daniel got that fluke role—what was it, you were visiting for spring break?”

“I was waiting for him to finish an audition and the PA saw me and asked me to read. He said younger was always better.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Dad, you’re not supposed to say that.” Poppy shook her spoon at him. There was mashed potato on the spoon. Small white clumps flew into the air and landed on Steve’s plate and in his water glass.

“Would you just calm the fuck down?” Steve snatched up his water and stormed into the kitchen.

Poppy crossed her arms over her chest and stuck out her lower lip. Two big tears formed at the corners of her eyes.

Daniel gently pulled her over onto his lap. “It’s okay. It was an accident. Let’s see what we can do about these mushrooms, huh? I don’t think they’re so bad. You know fish eat mushrooms?”

Jane watched him for only a moment before she knew she wouldn’t be able to hold herself together. She excused herself and went out onto the deck, but she could still hear Daniel talking to Poppy. She climbed the stairs to the third floor, sank into one of the lawn chairs, and drew her legs up against her chest. She pulled Daniel’s sweatshirt over them to keep warm.

Her mind swam with impossible alternative histories. What if she’d gone to Battery Park to meet Daniel? What if they’d run away together? He could’ve toured as a professional surfer. She would’ve always been on the beach cheering him on. They would’ve explored the world, tried new food, met interesting people, learned about anything and everything. If there’d been children, she wouldn’t have been afraid of leaving Daniel alone with them. She wouldn’t have had to watch their innocence be exploited for an indoctrination that would make them an alien to the rest of the world, a system that would leave them with nothing to hang onto if they someday didn’t want to be part of that system.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there before Daniel joined her. He had her purse with him. “Your phone has been ringing.”

“Thanks.”

It was Alma’s phone that had been ringing. There were two missed calls from their boss.

“Everything okay?” Daniel sat down beside her.

“Not really.”

“My family is an acquired taste.”

Jane laughed. “I’m not used to being around kids.”

“We don’t have to be here. We could go to my place.”

“Will Steve stay here tonight?”

“Probably. The forecast is good for the cove tomorrow. He’ll probably stay and surf.”

“Then we should stay. He needs to think we’re sleeping together. That’s what’s going to do it for him, I think.”

“Sounds about right. We’ll be up in Mom’s room since she’s stuck on the first floor.”

“Good.”

He hesitated. She sensed him debating something. Finally, he said, “Since we’re never going to see each other again after tomorrow night if there’s anything you want to say, you know, just to say it, I’m a pretty low stakes audience.”

Jane wanted to laugh, but she was afraid she’d cry. She hated how easily he read her, how he seemed to know what she needed even when she couldn’t admit what she needed to herself.

The setting sun was breaking through the clouds to cast hazy orange and pink beams of light out across the grey water. She considered that perhaps there was one secret she could tell Daniel. Maybe it would help her to have someone pass judgement who could be impartial.

Five years and sixty-three days ago Jane had stood under the swaying palm trees outside the Los Angeles Amtrak station facing the distended Eduard Munch heads of graffiti figures on the side of a Mexican restaurant. It was her first clear memory of California. Staring at those empty screaming heads, she thought her nightmares had followed her. She was heavy-headed after failing to sleep on an overnight from Denver and still wearing the thick maxi pads the nurse had given her for the spotting she’d said was normal after the procedure.

While Jane stood trying to decide what she would do now that she’d arrived in the city she thought would be the most difficult place for Seth to find her, it began to rain. Jane considered going to the waiting room. A miniature old lady in a red hat with matching luggage sat on a bench by the bus stop sign. If she isn’t going inside, I’m not either. Jane tried to catch her eye to share this moment of being women who didn’t mind a little rain, who didn’t mind a lot of things.

Jane explained to Daniel how she used to take pride in her ability to accept whatever came. She liked being the one who helped other people get what they wanted, never forcing anyone to do what she wanted or stepping on toes or hurting anyone’s feelings. That’s what she thought she was doing when, two weeks after returning from her honeymoon, Jane had made a doctor’s appointment she hadn’t written on the family calendar and asked for birth control pills. What Seth didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, she’d thought.

One night, her brothers and some of Seth’s friends (the Vanguard) had come over to hang out (celebrate the successful trial of one of their top twenty-five most important targets). It was a football season Saturday. Someone brought a root beer keg and they’d all camped out in the living room, drunk on adrenaline and too little sleep, to watch Nebraska take on Oklahoma. The living room was directly below Jane and Seth’s bedroom where she was studying for her semester practicum exam.

Here, Jane paused to explain to Daniel that she’d finished her degree at home after her marriage.

She could hear everything her family and their friends said through the air vent. She’d listened with half an ear as she made flashcards. The country music station was playing a retrospective of Patsy Cline, which Jane was enjoying because she knew nothing about country music. These hours she spent studying were the only time she could choose her own music. Otherwise Seth always had something inspirational on like Third Day and Jeremy Camp, or the house was vibrating with one of his beloved ska bands.

At some point, Jane became aware the voices downstairs weren’t as loud.

“When do you expect it will be?” asked Phil, always the worrier.

Jane crept out of the semi-circle of rainbow-colored index cards she’d set out on the floor and laid down beside the vent.

“When’s the best time to conceive?” asked Seth.

“Just before bed isn’t it?”

“Not during?” asked Jamal, joking and uncomfortable.

“I switched the pills two weeks ago,” said Seth.

“So she could be pregnant now. What’s nine months from today?” asked Aaron.

“June,” said Phil.

“They’re going to score again!” cried Tommy.

“No trials in June,” said Aaron. “We have to make sure Bones isn’t distracted by being a new father and all that.” He laughed.

Jane had tried to form animal shapes out of the texture of the plaster ceiling. Blotches of red and blue blinked around her vision. She counted how many times they’d had sex that month. Maybe four times, a very slight chance of pregnancy, but still a chance.

Patsy Cline sang with peppy nostalgia as Jane jumped up and ran into the bathroom. She dug through her drawer of hair brushes, rubber bands, and dusty scrunchies until she found her pills in their compact disguise. She’d never seen Seth open that drawer. Certainly, he had no reason to look way in the back unless he was searching for something particular. And he wouldn’t know to look for pills.

Unless her mother had told him.

As soon as the thought entered Jane’s head she’d known it was true. Her mother—who barely spoke—had told Seth her secret. She’d stared out the window when Jane tried to express the pressure she was feeling to have kids, and how she hoped her mother would be the one to understand Jane needed to take precautions. She given Jane nothing but her silence, and then she had turned around and given Seth everything.

The pills in her drawer that night looked exactly like her real ones—a cardboard circle with a calendar, each day marked by a little pillow of tin foil. Jane popped out that day’s pill. She set it on her tongue and let it dissolve rather than swallowing it with water. Instead of sour medicine, her tongue found the equally displeasing but distinct taste of baking soda.

Jane braced her arms against the counter and gave herself a good long stare down in the mirror. What she saw was not the face of a mother. Try as she might, she wasn’t there. Jane kept hearing Seth say, I switched the pills two weeks ago. Switched how?

Jane pulled open his bathroom drawer. It had a razor, deodorant—all the usual things. She searched the cabinet beneath the sink. She searched behind the trash can and all the toilet paper rolls. She searched the medicine cabinet, nothing.

Next stop, the bedroom. She’d tripped over the portable stereo and left Patsy singing into the carpet. Her search gained speed. Seth had to have hidden fake birth control pills somewhere. She’d become obsessed with finding them. No drawer was left unopened, no clothes pockets unchecked. If Jane had been as thorough a cleaner as she was a manic searcher that night, her mother would’ve been proud.

Groans of agony erupted downstairs as Nebraska dropped another pass. Jane prayed to the football gods for the game to go into overtime.

She’d worked up a sweat by then. Her hair stuck to her face and her neck, the back of her nightie to her lower back. She leaned on the bed to catch her breath. That’s when it hit her. The bed.

She dug her fingers under the lip of the mattress—one, two, three, heave! She shoved it up into the air until its opposite end slid and crashed into Seth’s end table. Spread in a pool of silvery foil circles on top of the box spring were, one, two three … fifteen months’ worth of baking soda birth control pills.

Greedily Jane scooped them up, pinched them together and bent them. She ran downstairs with them. Oops, dropped one. It sailed through the air like a flying saucer. Through the entryway she went, in her ‘husband’s eyes only’ nightie, breasts bouncing, nipples ripe enough to cut glass, and fourteen pill packs.

“Look what I found!” Jane flung the packs up into the air, showering the startled men with her discovered treasure.

Seth sprang back as if the packets would burn him. Jamal and Phil looked away in embarrassment at her indecency. Her brothers stared. For a moment, the room was frozen. No one knew what to do, and then Jane started crying.

Aaron recovered first. He stood up and motioned for the others to follow. “We should leave.” He didn’t even look at her as he walked by. She was Seth’s problem now, he’d seemed to say. He couldn’t help her. Jane wanted to grab him and make him stay so she wouldn’t have to be alone with the man who had betrayed her. But she could also hear Aaron’s voice in her head saying she’d committed the first betrayal by getting pills. This was her hole to crawl out of.

“Babies are gifts from God,” said Seth. “You can’t mess with that, Jane. It isn’t right.”

She’d looked at him, pleading for him to understand. “But, I can’t—”

“None of us can alone. But God helps. And I’ll help. We’ll do it together.” He’d wrapped her in a blanket and patted her like he was putting out a fire.

Over the next month, Seth’s attempts to mold her into a model Christian wife had become more forceful. They no longer had casual conversations about the differences in what they believed. Instead, they had arguments. He said a child couldn’t be raised in an atmosphere of conflict. He said she needed to see how her desire to challenge what they believed would compromise their parenting. Jane refused to have sex. People at church started coming up to her and recommending marriage counselors.

And then he’d asked her to take a pregnancy test. She agreed but made him promise that if the test was negative he’d give her another year before bringing up the idea of having kids. In turn, Jane promised to stop pursuing her interest in ‘secular culture’ if the test was positive.

It was positive.

Seth had been overjoyed. The fights stopped. Jane was showered with praise and forgiveness, which had felt good at first. Per their agreement, Jane set about trying to bury the parts of her that didn’t fit the rules. She put away her non-classical piano music. She stopped covert trips to art museums. She ignored text messages from her friend Theresa who had been teaching her about wine. She joined a women’s Bible study. And then, one weekend, while Seth was on a hunting trip, Jane had skipped her Bible study and rented SLUT: A Love Story.

Until then, she’d done what she considered an above average job of stifling her memories of meeting Daniel in New York. She’d thought of herself as on a quest to find the balance she saw embodied in Daniel, a balance between the secular world and the principles of Jane’s alternative world. But being pregnant was not about balance or staying in control of buried emotional impulses. Once Jane decided Bible study wasn’t happening, she’d driven to Blockbuster like a mad woman in search of the last Starbucks at the end of the world.

But the movie, which mostly exploited Daniel’s good looks and chiseled shirtless body, was not the Daniel Jane had been looking for. She returned the movie without finishing it. At the Best Buy across the street from Blockbuster, Jane found the movie soundtracks tucked away on a small shelf by the PC software. She still had Daniel’s list. Three years and it hadn’t left her purse. She bought titles based solely on Daniel’s recommendations. This was what her mother and almost every adult she’d ever known called a ‘slippery slope,’ an apparently innocuous interest that led into temptation. From there it was only a hop, skip, and a jump into sin and, ‘mistakes she’d regret the rest of her life.’

Feasting her ears on Daniel’s music, the regret Jane had anticipated for the rest of her life was not being allowed to dream of Daniel, of having a child who would be dependent on her toeing the line for twenty more years and doing it well enough she never realized her mother didn’t believe what she should. The worst thing Jane could imagine was causing someone else to doubt because Jane felt the need for a different kind of life.

For the next forty-six hours, Jane had floated through the depths of a symphonic ocean. She’d played movie music while she slept, though she didn’t sleep much. The music traveled with her in the car, while she studied, while she shopped for groceries. She hadn’t answered the phone because she didn’t want to pause during an important theme. She delayed taking a shower until a CD finished. She held one-sided imaginary conversations with Daniel where she told him how she enjoyed this or that track. She reveled in the simple melodies and contrapuntal orchestrations. She forgot to ask herself if what she was doing was right. She did not search for a moral answer to justify her obsession.

When Seth came home from his hunt, he’d found her browning meat for spaghetti sauce and crying into the steam coming up from the pan while she listened to Titanic. She had been playing one small section of An Ocean of Memories over and over on the little portable speaker she kept in the kitchen. Just past the halfway point of the track, the ethereal orchestra faded away and a naked horn arose from the silence tracing a simple melody filled with old loss, remembering something that could never be regained. She had heard the same melody embedded in the scores of several different Horner albums, each of them calling her to a place she couldn’t name because it only existed in her dreams. She dripped tears into her skillet as she listened, wishing she could return to that place.

Seth had jerked her around by the shoulders, terrified that something had happened to the baby. Jane tried to articulate an excuse about hormones making her emotional, but the more she cried the more nervous he had become. Finally, he’d had the sense to turn off the music. In the sudden silence, the cello continued to weave its melody in her head and Jane understood. “I just need to be alone.”

Since she had been alone all weekend, Seth had been confused by this request. It didn’t occur to him she meant a different kind of alone. After dinner he sat down to watch football. She offered to run out to Dairy Queen to get him dessert. Instead, she drove west out of town. She hadn’t stopped until she’d reached the Colorado border.

She hadn’t left a note. Jane explained to Daniel that she’d always thought it was kinder for Seth to think what he wanted than have to face the absolute certainty of her abandonment. She couldn’t admit that all his hopes for fatherhood—the crib they’d put together in the small bedroom, the stacks of parenting books he’d underlined and dog-eared and flagged with an army of Post-Its—would only ever be hopes.

Jane held it together through most of the story. But when she reached Colorado where she stayed with her aunt and had made the decision to have the abortion, words were impossible. She’d gone so many years pretending none of it had happened. Finally being able to admit it brought a relief she hadn’t known possible. She had betrayed everything she knew about being a good woman. Since then, she had lived without any hope of redemption even though she now knew there were other parts of being a woman than the role of wife and mother. Hazy moonlight illuminated Daniel’s face. She saw her broken heart mirrored in Daniel’s tear-filled eyes. It felt as though they had traveled a lifetime together while sitting on that deck.

He took her hand and held it against his face. He kissed it. By the end of her story their bodies were practically intertwined, the two chairs pressed together with her legs over his lap and his arm around her. Her head on his shoulder. The secrets that had kept them apart had faded to mere specks on a cloudy future horizon.

When he rose and motioned for her to follow him down to Rhea’s bedroom on the second floor, Jane knew what would come next. She understood now what Shayla had meant about wishing she’d been with her former boyfriend even after she’d known it would end. This night would be a relic she would carry with her in the long lonely months ahead, something to prove the dream had been real. Something she could pull out and use to confirm she was still worthy of love, however brief, however fated.