They did not sleep for many hours.
“You’re sure?” Mark repeated, at one in the morning, Allie naked and straddling him. “Say it again.”
“Yes,” Allie said. She stared into his eyes, bent forward, bit at his lips, dug her nails into his shoulders. If he concentrated he could feel, against his bicep, the slight ridge of the ring on her finger. She ground down against him. “Oh, yes.”
At two thirty in the morning Allie got up and rustled around in the kitchen downstairs; sex made her ravenous. Mark lay sleepily on his belly. He was engaged—but even now, inside his head, the words sounded unreal, the wild hope of a child. He thought back to the tawdry way he and Allie had met—they’d trysted in a hotel room in New Jersey, after knowing each other all of six hours. Now look at them.
Ten years ago he’d been married; he’d had a toddler for a son. If a time-traveler had told that long-ago Mark Fife where he’d be in a decade, what lay between him and his future, he might have cut his wrists in the bath.
Allie returned to the bedroom with a glass of water for him, and a glass of wine for her. She brought with her the sharp tang of sex, of sweat; it mixed agreeably with the wine’s bouquet. She sat beside him; he kissed her dry knee.
She said, after a sip, “You know it’s okay with me if you have some wine.”
He remembered how close he’d been to ordering a beer last night with Lew. Whatever danger he’d felt then was gone now, banished. He had come all the way into his new self; a little wine couldn’t hurt him. “I only ever get wine,” he said. “That’s got to be the deal, okay?”
He’d never told her much about his drinking—only that he didn’t like himself drunk, which was true enough. That for a long time he’d been drunk too much.
Allie studied his face. “Okay.”
He sipped from her glass. It was a good red—Allison made a study of wine—and he nearly shuddered in pleasure. “Tell me what I’m tasting,” he said.
“Wine,” she said, shrugging. “Merlot. I’m not one of those people.”
He laughed. “Yes, you are.”
“I’m not supposed to tell you. You’re supposed to decide for yourself.”
He took another sip.
“Boysenberry,” he said.
“You’re also not supposed to make shit up.”
“It’s oaky?”
She took the glass back from him. “We’ll go to a tasting.”
“Sure.”
She reclined against his chest. “So I said yes.”
“I remember. Thank you.”
“I’ve been wanting you to ask,” she said. “And I wanted to say yes before I asked you some things. I wanted you to know I want this, more than anything.”
She’d turned serious just as he’d made himself relax. “Ask me what?”
“Well… are we having a wedding?”
He was abashed not to have much of an opinion. He’d envisioned himself asking, envisioned them living together—but a ceremony?
“Your call.”
She turned toward him. “I’d like to have one.”
Now Mark did have an opinion, which was that his last ceremony had driven him nearly crazy and cost almost twenty thousand dollars. “You okay with small and cheap?”
She laughed. “I’m very okay with that.”
“Excellent. So where should we do it?”
He was thinking about some small, bland public office; a bland public officiant.
“Tahoe,” Allie said, without hesitation.
So much for cheap. But he said “Sure” anyway.
Allison loved Lake Tahoe, and had hung pictures of it all over her old apartment. She’d gone there for a vacation, by herself, after her divorce, and had fallen in love with the mountains, the waters. She told him she’d thought seriously about making a clean break, moving to Sacramento or even Reno.
Mark had never even been to California. The thought of the wedding, though, excited him. It was going to be a good time. Almost no one he knew besides his father and Lewis and maybe an uncle in Portland would make that trip.
“Blue skies and water,” she said. “We could rent a cabin and honeymoon there, too.”
“Hell,” he said, “We could move out there.”
She made a quick, surprised noise. He was as shocked as she was, but he didn’t retreat.
“Why not?” he said. “Everything’s wide open for us. You know?”
“Yeah. I mean, why are we staying in Columbus? I can do the business anywhere. You hate your job—”
“Wait,” she said. “Colorado.”
“You’d like that better?”
“I like Denver,” she said. “A big city. Better for business. And the mountains are right there.”
“Vancouver,” he said. “Let’s apply for Canadian citizenship. Get the fuck out of Jesusland.”
“New Zealand,” she said. “Citizenship’s harder, but they might need tech professionals.”
“There you go,” he said. “It’s settled. New Zealand.”
She nestled closer, took the glass back from him, and drained it.
“Okay,” Allie said. “Here’s the tough one. I don’t even know—”
He smiled. “Ask anything.”
“I just want you to know, I don’t know which way I’m leaning. There’s not, like, a right answer.”
“Okay,” he said, mystified.
But then, in the pause, he guessed it.
“Kids,” Allison said.
He’d thought this over before. Of course he had—a thousand times since Brendan had died, yes, but in particular during the last few months with Allie.
They’d even discussed it once. Allie had been off the pill when they met, but went back on when they agreed they were serious. Mark had told her, then, that he wasn’t sure he could ever think about children again. It’s not a priority for me, Allie had told him. I mean, who knows?
Which wasn’t the same as saying she didn’t want children at all, was it? He wished there was more wine in Allison’s glass.
“What do you think?” he asked. Because he was a coward.
“I might,” she said finally. “Right now, no. I always figured if I did, it would be later.” She lifted his hand and kissed the tip of his thumb. “But hey, I’m thirty-four—”
“Almost an old woman.”
She curled tightly beside him. “I mean, could you—do you want to have another one?”
She misunderstood his hesitation, and winced. “Mark, God—another one. That sounds so—”
Plenty of times before, he’d been driven to rage by the exact same question. But never with Allison—and not now. “It’s okay,” he said. “In the spirit of honesty, I have no idea how to answer.”
“Bill wanted kids,” she said. “I kept putting him off.”
She’d told Mark this before; Allie liked, or needed, to tell him what an utter disaster her marriage to Bill had become. He’d always wondered if he was supposed to reply by cutting down Chloe. Sometimes he did—Chloe had left him; he had a lot to complain about—but most of the time he didn’t. Couldn’t.
She said, “Now I don’t know. Over the past few months—” She sat up straighter. “All of a sudden I can see it. I mean, me with a kid.” She waited a long time before saying the next part: “Us, with a kid. I mean, I know you’re a good dad. I think we’d be good parents. Together.”
His mouth was dry. “You think so?”
“Yeah. I do.” She met his eyes. “I wouldn’t want to get married if I didn’t think we could pull it off. Parenthood. If.”
He chose his words carefully. “I wasn’t as good a father as you think. And I wasn’t as good a husband.”
Allie started to disagree, but stopped herself. She had barely met Chloe, but he’d told her plenty about the end of their marriage. Certainly Allie saw the trouble on his face every time he came back from one of his and Chloe’s infrequent dinners. Allie’s marriage may have been awful, and the one time Mark had met Bill he hadn’t taken to him, but he’d never been tempted to hate the man. A bad match, that was all, and if Bill ever asked him, he’d say so. Mark, however, suspected Allison had an entire manifesto prepared for Chloe: Let me tell you about the ways you fucked over Mark, you crazy bitch.
“You’re too hard on yourself,” she said, her voice husky.
He kissed the top of her head. The few sips of wine he’d drunk had left a faint, warm cloud of serenity behind his eyes. Had going dry all these years left him so much of a lightweight?
“We’d be good at it, right?” Allie said. “If?”
He had to give her an answer. It wouldn’t be fair, if he didn’t. And at the moment the answer was easy to give.
“We’d be great,” he said. “But not yet, okay? I want some time just for us.”
Her eyes were damp. “I want that, too,” she said, and turned to kiss him.
Mark had expected the wine to put him to sleep, but instead he lay wide awake, Allison snoring beside him, thinking about the strange woman who’d called him. He thought about his father and his father’s new girlfriend. He thought, for as long as he could bear to do it, about having a child with Allison.
Mostly he thought about Brendan.
In fact, he did what he was often prone to: He lost himself in a guilty fantasy, one that both pleased and sickened him. In this fantasy Mark and Chloe had divorced, and Brendan—who had never died—lived with her. And because it was a fantasy, Brendan had not aged, either; instead of a quiet, withdrawn teenager (because, had he lived to see his parents’ divorce, he surely would have become one), the Brendan whom Mark imagined was still seven, still the spindly boy he’d been the day he fell down the steps. His hair was still unkempt, needing a cut; he was still wearing the gray Buckeyes sweatshirt and jeans he’d had on when Mark found him at the base of the steps, crooked and boneless and still.
But he was alive, this Brendan, and Mark was visiting him and Chloe at the old house, where they still lived, and he and Brendan were sitting side by side on the old porch swing, and it was springtime and the trees were budding, and Brendan had his hands folded in his lap, and wouldn’t lift his face, as Mark explained that he was going to marry someone new; as Mark told him, You’re really going to like her; as Mark said, You don’t ever have to call her your mother; as Mark said, I’ve been lonely without you and your mom, you know that. Inside the house, Mark knew, Chloe was crying.
He said to Brendan, Maybe someday you’ll understand, but by then Brendan was gone from the swing, and inside the house, at its center, where the stairwell was, Chloe’s cries built to a terrible, grinding scream—
Mark started awake. Allison shifted beside him but didn’t open her eyes. He’d drifted off without turning out the bedside lamp. Allison’s ring glinted, where her left hand lay flat across his chest. Chloe, wherever she was, was not screaming. Mark was here, in his new life, happy. And his boy—the truth of it descended upon his chest like an iron bar—was still dead, still gone.