Lisa Unger - Die For You

He looked at me quickly, startled as though I’d slapped him. I wanted to. I wanted to pummel him, scream at him. And I might have if I didn’t suspect he’d just stand there, stoic, accepting my blows.

“What do you think it means to be a parent?” he asked. There was a musing quality to his tone, as if he wasn’t quite looking for an answer. I answered, anyway.

“I think it means you stop living only for yourself,” I said. “I think it means you experience a different kind of love.”

It sounded lame, defensive, even to my own ears. He gave me a long look.

“But what if it doesn’t mean any of that?” Something in his eyes made me shiver. “What then?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“You know as well as I that not everyone loves their children.”

I felt a wave of nausea, the debut of a tension headache. “What is that supposed to mean?”

He shook his head, pressed his lips into a tight line. I have such clarity on this moment now, but then I was mystified, despairing. All I could think was, He doesn’t want our child. He doesn’t think he could love a baby.

I knew he’d be nervous, afraid. I expected him to be as ambivalent as I had been. But in my center I believed that, like me, under the current of all that surface intellectual confusion there would be a deep well of love and desire for a child. His frigid withdrawal, the draining of color from his face, the physical retreat-I see it now as the beginning of an end that was still too far off to perceive.

“Linda and Erik are happy,” I said.

“Really. You think so?”

“You don’t?”

“Is that what this about? Wanting what your sister has?”

“No,” I snapped. “Of course not. This conversation is not about what I want or don’t want. It’s about what is. I’m pregnant.”

“So you wouldn’t have chosen this?”

“That’s irrelevant.”

He gave me a smirk, a quick nod of his head. “That’s what I thought.”

I felt a rush of guilt, for not wanting this enough, for having it anyway, for now trying to convince Marcus it was a good thing. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I remembered Linda and Erik’s euphoria when they learned she was pregnant. They hadn’t planned Emily-or Trevor, either. But they were truly happy each time. I thought it would happen that way for us.

The light outside was growing dim and we hadn’t turned on the lights inside yet, so we were sitting in near darkness.

“Isabel,” he said, coming nearer to me.

I wrapped my arms reflexively around my middle. How fast you start thinking of that person inside you, how early you act to protect. I moved away from him, sat in a chair at the table.

“I think I understand your position well enough, Marcus,” I said, looking down at the floor. It was dusty, needed cleaning. “Let’s end this discussion before the damage can’t be undone.”

“There are so many things you don’t understand.” I didn’t like the sentence; it seemed hollow, clichéd. But I wasn’t in the mood to edit him.

“Then tell me.” I looked up at him, but he was staring out the window again, not connecting with me, not engaging in any way.

“I don’t remember my parents,” he said softly. “I don’t remember what it was like to be someone’s child.”

He wasn’t reaching out for reassurance with those words. He was closing a door. I sensed this, didn’t even bother saying any of the things that sprung to mind. After a few beats, he moved over to the switch and turned on the light. I squinted at the sudden change. He seemed about to say something else, but instead took the jacket that lay over one of the chairs.

“I’m going to take a walk. I need some air,” he said.

I lifted my palms. “Fine,” I said, feeling a valley of despair open within me. Of all the reactions I imagined, this was the worst-case scenario. Even anger would have been better than abandonment.

He left then and didn’t come back until much later. I didn’t call my sister. There were so many things I couldn’t tell her about Marcus; she was always so quick to judge him even without things like this. I thought about calling Jack, but it felt like some kind of betrayal. I just watched TV for a while, hoping Marcus would come back quickly. But it was hours, after midnight when I heard his key in the door. I was in bed with the lights off. I heard him come up the stairs, push softly into our room.

“Isabel,” he whispered from the doorway.

I didn’t answer, pretending to be asleep. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I was so tired. I was relieved when I heard him go back downstairs and turn on the television. I made a point to leave early for the gym in the morning before he awoke and stayed away until after he’d gone for the day.

That night, he came home early from work with a gigantic teddy bear. He apologized and we pretended that everything was okay, normal. I wanted so badly to believe that he’d come around, I almost convinced myself. I tried not to notice that his smiles were forced, that his attentiveness just didn’t seem sincere.

Then, of course, a few weeks later there was the miscarriage. Soon after, the affair. And yet on the night before he disappeared we made love and shared croissants in the morning. Tragedy, betrayal mingling with the mundane of everyday life, a love that manages temporary amnesia masquerading as forgiveness to survive-is that the stuff of enduring marriages? Maybe just mine.

All these buried memories exposed to the light by his disappearance. I had fooled myself, thinking I was the one who saw more than others. I saw what I wanted to see, edited and rewrote the rest. I got off the train at East Eighty-sixth Street and emerged on Fifth Avenue. I was directly across town from my own apartment, separated by the expanse of Central Park. With a dead woman’s purse over my shoulder, weighted down by the first gun I’d ever touched, I felt so far away from my life that I might as well have been on the moon.

I passed the inverted ziggurat of the Guggenheim, its white expanse as vast and peaceful as a moonscape. I felt a twinge of longing to be meandering its downward spiral carefree and overwarm, gazing at the Surrealists, the Impressionists, the post-Impressionists, the early Moderns. Artists gone but art remaining, peaceful and still, even if the creator’s spirit was anything but.

The neighborhood was quiet at night, the proximity of Central Park making it seem an airier neighborhood than other parts of the city. I would have felt perfectly safe on any other night. But that night I found myself looking over my shoulder at the sound of approaching footsteps, gazing at others on the street with suspicion. I dug my hand inside that strange tacky purse and rested it on the gun, feeling quite able to use it if necessary.

As I walked, all the events of the last-was it only twenty-four hours?-played in my mind: that horrible screaming on the phone, Fred’s blood pooling on the marble floor, the lovely Camilla, her throat cut. I had the cold realization that I was, as Trevor suspected, terribly out of my league. I thought about my sister, how worried she must be, how furious she’d be when she learned I pulled a gun on Erik. She’d know then how desperate and stupid all of this had made me. I had a moment of clarity, my footfalls sounding loud on the concrete in the quiet night; I should call Detective Crowe and tell him everything I’d learned, then call that lawyer, get in a cab and turn myself in. I should take all the good advice and help that had been offered and stop being an ass-for the sake of my family, if for not for myself. I stopped in my tracks and took Camilla’s phone from my right pocket, Detective Crowe’s card from my left. I could have dialed, ended it right then and there.