Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

On another night, Rachel might have felt a twinge of jealousy or at least competitive edge — the woman had just given fucking birth, for Christ’s sake, and she looked ready for the center spread in a lingerie catalogue — but tonight she knew how good she looked. Not in an advertising-of-the-wares way. But in an elegant, understated way that told everyone in the room she didn’t feel any need to trumpet what God had placed in good proportion in the first place and which genetics — and Pilates — were leaving, thus far, in place.

She and Haya caught up by the bar at one point as AB slept in the car seat at her mother’s feet. Because of the language barrier, they’d rarely spoken other than a few passing hellos and had hardly seen each other in a year, but Caleb had said Haya’s grasp of English was vastly improved. Rachel decided to brave the waters and found that he hadn’t been exaggerating: Haya now spoke well, if deliberately.

“How are you?”

“I am... happy. How are you?”

“Great. How’s Annabelle?”

“She is... fussy.”

Rachel glanced down at the child sleeping in her seat in the middle of a party. Earlier, while she’d been on Haya’s hip, she’d never once squawked or even squirmed.

Haya stared back at Rachel, her beautiful face a blank, her lips set.

“Thank you so much for coming,” Rachel said eventually.

“Yes. He... is my husband.”

“That’s why you came?” Rachel felt a small smile tug her lips. “Because he’s your husband?”

“Yes.” Haya’s eyes narrowed in confusion. It made Rachel feel guilty, as if she were bullying the woman over language and cultural barriers. “You look... very beautiful, Rachel.”

“Thank you. So do you.”

Haya looked at the baby at her feet. “She is... waking.”

Rachel had no idea how she predicted it, but about five seconds later, Annabelle’s eyes popped open.

Rachel squatted by her. She never knew what to say to babies. She’d watched people over the years interact with them in a way she found unnatural — jabbering in that infantile tone of voice no one ever adopted unless they were talking to babies, animals, or the very old and infirm.

“Hello,” she said to Annabelle.

The child stared back at her with her mother’s eyes — so clear and untainted by skepticism or irony that Rachel couldn’t help but feel judged by them.

She placed one finger on Annabelle’s chest and the child closed her hand around it and tugged.

“You’ve got a strong grip,” Rachel said.

Annabelle let go of her finger and looked up at the cowl of her car seat with a hint of distress, as if she were surprised to find it there. Her face crumpled and Rachel only had time to say, “No, no,” before Annabelle wailed.

Haya’s shoulder brushed Rachel’s as she reached for the handle of the car seat. She lifted the seat up onto the bar. She rocked the seat back and forth and the baby immediately stopped crying and Rachel felt embarrassed and incompetent.

“You have a gift with her,” she said.

“I am... her mother.” Again Haya looked a bit confused. “She is tired. Hungry.”

“Of course,” Rachel said because it seemed to be the kind of thing one said.

“We must go. Thank you for... asking us to your... party.”

Haya lifted her daughter from the seat and held her to her shoulder, the baby’s cheek pressed to the side of her neck. Both mother and daughter looked of a piece, as if they shared the same lungs, saw through the same eyes. It made Rachel and her party seem frivolous. And a little sad.

Caleb came over to gather the car seat and pink baby bag and white muslin blanket, then he walked his wife and daughter out to the car and kissed them both good night. Rachel watched them through the window and knew she didn’t want what they had. On the other hand, she knew that she did.

“Look at you,” Brian said when someone — Rachel suspected Melissa — put a dollar in the jukebox and pressed B17, “Since I Fell for You,” and they were compelled to dance to it a second time that night. He raised his eyebrows at their reflection in the full-length mirror on the back wall, and she saw herself head-on. She was surprised, as she always was in the very first millisecond of seeing herself, that she was no longer twenty-three. Someone had once told her that everyone had a fixed age in their mind’s-eye image of themselves. For some it was fifteen or fifty, but everyone had one. Rachel’s was twenty-three. Her face had, of course, grown longer and more lined in the ensuing fourteen years. Her eyes had changed — not the gray-green of them — but they were less sure and less adrenalized. Her hair, so dark a shade of cherry it looked black in most lights, was cut short with a side bang, a look that softened the harder curves of her heart-shaped face.

Or so a producer had once told her when he convinced her to not only cut her hair but straighten it. Before that conversation, it had always been a long tangle that fell to her shoulders. But the producer, after prefacing his critique with “No offense,” words that always preceded something offensive, told her, “You’re a few steps short of beautiful but the camera doesn’t know that. The camera loves you. And that’s making our bosses love you.”

That producer was, of course, Sebastian. She thought so much of herself that she married him.

As she and Brian swayed on the dance floor, she acknowledged what a huge improvement he was over Sebastian. A step up in every way — better-looking, kinder, better conversationalist, funnier, and smarter, even though he tried to downplay that part of his makeup, whereas Sebastian always played it up.

But there was the issue of trust again. Say what you would about Sebastian being an asshole, but he was a genuine asshole. Such an asshole that he didn’t think he had to hide the fact. Sebastian didn’t hide anything.

On the other hand, with Brian, she didn’t know what she had lately. Things had been unnervingly polite between them since he’d returned from his trip. She had nothing to support her mistrust, so she didn’t press the issue. And he seemed fine with that. And yet they moved around each other in the apartment like they were circling a jar of anthrax. They pulled up short in conversations lest they say something that could lead to conflict — his habit of leaving yesterday’s clothes hanging over the bedpost, her predilection for not changing the toilet paper roll if there was still one square left stuck to the cardboard — and chose their words with ultimate care. Soon they’d stop discussing potential spots of tension altogether, which would only lead to resentment. They smiled distantly at each other in the morning, smiled distantly at each other in the evening. Spent more time on their laptops or their cells. In the past week, they’d made love once and it was the carnal version of their distant smiles — as binding as water, as intimate as junk mail.

When the song ended, the group clapped and a few whistled and Melissa tapped a fork into her wineglass and shouted, “Kiss! Kiss!” until they finally obliged.

“How self-conscious do you feel right now?” she asked Brian as she leaned back in his arms.

Brian didn’t reply. He was trying to make sense of something behind her.

She turned as his fingers parted and she stepped out of his grip.

A man had entered the room. He was in his early fifties, with long gray hair tied back in a ponytail. Quite skinny. He wore a gray unstructured sport coat over a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt and dark jeans. His skin was leathery and tan. His blue eyes were so bright they looked aflame.

“Brian!” He opened his arms.

Brian exchanged a quick glance with Caleb — it was so fast that if Rachel hadn’t been standing three inches from his face she would have missed it — and then a smile flooded his face and he approached the man.