Wally Lamb - We Are Water

She begins to cough. Points to the cup of ice chips on her tray table. I put some on the little plastic spoon and feed them to her. She sucks on them, smiles weakly, and continues. “He tried to convince me to end my pregnancy or put you up for adoption, but I refused. I knew I wanted you despite what was to come. I already loved you, Orion.” He saw her one more time after he learned she was pregnant, she says. “And then after that, he just disappeared. Stopped coming to the movies. Withdrew from his college. I tried to contact him there—borrowed my friend’s car and drove over there. But the woman in the registrar’s office wouldn’t give me an address. She was sympathetic after I began to cry. I had started showing a little by then, and I’m sure she put two and two together. But she stuck to her guns. And so I surrendered to the inevitable. Went home and confessed to Mama and Papa.” The following Saturday, her father drove her to the Saint Catherine of Siena Home for Unwed Mothers, she says, and she spent the remainder of her pregnancy there. Got her high school diploma but had to miss her graduation. “The sisters tried for months to convince me to do what most of the other girls agreed to: hand the baby over to Catholic Charities so that some nice childless couple who had prayed for a baby could adopt you. They accused me of being selfish, but I just kept shaking my head. I wanted to keep you and raise you and that was that.”

She’s flagging, I can see. Exhausted and upset. Should I stop quizzing her? While I’m trying to decide, a nurse enters. “Sorry to interrupt, Maria, but it’s time for your breathing treatment,” she says. Mom nods, gives her a wan smile, and opens her mouth. While Mom is puffing away on the device, I stand. Go over to the window and look out on the parking lot. But what she’s told me has opened up more questions, and when the treatment is over and the nurse leaves, I sit back down again. Take her hand in mine. I remind her about that time we went up to Boston—to Grandpa Oh’s restaurant. “How did you know where to find his father?” I ask her.

“Well, Francis was a smoker,” she says. “Always lit his Viceroys with books of matches that said HENRY OH’S CHINA PARADISE on the cover. During one of the times we were at the motel where he used to take me, I slipped one of those matchbooks in my purse as a souvenir of our love. Like I said, Orion, I was naïve back then. I thought sex and love were one and the same.”

She’d gone to Henry Oh’s China Paradise once before, she says, when she was six or seven months pregnant. “At first, he tried to deny that Francis was the father. How did I know this child was his son’s? ‘Because your son is the only man I’ve ever been with,’ I told him. I could tell he believed me, but he still wouldn’t tell me how to find Francis!” …

A look of exasperation had crossed her face when she said that—one I recognized. She had had that same look the day we’d walked up the stairs to Henry Oh’s China Paradise so that she could present me to my grandfather as proof of my existence. Proof that, since his son had not done the right thing by me, the obligation fell on him. He needed to help finance the college education of the boy who, whether my grandfather was happy about it or not, carried his family name. Henry Oh, Francis Oh, Orion Oh: we were linked. He was duty bound. And so I practically had had to run after her that day as she exited the restaurant, her head held high, her hand clutching the check that would allow me to attend Boston University. Mom had been fierce that day, victorious. And even at seventeen, when I was still so ignorant about life and love and the repercussions of sex, I somehow knew that, whatever it had just cost her to get that money, she had done it out of a ferocious, almost feral love for the son she had refused to hand over to adoptive parents. And so—

Jesus god, there it goes again. Love shack, baby, love shack … And suddenly I realize who must be calling me. Annie. It’s two days past when I was supposed to RSVP. Well, if she wants to find out if I’m going to her big gay wedding, she can go to hell because—

OH! JESUS!

Shit, that was close. If I hadn’t just pulled out of my fog and slammed on the brakes, I would have rear-ended that Subaru. That’s all I need right about now: an accident that would have been my fault. My heart’s racing, my palms have broken out in a sweat. Refocus. You want to get there in one piece, don’t you? With my eyes on the road, I feel for the radio knob and twist it counterclockwise. Return to the Mad Hatter and the shark lady.

“Okay then, Doc, so let’s say Jaws comes upon a pod of seals that are chillin’ in the waters off of Chatham. What’s his M.O.?”

“Well, first of all, ‘he’ is likely to be a she . Female great whites tend to be larger and more dominant than males. And as to the shark’s ‘M.O.,’ as you put it, great whites are ambush hunters. So what they do is identify a target and then ram it hard and fast, most likely from beneath because the underbelly is what’s most vulnerable.”

The Mad Hatter snorts. “That’s where we’re all most vulnerable. Right, guys? Under our bellies and above our knees?” An ah-ooga horn sounds, but the shark lady soldiers on.

“Once a shark takes hold, it whips its head from side to side, the better to tear open a large chunk of flesh. That exposes the organs and entrails, which will be ingested as quickly as possible. From what we’ve observed, great whites may travel in small clans, but when they’re on the hunt, they separate.”

“Every shark for himself, right?”

“That’s right. Or her self.”

Sharks. Ambush hunters. Viveca Christophoulos-Shabbas …

Annie met Viveca through her art. She’d had a piece selected for that Whitney Biennial, and at the opening Viveca approached her about exhibiting at her by-appointment-only gallery in Chelsea. But in fairness, I guess I’d started losing my wife to her art long before Lady Bountiful came into the picture …

It was strange how Annie’s career had come about. She couldn’t even say why, not long after our twins were born, she’d begun collecting odds and ends from junk stores, swap shops, and the curbside recycling boxes she passed while out for walks with Andrew and Ariane in their side-by-side stroller. She’d not understood it, that is, until she began creating those found-art shadow boxes. She had had no training as an artist. Something just compelled her to make them, she told me, but she was reluctant to explore with me the nature of that impulse. “Orion, I’m your wife, not one of your patients,” she reminded me once when I tried to tease out her motivation. She made it clear that this was her thing. No trespassing.

Her first pieces were humorous, or so I thought: The Dancing Scissors, The Jell-O Chronicles. One Saturday, I remember, she requested a “mental health” afternoon. The twins had been sick, and except for trips to the pediatrician’s and the pharmacy, Annie had been stuck in the house all week with cranky kids. Could I stay with them for a few hours while she went to a movie, maybe, or down to the mall? I got her coat, gave her a little swat on the rear, and said, “Go.” But by the time she got back home, it was after 8:00 P.M. This was the mid-1980s, before cell phones became ubiquitous; if someone didn’t bother to call in, you stared at the phone, waiting and worrying. “Where the hell have you been ?” I demanded when she came through the door that night. But she was so jubilant, so energized, that she hardly noticed my day’s worth of aggravation and worry. She had driven to Waterford, she said, intending to go to the Crystal Mall. Instead, spur of the moment, she’d hopped onto I-95 South. En route to no place in particular, she decided to get off at random exits and hunt for whatever awaited her at the dumps and secondhand shops of different shoreline towns. And it had been so worth it! She’d picked up treasures at each: a bolt of lace, a bundle of 1940s movie magazines, some wooden soda crates, a canvas bag brimming with hand puppets. Passing a billboard advertising a going-out-of-business sale at a job lot store in New Rochelle, she’d made a snap decision, signaled, and exited.