Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

I lay in bed for the rest of the week. Too sick to work. At night I puffed my sniveling self up into a zeppelin of self-reproach, and when I jolted awake in the morning from muddy dreams, that ink-black airship hung above the pine trees, casting a shadow and on the verge of combustion. I only got up toward afternoon, ate a little something, and marched through the woods, furious, overwrought, stamping pine cones to splinters. My atheism teetered: it was difficult not to see the punitive hand of some god or other behind this new ordeal, that damn God of Wilbert’s. I cursed the hunk of wood on Wilbert’s wall and at the same time prayed for a miscarriage: Dear Lord, please let me be rid of this, I don’t want it. Internet pregnancy forums list all kinds of things mothers-to-be should expressly not do, and so I worked overtime, slept too little, drank as much alcohol as possible, at home, up in that little room, wine, whiskey, vodka. Weekends I ate with those two pocket-sized French girls, who chatted with each other in incomprehensible Parisian, perhaps about my cooking (they invariably sliced open the meat I had cooked for them, scrunched up their tiny noses and brought it back to the kitchen to finish the job), perhaps about my constant nausea. I called the Stanford University Family Planning Service. I e-mailed Boudewijn.

He phoned while I was sitting in the empty breakfast room in Liège eating Nutella on French bread.

“Where are you?”

“Liège.”

“And. How did he react? They gave Arend a downer — and then? What’d he say? Tell.”

“And then nothing, Bo. There’s nothing much to tell. My ex-boyfriend’s got a psychosis, a whopper of a psychosis. He thinks the sun is made of yellow jam he can smear on his toast. It’s really awful.”

“So he’s not going to miss the little one for the time being.”

Only months later, when I was less self-absorbed, when I wasn’t afraid Boudewijn would find out I’d been trying to unload a $1.5 million boat, when I no longer dreaded seeing my parents, when we were already safely ensconced on our hill in San Francisco — only then did I figure out what he had been up to. In retrospect I understood his loyalty, his empathy, the earnestness of his e-mails, how he managed to get me to cancel the appointment at that Stanford Family thing and think “for at least five minutes per day” about “the joys of motherhood,” a phrase that leapt with surprising ease to the lips of this fifty-year-old childless man. In retrospect I understood his satisfaction when I passed the twelve-week mark and announced my pregnancy at McKinsey. The story behind his smile at Schiphol Airport, where he whisked me into a business-class lounge I called “louche” and why he, in the middle of that joint and with a mouth full of crab salad, had laughed so hard. “I’ve got really sad news,” he said, “Brigitte and I are splitting up. I’ve filed for divorce. We’re driving each other bonkers.” Then he put me on the train to Enschede and as a farewell laid his ringed hand briefly on my belly. (And still I hadn’t caught on, no idea that he’d already started finagling his transfer to San Francisco, no idea that he was already planning to cradle my head during delivery. A few years ago I dug up some old e-mails from that time, and sure enough, there it was in black-and-white: in October 2000 Boudewijn wrote that Brigitte was making a big deal — rightfully so, he felt — of his infertility.)

Now he said: “And soon, your parents. Be sure to greet your father for me.”

“I’ll do that.”

That boat. The fucking Barbara Ann . We really had to get rid of it, preferably in one shot, one viewing, because I was not about to travel back here from the States a second time. She was moored in the marina where we’d left her the previous summer. I was to meet the potential buyer the day after tomorrow in Sainte-Maxime, a wealthy American ICT guy I had met through McKinsey who spent his winters in Monaco and had recently been on the lookout for a Palmer Johnson like ours.

I crossed into France well before noon and decided to push on until Lyons, so as to arrive in Sainte-Maxime early the next day and take my time readying the boat. The route de soleil was, on my own in the Alfa, a different experience altogether: a bleak, monotonous streak through restlessly leafy hills, the sleepy aire restaurants and parking lots, no sunflowers, no traffic jams, no expectations. I had to do my best not to constantly think back on the Vluchtestraat and what I’d seen there. Why did things always go differently than you expected? Hours of dark toll roads later I found myself in Christmassy downtown Lyons, booked into a hotel with a sagging bed where I didn’t get a wink of sleep.

At the end of November my mother called me at McKinsey. She caught me so by surprise I didn’t even have time to die of shock. Suddenly I was sitting in a full office courtyard with my mother on the line — I had no idea what to expect, and in fact I’ve never figured out whether she was just pretending everything was hunky-dory, or if everything really was hunky-dory. She was as sweet as pie, gave no indication that she knew anything about the glass door incident. She asked if I would come to Val-d’Isère for Christmas. The half-second delay allowed me to invent an excuse: sorry, Mom, tons of work to do over Christmas. A few days later I really was sorry, because since deciding to keep the baby, something else was growing in me as well, an idea, a plan, a notion that I had started to cherish as though I were carrying twins. I took folic acid to strengthen them both at once.

The next morning, completely wiped out, I drove through Provence. Despite the mild weather I was still cold; a profound melancholy began to seep into my bones. At Chambéry, the exit I would use tomorrow to head back up to Val-d’Isère, I saw a bright speck of light. A minuscule hole in my perception, as though an extra-intense white heat pricked through the day’s movie screen. I glanced at the dashboard, at my hands on the sporty three-spoke steering wheel, and then back to the road.

“ Fuck. ”

Here we go again. I’d been asking for this for weeks, I was well aware of that. The last one was before the fireworks disaster, so I’d had, believe it or not, six migraine-free months behind me, I had warded them off with abracadabras and incantations. But the day of reckoning had arrived. Within minutes the illuminated speck spread into a fist-sized, swirling diamond of light — more eager than usual, it seemed, as though someone wanted to fast-forward the misery. The aura phase, the doctors call it. I had been familiar with the routine since high school: fifteen minutes from now all I’d see would be fireworks, everything would become a dancing, burning, full-screen light show. After a while the diamond would disappear, followed by a half-hour respite. Then the migraine would hammer a nail into my temple.

Too nauseous and blinded to drive, I maneuvered the Alfa into the first possible lay-by, turned off the engine, and rested my head on the steering wheel. All I had in my purse was paracetamol, no Imigran, which is what I needed now. The box was already empty before I left for California. There might be some ibuprofen 600 on the boat. I put on my sunglasses, but the frenzied flickering was on the inside: thoughtburn. I swallowed three paracetamols and concentrated as best I could on Christmas in Val-d’Isère.

The baby would fix everything . I didn’t tell Boudewijn, simply because he didn’t have a damn thing to do with it — but this idea did, in the end, keep me from having the abortion. Night after night I lay on the communal sofa of the pueblo, tossing pine cones into the fireplace (the strange hardness of the scales, their crackle and hiss as soon as the flames flared up and made short work of them), brooding, reasoning, feeling ; and the more my waist vanished and my belly swelled, the more I realized what a trump card I had in my hand. For the first time since the sliding glass door I allowed thoughts of Corsica in, tried to recall the emotions of the vacation. We knew full well what we were doing when we made love. On the boat, on the way back in Nancy. We wanted this child . It wasn’t conceived by mistake. I knew Aaron would acknowledge paternity at once, he would put everything aside to raise the child. And damn it, it was on its way — irrevocable. And wouldn’t this irrevocability cancel out that other irrevocability? A child, Aaron’s and mine … Did I realize what I was doing? I lay there on a sofa in Silicon Valley making Siem a grandfather . And after fully realizing that, I knew without a doubt: this thing in my belly would be stronger than what drove us apart. We’d become father and mother and grandpa. I would birth us back together.