Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

She hoped three times would be enough. After each one, she took stock of her body, weighed and surveyed it, but she couldn’t tell any difference, and was desperately afraid.

Dan came into the bathroom as she weighed herself, squeezing her breasts. In the mirror, their eyes met.

“You’re beautiful,” he said mechanically. “You aren’t fat.”

She smiled at him. Fat was what she wanted, but he couldn’t know that yet. “Thanks, honey.”

The way she said it — her ease and placidity — alerted him. He cocked his head. “What’s going on with you, anyway?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You dress differently. Walk differently. You have this vacant smile all the time.”

“I’m still wearing the same clothes.”

“You’re wearing dresses instead of pants. In January. You’re putting on makeup every day.”

“Maybe it cheers me up.”

“For God’s sake, Lisette, do you think I don’t notice? Are you seeing someone else? Is it that father from the Christmas concert?”

“Oh, honey,” she said, and turned to him, away from the mirror.

“Don’t touch me right now,” he said. “Just don’t.”

He spent the night in the guest room, the one they’d planned on turning into a nursery. The next evening, when she got home from rehearsal, he’d moved his clothes in there too. And he himself wasn’t home: no note, no message saying where he was. At midnight, she heard him come in, run the water in the bathroom, and get into bed.

She thought she’d give him some space. She was far enough gone, at this point, to think that space was what they both needed.

Then, strangely enough, they lived for a time as cordial strangers. They ate meals together and inquired politely about each other’s day. The shell of their former life held fast even as its contents were emptied. Dan lost weight, looked exhausted. Once, in the middle of the night, she got up to pee and heard a strange sound from his room, like choking or throwing up. She paused outside the closed door to listen, realizing, gradually, that it was the dry, painful twisting of sobs torn from a man unaccustomed to them. She put her palm on the door, then opened it.

“Go away,” he said immediately. “Just go away.”

In the morning, they acted as though this hadn’t happened.

Three weeks later, she peed on the stick and got a positive result.

“Oh, thank God,” she said out loud.

That night, she made steak and mashed potatoes, Dan’s favorite meal. When he came home from work and saw it, he took a wary step back. He had the look of a dog that’s been beaten and can’t help expecting the next blow. And this, she knew, was the next blow. But it was also a gift — eventually, he would recognize it as such himself.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. From the other end of the table, she could see herself reflected in his eyes — a torturer, a demon — but she stood with her fingers clenching the back of the dining room chairs they’d bought as newlyweds.

“Whose is it?” he said.

“It’s ours,” she said.

“Lisette, are you crazy? What have you done?”

“It’s a miracle,” she said firmly. “It’s our family.”

He stood there shaking his head. “We’re not a family anymore, Lisette,” he said.

To Tyler she said: “My husband knows. It’s over.”

They were in her car, after rehearsal, their breaths visibly streaming toward the dashboard. She crossed her fingers inside the mitten of her left hand. This was the chance she’d taken: that he could let go as easily as he’d latched on. If he fought, if he cried, if he struck out in anger, he could ruin everything. She’d given him that power over her life in exchange for what she needed. It was the biggest risk she had ever taken.

For one quiet, dark moment he looked into her eyes, then turned away. He reached his hand up and absently plucked the front of his winter coat. Seeing this nervous gesture again, she felt a great tenderness she could only describe as maternal, twisted as that was. And Tyler: he’d been fumblingly sweet, he’d stroked her hair, but she knew he wasn’t in love with her. She’d given him experience and some passing satisfaction and he already knew how to separate these physical facts from the emotional ones. There was a girl who played the flute, and Lisette had seen how he looked at her, queasy with wanting. The girl didn’t reciprocate, though, so Tyler had taken what he could get. The only question now was whether he could leave it behind.

He said, “Okay.” He could.

He was seventeen years old, bound for Princeton in the fall. His skin was clearing, his shoulders getting broad. There would be a lot of other women in his life.

In the months to come, she found a doctor, alone, took her prenatal vitamins, alone, bought a crib and baby clothes, alone. Dan wasn’t with her for the first ultrasound, didn’t hear the baby’s heart beat, didn’t read What to Expect When You’re Expecting. On the other hand, he didn’t move out, either. So that was something.

· · ·

At the spring concert, she and Tyler shook hands. She was showing now, wearing sack dresses most of the time, but it didn’t seem to register on him. She led youth orchestra sessions in the summer too, but he was going to hike the Appalachian trail with his dad. This, then, was good-bye. He said, “I’ll miss you.”

She smiled. She couldn’t wait for him to leave. “Enjoy college,” she said.

Just then a woman whose son played clarinet came by and put her arm on Lisette’s shoulder. She was warm and friendly, a busybody, Dana. She taught biology at the high school and let the girls leave the room when they claimed to be too freaked out by dissections.

“Oh, Lisette!” she said. “I can tell just by looking. Are you? You are, aren’t you?”

Lisette nodded, blushing despite herself.

“Congratulations! When are you due?”

“September.”

“How wonderful. Congratulations again.”

Lisette turned back to Tyler, expecting to have to explain — but he’d already gone off to the refreshments table, where Kim, the flautist, was eating a brownie.

That night, though, the doorbell rang at eleven. Dan was upstairs, sequestered in his room. When she opened the door, Tyler was standing on the porch, his brown eyes anxious. Her heart pumping, she stepped outside, closing the door quietly behind her. The last thing she wanted was for Dan to come down now.

“It took me a while to process what that conversation was about,” Tyler said. “Is it what I think?”

“I’m pregnant,” she said. “Dan and I are thrilled.”

He stepped closer. In the vague glow of the porch light his eyes glinted, the fear in them naked. “It’s not—”

“No,” she said. “It’s not.”

He breathed a theatrical sigh of relief, his shoulders rising and falling. For a moment she saw doubt clouding his mind, and then she saw him dismiss it. His eyes cleared and he began to walk away, his palm raised in a gesture of salute, separation, good-bye. He wanted nothing more than to put distance between himself and a pregnant middle-aged woman. He would never ask her another question, she was sure, because he had his whole future in front of him, luxurious, unspoiled; because she’d told him what he wanted to hear; because she was an adult and he was, after all, a child.

The summer passed slowly, the weather sticky and hot. She worked in the garden and took birthing classes. The doctor asked her if she wanted to know the sex of the baby, and she said no, figuring that Dan wouldn’t want to know either. Dan spent most of the summer away, first visiting his parents, then on a long fishing trip with his college friends. While he was gone, she moved his things back into the master bedroom, his socks and underwear back into the empty drawers, his shirts back into the empty half of the closet. In the spare bedroom she assembled the crib, the Diaper Genie, a little white bookshelf, a mobile. She had been collecting these things for months. Above the bookshelf she hung a framed copy of their wedding picture, she in her white dress, Dan grinning down at her, on the day they said their vows and bound themselves to each other forever.