Alice McDermott - After This

He kept his fingers on his wife’s back and placed his forearm over his eyes. The wind was just above them. It seemed to skim the tops of the surrounding dunes, bending the grass. But here the sun on his knees and on his forearm felt warm.

His love for his children bore down on his heart with the weight of three heavy stones. There were all his unnamed fears for them, and hopes for them. There was all he was powerless to change, including who they were-one too mild, one too easily tempted to be cruel, and the little girl (it was the weight of a heavy stone against his heart) a mystery to him, impossible to say what she, through her life, would need. And soon one more.

He hoped the fourth would be another boy-although he would never say so to his wife. What he had in mind most especially was a daughter’s wedding day and the pall an absent father casts on the scene, that sad tincture of mortality that mixes with the bright day when the bride appears at the door of the church on the arm of an uncle (as his own niece had done) or an older brother-it would be Jacob, of course.

No equal ghost appears at the ceremony, as far as he can recall, when it is the groom’s father who is missing.

Enough reason, he thought, for a man his age to wish for another boy. But it would be another stone, nonetheless.

He could hear the two of them now, softly crying orders to their men, even as they interrupted themselves to provide machine-gun fire and exploding hand grenades, the sound of the ocean and the wind and the occasional cry of gulls lending a certain authenticity to the scene with their steady indifference.

Then his wife’s voice, startingly close and yet oddly distant, specked with disks of black and gray as well as gold. “Pick him up and put him on the blanket,” she said to their daughter. “He’s full of sand.”

And then she stirred, moving beneath the lightly placed fingertips of her husband’s hand. The baby moving as well, roiling like a wave under her skin, pressing an elbow into her ribs, a heel against her hip.

“Thank you,” she said to her daughter and took the forgotten bear and shook it and brushed the sand from its worn fur and then set it carefully beside her, against her hip as if to offer it comfort, as if it were itself some spurned youngest child. The baby turned again even as Mary Keane glimpsed the drama of Steve Stevens (he had gone down on his belly behind a stalk of grass as Adolf Hitler drove by) on her daughter’s small face.

“Is anyone hungry yet?” she asked, and only Annie, who was never hungry yet, said No without raising her eyes. The boys, who had heard her, she knew they had heard her, ignored the question. Michael was crawling up the side of the dune, his plastic machine gun raised. Jacob-how like him-was watching his brother’s progress warily, his arms encircling his small platoon of green men, protecting them from the sliding sand. They both had heard her.

She looked over her shoulder at her husband. His forearm was thrown across his eyes, his mouth was slightly open. His fingertips, lightly, were on her back.

She leaned down to the bear, or leaned as much as the hump and heft of her belly would allow. “Are you hungry?” she asked it. Her daughter, compelled as equally by whimsy as by drama, suddenly straightened up and turned to her mother. “He’s not answering, either,” Mary Keane told her daughter, and they both smiled.

“I guess no one’s hungry,” Annie said gently, and here the mother glimpsed some future commiseration between them, some future understanding they would certainly share of what passed between women while the men in the world were distracted, unheeding, unconscious.

She shifted again, leaning her weight onto one thigh and then the other as the baby offered its own counterbalance. She moved her hands inside her coat and grasped her belly, the way she might hold a child’s face between her hands to silence tears, or to ask, What is it, what’s wrong?

She stroked her sides, the loose knit of the cotton sweater she had confiscated from her husband’s closet ten years ago, when she was pregnant with Michael and could bear only cotton or silk against her skin. She felt the baby ripple under her fingers. She felt a heel-surely it was a heel here on her left side-press against her skin and then dart away, going under, before she could quite gauge its shape.

It was possible it had something to do with the ocean, all this activity. Something to do with the salt scent of it on the air and on the wind. The tug of some ancient memory-didn’t they say life began in the sea-or maybe some dawning hope that the what-do-you-call-it, the fluid the baby now floated in (which someone had told her was also precisely as salty as the ocean), was a tributary, not merely a pool.

She ran her palms over her taut belly, soothing the poor thing, even as a swift kick under her ribs nearly took her breath away. Or maybe, she thought, it was the hurricane down south, agitating water everywhere-in oceans and bays, dog bowls and cisterns, in the bellies of pregnant women all up and down the coast.

Mary Keane smiled and looked around because the thought amused her, although she knew that in another minute she would not be able to retrace it clearly enough to retell.

Michael had slipped beyond the crest of the dune. Jacob was lying flat out now, on his stomach, his little men all before him, and Annie had followed her single soldier up the dune to a grassy patch where the wind whipped her dark hair and the blowing sand made her squint, even as her lips kept moving-now a conversation between her little army man and a headless creature formed by the two fingers of her right hand. But Michael was out of sight.

She waited. Were it not for the ballast of her big belly, she would casually stand, stretch a bit, casually stretch her neck until she got a glimpse of him. Casually because her husband said she worried too much, fretted too much, and would eventually infect their boys with her fearfulness-had, perhaps, already, in Jacob’s case, infected them with her fearfulness. So she waited, trusting, but feeling, too, the pins-and-needles prick of blown sand on her cheek and her forearm (was the wind changing?) until, sure enough, there was the top of his head, the tip of his plastic machine gun, just over the next dune.

She resisted calling to him, telling him to come closer. Her husband was asleep beside her. She could hear the way he pursed his lips with each breath, something like the soft sound of the football against their palms (although it was softer still), something like the thud of the ocean as it punctuated the rise and fall of the wind. He deserved the rest, poor man. They were alone on the beach. They were perfectly safe.

Michael’s head crested the dune again. Then his shoulders, the rump of his blue jeans, the short barrel of his machine gun. He was crawling on his belly along the top of the dune, crushing the sea grass, filling his shirt and the pockets of his pants with sand. She would have to remember to shake him out before he got into the car.

Down the path through the dunes she could see the pale expanse of beach and then the place where it gave way to sky. She leaned forward a little, toward it, resting the bulk of the baby on the edge of her thighs. It was possible that the sky was darker, out there, to the east. It was possible that they would catch some part of the southern storm. She had an image of her unborn child, its head up under her heart, its ear pressed to the wall of her flesh, treading water with the flutter of its small legs, listening. It would hear the echo of the waves, the whistle of the wind, the rise and fall of its father’s breath as his lips opened and touched closed.

Mary Keane was more than certain (she would have said) that this was her last pregnancy. These the last weeks she would live with the toss and tumble of a child in her belly, with the unseen future a real presence inside her; the unseen future actual flesh and blood inside her, not, as it was for the rest of the population and would be for her again once this child was born, merely imagination or hope or plan-the man Jacob would become, and Michael, the woman (commiserating with her mother while the men were turned away) who would be Annie. What was moving under her hands, pressing and turning under the taut skin, was the future itself, already formed, pressing an ear to the wall of her flesh.