Andrew Fox: Over Our Heads

In the hallway, I smelled chicken stock wafting from an apartment whose tenants I had never seen. I climbed the stairs and turned my key. The lamp by the window was lit. A coat I recognized was strewn across the couch, a pair of shoes set neatly on the floor beside the coffee table. Once, on a beach in Clare, a wave had knocked me off my feet, dragged me across the ocean floor and pushed me back and rolled me; I had tried to breathe but there was nothing but water. That’s how I felt when Carol stepped from the kitchen.

‘I still have my key,’ she said unnecessarily, her smile an exhibit for a case already won. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘Hi,’ I said, very aware suddenly of a lightness at my fingertips. ‘You’ve come for more of your stuff?’

She stepped towards me, the fullness of her lower lip squeezed between her teeth.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant. I think it happened in Dublin.’

Her dark hair was shinier than I remembered it, her skin clearer. And when she bent to sit, she cupped her belly with a hand as though the gesture were the most natural thing in the world. We talked about what we’d both been doing for the past few months. I told her that I’d missed her, and she said she’d missed me too. Eventually we moved on to Tyler, who she said was just a colleague, then a friend, then a mistake. When she started to nod off, I insisted that she take the bed, and fetched the spare blanket and pillow from the hall closet to make up the couch.

In the morning, with nothing resolved, we walked to the subway together and went our separate ways. I taught my class with a new and terrified energy, and I realized suddenly how young they all were, in their baseball caps and sneakers, their heavy coats that mothers had picked out. As I packed my bag, I wished them well for the weekend. They filed out with nods or a mumbled word, but Elizabeth Jordan lingered. She was a Psych major who always sat in the corner, rarely participated in group discussion and never spoke to anyone before or after class. But she wrote uncommonly well, with empathy and poise. She smiled at me, all teeth.

‘Have a good day,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to see you’re feeling better.’

I had half-forgotten her voice, New England-y and clipped.

‘Excuse me?’ I said.

She looked towards the door. ‘No, it’s just … I was thinking that you used to look so unhappy, is all. But now you look happy. You’re happy?’

I thought about it.

‘Yes,’ I said.

She smiled again, that dour face flashing with bright dentition. And her eyes, so often careworn, seemed relieved.

The following night, Carol came over for dinner. While I prepared the food, we stood across from each other at the breakfast bar, my knife dipping into the flesh of vegetables, her hand darting to the bowl to snatch a slice of pepper or a disc of carrot.

‘It’s strange,’ I said as we ate, ‘the way things turn out. Isn’t it?’

Carol set down her cutlery and wiped her lips. ‘What do you mean?’

I shrugged. ‘We were always so careful, is all.’

‘Well, nothing’s a hundred percent.’

‘And we never even talked about —’

‘We talked about it.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘for scares. But I used to think it would be the worst thing in the world, you know? We were so unprepared. Or I was. And all that stuff. But now … I’m just, I’m really glad you’re back.’

She cut and speared an asparagus stem. ‘I’m not really back yet, you know,’ she said. ‘But, do you want me to come back? And do you want to be here?’

I reached for her hand; she let me take it. And after dinner, without a word, she led me to the bedroom. We got under the covers together and lay there fully clothed. The sheets were soft and cool. Her breathing was high and quick. I woke in the night facing her. I’d always loved the way she slept, with her hands joined together beneath her head as if in prayer. I reached down to touch her stomach, expecting hardness, fullness, but she felt just as I remembered. She groaned and rolled over and I snatched my hand away, the feel of her in my fingers. On Sunday morning, after breakfast, she went to her sister’s place to collect her stuff. And every evening that week we unboxed the things she’d taken and returned them to where they belonged.

For Thanksgiving, we gussied ourselves up and brought a store-bought pumpkin pie to Darren and Emma’s place. Carol sprawled out on the living-room floor and played self-consciously with Sky’s stuffed toys and blocks. I joined Darren in the kitchen to help with the turkey and the stuffing, the cranberry sauce and the Brussels sprouts and the three different kinds of potatoes. He wore a T-shirt printed with an image of an armed Indian tribe and the legend Homeland Security , kept a bottle of gin on the draining board from which he took frequent nips. A green felt card table groaned under the weight of food. We chatted like in the old days but didn’t know what to toast. Later, when Carol passed out on the couch, and Emma pleaded with a sugar-rushing Sky to sleep, Darren and I crept downstairs to the stoop with the last of the gin. The street was quiet, the avenue dark, but every window on the block was lit.

‘This situation right here is really quite a situation,’ he said and passed the bottle. ‘You won’t believe what’s ahead of you.’

I took a swig and winced, passed the bottle back.

‘Tell me about it,’ I said.

And he did: the hysteria of night feeds and the calm of total sleep; the torture of teething and the joy of watching her grow.

‘It’s fucking agony and it’s fucking magical,’ he said. ‘Is that good for you to hear?’

I wasn’t sure.

Once classes broke, I called my mother. Eamonn answered.

‘She’s had a little spill,’ he said.

He told me about the ‘cold snap’ that had recently hit Dublin. The Council hadn’t enough grit for the roads and was importing it from the Continent. There was snow on O’Connell Street, a drift three inches thick against the walls of the GPO where Eamonn and my mother had gone together to mail their Christmas cards. On the way out, she had slipped on a patch of ice and fallen from his grasp.

‘I had her,’ he said, ‘and then I didn’t.’

She was in the Mater, with a pin in her ankle and a bedside locker stacked with get-well cards. Did I have any news I wanted him to pass along?

‘No,’ I said.

I hung up and called my mother’s mobile. She answered on my fourth attempt.

‘Hello, love,’ she said, her voice groggy.

‘I just spoke to Eamonn,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘we didn’t want to worry you.’

She launched then into a long description of her ward: the nurses who looked too young even to be out of school; the ten-strong Polish family who visited their mother en masse and stayed all day; the old man across the aisle who, she said, ‘has good days and bad. No one ever visits, so I sit with him whenever I can.’

‘Do the doctors let you out of bed?’

‘They worry too much, those boys.’

‘Listen, Mam,’ I said, ‘I have something I need to tell you.’

I did. And as she screamed, I couldn’t help but smile.

‘I wish your father were here,’ she said through tears. ‘He would have been so happy, so proud.’

‘So do I,’ I said.

I started, again, to worry about money, about what I’d do after graduation and how I’d provide for what I’d started to think of as my family . I told my mother that we’d be staying in New York for Christmas, and although she sounded disappointed, she said she understood. I quit buying coffee in the mornings, cancelled my journal subscriptions, took extra shifts tutoring at the Writing Center and sold all my big anthologies to the student union bookstore. When Carol came home and saw the shelves empty she looked as though she might cry, looked too as though she wanted to say something. But instead she removed my glasses and kissed my eyelids.