Ed King Read online

  “Well, what are we going to do, Walter?”

  “That’s going to take some discussion,” he said. “Do you think we can set up an appointment?”

  “This is so horrid,” Diane replied. “I never wanted to be like Mum. Now look at what’s become of me.” He heard sniffles.

  Walter said, “I absolutely understand. My calendar’s open in front of me right now. I could meet you, really, any time.”

  “Why is this happening?” Diane asked.

  “I’d like to help you to address that if I can. So let’s get together and talk,” said Walter. “I hear what you’re saying—it’s urgent for you, and I want you to know that I’m available with regard to it—in fact, I’m at your disposal.”

  “Oh, Walter,” said Diane. “What will happen to me?”

  That evening, he picked her up at the house in Laurelhurst where Diane was now installed as au pair. It was a night in mid-August when fall was discernible as a faint, crisp chill just after sundown. Diane was out front, arms crossed impatiently, wearing dungarees and a man’s white dress shirt with its sleeves rolled. She didn’t look well groomed. She hadn’t primped to see him. She looked like she’d come from the kitchen sink, and probably had. She got in quickly and said, “Go,” as if the Lincoln was an escape car, then watched the side mirror as Walter sped off. They left Laurelhurst behind. Walter chauffeured her along residential streets, going nowhere and—between long silences—speaking to the matter at hand. “I’m sure,” he said, “that I could arrange for an abortion. If you want to consider that, I would love to discuss it with you. And the first thing you should know is that I would take care of everything, and pay for everything, and go with you, and take you home afterward. I’d be there with you throughout the whole business. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  Diane rode with her head against the window. She looked—how did she look? Like he’d been stupid about rubbers? Like he was a total idiot? Like he disgusted her? It was impossible to know what Diane was thinking—he’d felt this way about her from the moment they’d met—because she was fifteen and foreign. “That all sounds great,” she said, “but I could never, ever do it. I’m not going to have an abortion.”

  “I don’t know,” Walter replied quickly. “We shouldn’t take options off the table.”

  Their silences grew longer as they rode past evening lawn sprinklers, dog walkers, and a few kids on bikes, asking, in different ways, again and again, “Now what?” Finally, though, Walter got Diane to agree to a plan—a far-from-foolproof plan, unwieldy and laborious, but the best he could come up with under the circumstances—which they put into motion in the middle of November, when Diane told her au-pair family that she was going home to England. A week before Christmas, her host mother and father dropped her at Sea-Tac Airport. She lugged her suitcases into the terminal, rode down the escalator to the baggage-claim level, then went back outside to meet Walter, who was waiting in his car. Yes, he felt oppressed by Diane’s pregnancy, and fearful of how things might turn out, but he also felt steeled and ready at this point. He’d told Lydia—who was back to normal, well organized, and on the ball—that he was “going to Houston for a conference.” She’d answered, good-naturedly, “That’s what they all say,” and he’d chuckled as if to acknowledge the truth of this. Then, feeling tender, and despising himself, he’d hugged her and insisted that he didn’t want to go to Houston, which, if you construed it the right way, was a fact.

  Now he and his knocked-up fifteen-year-old former au pair drove eighty miles north to Anacortes. Walter brooded at the ferry slip where they were going to embark for San Juan Island while Diane slumped, gray-faced, against the window. In a battering sea wind they drove onto the boat and ended up between a trailered backhoe and a wrecking van. Diane wanted to stay in the Lincoln, as opposed to sitting in the warm cabin up top, so Walter put a blanket over her legs and, self-consciously solicitous, another around her shoulders. The ferry churned into disagreeable seas, which became forbidding in Rosario Pass, eliciting, in Walter, fear of a roll. He said, “I’m sorry the crossing’s so rough,” and Diane answered, “Come off it, Walter. You sound pathetic.” Then they disgorged onto broken tarmac and drove deserted roads to the cabin at Cattle Point, where Walter installed his soured teen lover, put a wad of cash in her hand, and started dinner—macaroni and cheese in a box.

  Diane wouldn’t eat. She wouldn’t talk, either. The rain was louder on the roof because of her silence. She went in the bedroom, shut the door, and ignored him. Walter passed the night on the couch, awake with his clothes on, while she snored on the other side of the wall in a way that, despite everything, was moving and endearing. Somebody that young and beautiful could snore and it was charming instead of obnoxious.

  In the morning, before she woke, he sped into Friday Harbor. After scouring want ads in his idling Lincoln, he made a call from a booth and, following a cursory test drive, bought a seventy-five-dollar beater. It had buckled seat springs and smelled of mildew, but, leaving his own car behind, Walter drove it back to Cattle Point and, with false enthusiasm, urged Diane to learn to drive. “Come on,” he said. “This will be fun.” As if they could be jolly about an automobile, as if they were father and daughter. Diane got behind the wheel and immediately demonstrated her driving know-how. “None of your business,” she answered Walter when he asked her where and when she’d learned.

  They went back for the Lincoln, then caravanned to a gas station, where Walter filled both tanks. He bought a quart of ice cream, a deck of cards, a book of crossword puzzles, and four bags of groceries. All of this went into Diane’s topped-off beater. No, she said, she didn’t need him to lead her back, because she knew “the way to jail.” What she did need was twice the cash he’d doled out earlier. Walter forked it over. He stressed that she should enjoy herself, use the car when she needed to, and wait things out. “Brilliant,” said Diane. “That’s just brilliant.”

  One more time, Walter apologized, as if repeating himself would make things better instead of worse. “Look,” he said, “I take full responsibility for my part in this. I have a duty here, I know that, and I plan to see that duty through, no matter what.”

  “Go home,” she answered. “And lay off the subject of what a good citizen you are, all right?”

  On the ferry, his tail between his legs, Walter rubbed his receding hairline and stewed behind his steering wheel. On the mainland, he battled homeward in rain so harsh he worried that an accident, if it happened, would be his undoing. How was it, Lydia would want to know, that he’d had an accident north of home when the airport was south of it—the airport he’d supposedly made use of for his supposed trip to Houston? “Right,” thought Walter, “I’ve been in Houston,” and he stopped at Northgate Shopping Center to look for gifts that would seem like Texan gifts.

  That night, sleepless, with Lydia beside him in a cotton nightgown and high-waisted panties, he lay in bed worrying about ways his plan could fall apart. What scared him the most was Diane’s clear ire and her potential for irrational behavior. She might go to a pay phone in Friday Harbor and call him at home, for instance, even though he’d asked her not to. This worried him so much that, in the morning, when the phone rang, he answered in a panic, sure it was Diane, but it wasn’t Diane, and all weekend it wasn’t Diane, and even though he still worried about a phone call incessantly, by Monday he’d succeeded in incorporating this worry into the larger, more generalized, apocalyptic worry he felt about the whole affair. How much more could he take?

  On Monday, Walter contacted an obstetrician in Anacortes and an adoption agency in Bellingham about “a delicate situation involving our au pair.” On Wednesday, he took a day off from work and ran up to San Juan Island with flowers, doughnuts, magazines, and a used television set. As it turned out, there was reasonably good reception at Cattle Point. To be polite, and to make it look as if he wasn’t in a hurry to catch a ferry home—to add a layer of reassurance for Diane that he was a good guy—Walte
r served Jiffy Pop and watched As the World Turns with her. “I’m in prison here,” Diane said. “There’s nothing to do. I don’t do a thing.”

  “Take walks,” said Walter. “Get exercise.”

  The next time Walter came to the island, it was to collect Diane for her appointment with the obstetrician. An hour on the water to pick her up at the cabin, an hour back to the mainland with a seething girl for company, thirty minutes with the doctor in Anacortes, a hot dog and ice cream devoured in a parking lot, and then yet again to the interminable ferry, again to Cattle Point, again getting Diane to her cloister, and then, for Walter, once more to the mainland, once more the long drive home. The next week, he had to do it all over again for a trip to the adoption agency, so Diane could sign relinquishment papers and claim she didn’t know who the father was, even though the father—actually, Walter still wondered—was sitting right there, pretending to be helping. Walter felt grateful that the woman in charge of things pretended not to have seen this before—namely, the pregnant girl accompanied by an older man who purported himself as strictly a good Samaritan. But he didn’t feel grateful when she said that Diane would have to return the following week for an assessment of her features. This was so that the baby, when it came, could be placed in a family that had the right look, the better to allow for a successful sham, and to keep everyone not party to the deed—especially the baby, as it grew into a man or woman—from wondering what it meant that no one else in the family was, say, left-handed and cross-eyed. The next week came—another twice-circuitous journey. The assessment of Diane’s features was demeaning, and though she mechanically went along with the process, afterward she was livid about such a soulless inventory of her features. Walter worried that her goodwill was eroding further because she seemed brimming over now with shame and wrath. “Like meat,” she said. “It’s humiliating.”

  She swelled prettily, though, as things progressed. They both went on lying to everybody involved in order to sustain the charade indefinitely, and in order to move forward without a hitch. Lydia, with her inner battery now fully recharged, took a wifely interest in what she called Walter’s “distance.” He told her that stress at work—preoccupation with “an upheaval” at Piersall-Crane (“Someone got canned, and somebody somewhere decided to dump his accounts on guess who?”)—was the cause of his absence from their family life. Then he played with the kids, to lend depth to his remorse. Meanwhile, Diane metamorphosed. Her teen-age pregnancy was charming, yes, but she looked blotchy and had a burgeoning double chin.

  What to do? How to get to where this thing was done and he could move on with life unencumbered? And in the meantime, how to keep an angry fifteen-year-old on his side? Out of ideas, he bought her, once again, a double ice-cream cone in Anacortes, but it just made him all the sadder to watch Diane, so buffeted by circumstance, lick away earnestly at her Rocky Road. He said, “I know all of this is tough, but, believe me, I’m sticking with you, and we’ll get through it. These things happen.”

  Diane sighed. “A baby,” she said. “And look what I’m doing.”

  “I’m looking at it,” answered Walter, “and what I see is two people doing the best they can to do the right thing, Diane. We’re going to make sure our baby has a good home. We made a mistake—I made a mistake—but we’re owning up to it together, and so far, I’ve been proud to stand beside you while you stay the course with so much … is the right word ‘courage’? Look, I’m sure it isn’t easy to be alone on the island day in and day out, especially at your age, but we have to bear up, and we’re getting there.”

  “It’s not just that it’s a baby,” Diane said, “it’s that it’s my baby, growing inside of me.” Then she cried while her Rocky Road ran down the cone onto her hand.

  Walter convinced Diane to opt for an induced birth. She was to say that she lived on San Juan Island and was afraid of having her baby on the ferry, but the real reason, of course, was that an induced birth meant Walter could schedule.

  One week before the day he’d marked on his calendar as TRAVEL TO BALTIMORE, they had to listen to a lecture from the adoption agency’s director. By law, Diane would have forty-eight hours following the birth of the baby to change her mind. After that, there would be a third day for the baby in the maternity ward, to make sure it was healthy. If there was anything wrong, if the baby didn’t meet certain standards, the new family wouldn’t come for it, as stipulated in their adoption papers. If nothing was wrong, as everyone expected, then, on the fourth day, the new family would take the baby without seeing Diane, or Diane’s seeing them. Thereafter—out of this the director made a full-blown disquisition—Diane should think of herself as having done the right thing, as having provided love and a good life for her child by relinquishing it to adoptive parents, who subsequently would in fact be the sole parents in all legal regards. Was that understood? Did Diane know what she was doing? Did she get the nuances, the legal principles, the injunctions? Odds were that she did, thought Walter, because it had all been plodded through with Biblical depth and thoroughness. There it all was, a lot of spelled-out mumbo-jumbo, no doubt arrived at by lawyers and politicians and, he hoped, irrelevant in his case. Let the counted-on scenario begin, he thought, with no “if”s intruding.

  The appointed day arrived. For the trip to the mainland hospital, they took two cars, Diane in her beater without a license or insurance, and Walter in his workhorse Lincoln-cum-taxi, so that afterward they could go separate ways. But not really separate ways, because Walter would remain tethered to Diane to the tune of—she’d made clear what she wanted—one hundred fifty a month. How would he swing that? It was a question for later. A big one—but later. For now, on the ferry, they sat in his car together, Diane with her hands supporting her belly, Walter in the driver’s seat with his fingers twined behind his head, feeling, for the first time, that this episode might indeed draw to a close without ripping him apart. Maybe he would get away scot-free. Maybe, soon, the danger would pass. “Hey,” he said, “how are you doing over there on the passenger side, Diane?”

  “Scared.”

  Walter nodded as if he understood. “That’s got to be normal. On the other hand, the odds of complications during childbirth that doctors can’t handle are extremely low these days. What else?”

  “Odds,” sneered Diane. “Don’t be so stupid. I’m not worried about the odds on what’s happening today. I’m worried about the odds for tomorrow.”

  “I know,” answered Walter. “I know, I know. But I think it’s good for us to take this one day at a time. Right now’s not the moment to plan your whole life. Let’s think about what’s on our plate today, and we’ll think about tomorrow tomorrow.”

  Diane said, “Easy for you to say. Tomorrow you go back to your cute children, your wonderful wife, your summer cottage, your car, your house, your wage packet—all of that, Walter. It’s no wonder you’re not thinking about tomorrow. You know precisely what tomorrow looks like.”

  “That’s true,” he countered. “Whereas you, young lady, when this unpleasantness is done, will be young and beautiful and have your whole life in front of you, an open book, a wonderful adventure, while I’m watching Ozzie and Harriet.”

  At the hospital, the obstetrician delivered a last-minute bad surprise: induction could take “several days.” This made Walter’s anxiety skyrocket, because his lies were good for a limited duration. He’d counted on the baby appearing on day one, then disappearing—on schedule—ninety-six hours later, but now, if he had to factor in several days prior to the birth for labor induction—well, he couldn’t factor that in. His whole ruse, at the last minute, would topple, or unravel. “What about a C-section?” he asked.

  It turned out that this was not his decision. He was banished to the waiting room to hope for the best, and to sit with another prospective father—twenty-five and balding—to whom Walter explained, when asked, what an actuary does, before both of them descended into nervous brooding. After four hours, to his relief, an inte
rn came to tell him that labor was under way. Five hours after that, around 7 p.m., Diane gave birth to an eight-plus-pound boy, who, the obstetrician came to tell Walter, squalled loudly, with healthy lungs. When Walter first saw him, through glass, held closely to the pane by a maternity nurse, he noticed that his son wore a beaded bracelet identifying him as “Baby Doe.” Baby Doe, decided Walter, looked like his grandfather—like Walter’s father—who lived in Cincinnati with his third wife. He looked sturdy, healthy, strong-boned, and handsome, like most of the Cousins men, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with him. “Wow,” thought Walter, “that’s my son,” and for a moment he regretted that, as of three days hence, he’d never see him again. That was upsetting. That hurt a little. Another atrocious outcome of this swamp-march.

  From a hospital pay phone—from “Baltimore,” this time—he called Lydia. “Up late,” he said. “Long day here. I’ve been burning the candle at both ends.”

  “At a conference?”

  “I hate conferences.”

  “What’s keeping you up so late at a conference?”

  “I have to hunker down and prep for meetings. Otherwise, I’m not prepared, darling.”

  Then it was time for a visit with Diane, who was sitting up in bed in a blue hospital gown, a little peaked, with gray lips, greasy hair, and the amorphous torso of a completed pregnancy. “Diane,” he said cheerfully, “you’re looking good.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “I was just there, checking. He’s a handsome kid. I got kind of caught up in looking at him and had to make myself stop staring at the little guy. It was emotional, Diane. Pretty painful.”

  “I’m not asking about you, Walter. I’m asking about him.”

  “Not a peep,” answered Walter. “Right now he looks happy. And how are you? Are you doing all right? Is everything looking like it should?”