Still, surely it didn’t stop at dancing. I don’t know the details because I was a child and because I was her child, but I know it happened. For a while. And then his wife got pregnant.
Russell is a good guy, the adultery notwithstanding, but it wasn’t the prospect of becoming a father that stopped it. It was actually becoming a father.
One morning he knocked on the door, soaking and lost. He wasn’t scheduled to be in town—he’d been coming less and less—so when Nora opened the door and found him on her front step, she was surprised then delighted then worried in very short order. It was pouring, and he was drenched, but he didn’t even look up when the door opened.
“Russell?”
“Nora.”
“You’re here.”
“Yes.”
“I’m so glad.”
Nothing.
“Come in.”
Nothing.
“Russell, you’re soaking. Come inside.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Nothing. Then finally he looked up from his sodden shoes. “The baby was born,” he said.
“Oh, Russell,” she gasped. “I’m so glad.” And she looked it. That’s what I remember from that moment: she was truly glad, truly happy for him, like he was her best friend and not her lover, which, I suppose, he was.
“No,” he said.
“No?” she said.
And then Russell whispered, “He has Down syndrome.” Her face fell, and he dropped to his knees right there on the front porch, and she bent down over him, an attempt to shield him, which did not work.
“Did you know?” Nora asked, as if that were the point.
He shook his head. “Sarah said no to all the tests. The midwives told us they were unnecessary.”
“Is he okay?”
“Who?”
“The baby.”
“No, Nora.” His eyes focused on her clutching him in the rain. “He has Down syndrome.”
“Yes, I know,” said Nora, “but is he okay?”
“I don’t know.” His eyes were wild. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“As long as he’s healthy,” Nora said, “as long as Sarah’s okay, you’ll be okay. You’ll all be okay. There are so many worse things than Down syndrome.” Maybe this was fumblingly put. Heat of the moment and all that. Shock and sadness and no time to pick your words over like lentils, looking for stones. And to her credit, her eyes did not so much as flicker in my direction. But I know she thought it all the same. Me. I am what’s worse than Down syndrome. Among other things.
“We were wrong,” Russell said.
“Who?”
“You and I.”
“About what?” said Nora.
“It wasn’t the water. It wasn’t the chemicals. It wasn’t the plant. Who knows what it was.”
“What are you saying?”
“So many things can ruin a baby. So many things get broken on the way. No one can ever say why.”
Nora stood upright, backed away a step. You’d like to think she was appalled by his words, the horrible things he was saying, or maybe appalled by the state he must have been in to utter them. And maybe she was. But mostly I think she was stumbling under the dawning realization of what he was going to say next. “Why are you here, Russell?”
“To tell you it’s over.” He did not specify what it was that was over. Everything, maybe.
But it wasn’t that simple.
For one thing, no one understood as well as Nora what Russell was going through. He felt at first that he could hardly stand under the weight of loving his newborn son but that his heart was also broken because no one else ever would. What we know now—that Sarah had shock and postpartum depression, not lack of love, that Matthew’s teachers and neighbors and doorman and the guy who runs the bodega downstairs and the two women who own their favorite coffee shop and all the kids at the Ninety-First Street playground would adore everything about him, especially his smile, wide as the arc of the swings—Russell could not see at the time. But I could. And Nora could. She was so thoroughly, entirely, in-all-the-world the right person to talk him off this particular ledge it seemed like a miracle to Russell that he’d ever met her. But, of course, that was why he’d left the hospital and driven through the night to show up at our door. That was the one thing, the main thing.
But the other was this: Letting go of Russell was heartbreaking and devastating and left a hole like a canyon, but it was possible. Letting go of the case against Belsum was not.
Actually, that’s not quite true. It was possible for Russell, who let it go like a weight sinking to the bottom of the ocean with him holding on. He released it and then floated right to the top where air and light and hope are. He watched it spiral down below, doomed, but doomed without him, his sadness eclipsed utterly by his relief. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t have enough hands anymore.
But Nora hung on like life while the case sank toward death, down down under the waters. She fought the waves and swells by herself, though she lacked expertise and experience in law; she lacked her partner in commitment and enthusiasm; she lacked someone with whom to share the highs of discovery and the lows of what she knew goddamn well but could never prove. But that didn’t mean she stopped. She never stopped.
There was no money for a new lawyer, one who hadn’t sought them out, wouldn’t work on contingency, would have to start from scratch. So Russell still helps. Still takes her calls. Files necessary paperwork. Keeps her apprised of developments. Does the minimum to keep the suit pending. But it’s on the back burner. Of the neighbor’s stove. Nora does the bulk of the work now—researches, reads, compiles notes, remains vigilant. She cheerleads too—stokes her neighbors’ anger, encourages when they despair, reminds when they forget. She’s kept the lawsuit alive, kept up with everyone signed on to it, kept after the elusive proof that will finally be enough. She has done it all. And she has done it mostly alone.
In the end, this is another of the many things my mother and I share, not just unrequited but unrequitable love, stories we know from the start will not—cannot—have happy endings. An unusual thing to turn out to be hereditary. Happy is not an option for us. Nora understands this. But she imagines fair is still on the table.
One
Fall comes for real. The world gets a little chillier, dark a little earlier, a funny, buzzy feeling.
“Mercurial,” Petra calls it.
“Serotinal,” I offer.
“Just barely.” We actually needed sweaters this morning. “Isochronous.”
“Seasonal?” I check.
“Or occurring at the same time. Either might show up.”
“Variegated,” I reply.
She high-fives me. “Good one.”
Even though it’s an easy word unlikely to show up on the SATs, what fall in Bourne usually is is anticlimactic. The color of the leaves changes but nothing else does.
Except this year. River’s face is healing. You can see it changing slowly like the seasons from bruised to mended, from broken open to whole. Other things are changing too—maybe also breaking open, maybe not—but they are harder to see.