As Robbie rattled on, Caroline felt strangely buoyed by the TA’s dismissal. Here she sat in a bland room with bland desks and bland chairs, surrounded by bland people who were not pregnant, who were not harboring life within. Now these people were discussing avidly the importance of the bee. At that moment, deep within her, the baby moved, an elbow or a knee just below her left ribs, and Caroline was transported. There existed nothing so momentous as this feeling of intimacy and distance, the strangeness of it and the atavistic understanding. The TA had no idea. Caroline felt a surge of pity for him. Pity and impatience.
Caroline picked up her notebook and pen and returned them to her bag. She stood and moved toward the door.
“Um, Ms. Duffy,” the TA called. “You just got here.”
Someone in the class snickered.
“I’m leaving,” Caroline said, and she did.
Caroline went directly to the registrar’s office and withdrew from the University of Kentucky. The registrar’s assistant gazed at her belly and accepted the paperwork without comment. When she arrived back home, Nathan was sitting in the same position as when she’d left. He looked up as she entered the room.
“No more college,” she announced breezily, standing in the doorway. “I quit.”
Nathan watched her for one long moment, chewing a pen cap. On his lap was a black-and-white composition book, the kind he used for observations on the frogs. He had dozens of them, shelved carefully in the den, the raw data for his dissertation. Caroline felt her breath shorten and catch. For the first time in their relationship, she feared his rejection. Nathan, steady as a heartbeat, had never wavered in his own professional vision and her place beside him, sharing that life. But a college professor married to a college dropout? The vision tilted and shook. An Etch A Sketch in the hands of a restless toddler. What would Caroline do if she wasn’t with Nathan? What would she do?
Nathan removed the pen cap from his mouth and shrugged. “You can always go back after the baby,” he said. “It’s just one semester.”
“Exactly,” she said, exhaling. Her breath returned. The vision stabilized. “I’m so uncomfortable, Nathan. It just seems so pointless.”
“I agree,” he said, and rose from the chair. “I love you, Caroline.” He kissed her and took her hand and led her into the room. “Did you know that the frogs communicate with gestures?” His face was hazy with wonder. “They wave their hands.”
“Hands? Is that really the right word?”
“Yes. Hands.”
Together they crouched over the pools, lit up like a tropical night by a red heat lamp, and studied the frogs. Their skin was a bright banana yellow spotted with black, the eyes a deeper yellow, nearly gold, and split by a pod of black pupil. Caroline counted the long, thin fingers, each shaped like a tiny upside-down spoon.
“Don’t they look like the baby’s hands?” Caroline said, turning to Nathan. When their doctor had performed the twenty-week scan, Caroline and Nathan both had gasped. The images offered a revelation of bone and form and quick, jiggery movement.
“They do,” Nathan said to Caroline. “See? Life.”
* * *
Inside the Hamden house, I followed Caroline up the stairs. We moved slowly, cautiously. Ferrets, foxes, even bears lived in the woods around here; or maybe the house had a squatter. We stood for a moment on the landing to listen. And then we heard it: a high-pitched, mewling sort of noise like a newborn’s cry. We followed the sound to the master bedroom, where a metal bed frame bereft of mattress sat smack in the middle. Yellow autumn light filtered through the dirty windows, giving the room the feel of an old photo, something ghostly printed on tin. And there in the far corner, splayed atop a pile of old newspapers, was an enormous orange tabby. Her long stomach bristled with pink, distended nipples, and surrounding her were a dozen newborn kittens, each one no bigger than an infant’s fist and just as soft, round, and useless.
We stood motionless in the doorway. We made no sound, but the cat saw us. Her ears went rigid. When Caroline began a slow approach, the cat pulled back its head and hissed, showing four pointed white teeth, two up and two down. She looked reptilian, or like a small, vicious monster from a fairy tale. A few of the kittens mewed faintly. One struggled to open its eyes, and then it did and they were the hueless blue of water, and they stared straight into me.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
Caroline didn’t answer straightaway. “Well, that’s unexpected,” she said, her voice strained but cheerful. “Of course there’s a family of cats in the master bedroom.”
“At least they’re cute.” I moved closer to touch one, but the mother reared up its head and hissed. I stepped back. “I bet the girls would love a kitten,” I said. Other than the rabbit Celeste, I’d never owned a pet, but the same childish yearning returned now, an echo of an ache so potent I imagined the girls must feel it, too. How could you not want something to care for?
“Well, we’ve got Milkshake,” Caroline replied, referring to their yellow Lab who poured like sticky liquid over every visitor. “And the girls have their gerbils.”
“What about Louis?” I suggested.
“He’s got Stu the chameleon. And a tankful of saltwater fish.”
“Well, we could put up signs. Give them away.” I was trying to salvage Caroline’s mood, which I could see was declining rapidly and perhaps irreversibly. She was the camel, and this was the straw.
“No.” Caroline shook her head. “That would take too long. And Nathan will be here in two days. He’ll want to keep them all. Trust me.” She said the last with a certain testiness.
“Let’s just clean the downstairs first,” I said. “Let the cats sleep. We’ll decide later.” Postponing a difficult decision was a specialty of mine. I found that often the difficult part evaporated into the haze of delay.
But Caroline didn’t answer. She was staring at the cats with a mixture of disgust and exhaustion; her mouth had a pulled-down quality, a tired little frown. At this moment all of her family’s worldly possessions were packed into a U-Haul being driven from Austin, Texas, to Hamden, Connecticut, by two men named Sasha. The Sashas had claimed they would make no stops. Probably they were in Pennsylvania by now, home of the Amish. Perhaps stuck behind a family in a horse-drawn carriage. Perhaps already running late. Caroline’s children, staying the night with a kindergarten friend in Austin, were undoubtedly eating too much sugar and playing with toy guns. Nathan was living out of a suitcase; he’d packed only one pair of pants. Everyone was waiting for Caroline to proclaim the new house ready.
There were times—at Christmas, say, or the day we all took Noni to the shore for her sixtieth birthday—when I envied Caroline’s centrality. The way her children bounced around her with their giggles and sticky lips and Nathan rubbed her shoulders as she closed her eyes and sighed: it all looked so fine and sweet. But sometimes it looked simply crushing. A straitjacket of her own making. Every morning she packed three school lunches, each one requiring a different sandwich. Every night three different bedtime stories.
“Listen, I’ll take the kittens,” I offered. “My roommates keep saying we need a pet.”