A Terrible Gift
The rhododendrons were confused. From the cab of my brother-in-law’s idling pickup, I admired their rare second bloom. I’d taken the unexpected boon of white, humid blossoms as a good sign until my neighbor explained that it only happened when the plants were under considerable stress. “What do plants have to be stressed about?” I’d asked. “Same as the rest of us,” he’d replied. How incredible, I thought, that stress could produce such beauty. I’d been feeling dramatic lately. In fact, Doug had brought me fishing that morning to help me “shake that funk,” as though depression were a dance floor. He pressed down the parking brake and sat hunched over, working his finger around the bottom of a chocolate pudding cup. I was almost certain Doug had not washed his hands since cleaning the trout. Looking away, I noticed that someone had mown the lawn while I was gone. The lawn was supposed to be my job. But as everyone knew, the fewer responsibilities one had, the harder it was to get around to them, and since graduation this had been my lot. The fish I’d caught was curled like a comma in the bottom of a faded red bucket by my feet. I peered down between my legs.
“The real fisherman’s dilemma,” Doug said, “happens when you get home. After communing with the wild, do you really want to re-enter your life?” He tossed the empty pudding cup to the floor and sucked his brown, fishy finger.
“I’m just exhausted,” I said, opening the door.
“Don’t forget your catch.”
I grabbed the bucket and got out. Doug accelerated back onto the road and his tires blew bits of gravel against the mailbox. It was late afternoon. Doug had picked me up at 4 a.m., and we’d hiked to a secret fishing hole on Scituate Reservoir he’d heard about — secret in this case meaning illegal. As long as I didn’t move them, my legs just felt strangely warm. If I moved them, they hurt. The only trouble I would have reentering my life would be the literal kind. As I approached the house I heard the sharp, abrupt barks of Brenda Sue, the small black terrier we’d adopted at the beginning of the summer. Brenda Sue was, as we’d begun saying apologetically at the dog park, eyes lowered, “very vocal.” When another bark accompanied Brenda’s, I thought for a moment my wife had rescued another dog. I felt a fury rise within me, but before it took shape I realized that it wasn’t a dog barking at all. It was Dora.
“Good girl,” she said, and let out a second loud yip.
Brenda Sue followed suit.
I opened the door and looked at Dora with a mixture of relief and concern.
“Watch this,” she said. “Bark, Bren! Bark! Yip, yip, yip, yip!”
Distracted by the powerful smell of fish, the dog turned her head toward Dora but kept her eyes trained on the bucket. She barked.
“Good girl! Good bark!”
“I thought she already knew how to bark,” I said.
“I’m teaching her when to bark, so I can teach her when not to bark,” Dora explained. “It’s a technique I read about online.”
Brenda Sue was sitting very still in the way she only sat when expecting to be fed. She let out another bark for good measure.
“Let’s not forget about the second part of the training,” I said, and brought my fish to the kitchen.
“You’ll see,” Dora called after me. “Have faith in the counterintuitive!”
Following Doug’s instructions, I spread newspaper on the counter, laying the fish down on top of a Best-of-Providence article for incoming students. It was a rainbow trout, but the iridescent greens and pinks that gave the fish its name had already begun to fade.
“Dora,” I called, “do you remember what the fisherman’s dilemma is?”
She popped her head in from the hall. “The fisherman’s what?”
“Dilemma.”
“Is it ‘Fish or cut bait’?”
“That’s what I keep thinking too,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure that’s a Far Side comic.”
“Oh my God, I loved Far Side.”
“I’ll just look it up online,” I said. This was a year before smartphones.
“Internet’s down,” Dora said, then disappeared down the hall.
I folded my trout between the Best Head Shops and the Best Cheap Eats and put it in the fridge.
“Who mowed the lawn?” I asked.
“Barry! Wasn’t that nice?”
Apparently, after our chat about rhododendrons, Barry now thought me incapable of plant care at even the most basic level. I felt chastised. I washed my hands, stole a twenty from Dora’s purse, then found an envelope on which I wrote: Thanks for doing the lawn. Any good with gutters? I read this a couple times, scribbled over the second line before inserting the cash and sealing it, and walked over to drop the letter in Barry’s mailbox.
*
Dora flipped through a cookbook while I studied the trout, which by 8 p.m. was largely shades of gray. We’d looked up “trout” in the index, but it went straight from “tilapia” to “tuna” in the fish section, so we’d taken to discussing which fish it most resembled. It looked like salmon to me, because of the color it once had, but Dora was sure we’d be better off following a recipe for another freshwater fish. This was fine. I was by that point primarily interested in gently petting the trout’s delicate scales. Amazingly, between the two of us, we couldn’t think of another freshwater fish.
“This is ridiculous,” Dora said. “There are millions of freshwater fish.”
“Maybe we’re experiencing some glitch in the spacetime continuum,” I offered.
In June, I’d received a Master’s in printmaking, proving me now officially useless in most practical matters. I’d made myself a t-shirt that read, “Don’t ask me, I have an MFA,” and I’d worn it nonstop until Dora confided in me that it wasn’t funny, just sad.
“I’m calling my brother,” she said.
Dora had moved to Providence while I was in school, and halfway through my arts degree had been accepted into a Master’s program in Geology. This led to another kind of impracticality altogether, one rooted in the long view. She’d begun to say things like, “In five million years, this conversation won’t matter,” before losing her keys.
As she always did when on the phone, Dora paced, and I dragged my fingers from the fish’s head to its tail—a respectable thirteen inches — then back up, the scales slimy but catching slightly on the ridges of my fingertips all the same. I wondered how old it was. Was it male or female? I looked at Dora’s flat stomach. I still wasn’t used to the fact that she was pregnant. She was slender and had an ex-dancer’s grace. My trouble considering her “with child” was rooted in facts: the fact that she wasn’t showing yet, for one, but also no doubt the fact that we’d lost a pregnancy the year before, right on the cusp, days before we’d been planning to tell the world. And despite the fact that we’d gone public with this one, the idea that we could lose it lingered, along with the feeling that I shouldn’t take it too seriously. This was not a feeling I could share with Dora, which had led to a kind of emotional constipation and probably also the fishing trip. I turned the trout over, and in the process got a good look at the dark pink flesh inside. Its semi-transparency made me think of those polished, semi-precious stones you can buy at truck stops throughout the Southwest, and I considered telling this to Dora but decided to keep this too to myself. It was my semi-precious fish flesh, and I didn’t want it to get lost in geological time.
“Congratulations,” she said, hanging up the phone, “Doug says we’re supposed to cook it like Salmon.”
She leaned on me gently. She’d never been close with her brother, who was forty now, older by six years. He was always in and out of trouble, in and out of relationships. But when he offered to drop everything and move to Providence to “help with the baby,” I could tell she’d been thrilled. Now he’d been here for little more than a month and was already helping us cook.
“You know what?” I said. “I don’t feel like fish.”
I rolled it back up and returned it to the fridge, then closed the door and stood against it, looking defiantly into Dora’s bewildered face. Before she could say a word, I turned back around, got the fish out and put it in the freezer. Dora’s expression turned to concern, then to kindness, and she gave my arm a light squeeze.
“Big mouth bass!” she said.
*
After walking Brenda Sue the next morning, Dora left for class. The dog served as my alarm clock most days, jumping into bed after her walk and licking my face until I threw back the covers, and this morning she did, and this morning I did, and coffee was already brewed. On the counter beside the coffee maker was a note Dora had left: Don’t forget to call about the Internet. I took the whole pot to my small ersatz studio in the back yard, a tool shed I’d emptied out at the beginning of summer. I had another month or two before it would become too cold to work in there, so I’d promised myself to make as much use of that time as possible. I didn’t have adequate space in the house, so I probably wouldn’t get much work done until spring. By then the baby would be born. I stood before the piece I was working on. I’d been working in linoleum because of the precision and clarity of line the material allowed, and the image before me was of a baseball field — little league, I’d decided. The field itself was done in great detail, labor that had caused my hand to cramp and swell, and the parents in the audience displayed the minor tragedies and tensions each brought with them to the game. One couple interested me in particular: they sat apart from the other families, as though strangers to the scene. At first, I’d suspected them of having no child at the game. I realized as the scene developed, however, that they were the parents of the entire work’s focus: a young boy in left field with his glove open at arm’s length in front of his face. I was stuck on a couple of places, and the child’s face was one of them. The ball was in the air, clearly coming down toward the kid, but was he ready? I kept looking to the parents for guidance, but they just sat there and stared, impregnable. I wanted to leave the child’s face blank, uncut, but the longer I left it without expression, the more I felt obliged to choose one. I blew across the surface of my coffee and watched ripples on the surface form and disperse.
Though I’d entered the graduate program in painting, my work had grown increasingly dimensional, often involving more collage than brushstroke. By second semester it had been the printmaking program that spoke most to me and I’d been allowed to transfer. They had a more liberal attitude toward medium and end-products, and likewise attracted artists similarly interested in experimentation. I’d felt that without constraints, I’d mature. So it was a source of some embarrassment that I currently found myself pursuing mimesis. The truth of it was, I’d always had trouble dedicating myself to one mode for long. I oscillated between the abstract, the realist, the symbolic. Beyond the embarrassment, it was a source of fear that I’d never be more than a tinkerer, a dilettante.
Brenda began to vocalize maniacally, and I went to check on her. Doug was on the other side of the fence leading to the front yard, laughing and shaking his head.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s not like she doesn’t know you.”
“Hey, it’s better than the opposite. I knew a dog once who, well, never mind.”
I pulled Brenda back from the gate. “What,” I said.
Doug crept in, giving her a wide berth. He chuckled. “Aw, hell. I was going to say a dog that saw someone trying to burgle its house, but instead of attacking it just went over and started licking his hand.”
“But what.”
“Well, I was the burglar.”
“Oh.”
Doug knelt for Brenda, who’d now rolled over on her back to let him scratch her belly. “In the end,” he said, “I didn’t have the heart to finish the job. The dog talked me out of it!”
“That’s some dog. Coffee?”
Doug didn’t work, but had a little money left over from something he spoke about only in abstract terms, so he’d been showing up nearly every day since he got into town. Perhaps because he’d always choose a different time, it always took me by surprise, though I couldn’t say I minded the interruptions. Doug was a calm and deliberate man. All big picture.
“I’ve moved on to tea,” he said.
We stood for a moment, me looking through my shed’s open door, Doug looking down at the grass, Brenda Sue investigating Doug’s boot.
“I heard you were having trouble with your catch,” Doug said.
“Trouble?”
“Look,” he said, “it’s no big deal.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“It happens to a lot of people.”
“What exactly are we talking about here? We were going to eat the fish, then we didn’t eat the fish.”
Doug smiled too broadly, like his sister did sometimes, and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I want to share something with you,” he said.
“Okay, but I need a refill.”
I ducked into the shed again and stole a glance at my faceless child while refilling my mug. Doug didn’t wait until I’d come back out, so his voice was raised, seemingly amplified even further by the thin wooden walls.
“I joined an online dating service,” Doug said, “called Positive Singles.”
It occurred to me that I might simply be scared to have the child catch the ball. What kind of message would it send? Was I the kind of artist content to capture such a bald moment of delight?
“Okay,” I said.
I tried to envision the print complete, a simple, happy boy catching a ball, and my heart sank.
“It’s an outfit for people with STDs.”
I looked at the parents for comfort. They seemed to be edging apart from one another. They were the work’s sole element of pathos, its origin, protecting it against imminent melodrama. Was it possible they gave me permission to let the boy make the catch? Perhaps I was wrong about the subject of the scene. I left the shed.
“With what?”
“Sexually Transmitted Disease,” Doug said.
“I heard you.”
“But here’s the thing …”
“What do you have?”
“Here’s the thing. I don’t have an STD.”
Sunlight was pooling in the lawn at our feet, but a large oak shaded our faces. I looked up at the turning leaves.
“You should see these women,” Doug continued. “A lot of them are knock-outs. But they’re also damaged. They’ve lost faith in themselves. It makes them more beautiful, but it also means they’re seeking something vital in a relationship. They’re looking for trust. I’m betting that any dating situation with any one of them is going to be deeper than average right out of the gate.”
“But you’re lying to them.”
“I’m not being entirely forthright.”
“What happens if you really fall in love with one of these women?”
“I’ll let myself contract her STD. As a sign of commitment.”
“A sign to whom?”
“To myself.”
What Doug hoped to convey with this story I had no idea. But it would do no good to ask him directly. He liked to play the sage, letting those around him solve without further comment his anecdotal koans. Not long ago, Dora and I had laid in bed trying to decipher a story he’d told at dinner after witnessing a tense exchange about whose turn it was to do the dishes. “When I was in the service,” he’d said, “I used to gamble my checks back and forth with another soldier. Private Webber was his name. We didn’t have anything to spend the money on, so we’d just gamble these checks, back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes he’d be up, and sometimes I would.”
“So,” we’d said, “What happened?”
Doug had only shrugged. “He fell off a truck and broke his neck during a training exercise, and later that month I was deployed.”
Dora, due to her chronically long view, was convinced that it had something to do with letting things go. I thought it had more to do with holding things dear, but I admitted that these might in some cases be synonymous.
“Hey,” Doug said now, “speaking of Positive Singles, can I use your computer? I want to check my profile.”
“Internet’s down.”
“Well, I’m off to the library then. If you need anything, give me a call, okay?”
I watched Doug pass through the gate, then went back into the studio to look at the child in left field. Not only did he look alone out there, he looked stupid. There was no way he was going to catch the ball, I thought, unless he stopped hiding behind his mitt.
*
Dora came home just minutes before the midwife. She’d been kept late by a professor who must have had similar suspicions about units of time lesser than the eon, and as a result she was slightly cranky, quite hungry, and overheated. I’d forgotten about the midwife. I quickly put the dog in the backyard and took a seat as Dora let her in. I was having a beer and felt uneasy about drinking in front of this person, but not uneasy enough to stop. It would be the second midwife we interviewed. The first one, a young woman with strong hands and fierce, darting eyes, had shown up late and twice answered her cell phone during the meeting — a bad sign, as Dora had noted while we watched her ride off on a small green moped, sans helmet. Now Dora led a smiling Hindu woman into the room, and as I stood to shake her hand I looked directly at the red bindi set against her dark brown skin. Her name was Aruni. After offering her a glass of water, which she refused, Dora got right to the questions. She wanted to know how long she’d been practicing (six years), whether she was certified as a nurse (no), and whether her religion had any impact on her practice (only in positive ways). As she asked questions and took notes about Aruni’s answers, Dora kept looking over at me and bulging her eyes. After the third time, I put my beer down beside the chair, but she continued to do it until the soft-spoken woman left. We stood at the door and watched Aruni climb into the passenger seat of a minivan driven. Then Dora stormed inside.
“She’s not the one,” she said, “and you’re an asshole.”
“Dor,” I said, closing the door, “I’m sorry, I put the beer down!”
Dora had gone to the kitchen to let Brenda Sue back inside, and the little dog ran through the house, making sure it was all as she left it. She stood for a moment at my legs, sniffing my pants for alien smells. In the kitchen my wife was in front of the open fridge, eating a cylinder of string cheese with a thin pink strip of hot sauce along the top.
“I know that you can’t help me bring this baby to term, Shya. But gosh, it sure would be great if you’d take an active interest.”
“I’m interested!”
“You were supposed to prepare —”
“Prepare some questions. Fuck, yes, you’re absolutely right. I was going to do that today, but the Internet is down. Your brother stopped by this morning.”
“When can they fix the Internet?”
Dora finished her cheese and peeled the plastic off another one.
“I think I know what’s wrong,” I said.
Sometimes all you had to do was unplug the router for a minute and it would reset. But I’d failed to do even this. My phone rang in the other room, and I remained motionless. It was not a good time to walk away.
“You didn’t call the guys.”
“I didn’t call the guys.”
Dora turned her attention to her second string cheese, which she decorated with another pink stripe. She bit off the end.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” I said. “I promise.”
“Don’t promise,” Dora said. “Do. I’m ordering pizza.”
I took my phone into the yard. It was nearly dark out, and a light wind had picked up, bringing down leaves from a neighboring maple that spun down like paratroopers onto enemy soil. I picked one up and brought it to the studio—I was thinking about trying my hand at still lifes — and stood before the baseball field while listening to voicemail. It was my mother.
“Sorry I missed you,” she said. “I just had a nice chat with my friend Susan, and she asked me how you were, so I told her about all the great things you’ve been doing, and how you just got your Master’s degree, and that Dora is pregnant, and that I’m so proud of you, so I just wanted to call and say that I was thinking of you, and that I’m proud of you and that I love you very much. So, yeah, that’s it! I hope you’re having a beautiful, New England autumn. Call me when you have a chance. Love to Dora. Bye bye.”
I hung up the phone and did something I’d never considered before. I imagined my own face on the child in left field, behind the glove. It seemed like such an obvious thing to do that my cheeks flushed right there in the shed. It would be nearly impossible, I knew, to avoid the facile symbolism and self-indulgence that recursive art always exemplified. Putting my own face in the piece would obliterate all the more nuanced readings the work might otherwise inspire. It would become, all of a sudden, about me, my life, my concrete problems and fears and psychological needs. It was the antithesis of everything I’d learned in grad school about what art can do when freed, as it should be, from the trappings of direct reference, and as a consequence it seemed self-destructive, irresponsible. My classmates would have hated it. It would not have survived workshop. The more I considered it, however, the harder it became to imagine what else the picture could be about.
*
The next morning, the note Dora had left me the day before was by the coffee machine. Again. She’d found it in the trash, uncrumpled it, and left it out. Coffee had emphatically not been made. As I poured grounds into the machine, I imagined Dora deciding whether to make just enough coffee for herself, or to forgo coffee altogether until she’d left the house and could pick it up on the way to class. I was glad she hadn’t just made it for herself, because that would have seemed nasty. On the other hand, I knew how important it was to her to drink a cup before leaving the house, so really, what she’d done was probably worse. Now that we were apparently going to have a child, we could fight more. We could fight harder. With a child in the foreground, the selfish horizon of separation receded quickly into the distance. We knew a couple who’d had a kid in their mid-twenties. She was five now. The last time we’d seen her, the couple had explained how she’d begun to cut ads out of magazines like Living of posed, happy families, and tape them to her bedroom walls. The girl knew the pictures were fake, that the people in them were models. She also didn’t admit to having any problem with her own family life, which was, as far as we could see, perfectly safe and comfortable. Both her parents were smart, sane people. But it was obviously weird behavior. And it was clearly bothering the couple. They’d spoken about it in hushed tones after the kid had finished her dinner and disappeared to the playroom. They seemed both guilty and eerily suspicious of one another, as though the whole thing pointed to some secret failure or mistreatment one of them wasn’t aware of. On the way home neither of us had spoken for a long time, until Dora finally said what was on both our minds. “This is going to be hard.”
I crumpled up the note again and threw it away again, then went into the study and unplugged the router. On my way back to the kitchen I noticed an envelope on the floor by the front door. It was the one I’d put in Barry’s mailbox. In it were two ten-dollar bills. Hadn’t I put a twenty in there? I felt certain I had, but the idea that Barry would swap it for tens was accountable. Maybe he’d needed the twenty for something? I put the bills in my pocket. Or maybe he’d decided to take half the money, then decided at the last minute to return the whole amount. Maybe he was trying to confuse me by giving me the same change. I looked out the back window toward the shed. I thrilled a little at the thought of what I’d done there last night. I wanted to show someone, but I couldn’t think of whom. I could call one of my classmates, or better yet, maybe I could bring it to my former advisor, gloat in his baffled stare. Brenda Sue chewed a piece of rawhide at my feet, her ass in the air as she crouched down to find the perfect angle.
The day Dora miscarried we’d been expected at a function for her geology department. She was still in her first semester, so she was nervous about all the normal things, the politics, the other students she hadn’t spoken to yet, and her stomach was upset — her words — an upset stomach, due, she assumed, to stress. But as the evening grew closer the discomfort grew too, turned to cramping, and this cramping grew severe. I was standing outside the bathroom door when she began to weep. I remember clearly how Brenda Sue, just moments before happily gnawing on a toy we’d given her in anticipation of our evening away, came up beside me, curious about the sounds behind the door, which grew louder, a sobbing deep and mournful. I asked repeatedly if she was okay, if I could come in, and when her answer finally came it was simply, “I’m bleeding bad.”
We’d been told spotting was normal, and I held onto a false hope, a hope I knew was false, that this was that, spotting, bad spotting, but I called her doctor at home, and was told to take my wife to the emergency room. An examination quickly confirmed Dora’s fear — no heartbeat, dilated cervix — and when she was given the option to pass the tissue at home or undergo dilation and curettage, she made the decision right away. We did not discuss these options openly; she did not ask for my input, nor did I offer it. But the procedure couldn’t be performed until the next day so we had to return home, Dora carrying a tiny dead fetus inside her, me carrying a surprisingly deep grief, and if I were to pinpoint the moment things changed between us, I would say it was that night, a quiet night spent grieving, together but separate, a towel laid out on the bed beneath my wife, listening to our old house creak in ways it probably did all nights after we’d fallen asleep, as though relaxing from the day’s work of holding us up.
After that I noticed the change in small, often unimportant ways. Chief among them was that we spent more time apart. But it wasn’t quite the time itself that stood out — Dora was entering a busy period of coursework — rather the ease with which we took to it. Where before we’d texted one another nonstop whenever not in the same room, we suddenly felt content to simply “see you later.” Privately, I found that I thought about her less, too, and while initially this made me feel guilty, before long it came as a relief, and I experienced a clarity of focus with my own work I realized I’d been lacking. All of which is to say that this change troubled me but also wasn’t entirely unpleasant. I doubt we appeared any different to anyone but ourselves, and indeed, after enough time had passed for us to feel comfortable talking about the miscarriage to our close friends, the news was always met with astonishment, with comments that moved quickly from sympathy to a lighter, almost congratulatory note of admiration for how gracefully we’d moved on. One friend even claimed to have noticed an ease about us, a harmony she described as mature. And it’s true that in the following months we did seem, for lack of a better word, happy, together. It wasn’t that we didn’t fight, but that we found it easier to forgive, to recover and encourage and console. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that for the first time, after over two years of marriage, there was a between between us. Enough so, at any rate, that when Dora got pregnant again, I was surprised that she did not hesitate to suggest we keep it.
Soon after Doug arrived in town, I went into all this one night after Dora had gone to bed. We were up late, drinking—I highly doubt that, sober, I would have thought to share these feelings with my wife’s brother — and I spilled into my doubts and fears, my sense of how our relationship had changed, how in some ways this had been good, and how a baby, if it came to term, might change all that again. We were out in my newly converted shed, considering the canvas on which a baseball field was just becoming recognizable. I had gone on too long about something I immediately regretted bringing up at all, and this to someone I barely knew.
Doug leaned in to examine the fine cut-work of the material I was using. “You mean, like a kitchen floor?” he said at last.
“Well,” I said, “I guess technically. But this linoleum is finer.”
He shook his head, openly marveling.
Then he told me about his truck.
“I bought it as-is from some guy,” he said. “It was running like shit, but really all it needed — well, one of the things it needed — were new spark plugs. The engine was misfiring on account of carbon buildup in the plug’s combustion space. You know how a spark plug works?”
I admitted I did not.
“So there’s a central electrode that carries a charge down an insulated channel, in this case porcelain? It goes to the tip of the plug that sits inside the cylinder. At the tip, that charge arcs across the gap to another electrode called the ground. Follow me? And so when there’s gas in the cylinder, that electrical charge ignites, causing a small explosion that pushes the piston back down. You have to picture all this happening pretty fast. But so when there’s carbon build-up there’s no space for the arc, which means no spark from the plug. And what you have is a truck that runs for shit.”
It felt like my turn to marvel, so I shook my head, shooting for an attitude of incomprehension and awe at the law of thermodynamics. Soon afterward Doug left, and I went to bed, and I never spoke to him again about whatever confusion I may have had about my feelings for my family.
*
Surprise! The Internet worked after being reset. I checked my email to find that throughout the day before Dora had been sending me links to salmon recipes with simple little notes like “This looks promising!” and, “Should I pick up some dill on the way home?” This is what I mean. The space that had opened up between us, I was beginning to see, could be filled by minor perfections, simple kindnesses, dinner plans. I was also beginning to see that she filled it often. Dora was the love of my life. She still is as I write this. I hope that doesn’t pull you too far out of the story. That space between us could be filled because it was there; it had appeared despite our wishes, and the damage that had been its cause was in that sense a terrible gift.
After checking my email I remembered Doug, why he’d needed the Internet, and looked up Positive Singles. I searched for his name. It wouldn’t show me the whole profile without joining the site, but there was a picture of Doug I recognized. It had been cropped from one we had framed: Dora and Doug standing together on a beach in Tulum, Mexico. It was the trip they made together two years ago, a month or so after their parents had died in a car crash, killed by a drunk driver on their way home from the Spanish lessons they were taking in preparation for their own Mexico vacation. Under the profile pic was a brief “teaser” about Doug amid various ads for herpes treatment options and prophylactics, and I read it once, then put my cup down and read it again. Brenda Sue scurried through the house, barking at someone walking up the front steps.
Lonely man seeking real love, it said.
“Good girl!” I called out. “Good bark!”
You can be smart, dumb, pretty, ugly, short or tall. I just ask that you be true, and accept me for who I am.
Deceit aside, this struck me as impossibly sweet. I had no doubt that it was exactly what Doug wanted. The doorbell rang, and Brenda Sue continued to bark, filling the house with darts of sound. A Cardinal lighted on the fence just outside the window, a flash of red against the muted brown, and I thought of the future growing inside Dora. I pictured it far off, not growing but rather coming closer and closer. The future was a baby and then it was a child. It was a child and then it was a young boy. The future came closer still, and the boy was on a baseball field, standing idly in the grass and smelling the rich, grassy leather of his glove. He was in position. His glove opened like a flower, and I was watching from the bleachers, filled with an irrational fear that everything depended on what came next, that his entire life would be defined in that moment. Dora gripped my hand. The pitcher pitched. The batter swung.