Balloons

Joan Bauer

__________

When Sarah dropped Lily off around noon, she said she was just going to a half-hour tennis lesson. I invited her to come back here for coffee afterward, and she said she would like that. But she never came back. 

            Outside, our two girls were happily scooping up leaves in the wheelbarrow under a cerulean sky, piling them at the base of the slide so they could crunch and scatter them when they landed. My Allie had managed to stuff the whole lower deck of the Rainbow gym full of leaves. It would probably take me an hour to clean it all out, but at least they were busy.

            I looked at my watch. Soon, I would have to wake up the baby so we could all walk over to St. Mary Mag’s to pick up the boys. Most days, I brought Lily’s big brother back here with my Sam so that Sarah could pick him up from our house. Yesterday, he had asked me why his mother never came over to school anymore. She will again, pretty soon, I told him. If it had been anyone else, I would have called her by now and said, “where are you?” But I hated to disturb this arrangement I had with Sarah. What if she took it away from me?

I grew up in a house just three blocks away, and I went to St. Mary Mag’s too as a child. That was back when the girls’ uniform was blue, not red plaid, and the tuition was free. There were still quite a few of us lifers here in the neighborhood. At first, I was excited to send my own children back to the place where I used to jump rope with my cousin Patti, whose long hair I would braid over and over and who now had a boy of her own the same age as Sam. But she had moved with her husband back to New Jersey, so while I had hoped to recreate my own support system when we came back to St. Mary Mag’s, I often stood there alone watching long-time friends pair up on the playground—all the same people, in all the same little cliques.

            It was awful until I met Sarah. Last August, Caroline Mangan hosted a coffee for kindergarten parents at her house. I might never even have talked to Sarah at all if Caroline hadn’t turned her back on me to hug someone else just as I was walking up. I don’t think it was intentional, I really don’t. But I was hurt, and I looked around to see Sarah holding Lily on her lap, dealing grimly with the powdered sugar donut Lily was eating and brushing her long blonde hair out of her face.

            I sat down next to her while Allie helped herself to one of Caroline Mangan’s oversized chocolate-chip cookies. Sarah was new in town; she’d moved four hundred miles from home because her husband was involved in a bank merger, and she’d enrolled her son Danny at St. Mary Magdalene a few days after the school year started. She’d missed the summer social and all the new parent meetings. She was trying to navigate the whole place and its network of mothers pretty much on her own.

            Sarah looked to be about six months pregnant, and so I was surprised when she told me the baby was due in just a few weeks.

            “So, how’ve you been feeling?” I asked.

            “Not great,” she admitted, shifting her weight in her chair. I assumed she had varicose veins or something, and so I didn’t press her for details. Instead, I started talking cheerily about how much fun it was to have three.

            “I used to think I would never be able to handle it, but you do,” I said reassuringly. “I thought it was harder going from one to two than two to three.”

            “That’s a big adjustment,” Sarah agreed. “Lily, stop it.” Her tone was annoyed, surprisingly so. I always tried to modulate my own irritation with my children in front of people I didn’t know very well.

            I asked Sarah a lot of questions about the baby—where it would sleep, whether she had names picked out. She answered me—she had an answer for everything—but there was no enthusiasm in her voice. I knew that pregnant women sometimes became depressed and even had personality changes, so I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Later, I wondered what “normal” Sarah might once have been like.

            “So,” I went on, “will you be nursing?”

            Sarah opened her mouth and then closed it again, looking stricken. And then Allie came running up to me, covered with chocolate. I took the oozing cookie out of her hand, holding her at arm’s length while I fished in my diaper bag for a baby wipe. “Here, Allie,” I said, working a baby wipe between her fingers. “That’s enough cookie.” And suddenly Caroline Mangan was offering me a cup of Starbucks coffee with cream and sugar, and while I was talking to her, Sarah and Lily walked away.

Later, I thought it was very strange, how Sarah had pretended for me. Maybe, if I’d been a little more attentive, I could have guessed at what was behind that hesitation of hers. If I had, I wouldn’t have acted like such a fool, going on and on about names and bedrooms and even telling her how small she looked, as though it were a compliment. What an agony I must have caused her.

            But still, Sarah seemed to like me. Our kids were close in age, and she brought them over to play a few times. I treated them more gently than I ever treated my own, pitching baseballs to the boys and singing silly songs as I pushed the girls on the swings. Danny and Lily acted as though they’d come to kid heaven, and I wondered where I had ever learned to be so good with other people’s children. As for Sarah, we always ended up laughing about something or other.

            We didn’t talk too much about the baby, and Sarah was so small that I kind of lost track of the due date. One day, we were at the park after school with the kids. Danny and Sam were playing with their trucks in the sandbox, and I was pushing Lily on the swing. Lily and I were talking about what would happen when she was a big sister. “I’ll have to give my toddler bed to the baby and sleep in the big bed,” she said.

            “But the baby will be too little for your toddler bed.”

            “But Mom said when the baby comes, I won’t be the baby anymore, and I won’t need my little bed.”

            I smiled over at Sarah. It was Friday, and she was being induced the following Monday. “Are you ready?” I asked her.

            She glanced over at Lily. “Why don’t you go play with Allie on the slide,” she said.  Obligingly, Lily slid down and ran across to the slides.

            “I have some bad news,” she said to me when the kids were all out of earshot. I stood there with my mouth open. As the story washed over me, I only picked out bits and pieces.

            “The doctors say it might not survive the birth at all,” she was saying. “And if it does, the most it can be is a few days. We don’t know if we’ll even be able to take the baby home.”

            “Sarah, I’m so sorry,” I said. “How long have you known?”

            “We had a bad ultrasound at about twenty weeks,” she answered. “We were expecting a stillbirth over the summer.”

            Twenty weeks! “And there I was, gushing about how easy it is to nurse the third kid!”

            “You didn’t know,” she soothed. “We didn’t tell very many people.”

            We stood watching the girls for a while. “What about the kids?” I asked at last. 

            “We’re going to tell them over the weekend.”

            Inwardly I frowned.  It seemed awfully late. “How do you think they’ll take it?”

            “I’m not sure Lily really understands anyway,” she said. “Danny will be upset. He’s been talking about having a brother for months.”

            “Is there anything I can do? Can I take them for a little while tomorrow, so you and your husband can just be together?”

            “Thanks, but I think we’re just going to have some family time,” she said. 

            After a little while, we gathered the kids up and took them home. My mind was full of Sarah’s terrible news. After she told me, I was almost afraid to see her again. I wondered what I would say to her. Of course, by the time I did see her, the baby would already have been born.  And what would I say then?

            “Imagine being pregnant for all those weeks knowing that your baby couldn’t make it,” I said to my cousin Patti on the phone. I put on a video for the kids and walked out to the kitchen. “I mean, you still have to gain all the weight, you can’t sleep—”

            “Right,” Patti said. She was having her afternoon coffee. She always had a little half-cup at four-thirty—just enough to keep her going until Marty got home. I pictured the old white Mr. Coffee percolating on the boomerang Formica of her pleasantly outdated kitchen in New Jersey.

            “And then for weeks she had to pretend that everything was fine,” I went on. “She even told me where the baby was going to sleep, for God’s sake.”

            “Well, maybe she didn’t want to have to tell you all about it,” Patti reminded me. “You don’t know her that well.”

            I tried not to take offense. I actually thought of myself as a pretty good friend of Sarah’s.  “But why didn’t she tell her kids?” I asked Patti. “What is that going to do to them when they know?”

            “I don’t know.” I heard her pause for a sip. I could almost smell the Folgers that she always drank. I pressed the phone to my ear so I could reach for a filter, and as I watched my sweater sleeve slide up on my wrist, I admired again the gold bracelet my husband had given me last Christmas.

            “I’m just afraid it will erode their trust in her,” I went on. I knew that Patti would speculate about this with me as long as I wanted. She loved to discuss the pathologies of people she didn’t know.

            Suddenly I felt guilty about it. “Patti,” I asked, “when do I call her?”

            “Give it a little while.”

The day of the birth was the last warm day of the year, an eighty-five-degree day in early October when you wanted to pull the kids out of school and head for the beach. It was a day when you wanted to lie on the sand until long after you should have taken them home, allowing the heat to penetrate your skin as if you could store it for the cold months ahead.

            The weather changed after that. We’d had day after day of clear, hallucinatory blue skies—then suddenly, there was a chill and we needed jackets. When we’d been running around outside, we were grateful for the heat in our cheeks; and as we walked back from the park at five o’clock in the afternoon, we smelled the wood smoke of the season’s first fires.

            For a few nights I asked myself, is it too soon? I longed to get that first call over with; the funeral had been private, and I was afraid she might be wondering why she hadn’t heard from me. I wrote and rewrote my sympathy letter. I made her a batch of soup. I was going to call tomorrow.

            And then she called me—astonishingly soon, before she was seeing anyone—to invite Allie to come over and play with Lily. And next thing I knew, I was sitting in Sarah’s dining room with all the junk from the hospital—the emesis basin, the sitz bath, the squirt bottle—still piled on the sideboard.

            “Were you able to tell who he looked like?” I asked.

            “He looked a lot like Danny,” she began, with more animation than I’d seen in her for a long time. “Danny looks like my husband, especially around the eyes. And Joshua had the exact same eyes. Different color, though. Danny’s eyes are blue, but Joshua’s were a sort of hazel-green, like Lily’s.”

            She showed me the pictures. I could hardly bear to look at the baby, who had perfect little features and a purple bloat on the side of his head, as though a complex system of veins that belonged deep inside his skull pulsed just under the skin. But the whole story was in the faces of the other people in the room. There was a terrible chronology in those few pictures. Early on, Danny and Lily were smiling as they each took turns holding the baby. An eager big brother looked on at the bath. But in the next one, Danny’s lips were contorted with tears; and the worst one of all was the picture of Sarah’s husband with his head bent over the baby in his arms, obviously weeping.  Even the nurse curled her body around the child in an attitude of protection and love.

            “We kept trying to get him to open his eyes,” Sarah told me. “And we couldn’t wake him up, and we couldn’t wake him up. And then suddenly he opened them very wide and it was like, ‘I’m here.’” She turned her head, picked up her coffee cup, set it down again. “When we went into the hospital, my mom wanted to keep the kids at home with her, but I was afraid they were never going to see him if they weren’t right there. And the way it turned out, he was really alert for only about twenty minutes. They never would have gotten there in time.”

            Sarah said that sometimes she would start crying and it would go on for hours. If anyone asked her about the baby, she might cry all afternoon. She didn’t know how she was going to face the other mothers when she took Danny to school.

            And that was when I saw my opportunity.

            It was a simple arrangement. Sarah would drop Danny off at my house at ten minutes to twelve so that I could walk him over to school with Sam. She would pull into my driveway in her minivan and step out in one of the bright pastel sweaters that already fit her again and looked so striking against her long blonde hair, a better color now that she’d been able to get in for an appointment. “How are you doing today?” I would ask. And she would lean against the car and say, “not so good,” and wrinkle her nose a little. And then she would scoot Danny out of the car, saying, “I don’t want to make you late,” and he would shoulder his backpack and throw an armful of leaves at Sam and start running ahead of me toward the crossing guard and kindergarten. In the afternoon I brought him back to my house, where she picked him up half an hour later.

            I was extremely caught up in my arrangement with her. I thought about Sarah all the time—about the years and years of loss she would suffer, the birthdays she would observe quietly, wondering what her son would have been like. As I stood in the shower, I tried to picture my own children’s faces. Which one of them had the long eyelashes, Sam or Allie? I sometimes thought that I never really looked at them—never noticed when they’d grown or when that baby look finally left their faces. If anything ever happened to one of them, I wondered if I would even remember what they had really looked like.

            The back door creaked open, startling me out of my thoughts. Lily came merrily into the house and took off her purple Land’s End jacket and shoes, scattering bits of dried leaves on the carpet. She settled herself in front of the dollhouse that we’d tucked under the piano bench. Meanwhile Allie hung onto my leg and whined for juice.

            “Use your big girl voice, Allie,” I said. As I walked into the kitchen, I called over my shoulder, “Lily, do you want a snack?”

            Lily came running after us and climbed up onto one of the kitchen chairs. Her feet were so tiny, and she lisped; it was sometimes difficult to understand her. I poured her a cup of water and offered her a graham cracker. Lily wasn’t a good eater most of the time, but she always ate graham crackers at my house. I glanced at the clock. Five more minutes and I would have to go wake up the baby.

            I was a little hurt that Sarah hadn’t come back. After all, I thought she liked talking to me. I fantasized about being the only friend who could really help her; my kitchen table would be an impromptu therapist’s couch. As I watched for her every day, I felt nervous and excited, as though I were the only one allowed to see a famous recluse.

            Sarah told me that when it had been two weeks, she would go back to picking Danny up herself.

            “If it makes it any easier,” I said, “when you do go, you can park in our driveway and walk over with us.”

            “Thanks,” she said. “I might do that.” We made plans for it a couple of times. Each time, she would call at two-thirty and ask me to bring Danny here instead.

            I sometimes think that this offer of mine may have been a little too much. Maybe Sarah thought I was trying to own her; maybe she thought I was trying to make her dependent on me. It was hard to explain this feeling to my husband. “Don’t obsess about it,” he said. And suddenly I felt morbid.

            At around the same time, I began to notice that Sarah was changing toward me.

            We developed a sort of coolness, a quietness. One evening, when I called Sarah on the phone, she had nothing to say and even seemed irritated. I began to feel afraid to talk to her when she dropped Danny off every day; I would grab him and hurry off, pretending to be late. As the two weeks came and went our arrangement became awkward, unnecessary, like scaffolding left in place long after a building was repaired. I began to think it was strange that Sarah was driving Danny here when school was only fifty feet beyond my door. It was almost a phobia.

            “More juice,” Allie said, holding out her cup.

            “More graham cracker,” Lily said. She ate three of them. I wondered if she’d had any lunch.

            It was a quarter to three. Sarah was now an hour and fifteen minutes late, and it was time to go to school. “Come on, girls,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

            Lily brought her graham cracker with her, and this time I didn’t tell her not to.

            The baby was standing up in her crib with a poopy diaper. As I lifted her out, I imagined the phone ringing downstairs while I held her feet with one hand and wiped her bottom with the other. Her pants were dirty too—we were going to be late. I pictured Danny and Sam walking out the school door and not seeing me.

            “Allie,” I said, “get some clean pants for me. She pooped on these.”

            “I’ll get some,” Lily said. They started pulling clothes out of the bottom drawer. I slid the dirty pants carefully off, wadding them up and sticking them under the changing table. I would have to soak them later.

            “It doesn’t matter if they match or not,” I said to the girls.

            When I turned around, I saw that they’d pulled a lot of clothes out of the drawer. I grabbed a pair of pants and hurried the baby into them, then picked up her shoes. “Let’s go, now,” I said to the girls. “Come on.”

            I would get Danny and I would bring him back here. And then Sarah would come at three-thirty, like she did every day.

            Maybe she needed some time to herself, I thought as I coaxed Lily’s foot into a shoe that was curled with long wear. Maybe she just went home for a while. Or did some errands. It would be nice to do a few errands without a child in tow.

            But then she would have called, wouldn’t she?

            I wondered suddenly if it had been a good idea to leave Sarah alone like that. These past four weeks since the baby died, there had always been someone there—her mother, in town from Pittsburgh, her husband, one of the kids, a friend. Maybe she hadn’t gone to tennis at all. Maybe she had taken this opportunity, when there was no one around, to do something.

            Her kids would be with me. She would know that I would go get Danny, and that I would eventually try to reach her husband when she didn’t answer the phone. Her children would never see her. Unless, of course, I just took them over there and knocked.

            Why hadn’t I called, I thought as I hurried my own girls into the stroller. Allie wanted to walk with Lily, but I thought the more of them I could restrain, the better. Allie was yelling and kicking her feet as we headed down the driveway.

            I would have to call Sarah’s husband, and he would go home, and finally he would call me to tell me what she had done. I would keep the kids for him while he talked to the police.

            As Danny and Sam dropped their backpacks in the hallway and went running outside, I scolded myself for these awful thoughts. I should just call. After all, I wasn’t doing her any favor, really, by keeping her kids too long. Eventually they would want to go home.

            And besides, it was wrong of me to dramatize myself in this way. Here I was, imagining myself at the center of a family tragedy. A martyr for the kids, that was me. Don’t worry, I would say to her husband. You take care of what you need to do. I’ve got the kids.

            I decided to go outside with them. The girls were down in one of the window wells, pulling out rocks and throwing them into the wheelbarrow.

            “Come out of there, girls,” I called. “You don’t belong down there.”

            The boys, meanwhile, were standing up in the swings. By the time I’d redirected them all to the leaf pile again and taken a few pictures, it was a quarter to four. I went in and tried Sarah’s number. No answer.

            I needed a plan now.

            She was only fifteen minutes later than usual. I would wait until four and call again. And if she didn’t answer, I would put the girls in the stroller and we would all walk over to her house. I wasn’t calling her husband and looking like a fool just yet.

            But things got busy there in the back yard. Sam was crying because Danny was beating him at soccer and so I had to let them both play against me, two against one. We went back and forth across the yard, using the fence at either end as our goal. But every few minutes, Allie would start to whine and I would have to stop playing soccer and push the swing a few times. I couldn’t keep them all going much longer without TV. “Hey, Mom,” Sam called. “Are you still playing?”

            “Sure.”

            I reached down under a bush to fish out a soccer ball that Danny had kicked out of bounds. There was a patch of grass over here by the garage that was shorter, silkier than the rest; it was a brighter green, a yellow-green, as though it were growing over some especially rich soil. I suppose that the previous owner had simply filled in a bare spot with a different kind of grass seed than the one that had been used over most of the lawn. But I couldn’t help imagining that the grass over here grew thick and soft as a baby blanket because there was a body buried underneath.

            It was a crazy thought, I said to myself. All these thoughts about Sarah were crazy. Sarah would come around; Sarah would still be my friend when she’d had a little time. This was nothing more than a beautiful autumn afternoon that I was free to enjoy outside with my kids and their friends. The chill in the air and the smell of dead leaves were still pleasant; the birch leaves were like gold coins on the ground. I was not yet tired of raking. I could look forward to a fire in the fireplace when my husband came home. Everything was all right for now.

            We were all balloons, I thought, tethered to reality by such frail strings. Every day when I woke up, I looked forward to the slim list of activities that stood between me and futility: grocery shopping, coffee with Sarah, playdates and appointments. It was hard to imagine now that I’d ever done anything else. Across town from here, while I drove my minivan home from the cleaners, other people made sales calls; across continents, in camps without sanitation, other people hoarded the last rice in scraps of burlap while I filled my days with these little things that would leave no lasting mark.

            And yet these little plans, these to-do lists, protected me. Every little connection to some other person, everyone who needed a ride to soccer practice or a phone call to cheer them up sustained me another day. There were so many women like me. When we had gained weight and there were hospital benefits to go to, we would stand tentative in front of bedroom mirrors and ask our husbands, “do you think the black suit is dressy enough?” while they sat bewildered across the room, wondering what answer would get them in the least trouble. But because of these things, these minutiae we had to worry about, we would be all right.

            And then we would not be. Something would happen, and we would jerk ourselves loose and float off into space.

“I came by,” Sarah said, “and no one answered the door.”

            “I was here,” I answered, bewildered. “I was here all the time, except when I went over to school.”

            “Well, maybe you were down in the basement or something.”

            “I wasn’t,” I said, frowning. “I really was right here.”

            “Well, anyway,” Sarah said then, “when you didn’t come to the door on the third try, I just went home.” And didn’t call, or let me know what she was doing.

            “I’m really sorry,” I said, though I didn’t know why I was apologizing. Danny put his shoes back on right away, without being asked. I sat on the living room floor amid scattered blocks, dollhouse furniture, books, graham cracker crumbs. Sarah said nothing about the missed coffee, about whether she would walk over to school with me to get Danny herself any time soon. I had thought it would help if we walked together, if she had someone to stand with on that first long wait on the playground. Surely, we would be friends again; surely, this was just grief, and not something more ominous.

            Sarah was holding the front door open with her foot while Lily and Danny edged past her, their purple and red Land’s End jackets bobbing short and thick around their waists. My hands flailed out suddenly, as though something I could not quite catch was drifting away. The children, I thought wildly. If I could just hold onto the children. I knew I would never lift off; I was afraid to let go. But, what would it mean—what would I see—if, just for a moment, I could slip free of myself and look down?

            “Thanks,” Sarah called off-handedly over her shoulder. And then she said, “if it’s all right, I’ll bring him by again tomorrow.”

__________

Joan Bauer holds a master’s degree in English and has worked as a trust officer in a bank. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Dappled Things, Amethyst Review, The Windhover, and San Antonio Review. “Consignment,” a novelette, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions.

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