Page 7 of The River Is Waiting

Why had that shrink’s attempt to defend me against my father during that session pissed me off? Why had I stopped going to see her after that?

But anyway, that flamboyant gesture I made—shitcanning school and driving cross-country to rescue Emily’s and my relationship? It worked. “Oh my God,” she said when she answered the door. “Corby? What the…? Why…?”

“Because the only thing that matters to me is you. Will you marry me?” When I began to cry, she reached up, put her hands on my shoulders, and pulled me close. Rested her head against my chest and said she didn’t care that my showing up made no sense—that the only thing she knew was that she fucking loved me. As for marriage, she didn’t say yes or no.

Emily’s housemates weren’t happy about my arrival, even though I began kicking in toward the rent. The shy one, Becky, tended to freak out if I went into the kitchen shirtless or left the bathroom wearing just a towel. Mason, the dude who had “feelings” for Emily, kept making crypticremarks in my presence that Em said were passive-aggressive. Odessa’s beef was that I left dirty dishes in the sink, which I had done like maybe two times, tops. They had a meeting one afternoon when Emily and I weren’t around and voted us out of the house. Emily was hurt and I felt bad for her, but another part of me was like, hallelujah! No more having to put up with the bullshit of community living with these prima donnas.

We moved into a two-room apartment over a garage near campus. I started to love living in SoCal. The easygoing vibe, the unbelievable weather. Emily’s student teaching went so well during her last month that she got an A and the principal at her school offered her a job for the following year. I’d gotten a job, too, selling suits at a Men’s Wearhouse in Redlands. Every other weekend when I was off, I tried selling my paintings at the street fairs around the Embarcadero Pier. Most of the Saturday and Sunday tourists were buying seascapes and no one was interested in the abstract expressionist stuff I was doing at the time. I wasn’t about to lower my standards and start churning out that kind of cheesy shit just because it sold. Instead, I lowered my standards and started sketching rock icons in charcoal—the usual suspects: Hendrix, Janis, Prince, Cobain. I got fifty bucks a pop for them. Sold three or four a day on average and put most of that money toward buying Emily an engagement ring. Making it official.

Emily didn’t go back east to her mom’s that summer; she stayed in Cali with me. I think it was mid-July when she developed something called deep vein thrombosis. Fearing a blood clot down the road, her doctor took her off the pill and prescribed a diaphragm instead. It wasn’t until she got pregnant that we read the fine print that said diaphragms had a 4 percent failure rate if you’d used them correctly every time and a 12 to 18 percent failure rate if you hadn’t. A few times in the heat of the moment we might have gotten careless, I don’t really remember. But whatever the reason, the home test kit said Emily was pregnant. When I took a knee and showed her the diamond, she cried. Said yes. But when Emily called to tell her mom we were engaged, Betsy had news of her own. She had breast cancer and needed a mastectomy.

Between wanting to be there for her mom during her recuperation and wanting her mom closer during her pregnancy, Emily lobbied for us to go back east.

“You can fly back when she has her surgery, help out for a couple of weeks while she recuperates if you want, but you and I have a life out here now, babe,” I said. “Maybe after the baby’s born, your mother can come out here and—”

She shook her head. Told me her mom needed her and she needed her mom.

“Yeah, but what about the teaching job you just got? What are you going to do—resign before you’ve even started?”

And that’s just what she did. I gave in. We rented and packed up a U-Haul trailer, typed Betsy’s address into MapQuest, and hit the road. There went our California life.

The trip back east was hell. I had bought the cheapest trailer hitch kit that U-Haul sold and hadn’t installed it right. We were just over the state line into Arizona when the trailer broke free, just missed the car behind us, and then went flying off the side of the highway and into a gulley. That set us back a whole day, plus the cost of a better hitch and a nondescript motel room that had bedbugs.

Emily’s nausea came and went as we traveled all those miles. We fought. She had a couple of crying jags. We were driving through Missouri when she began spotting. The doctor we saw at an emergency room in Oklahoma City examined Emily, ordered an ultrasound to be on the safe side, and assured us that a little bleeding during the first trimester was something a lot of women experienced. “Maybe twenty-five percent. And most go on to deliver healthy babies down the line. So there’s no need to panic, Mom and Dad. I think everything’s going to be fine.” In the blurry picture he gave us, the fetus looked like a lima bean with an eye. It was about an inch long, he said. Emily miscarried the next morning about a hundred miles outside of Nashville. She alternated between crying and sleeping and I tried to comfort her as best I knew how, but it was guesswork; I was in over myhead. She said she didn’t want to see another doctor. She just knew. All she wanted was to see her mom. So I fought sleep, pounded Red Bulls, and drove almost nonstop the rest of the way.

Betsy had good news: the cancer had been contained to her breast without having metastasized. She was solicitous with Emily and, surprisingly, with me, too. “Do you need a hug?” she asked me when we were alone together in her kitchen. I hesitated—Ididn’twant one because I kept picturing her severed breast on a stainless steel tray. But I told her I did so I wouldn’t hurt her feelings. “No bear hugs,” she warned. “I’m still pretty tender there.” When she put her arms around me, I found myself unable to reciprocate. Instead of hugging her back, I reached around and gave her some little one-handed pats on her back.

Emily and I were married at the Stonington Town Hall on August the first. Emily’s dad couldn’t get there on short notice, but he mailed us a check and asked us to send pictures. Emily wore her sleeveless yellow sundress and I wore my lucky plaid shirt, the vest from my one suit, and my least faded jeans. Our witnesses were Em’s high school friend LeeAnne and her boyfriend. Both of our mothers were there, my mom still in her waitress uniform because she’d had to dash over from her shift at Newport Creamery. Betsy was decked out like it was the big church wedding she had wanted her daughter to have. After the marriage license was signed, she sprang for lunch at the Floodtide, one of those upscale places where they put guys in toques at the carving stations and you get your Caesar salad tossed table side. No honeymoon; we both had job interviews.

West Vine Street Elementary hired Emily to teach third grade. That same week, I got my job as a graphic artist at Creative Strategies, a startup agency that was happy to hire me based on my portfolio and the fact that they could lowball me, salary-wise, because I had no degree. My RISD buddy Matt, the only one I’d stayed in touch with, had graduated, landed a job at Cutwater, one of the big agencies in Manhattan, and sublet an apartment in Brooklyn, where all the cool kids lived. My job was in working-class Connecticut and I presumed he was making a lot more than me. But itwas a trade-off. I had lucked out at love and Matt hadn’t—not yet, anyway. Had I not abandoned school to save my relationship, I would probablynotbe married to Emily. But I was. I was more in love with her than ever, and if she wasn’t quite as committed to me as I was to her—something I worried about from time to time—it didn’t mean shewasn’tcommitted. She was just a little reserved, that was all. Not aloof like her mother—not by a long shot. She just held a little something back for herself, that was all. Nothing wrong with that.

We postponed getting pregnant again, telling ourselves that we had plenty of time, and that we both wanted to establish ourselves in our careers first. We needed to be practical, not impetuous or haphazard like the first time, she said. But fear was involved, too, I think—more so for Emily than for me. Having had that miscarriage under such difficult circumstances made her gun-shy. I asked her maybe three or four times if she wanted to talk about it, but she always just shook her head and got quiet. She still kidded with me, showed me that wise-ass side of her that I’d enjoyed so much during our first summer, but it surfaced less often. We were fifty-fifty on the household chores and sometimes when I did the laundry and put stuff away, I’d look at that blurry ultrasound photo she kept in her underwear drawer: the tiny lima bean of our nonbaby. It wasn’t like Emily was hiding it; she knew that I knew it was there. She just never wanted to discuss it: that traumatic cross-country trip back east.

During the summer of 2014, we rented a cottage up in Truro on the Cape. It was during that week when Emily told me she thought she was ready to try again. We stopped using birth control and Em was pregnant by the end of that month. “If I were you two, I’d start shopping around for one of those double strollers,” Emily’s gynecologist told us the day we went in for the ultrasound. “What? Are you kidding us?” I said. I started laughing. When I glanced over at Emily, she looked scared.

CHAPTER FOUR

April 27, 2017

And now I know.

I swivel around and look in the back seat to prove to myself that I’m wrong. But there’s Maisie, strapped in, clutching her Mr. Zebra. Niko’s car seat is empty. Too late: the image of him on his belly behind the car, studying those ants.

Opening the door, I stumble out of the car, lose my balance, and fall to the ground. On hands and knees, I force myself to look beneath the undercarriage. See him and have to look away. I beg a god I don’t believe in to make this not be happening. To make these shouts of denial not be coming from me but from some other child’s father. I hear Shawn McNally’s agitated plea to 911. See Linda coming around from the back of the car, her hand over her mouth. I go to my son, drop to my knees beside him, averting my eyes but then forcing myself to look again. He’s on his side, his head turned to the left, a puddle of red under his crushed body. I watch the rapid rising and falling of his little chest—his fight to stay alive—and have to look away. This isn’t happening, is it? Don’t leave us, Niko. You have to hold on.

When I move to pick him up, cradle him, Shawn stops me. Tells me to leave him where he is. He pulls me up onto my feet and bear-hugs me. Maisie! She’s still in the car. But no, she isn’t. Linda’s gotten her out and is holding her, shielding her from the horror. Looking confused and frightened,Maisie reaches for me. Taking her in my arms, I try to hold it in but can’t. When I start to wail, she does, too. “What do I do?” I ask Linda. “I don’t know what to do!”

“You need to call Emily,” she says.

I shake my head. “I can’t. How can I tell her it happened because of—”

“You have to tell her, Corby. She needs to know.”

I nod and rummage in my pockets for my cell phone. “Must have forgotten my phone in the house,” I tell Linda. “Can you hold her for a few more minutes?” She nods. “Daddy has to call Mommy first,” I tell Maisie. “Then I can hold you.” Feeling a surge of nausea, I run toward the house, trying not to hear her screams for Daddy.

Where is it? Where’s my fucking phone? In a frenzy, I run from the kitchen to the bathroom, from our bedroom to the kids’ room. I’m stopped by the photo on the shelf by their dresser: the two of them standing up in their crib, wearing the sleepers we gave away after they outgrew them. Maisie’s smiling sweetly; Niko, the comedian, is making a goofy face. Oh God, what if…? How can what’s happening be real when twenty minutes earlier I was wiping syrup off his face and lifting him out of his high chair? I don’t want to go back out there. I want to stay in here, in the safety of before it happened. Before I put it in reverse and…

In my second sweep, I see my phone sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter. I grab it and tell it to call Emily, but it rings unanswered until Em’s voice kicks in and says to leave her a message. I text her:Emergency! Come home now.There’s no immediate text back. Goddammit! She must have turned her phone off. I run back outside.

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