a terrible send-off for Brent,” she said, “but then, you get kind of used to the unexpected when you work for DIDA.” It was the wrong thing to say to me now that Adam had signed on as a volunteer, and she caught herself. “But nothing like this has ever happened in all the years I’ve worked for DIDA,” she said. “Really, Maya.”
I didn’t want to talk about DIDA. What I wanted to say was, Did tonight remind you of the night Mom and Daddy were killed? But I would never say those words. Our relationship was so complex. We were close in so many ways. Distant in others. If tonight had reminded her of that other night, I would never know.
“You get some sleep,” she said. “Do you have some Xanax lying around?”
“Somewhere,” I said.
She touched my cheek with the back of her fingers, the way a mother might touch her child. She was not usually tender, and I was moved by the gesture. Then she pulled me into a hug.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
We stayed that way, holding on to each other, for close to a minute. No matter how tightly I held her against me though, I felt that long-ago night wedged between us like a solid wall of stone.
10
Rebecca
REBECCA SAT IN HER FAVORITE RED VELVET CHAIR AT Starbucks, shoes off, feet tucked beneath her, a double Americano on the table next to her. She was reading a book written by a guy who’d worked with the Red Cross after the quake in China. Even though she’d worked in China after the quake herself, she couldn’t concentrate on the book today. She was impatient and the coffee wasn’t helping.
The devastation from the earthquake in Ecuador was much worse than anyone had realized, and she was itching to go down there. Brent had been working thirty miles from the epicenter for a week now, and he’d finally managed to call her on a satellite phone the day before. “Tell Dot we need you here,” he’d said. They were extremely shorthanded, but Dorothea didn’t want her to go.
“Not until we see what these devils in the Atlantic have on their minds,” she said when Rebecca relayed Brent’s message.
The tropical storm that had been wallowing a good distance off the coast of Bermuda was now Hurricane Carmen. She barely deserved the name hurricane, in Rebecca’s opinion. She was nothing more than a puffy white amoeba on the weather map. No one seemed sure where she would make landfall—if she made landfall at all. Possibly South Carolina. Possibly farther north, along the Outer Banks. But the storm was so pathetic that evacuation was voluntary, and Rebecca knew that most people would stay to watch the waves swell and the wind howl and enjoy being as close as they could get to danger while remaining perfectly safe. Durham and the rest of the state were promised buckets of rain and a little wind, but so far, nothing more than that, and Rebecca couldn’t believe she was stuck in North Carolina because of potential rain. She had to admit, though, that Dot had a sixth sense about storms. Rebecca sometimes thought she had missed her calling and should have been a meteorologist. She wondered if, when it was her turn as DIDA’s director, she’d be able to determine who was needed when and where with Dorothea’s precision.
“It’s not just Carmen I’m concerned about,” Dorothea had said to her in her dining room-slash-office that morning. She’d pointed to the weather map on her computer. “See these two guys north of Haiti?” She ran her finger over two other amoebas. “I don’t trust them one bit.”
“Okay.” Rebecca had given in. “Whatever.” So now she was biding her time—working out at the gym, running, catching up on e-mail and helping Dorothea with DIDA’s mind-numbing administrative tasks.
She’d finally had a couple of hours alone with Maya the evening before. Over their Frapuccinos at this same Starbucks, they’d talked about the baby. They’d sat in the courtyard outside so Rebecca could smoke, and she’d loaded Maya up with advice: It was too soon to make a decision about trying again, she’d said. Maya needed to put the whole baby thing out of her mind for a while. She had to give Adam time to grieve before reintroducing the topic of adoption. Maybe by then he’d be ready.
Maya listened in that patient way she had, looking more at her mug of coffee than at Rebecca. And when Rebecca had offered every last bit of sisterly advice she could come up with, Maya leaned toward her.
“I know you have my best interest at heart, Bec,” she said, “but you can’t really understand how this feels.”
Rebecca didn’t know why the words hurt her so much, but they did. Maybe because they were the truth. She couldn’t understand. She was out of her league, and that was a feeling she loathed. She thought of telling Maya about that weird fantasy she’d had in Brent’s hotel room of holding the baby, that powerful sense of loss, but caught herself in time. Maya’s loss was real; hers was imagined.
“Well,” she’d said, “I want to understand.”
“It’s creating issues between Adam and me,” Maya said.
Rebecca frowned. What did she mean by “it”? Maya could be so vague. She had a way of talking around a subject instead of coming out and saying what she meant. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Because he won’t adopt or what?”
“Partly,” Maya said. “I haven’t told you a lot of this because I didn’t want you to worry, but ever since the first miscarriage, things haven’t been the same between us.”
She remembered that lunch she’d had with Adam a few weeks earlier when he talked about the Pollywog. How happy he’d looked. How she’d realized then that some of the joy had gone out of him in the last year or so.
She stubbed out her cigarette and leaned forward. “You two are solid, Maya,” she said. “All couples have their ups and downs.” She held her breath, waiting for Maya to tell her once again that she couldn’t understand since she’d never been married, but Maya only shrugged.
“I know,” she said. “But this just … this feels bad.”
Adam and Maya. Maya and Adam. Their personalities were entirely different—extroverted versus introverted, jocular versus serious—but together the two of them formed one whole, balanced human being. Rebecca couldn’t imagine Maya without Adam. She couldn’t imagine her own life without Adam in it as her brother-in-law.
“This is a phase,” she said. “You’ll get through it, honey. You can’t rush it. You can’t do anything about it. But—” she leaned forward again “—the thing you can do something about is work, and I think you’re working way too hard right now.” Work was a topic she could understand and she felt herself on safer ground. Maya was covering for one of her partners who was on vacation. Someone else could have covered for him—someone who hadn’t miscarried a couple of weeks ago.
“I need to stay busy,” Maya said. “You know how I am.”
She did know. Work had always been Maya’s way of coping. Even after their parents’ deaths, when their lives had been turned completely upside down, Maya threw herself into her schoolwork. Her teachers and the school counselor had been astounded. Maya had always been a good student, the type who didn’t have to study all that hard to do well, something Rebecca had envied since she’d had to cram to get the same grades. But after their parents’ deaths, Maya lost herself completely in her studies, graduating
