Windfalls: A Novel Read online

  WINDFALLS

  ALSO FROM JEAN HEGLAND

  Into the Forest

  Life Within: Celebration of a Pregnancy

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Jean Hegland

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8489-6

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-8489-7

  ATRIAB O O K S is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For Heather Fisher and Russell Shapiro

  and the family that they make

  for Hannah, Tessa, and Garth,

  whom I love more than words

  and—again—for Douglas

  Nothing could have prepared me for the realization

  that I was a mother, one of those givens, when I

  knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

  —ADRIENNE RICH

  Of all the means of expression, photography is the only

  one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant.

  We photographers deal in things which are continually

  vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no

  contrivance which can make them come back again.

  —HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

  Praise the mutilated world

  and the gray feather a thrush lost,

  and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

  and returns.

  —ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

  (translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh)

  AFTER ALL

  Atree stands on a windswept hillside. Alone between the darkening heavens and the stony earth, it raises bloom-filled branches toward the sky. A low sun kindles the storm clouds that brood above it, warms the wood of its broken trunk, ignites the blossoms that cram its gnarled limbs.

  The tree has been split almost in two—perhaps by lightning, perhaps by wind, or by the weight of its own fruit in some too-fecund autumn long ago. Half of it now sprawls unflowering along the ground. But the living half of the tree still reaches skyward, its limbs so cloaked in bloom that the blossoms seem to hover in the storm-charged air. White flowers cluster on even the smallest twig, and in the photograph each bloom shines like a candle flame.

  It is that cloud of flower-light that first draws the eye. Soaring and trapped beneath the glowering sky, that unlikely multitude of blossoms holds the viewer cupped inside a single moment. Gazing at it, a viewer may be transformed, turned from an onlooker into a witness—and, perhaps, from a witness into a partner.

  It is a lovely photograph, even a stunning one. Large but not huge, it has been printed full-frame on double-weight matte paper, and its velvet blacks, its pewter grays, its whites as rich as satin all attest to the craft—and maybe the heart—of its maker. But the purest white on the photograph is not the living white of storm light through apple petals, not the roiling brightness of slant-lit clouds. Instead it is the dead white gash that runs the length of the print—from ominous sky to bloom-laden branches and down through the rocky earth.

  Someone has folded the photograph in half. Someone has folded it as if it were a letter or a newspaper clipping, and that fold has cracked the print’s emulsion and left a long unhealing scar in its wake. It is shocking to see that photograph defiled. But the longer one studies it, the more one wonders.

  Spread flat, the print buckles and curls, its corners bent, its edges worn. It appears to have been folded and unfolded so many times that the white crease now seems almost like a hinge. Simply by looking, it is impossible to say whether the photograph has been rescued or ruined, impossible to know if the person who last held it in her hands considered it a treasure or would have called it trash. But gazing at that marred and glowing image, a viewer—or a partner—might have to ask whether it hasn’t served some purpose, after all.

  BECAUSE

  THE SHADOWS OF EARLY EVENING HAD LONG SINCE BEGUN TO seep into the room. For over an hour Anna had watched them thicken in the corners and beneath the chairs that lined the walls. She had studied how shadow deepened on the faces of the other students, how it gathered beneath their hands and in the folds of their clothing, and for a while she had even tried to fix her thoughts on wondering whether it was one single shadow or many that filled the health center’s waiting room as the brief midwinter day wore on.

  She had been waiting so long that everyone who had been there when she’d taken her seat had long since been called out, and other people had taken their seats, and most of them had left, too. For the last fifteen minutes, a skinny man with a scrawny beard and a stained Irish sweater had sprawled in the chair next to her. He reeked of fresh and stale tobacco, and the smell filled her throat so tightly, she wondered if she would gag. She was thirsty by now, too, and she needed to pee again, but she hated to leave the room in case her name was called while she was gone.

  Instead she tried to focus her attention on her surroundings. It was an old game, a trick she’d first learned as a child. Long before she’d ever held a camera, she had discovered that just by looking, she could transform an ordinary object into something strange and rare. The same sensation other kids achieved by spinning in circles or rolling down hills, she got by giving her whole regard to the brass spigot on the side of her house or the sparrow bounding across the polished earth beneath the playground swings, concentrating until all that remained in her awareness was the worn sheen at the lip of the spigot or the glint in the sparrow’s eye. There’d been a fierce thrill to it, even then, as though she were an explorer laying claim to something no one else had ever seen, like Robert Peary at the North Pole the year her grandmother was born or Neil Armstrong on the moon the year that Anna turned ten.

  At first glance the room in which she sat was ugly, but its ugliness was inadvertent, so unplanned and undisguised that there was something nearly touching about it, too. The enameled walls were grimy with age, and the chairs that ringed the room were battered and scarred. A coffee table sat in one corner, its surface covered with a sprawl of magazines and earnest pamphlets that all the waiting students ignored. Afraid of meeting anyone’s eyes, Anna avoided studying their faces. Instead she looked at the twisted leather laces in the boots of the man next to her, noticed the dirty pennies in the loafers of the girl who sat across the room, examined the way the shadows beneath the coffee table grew denser as the minutes passed.

  Shifting in her seat, she snuck a glance at the wristwatch of the man beside her, and then raised her eyes to study the casement windows on the wall above the girl’s head. The building was one of the oldest on campus, and the windowpanes were wavery with age, their texture like the smooth ripples in the sandy bottom of a pond. Despite the grayness of the day, there was something gentle about the light they let into the room, something so tender and wistful that for a moment that light bypassed all Anna’s anxieties, soothing and moving her so that she all but forgot how long she’d been waiting, and what she had been waiting for.

  The door at the far end of the waiting room opened. A nurse stood on the threshold and glanced at the manila folder she held.

  “Anna Walters?” she asked the room.

  At the sound of her name, Anna cringed. She wanted to hide, but she forced herself to stand, as though being responsible and agreeable could, even now,
affect the news she was about to hear.

  “You’re Anna?” the woman asked. Her eyes flicked over Anna’s patched denim skirt, her muslin blouse and black army boots, although her face said nothing. Anna nodded, then bent awkwardly to pick up her backpack and her portfolio.

  “This way,” the nurse said. She turned and led the way down a narrow makeshift hall. Anna saw how the nurse’s shoulder blades jutted against the polyester fabric of her uniform, how her flat rear remained motionless even as she walked. It was unnerving to think that that dry stranger knew the truth Anna could not yet know for certain about herself. She felt her need to pee intensify, felt her shoulders tighten, tasted a bile of black coffee and fear at the back of her throat. Please, she begged the universe. Please, she begged the treacherous reaches inside her body. Please let my nausea be nervousness, let my exhaustion be stress. Please let me off this one time, and I’ll never risk anything again.

  The nurse opened a door at the end of the hall and motioned Anna inside. The little room smelled of rubbing alcohol and iodine and the nurse’s perfume, and inside of each of those smells was the new smell that everything had held recently, a weird smell with an unidentifiable edge. Anna saw an examining table, a sink, two chairs. Tacked on the ceiling above the table was a poster of a tabby cat dangling from a bar by its claws. “Hang In There!” it said in pillowy letters along the bottom of the poster.

  The nurse motioned toward one of the chairs. Anna shrugged off her backpack and sat obediently, leaning her portfolio against her knee like a faithful pet.

  “You’re here for test results,” the nurse said, sitting in the other chair. Test results, Anna’s mind echoed. Put that way, it seemed nearly trivial, as though they were only discussing another class. She had never failed a class, never failed a test. She had always liked tests for the tidy challenge they offered, for the proof that she was doing well. Why was I so worried? she thought—it’s only a test.

  Catching sight of the nurse’s immobile face, Anna was suddenly embarrassed to be wasting anyone else’s time with her own unfounded fears. She thought of the newly developed prints she’d had to abandon in the wash water in order to make it to her appointment on time. She hoped that no inept undergraduate had torn their soft emulsions or stained them with contaminated tongs. While she waited for the nurse to affirm what she was suddenly certain she’d known all along, she cast her eyes around the room. A single drop of water hung from the lip of the faucet, its pendent surface bright as a star. On a photograph that speck of light would be pure white, the brightest spot. She stared at that drop, already anticipating the wash of sheepish relief she suddenly felt certain would follow the nurse’s news.

  The nurse opened her file, glanced at the top page. The world stopped, poised between two possibilities, teetering. Anna watched as the drop grew heavier, slowly elongating like a tiny ripening fruit, while all her terror came coursing back. She wanted to stand up, wanted to leave the room before the news could reach her. She wished with all her heart the nurse weren’t so thin and stern.

  The nurse was speaking. “—was positive.” Her voice was neutral, flat. “Of course you’ll need to schedule a physical exam to make sure.”

  The words churned in Anna’s mind. For an unhinged moment positive seemed like a good thing. But then its new meaning slammed her like a fist.

  “No.” She gasped and clutched involuntarily at her portfolio.

  “I’m afraid so,” the nurse answered matter-of-factly. She wore black mascara that smudged her eyelids and her cheekbones, a pale shade of lipstick. Her skin was large-pored, devoid of light.

  “It can’t be,” Anna said, though even as she spoke, she could feel the truth of it like a stone in her gut, the reason she’d felt so odd and shaky, so half-there, the reason the world had smelled all wrong, the reason no food had tasted right.

  “Why can’t it be?” the nurse asked, studying her with an unexpected curiosity.

  “I’m not a mother,” Anna explained, the logic of it clear until the words left her mouth. The nurse’s face flattened, and Anna gave a nervous laugh. “I mean, I …” she said, but her voice faded into baffled silence. I’m too young, she argued silently. I’m busy doing important things. I’m a graduate student, a photographer. I’m no one’s wife. Besides, no one would want me for a mother. Her eyes swept the room, landed on the faucet. The gleaming drop was gone.

  “It takes a while, sometimes, to absorb,” the nurse said. She pulled a packet of papers from the folder and handed them to Anna. “Here’s some literature explaining your options. You’ll want to read it as soon as you can.”

  Anna stared at the papers. Words jumped out at her—complications, relinquishment, curettage—a barrage of words whose meanings she couldn’t begin to fit inside her head.

  “You’re not the first person this has happened to,” the nurse said, and Anna thought she could detect a wisp of sympathy in her tone.

  “It was a mistake,” Anna said, suddenly desperate for comfort or forgiveness or understanding. “An accident. I wasn’t, I mean, I didn’t—I never—”

  “As I said,” the nurse answered, “you’re not the first.” She shut Anna’s file and rose to leave, adding as she reached the door, “You’ll want to make an appointment to see the doctor on your way out.”

  It was like facing the end of the world with a body full of novocaine. Somehow she managed to gather her things, managed to find the restroom and pee long and hard, huddled on the toilet with her face buried in her hands. Somehow she made her way back into the waiting room to make an appointment to see the doctor, even trying to schedule it around her seminars, although she had to struggle to remember what they were and when they met. She took the little card the receptionist gave her, and as she turned to leave, she caught sight of all the other waiting students. She imagined their simple problems—strep, pneumonia, herpes—and she wished that she could weep.

  Out in the linoleum-floored hall, the empty elevator was waiting. She rushed into it and pushed the button for the ground floor. The elevator lurched beneath her like a ride at the fair. She gripped her portfolio and thought of the prints it held and of the exposed rolls of film in her backpack, their long strips curled like promises inside the darkness of their canisters. She’d been doing such good work, she thought, had been making such exciting photographs.

  There was a bump and another shudder, and the door opened, revealing a sudden wall of people that seemed to face her like a jury. She pushed blindly through them as they moved in to fill the elevator. At the back of the crowd was a young woman carrying a baby. Anna looked at it, and the baby looked back, its gaze cool and level. The woman entered the elevator, the doors closed, and suddenly Anna was alone in the empty foyer.

  The baby made her think of her sister Sally’s sons—her nephews—the only children she’d spent any time around since she’d ceased being a kid herself. Jesse was four already, but Dylan was still a baby, the size of the infant she’d just seen. “I don’t know how we ever lived without him,” Sally had crooned into the phone the day after Dylan was born. Sally’s voice was thick with a pleasure that sounded almost sexual, and talking to her, Anna had expected that Dylan would be remarkable, would somehow shine with his own irrefutable light. But she’d arrived home for Christmas to discover that Dylan was just a baby like any other—cute enough, she guessed, in a kind of vacant way, with his round head and soft fists and rosebud lips—but only a baby all the same, a fat, blank bundle who did little more than sleep and fuss and mess his clothes.

  “Isn’t he wonderful?” Sally had demanded that first night. She was ensconced like a queen on the couch in their parents’ living room, Dylan asleep in her arms like a bland cocoon. “He and Jesse are the best things that ever happened to me.”

  Anna had taken a sip of her eggnog. She’d held the slick cream and warm brandy in a puddle on her tongue, rubbed the peppery flecks of nutmeg between her teeth, and then swallowed, welcoming the silken fire at the back of her thro
at. She’d wished she could say what she knew she never would—how terribly meager it made Sally’s whole life seem, to think that one grubby boy and one damp baby could be its best thing. Sally had been a painter before Jesse was born. She had studied in Italy, had won awards. She had sold paintings and been part of successful shows, but the woman she’d been then seemed to have vanished into the abyss of motherhood, leaving behind her a complacent cowish creature who worried when Jesse wouldn’t eat his peas and laughed when Dylan’s leaking diaper left yellow stains on her lap.

  It’s just biology, Anna had thought, staring at her parents’ Christmas tree until the lights grew into one great blur and none of the needles remained distinct. Motherhood was just a trick, just a hormone-driven strategy to keep Homo sapiens alive until they could themselves reproduce. Mothers were tools, nothing more than nature’s dupes. Looking at her sister’s limp hair, at the lax skin beneath her eyes and the beatific expression on her face, Anna wondered how much art was lost to the world each time another baby was born. With a ferocity that nearly frightened her, she’d thought, I could never be like that.

  Now she crossed the foyer on leaden legs and left the building. The world outside looked strange, somehow both flat and sharp, as though it had been smashed into two dimensions. The late winter light was greasy, the sky low and gray. Students pushed past her from every angle, their chins buried in their coats, their feet heavy in their boots. They were hurrying to their final classes of the week, or else racing home, drawn like a tide to the promise of Friday night. They were all born, Anna thought dumbly. They all happened to someone. Each one of them had interrupted someone else’s life.

  She stopped, stared at the brick wall of the building she was walking alongside, the mortar frozen like stone icing between the cold brick. Reaching out her forefinger, she fitted it in the groove, ran it along the mortar furrow until the pad of her finger hurt. Then she headed off across the cold campus, her body aching with the ugliness of everything she saw—the mounds of old snow crusted with dust and gravel, the sodden yellow lawns studded with a winter’s worth of dog shit, the passing students huddled against the gritty wind. Who would want to be born? she wondered.