All i want, p.16
All I Want, page 16
Emma’s having a waking nightmare. She’s not herself. What does herself even mean?
She watches herself—watches her—doing things she would never do.
Interrupting the performance. Jumping up. Her chair scrapes, loud.
Everyone turns. Let them look.
She turns.
It’s her house.
The theater is inside her house.
She lives there.
She faces the stage.
Eliza Doolittle is looking at her. She knows that Emma knows. She’s waving the doll in Emma’s direction.
Something terrible is happening. But why is it happening to Emma?
Someone is dead or about to be dead.
“Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly?”
The woman stuffs the doll back in the bag and opens the umbrella again, raises it, and twirls around. She misses a step, almost trips, catches herself. When she stops, she’s staring out at the audience. Staring at Emma.
As if from a distance Emma hears herself scream. She never screams, not even in nightmares when she so wants to scream, and she can’t.
She turns. Who hears her? Who will help?
Faces float around her like headlights in the dark, like bulbs on a Christmas tree. They drift in and out of focus, a theater full of worried strangers wondering what to do about a massively pregnant woman, standing there.
Screaming and screaming.
* * *
WHEN SHE TRIES to open her eyes everything is covered with mirrors, glittering. Too bright! Finally the light dims, and she sees people around her, above her, looking down. She’s lying on the floor. She feels someone behind her, supporting her head and shoulders. She turns. It’s a man. She assumes it’s Ben, but it’s JD. Upside down. He smiles at her, and she tries to smile back. But she can’t, she just can’t.
She’s lost track of time. Seconds or maybe hours later, Ben pushes his way through the crowd. At first he seems to be scowling at her and JD, she can’t be sure. Ben adjusts his face to look more like a guy whose beloved pregnant wife has screamed and fainted in the middle of the community talent show than a guy who… what? Emma’s woozy again.
It’s so hot in here. She claws at her sweater.
She’s gone off script. Wrecked the show. That’s what she sees in Ben’s face. He’s more annoyed than worried. She’s dizzy, disoriented, but not so far gone she doesn’t know she’s ruined the event, ended it before they could even announce the winner of the talent show.
Through the fog, she hears Ben saying that she’s been having blood pressure problems. Maybe she stood up too fast and the blood rushed to her feet and she felt off balance and screamed because she was going to faint. Suddenly lots of people are helping or trying to help. They ease her into a chair.
Beth goes up to the microphone. “Good night, everyone. Let’s hear it for the performers.”
There’s some confused applause. It’s weird to be clapping with Emma still half-conscious. Beth thanks everyone for coming and wishes them a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Once, when she was a girl, she’d turned on the light switch in her friend’s house and faulty wiring blew her across the kitchen. This felt a little like that. The shock of Sally singing the song that was in the journal—the notebook that, as far as she knows, no one else has ever seen—knocked her clear off her feet.
* * *
BEN HELPS HER stand. The dizziness is beginning to go away, and she doesn’t seem to have hurt herself falling. Nothing hurts. Nothing aches. Her light-headedness is improving.
“Are you feeling better, dear?” It’s Sally, with her clown makeup off and without the wig and hat. How did she change so quickly?
“Why did you pick that song?” says Emma.
“I always liked it,” Sally said.
“And that’s all?”
“What else would there be?”
Emma believes her.
All I want…
Then Sally comes close to Emma and whispers in her ear. “I’d be careful if I was you. I’d get the hell out of here while you can. Because… you know why. I don’t have to tell you.”
The words sound familiar. Emma feels as if she’s heard them before. Or… read them before. Wait. It’s what the old lady who got murdered said to the woman who wrote the journal. Does Sally know? Why is she warning her? Has Sally read the journal? Emma feels woozy again.
Sally’s saying something. “I was forced to sing that song. It wasn’t my idea. I am so sorry.”
“Who did?” whispers Emma. “Who made you sing it?”
Sally is moving her mouth, but Emma can’t hear her. Everything—her hearing, her vision—has gone terrifyingly fuzzy.
By the time this new spell of dizziness has passed, Sally is gone, and Ben has taken her place. Is he frowning or looking concerned? How odd that Emma can’t tell.
Emma props herself up and puts her hands on her belly. The baby kicks hello.
There must be an explanation. A reason for everything. It’s very simple, she just isn’t seeing it. She feels stupid. But no one warned her that she was going to have to deal with this on top of being nine months pregnant. No one prepared her. No one could have imagined it. No one—including Emma—knows what’s happening. A haunted house and a decades-old murder is not in any of the baby books.
She needs to be near the hospital, her doctor, just in case. What if she faints again? What if she hurts the baby?
“Let’s go to the city,” she tells Ben.
“We’re on our way,” says Ben. “We’ll leave the minute we can.”
The crowd has put on their coats and left. Emma seems to have lost track of time again. Two camels and a cardboard sheep are all that remain of the play. Lindsay, Beth, and JD stand around awkwardly, waiting for direction. JD offers to close up the house and look after things while they’re gone. Beth and Lindsay say they’ll help.
Emma’s calm enough to tell Lindsay that she had an emergency bag packed and ready, in case she suddenly had to go to the hospital. It’s in the bedroom closet. Lindsay skips away and returns with the bag, plus a coat, scarf, and gloves into which they bundle Emma.
Ben eases her into the front seat of his car. He’s had the engine running for a while to warm it up. It’s cozy and nice inside. How thoughtful everyone is. And how unhinged Emma is, to ruin everyone’s evening, for which they worked so hard, just because of some coincidence, a Broadway song she read about in a book that might not even exist. A weird coincidence.
What else could it be?
* * *
IN THE CAR, all the way to the city, Emma weeps. Pregnancy is a great excuse: the discomfort, the hormonal shifts. The worry! The scariness of having fainted. The embarrassment of fainting in front of the whole town. The guilt for having ruined Ben’s hard work, though she knows it’s not really her fault.
She’s having all the wrong emotions! The right one would be… anger. She needs to make Ben help her figure out what is going on.
Because the real reason for her despair is the frustration, the fact she can’t ask Ben for help. She can’t tell the person who is supposed to be her closest ally.
She can’t begin to tell him about Sally, the song. She can’t say Explain this, please! He showed her that there was no journal. And now Sally has sung the song from the nonexistent journal.
Maybe the gap between them started opening a long time ago and she just didn’t notice.
She’s afraid to say what she wants and needs to say. She’s afraid he’ll think she’s crazy. She’s afraid he’ll tell other people she’s crazy, and they’ll take the baby away.
Where did that thought come from? It’s impossible, unreal. But how to explain what’s happened? The notebook, the song, the girl in the field… Maybe she is out of her mind. The chemicals, the hormones…
Sally. The journal. The song. Everything seems connected, everything makes perfect sense and no sense at all. Something keeps eluding her. It’s like trying to remember a dream. If she tells Ben, it will mean talking about the journal again. Which she couldn’t find when he came up to the attic. Did he think she’d made it up?
Of course he wouldn’t understand why she was so shocked when Sally sang that song. Especially since Emma wonders if Sally could be the journal writer’s daughter. Even so, how would Sally—given away at birth—know about the song, maybe the only song her mother ever sang on Broadway?
There is nowhere Emma can begin. No way she can unravel the knots without making Ben think she’s lost it.
Ben is driving a little too fast, and every so often a sliver of ice slaps against the window. The lights of Route 17 blur into flashes of color coming at them from both sides of the slick highway.
And that’s when she realizes: She’s scared of Ben. Not of something he might do to her, but of how he might see her. Of whom he might think she is. A crazy woman, a lunatic.
An unfit mother.
Another nasty rogue idea has wormed its way into her brain.
No one has ever suggested she wouldn’t be a good mother. But Ben has hinted that she was imagining things. It’s only a few small steps from hallucinating to unfit. You don’t let a person who is hallucinating take care of a baby!
Does Ben want to leave her and take the baby?
Maybe he is having an affair with Rebecca. Rebecca can’t have kids. Maybe Ben and Rebecca are plotting to steal Little Person.
Ben looks grim. It’s begun to snow, and driving takes all his concentration. There’s black ice, and an icy mist coats the asphalt.
He’s a good driver. Emma trusts him.
Every so often he looks over at her, obviously worried. Her face aches, half from weeping and half from smiling to prove that she’s fine.
“Please,” says Ben. “Please don’t cry. Everything will be okay.”
But how can he say that when he has no idea?
Everything feels dizzying, confusing, and disturbing—but physically she feels fine. The baby is swimming and kicking. Emma’s not queasy or light-headed. Her heart’s beating calmly and steadily. If she hadn’t screamed and fallen down in the middle of the community talent show, she’d never suspect anything unusual happened.
Ben says, “We need to call Snyder’s office and take you to the ER.”
“No,” she says. “Please. Trust me on this. I think I’m okay. It just got very hot in there.”
He knows that the theater was cold.
“Please. The hospital’s where you get sick, exposed to all those ER germs. I feel fine.”
“Let’s just go there—”
“No!” The force of her resistance surprises them both. What shocks Emma more is how angry she is. Ben is worried, he’s trying to help. To keep her and the baby safe.
“If I go to the ER and get sick, it will be your fault. That will be on you.”
“You make that seem like a threat,” says Ben.
“It’s a fact,” she says. “Take it any way you want.”
How unhappy they sound. They don’t sound like a couple who love each other and are going to have a child.
“I’m trying to help you, Emma. To keep you and the baby safe.”
“I’m sorry,” says Emma, but she isn’t. “I want to go to our apartment and lie down and fall asleep. Can I do that? Can I just do that?”
“Okay,” Ben says. “But the minute you feel even slightly weird or uncomfortable, you’ll tell me. Promise?”
Emma promises. But it’s a lie. So many things feel weird and uncomfortable. If only she could tell him.
* * *
IT FEELS GOOD to be home in their apartment. It’s way overheated, in that New York apartment winter-hothouse way. But cozy. The planet is going to have to forgive Emma and Ben for now. She’ll turn the thermostat down tomorrow. For the moment all she wants is to be warm. Only now, when she’s no longer there, can she admit that the house’s draftiness was a problem. The furnace and the heating system are maybe eighty percent effective—a miracle, considering. But the house has cold spots, chilly winds blow through.
In time JD will fix that. But he hasn’t yet. Why did she imagine she could stay up there with a baby during the dead of winter? She wasn’t thinking. She’d wanted Ben to see her a certain way, wanted to be a certain way. Tough, independent. Daring. The woman he married. The girl whose parents said she wasn’t brave.
And now it’s backfired. Or something has. There are too many coincidences and overlaps, little warps in time. Something is wrong.
She slumps onto the couch and sits there like a blob while Ben bustles around, tidying up.
“What can I get you?” he asks. “Herbal tea?”
“Since when do you drink herbal tea?”
“I got it for you. I knew you were coming back and can’t have caffeine, though at this point…”
“At this point what?” Emma is so sick of hearing him criticize her for being overcautious, neurotic. Living alone in the middle of nowhere for most of her pregnancy—isn’t that nervy enough?
“Look, Emma, I still think you should go to the ER. Want some water?”
“No thanks.”
“You should hydrate.” Ben fills a glass from the sink and drinks it in one long gulp. She watches his Adam’s apple bob like… the baby’s foot rippling in her belly.
“No. I’m fine.” Is she? She’s confused, is all.
Puzzle. The word forms in her mind before she recalls what pieces she needs to fit. The journal, Sally’s song. Something about it terrifies her. She tells herself not to panic and panics all over again.
Maybe Ben is right. She needs to go to the emergency room. She needs to talk to someone who can help her sort things out. But where would she begin? The possible daughter of a possibly dead woman sang a song that is possibly the only song that the possibly dead mother sang on Broadway.
Could Sally have found the journal and guessed that her mother wrote it and sang the song as a tribute to her mother? Could JD have found it and given it to his stepmother? That seems like the last thing JD would do.
Scraps of the evening come back. The tuba player. Fear not, Mary, for thou has found favor with God. Maybe Emma can ask Ben to play that beautiful church music.… No. The last thing she wants is to revisit the play.
She wants to forget—and understand. She can’t do both at once. She doesn’t know what she wants. Stay focused.
Something is coming back to her.
Just before they got in the car to come to the city, Ben made a call on his cell. Emma only caught parts of the conversation, but she thought she heard Ben telling someone to straighten up the apartment, they were on their way.
Well, sure. He’s been working constantly. Not a lot of time for housekeeping. She wonders who he called. She can’t bring herself to ask. Not even to make conversation. Enough has happened tonight.
The real reason she doesn’t want to know is that she’s afraid he called Rebecca.
For now she just needs to stand. She can make it as far as the refrigerator. That will be her goal.
She’d like help getting off the couch, but Ben’s in the bedroom. She plants both hands on the edge of the sofa and heaves herself up.
Two wineglasses are in the sink. There’s lipstick on the rim of one. In a crime show, the detective would identify the woman by the shade of the lipstick. But Emma’s way past noticing what color lipstick anyone wears.
Ben got water a few minutes ago. He must have seen the glasses. Why didn’t he hide them? Maybe he wants Emma to find them. What a cowardly way to tell your wife you’re having an affair: two wineglasses in the sink.
An alternate explanation is that Ben has nothing to hide.
“Ben, can you come here a minute?”
Ben arrives instantly. “Is everything okay?”
“Fine. I guess. Whose wineglasses are these?”
Ben laughs. “Oh no! The classic tell. The cheating husband. The murderer. The smart detective solves the case with the lip prints on the glass. Look, if I was either of those things, the cheating husband or the murderer, don’t you think I would have washed or tossed those glasses the second we got home? I asked Avery and Rebecca to pop over here and make sure everything was in shape for when we got back. I called them as we were getting into the car. I’m pretty orderly, but still… I told them I had a good white wine in the fridge. I told them to help themselves, as a thank-you. I meant they could take the bottle home, but I guess they couldn’t wait.”
Emma thinks again of the looks she’d seen pass between Ben and Rebecca at Thanksgiving. It’s like a photo she can’t delete from her files. Is that what’s going on here? The cheating husband making the wife think she’s lost her mind?
The refrigerator is half-full of things that seem newly bought. A bag of oranges, a head of lettuce, a container of strawberries.
Are they things Ben likes? They’re what he thinks Emma would like. Healthy food he told Rebecca and Avery to buy for her. Why is she suspicious?
“Rebecca did the shopping?”
“Rebecca and Avery,” says Ben. “Get this. They like grocery shopping together. The happy couple. As they tell you a million times.”
We used to like grocery shopping, Emma thinks. Ben’s presence—his concern, or show of concern—is making her feel worse. It’s a kind of pressure.
Not being able to ask about the journal and Sally’s song—her silence roars in her ears, like white noise. Can there be an elephant in the room when only one person knows that the elephant exists?
She wants to be alone for a few minutes. She’s nine months pregnant. She just played the Virgin Mary. Just fainted, just traveled all the way from the country to the city. Now she wants her husband gone, just for a while. She’s gotten used to solitude. Not solitude, exactly. Her and the baby. Ben is right to feel left out. No wonder he doesn’t love her.
JD was holding her after she fainted. She has a vague memory of him promising to watch over the house…
“You know what I’d really like?” Emma says.
“What?” She expects Ben to be annoyed, but there isn’t a trace of irritation in his voice.
