Windfalls: A Novel Read Free Page A

great. Have you been at another party already? Maybe you need to lie down for a while.”
    Anna nodded and pushed on through the crowd and then up the cold back stairs to her room. Inside, she dropped her backpack on the floor, set her portfolio against the wall, and slumped against the door. The stillness was so complete it felt congealed, though below her the sounds of the party continued. She was too weary to take off her coat, too weary even to cross the room to turn on the space heater. She flung herself down on her mattress, wrapping herself in her grandmother’s quilt and burying her face in her cold pillow. For a long time she lay there, listening to the throb of the party, inhaling the faint scent of herself embedded in the pillowcase, feeling the air press against her shoulders like a cold washcloth, and watching as the last light seeped slowly from the room. She remembered the light that had flickered through the high windows in the waiting room, how moved she had been by it, how comforted by its watery calm. But that was before, she thought. And this is after.
    She felt a cavernous loneliness. She wanted to find someone who would promise her that things would be okay. She wanted to weep in someone’s arms, wanted to be comforted by someone, and forgiven. But she’d only been in Indiana since September, not long enough to have made any real friends yet. All of her old friends were dispersed around the world like dandelion seed. For a moment she considered trying to find a secluded telephone and calling one of them. But even if she could manage to sort out what time it was in New York or Paris or on the North Slope, and even if she could arrange to pay for the call, she couldn’t imagine what she would say. She saw herself clutching the receiver and trying not to sob while the expensive seconds ticked by.
    For a moment she thought of her family—her parents, her grandmother, her sister—but they were both too near and too distant to trouble with this. A new record came on, Stevie Nicks singing about changes. Anna thought of the sculptor. She remembered his mane of auburn hair, the curves and planes of his shoulders and chest, his proud hooked nose and tawny-green eyes. For an instant she let herself imagine that he would be glad and tender when she told him, that he would wrap her in his finely muscled arms and lift her into another life. She saw them together, on a farm somewhere in springtime, he working in his foundry, she in her darkroom, the two of them meeting in the evening for a meal of brown bread and red wine and steaming soup. She imagined him cupping her growing belly with his sinewy hand, imagined her smiling up at him, imagined their shining eyes meeting.
    The record quit, and a fresh burst of laughter rocked the house. “Bullshit,” she scoffed into the pillow, though the word smelled sour after she’d spoken it, and sounded way too small. That was what had caused all this to begin with, that kind of gooey stupidity. She forced herself to remember the last time she’d seen him, how he’d called her babe and draped his arm around her as though she were a thing he owned.
    She wondered where he was tonight, what he was doing while she lay alone in the darkness of her cold room, the bundle of cells they’d set in motion snowballing inside her. It’s his fault, she thought. He did this to me. But before her anger grew large enough to matter, it was toppled by a futile truth. He hadn’t done anything she hadn’t thought she wanted. He couldn’t be blamed for the fact that she’d decided to let him into her bed. He couldn’t be blamed for the fact that her diaphragm had failed.
    It was after midnight when she finally unwrapped herself from the quilt. She groped through the darkness until the lamp chain tickled her fingers. She pulled it, and a red-tinged light spilled from the beaded shade into the room. She forced herself off her bed and across the dry pine floor to the space heater in the