Finally, when the baby had paused for a moment, Nathaniel interjected. “Before I get dessert,” he said, “David, maybe you want to tell your father your news?”
The baby looked so uncomfortable that I knew that, whatever this news was, I didn’t want to hear it. So, before he could say anything, I turned to Eden. “How did you two meet?” I asked.
“At a meeting,” she said. She had a slow, almost languorous way of speaking, nearly a drawl.
“A meeting?”
She looked at me disdainfully. “The Light,” she said.
“Ah,” I said, not looking at Nathaniel. “The Light. And what is it that you do?”
“I’m an artist,” she said.
“Eden’s an amazing artist,” David said, eagerly. “She designs all our websites, all our advertisements—everything. She’s really talented.”
“I’m sure,” I said, and although I had been careful not to sound sarcastic, she smirked anyway, as if I had and yet I, not she, was the butt of my own sarcasm. “How long have you been seeing each other?”
She shrugged, just a slight hunch of her left shoulder. “About nine months.” She directed one of her half smiles at the baby. “I saw him and just had to have him.” The baby reddened at this, embarrassed and flattered, and her smile grew a little wider as she watched him.
Now Nathaniel interrupted again. “Which brings us to David’s news,” he said. “David?”
“Excuse me,” I said, and quickly got up, ignoring Nathaniel’s glare, and hurried to the little powder room tucked beneath the stairs. Aubrey had always claimed that this was the site of many after-dinner-party blow jobs between guests when he was younger, but it had long ago been covered in a fussy black-rose-patterned wallpaper that always made me think of a Victorian-era brothel. Here, I washed my hands and inhaled and exhaled. The baby was going to tell me he was marrying this odd, weirdly seductive, much-too-old-for-him woman, and it was my duty to stay calm. No, he wasn’t ready to be married. No, he didn’t have a job. No, he hadn’t moved out of his parent’s house. No, he wasn’t educated. But it was not my place to say anything; indeed, what I thought was not only not relevant, it wasn’t even wanted.
Resolution made, I returned to my place at the table. “Sorry,” I said to all of them. And then, to David, “Tell me your news, David.”
“Well,” said David, and he looked a little bashful. But then he blurted, “Eden’s pregnant.”
“What?” I asked.
“Fourteen weeks,” Eden said, and leaned back, and that strange half smile moved across her face. “I’m due September fourth.”
“She wasn’t sure she wanted it,” the baby continued, excited now, when Eden interrupted him.
“But then I thought”—she shrugged—“I might as well. I’m thirty-eight; I don’t have forever.”
Oh, Peter, you can just imagine what I could have said, maybe even what I should have said. But instead, with such effort I began to sweat, I just sat on my hands and closed my eyes and leaned my head back and said nothing. When I opened them—who knows how much later: it could have been an hour—I found all of them staring at me, not mockingly but curiously, maybe even a little fearfully, as if they were worried that I might actually explode.
“I see,” I said, as evenly as I could. （Also: thirty-eight?! David’s only twenty-four, and a very young twenty-four at that.） “And so you three will live here, with Dad?”
“Three?” asked David, and then his face cleared. “Oh. Right. The baby.” He raised his chin a little, unsure if the question was a challenge or just a question. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, there’s plenty of room.”
But here Eden made a sound like a grunt, and we all looked at her. “I’m not living here,” she said.
“Oh,” said the baby, crestfallen.
“No offense,” she said, maybe to David, maybe to Nathaniel, maybe even to me. “I just need my space.”
There was silence. “Well,” I said, “it sounds like you both have a lot to work out,” and David shot me a hate-filled look, both because I was right and because I had seen him humiliated.
After this, there didn’t seem anywhere I could go, conversationally, without starting some sort of conflagration, so I announced I had to leave, and no one stopped me. I did bring myself to hug David, although both of us were so awkward that it was really more of a bumble, and then I attempted to hug Eden as well, her skinny, boyish body rigid in my arms.
Nathaniel followed me out. Once we were on the stoop, he said, “Before you say anything, Charles, I want you to know that I agree.”
“Nate, this is crazy,” I told him. “He barely knows her! She’s practically forty! Do we know anything about this woman?”
He sighed. “I asked a—a friend of mine, and he said—”
“The friend in Justice?”
He sighed again, and looked upward. （He rarely looks me in the eyes these days.） “Yes, the friend in Justice. He looked into her and said there’s nothing to be concerned about—just a mid-level member, a lieutenant in the organization, comes from a middle-class family in Baltimore, went to art school, no major criminal record.”
“She sounds amazing,” I said, but he didn’t answer. “Nate,” I said, “you know you’re going to be taking care of this baby, don’t you? You know David can’t do it alone.”
“Well, he’ll have Eden, and—”
“I wouldn’t count on her, either.”
He sighed, again. “Well, it may come to that,” he admitted.
I wondered, as I often did, when Nathaniel had become so passive. Or maybe not passive—there’s nothing passive about raising a baby—but resigned. Was it when I moved them here? Was it when the baby began misbehaving? Was it when he lost his job? Was it Norris’s death, or Aubrey’s? Was it when our son joined an unsuccessful and marginal insurgency cell? Or was it years of living with me? I wanted to say, “Well, you did a great job raising a kid the first time,” before I realized that the only person implicated in that statement was me.
So I said nothing. Instead, we watched the Square. The bulldozers had returned, and the most recent iteration of shantytowns had been cleared away—a soldier stood guard at each entrance, making sure no one tried to come in to reestablish it. Above us, the sky was white with floodlights.
“I don’t know how you sleep, with all this light,” I said, and he shrugged, resigned again.
“All the windows facing the Square are boarded up anyway,” he said. He turned to me. “I heard they’re shutting down the refugee camps.”
Now it was my turn to shrug. “But what’ll happen to all those people?” he asked. “Where will they go?”
“Why don’t you ask your friend at Justice?” I asked, childishly.
He sighed. “Charles,” he said, wearily, “I’m just trying to make conversation.”
But I didn’t know where the refugees would go. There was such movement of people—to hospitals and from hospitals; to quarantine camps and to crematoriums and to graves and to prisons—that I could no longer keep track of where any one group was at any one time.