Adam and Evelyn

Content warning: Child loss

Another apple disintegrates under the weight of Evelyn's boots. It is the third one in the five minutes that they've been in the orchard, and it does nothing to quell her nagging suspicion that this whole excursion is a mistake. The mushy fruit clings to the sole of her shoe like a beggar, but she refuses to fall any farther behind.

Already ten paces ahead, her wife, Gloria, whips through the row of apple trees with the same pinballesque efficiency she uses when stuffing bills and magazines and credit card offers into the mailboxes on her route. Her fingers, nails bitten to the quick, carelessly snatch apples from their branches. Gloria's dark hair, longer than Evelyn likes, flows past her shoulders. In the glare of the Illinois sunshine, Evelyn can discern all the strands of gray that weren't there when they visited this orchard a year ago.

Of course, a year ago they'd also had Adam with them. His laughter, delicate and bright as a new Hot Wheels car; the pitter-patter of his feet against the grass; the way he perched on Gloria's shoulders, his legs wrapped around her neck like a hug, as he clutched at the apples high in the trees.

Evelyn tries not to think about that, tries to shove those thoughts in the crawl space of her mind along with the bruising and the nosebleeds and the hospital visits and the leukemia. She reminds herself that they're here today to enjoy themselves.

"What do you think of this one?" Gloria asks, turning to Evelyn. In her hand sits a lopsided circle the color of blood, large and lustrous. The apple picking bag that's strapped to her shoulders like a harness, already a third of the way full, resembles a baby sling.

Though thankful for the words—they've spoken no more than necessary today, no more than to begrudgingly agree to fulfill their promise to come to the apple orchard—Evelyn cannot bring herself to look at her wife, the apple, the bag. She pivots and places a hand above her eyes, squinting until she can see nothing but a dim bar of sunlight, and says, "Looks good." Her throat is dry and her voice comes out like cheap sandpaper.

"I think so too. How are you doing over there?"

"I'm doing," Evelyn says.

Leaves rustle as Gloria picks another apple. The sound of it falling and knocking against the others in her bag is like bone on bone. Evelyn grinds her teeth and turns back to her own tree. Its arms overflow with blood-red offerings. The sugar-sweet aroma churns her stomach.

"Ev, your bag is empty," Gloria says, her voice suddenly close, and Evelyn startles. When did Gloria get behind her? How long has she been staring at this tree? She looks down at her bag, at a loss for words and apples. 

Gloria says, "Here," plucks an apple from her own bag, and tosses it into Evelyn's. "You have to start somewhere."

Evelyn murmurs a noncommittal thank you. It's enough for Gloria, who turns on her heels and continues down the lane. Evelyn waits a few seconds before releasing the apple from its baggy prison and dropping it in front of her. This time, she makes sure not to disintegrate it.

***

If she wants to, Evelyn can conjure up the image of Adam in the Subaru, his tiny face aglow in the rearview mirror as they passed the apple orchard, his voice as high and feverish as the Elmo doll in his lap. They were heading home from the airport after a trip to Disneyland, and Adam was in no hurry to let the magic end. Jet lag anchored Evelyn's hands to the steering wheel and her body to the leather seat. But then Gloria nodded her approval, twisting in her seat and eyeing the retreating orchard, vetoing fatigue, so Evelyn U-turned and the three of them watched the plantation expand through the windshield.

Adam bounced around the orchard like a feral child. He sprinted up and down rows of hedges and trees and ran his fingers across all the fruit on the low-slung branches. More than once, he launched Elmo into the air on a mission to retrieve a treetop apple. A few onlookers shook their heads at him. Evelyn turned bright crimson under the weight of their stony judgment, but Gloria simply shrugged and said, "Hey, boys will be boys."

Still, Evelyn had fun despite herself. She clapped when Gloria gave him a piggyback ride. She encouraged him to "Reach for the sky!" in her best Woody impersonation. She laughed when he grabbed a bruised apple from the ground, chomped, and the juice dribbled like a trail of tears down his chin.

Toward the end of their time in the orchard, as they were going to weigh their fruit, Adam stepped the wrong way onto a fallen apple and pitched forward. Evelyn whirled around when she heard his cry and watched the event unfold as if in slow-motion: Elmo flying from the boy's grip, Adam arcing his body to the side to land on his sleeveless arm instead of his face, his shoe, perpetually untied, dislodging itself from his foot. He collapsed on the ground with a thud.

To his credit, the boy neither cried nor fussed, not when Gloria sat him upright and rubbed his back. Not when Evelyn traced her finger lightly down his arm, asking "Does this hurt? How about now?" Not even when, later that night, as Evelyn was weaving crust into a lattice for her apple pie, she questioned the mottled purple bruise by Adam's shoulder as he circled a date in red magic marker on the calendar and made plans for next September's apple picking adventure.

She can conjure up all of this at a moment's notice, if she wants to. The problem is, she doesn't.

***

To Evelyn, the thirty minutes they've been in the orchard feels like thirty hours. Her apple bag is still empty while Gloria, in the next row over, resembles a mother kangaroo, her pouch poking out over her stomach, pregnant with life.

"How're you doing over there, Ev?" she shouts over the thicket of trees. There are small openings in between each tree that reveal a sliver of the other lane. Evelyn can see her wife through the gap, knows she already has the answer to her own question.

"I'm doing," Evelyn replies, but her heart isn't in it, hasn't been for a while.

"I can't wait to taste some of your apple pie," Gloria says. The rustle of leaves echoes as a branch snaps back into place. "I might even have it with some hot fudge and crushed nuts."

Evelyn recognizes this statement as call-and-response. "And I might leave you for Jodie Foster if you do" is the answer Gloria wants to hear, a reference to their first date at Evelyn's house so long ago. Back then, after Evelyn had said that, Gloria abruptly dropped her fork, leaned across the table, and kissed Evelyn, breaking the seal of her lips with her tongue. When she pulled away, the first thing she said was, "I'd like to see Jodie Foster do that."

The memory passes through Evelyn's mind as though it were simply something she'd seen once in a movie or a dream, something that happened to actors, imaginary people, anyone but her. Gloria stands on the other side of the trees, her fingers grazing a waxy red apple, and stares at Evelyn. She is waiting for an answer.

Evelyn's feet move before her mouth can. She speedwalks down the lane, away from the spot where Gloria is calling after her, bouncing words off her back.

She goes four lanes over to a spot where the gaps in the trees only reveal the next two rows. Unsurprisingly, this section of the orchard also exclusively contains apples the same shade as blood. But it also contains quiet, which is sweeter than any fruit could ever hope to taste.

A little while before or after Adam died in March—Evelyn can never remember which, in the blurry haze of the timeline—the doctor said that only five percent of children, at the most, got unlucky with leukemia treatment. That was the word he'd used, Evelyn remembers that much: "unlucky."

But that isn't something she ever wanted to know.

What Evelyn would like to know, what she asked herself today when she crawled out of bed and saw the red magic marker circle on the calendar, what she's been asking herself almost every day since spring, is if he had been sick even before then. Before he fell on the apple and bruised his pale skin. Before the constant calls from the preschool and the blood-crusted T-shirts.

What she wants to know is when it started. She already knows how it ends.

That's what she's thinking about when the sound of laughter wafts through the lane. The leaves quake like someone is trying to uproot the trees. A little boy pokes his head through the opening as though it's a secret entrance. Evelyn steps back and presses her empty apple bag against her stomach. Somewhere a lane or two over, a woman is yelling a name: "Conrad! Conrad, where are you?"

"Shh," says the boy to Evelyn, bringing a finger to his mouth. He winks conspiratorially like an accomplice. He can't be any older than six, with a flop of blond hair. "I'm hiding from my mom."

Evelyn says nothing.

The shouting gets louder, the voice more shaky. The boy retreats into the interstice of the trees just as his mother appears at the end of the lane. Blonde with her hair in a ponytail, probably a decade younger than Evelyn, late twenties if she had to guess, her tone unmistakably laced with panic and desperation: "Conrad, please! This isn't funny anymore!" She looks like a bobblehead, craning her neck as if it were spring-loaded.

When she looks at Evelyn, even from fifteen feet away, the tears and fears in her eyes are unmistakable. Something stirs inside Evelyn, some unspoken maternal bond. She lifts her finger and points to the spot where Conrad is waiting like a ninja, eyes closed, chest barely swaying with the rhythm of his breathing. The mother steps forward tentatively, like Evelyn might be luring her into a trap, but when Conrad's close enough to see, she lets a few tears stain her cheeks and mouths out her thanks.

Conrad groans when his mother yanks him from his hiding spot. Green leaves litter his hair. "Aw, man! How did you find me?" is all he thinks to ask. He isn't concerned that his mother thought she lost him.

To Evelyn's surprise, Conrad's mother drops to her knees and hugs her son. Her body rocks with the sobs of relief. Any panic, desperation, anger she had is gone. Her son is safe again. He is accounted for. He is alive. "You're okay," she keeps saying, running her hands over his hair. "You're okay, you're okay."

Rain clouds drift past the sun, blanketing the three of them in shade. Something fragile inside Evelyn is threatening to shatter. This time she doesn't just speedwalk out of the lane, she dashes. She can't be here anymore.

She must look as crazy as Conrad's mother, running past rows of apple trees like a bobblehead. She knows what to look for: plaid vest, camo pants, black boots. Why is it so hard to find her wife?

Evelyn realizes with a start that Gloria drove today, that she's got the keys with her. She imagines Gloria jumping behind the wheel, replacing her spot in the passenger's seat with a child-sized lump of produce.

After minutes of running, she goes to the first unoccupied lane she sees and slumps against a tree. Throwing a hand over her eyes, she tries to regulate her ragged breathing. The sun and the blue sky are gone, overshadowed by fat gray clouds. Something soft and light and wet pricks her arm.

"There you are."

She lowers her arm only slightly to see Gloria standing there. The look on her face, like her tone of voice, gives nothing away. She is still carrying her apple bag, which is almost full.

"It's time to go." Evelyn hears the desperation in her voice but is helpless to stanch it. Another raindrop hits her face. "I can't do this anymore."

Something flashes across Gloria's face that Evelyn doesn't recognize. Gloria tilts her head to the side, as if she's seeing her own wife for the first time.

"No, I'm not ready to leave just yet," Gloria says.

Evelyn slowly rises to her feet. "Well, I am. I've been ready since the moment we got here." 

"Trust me, I can tell," Gloria says. Her voice shakes like Conrad's mother's. "Can you just try to enjoy yourself? Please?" The last word comes out as a whisper.

"No," Evelyn says, before the word please gets a chance to breathe. "We need to go. Now."

"I'm sorry," Gloria says as she rips an apple from a nearby branch, "but I'm having fun here. I'm having a blast."

"Don't do that," Evelyn retorts. "Don't act like you're having a good time when you're not."

Gloria tilts her head the other way and stares into Evelyn's eyes. "At least I'm trying."

Evelyn says nothing.

Somewhere a few lanes over, Conrad is shouting: "Hey, hey! Watch what I can do!"

"I'm trying to keep things normal," Gloria says, quieter. "That's all."

Evelyn shakes her head. "You don't get it. It's not normal. It's never going to be normal again. Not like it was."

Gloria tucks a lock of hair behind her ear as the drizzle comes down on them. Beads of rain gather on the apples in her bag and slide off slowly.

"And I didn't even wanna come to this stupid place to begin with," Evelyn adds. "In fact, I wouldn't have either if not for," but she can't bring herself to mention the calendar in the kitchen, or the boy who wrote on it.

"That's the problem, Evelyn." When was the last time Gloria used her full name? She can't remember. "I've tried to be patient. Really, I have. But you never want to go anywhere or do anything anymore."

Though she knows it's true, in the heat of the moment, Evelyn can't help herself from striking back. "Well, what about you, huh? You're acting like everything is fine. Like everything's okay. You're acting like he isn't dead."

It occurs to her, already too late, that this comment is a mistake. She can count on one hand the number of times they've broached the subject of Adam in the past six months. Evelyn knows it was a low blow.

But wasn't she the one who bore the brunt of the in vitro fertilization? Wasn't she the one who refused the epidural, the one who writhed and panted and cursed in that bleach-white hospital bed five years ago? She and Adam have a bond that Gloria can't possibly understand.

She believes that should count for something. 

Evelyn says, "You're acting like you know everything, like you know how I feel, but you don't. You weren't the one who had him."

Gloria blinks once. Her eyelids don't come up all the way on the return trip. She speaks slowly, deliberately: "No, but that doesn't mean I didn't love him."

And she turns on her heel and stalks off. She gets to the end of the lane and vanishes behind an armada of trees. Thick raindrops pelt Evelyn's body as she waits for Gloria to return.

She doesn't.

Gloria is gone.

Above Evelyn, a ripe red McIntosh apple hangs off the end of a vine. Slowly, deliberately, she reaches up to grab it. When it's firmly in her grasp, she hurls it at the ground and disintegrates it under the weight of her boot. Then she drops to her knees and rummages through the wreckage until she discovers what she's looking for. She finds five in total.

The brown apple seeds, small as grains of rice, weigh heavy in her hand as she walks to the end of the orchard lane. She picks an empty spot of grass. She rips out as many blades as she can before plunging her hands into the wet earth. When she decides the hole is deep enough, she buries each seed, one by one, in the ground. Then she replaces the soil with her dirty fingernails and steps back.

It'll be perfect, she thinks. Just give it time. She's creating something here, a legacy, a future. Something beyond herself. Something that will have a fair chance at life.

She makes a promise to check it every year, every month, to watch its growth. She'll mark it on her calendar in red if she has to, if that's what it takes.

Here now in the autumn rain, Evelyn can conjure up almost everything clearly in her mind's eye, if she wants to: years from now, the blistering sun, the spring-green leaves, and the tree—this very apple tree that she planted and grew all by herself—with its twiggy arms outstretched as if offering a hug, a sweet red embrace. She can feel the breeze on her skin, hear the sound of a child laughing in the distance. The only thing she cannot see, not for the life of her, when she turns her head to the side, is if Gloria is with her or if, once again, she'll be standing here all alone.