She Has Your Eyes Read Online Free Page B

remained standing. “No,” she said, the word cutting between us. “I am not going to have this conversation in front of my daughter.”
    “I’m not comfortable with that either,” said David.
    Oh, great—their first official parental alliance.
I shook off the thought as quickly as it came to mind.
    “What?” said Wylie. “Why not?”
    “Trust me,” said Janine, “you and I are going to talk
plenty
later. But first I want to talk to Devin.”
    “David,” he corrected.
    “
David
”—she added emphasis to the name as it fell out of her mouth—“alone.”
    “So what do
I
do in the meantime?” Wylie sulked.
    “You mean you haven’t done enough?” said Janine, raising her voice.
    “OK, OK—let’s just keep calm,” said David, putting his hands up as if in defense. “Andi, would you mind taking Wylie into the den while Janine and I talk?”
    This time
I
was reluctant to move. I looked at him in protest; he read my thoughts and said out loud, “Please.” And yet his eyes seemed to be saying,
I’d rather not be left alone with this madwoman
. Wylie skulked ahead of me back to the den, and I followed her, looking back at David one more time, feeling as if we were about to be pulled apart, and it would be some time before we reconnected.

    The baseball game had finished, and I surfed the channels mindlessly, too nervous to stop at any one show and toodistracted to think about anything other than what was going on in my living room.
    “Do you want to watch a movie or something?” I asked.
    Wylie shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Whatever you want.”
    I stopped on a rerun of
Iron Chef
. We sat at opposite ends of the couch and stared at the screen as Bobby Flay filleted a giant sea bass. Wylie ignored her cell phone alerting her to new text messages.
    “So what do you think they’re talking about?” she asked as Alton Brown gave a brief history of the kumquat.
    “I have no idea.”
    “I mean, obviously they know each other. It was, like,
so
obvious the way they were staring at each other that they’d
done it
.”
    I tried to delete the mental images that kept popping up of David and Janine in sexual positions. “It seems that way,” I said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean—” I cut myself off.
    “What?” she coaxed, but I didn’t respond.
It doesn’t necessarily mean they loved each other
, I had wanted to say, and realized that would be a horrible thing to tell a girl about her parents. And why did it threaten me so much? I wasn’t naïve enough to think that David had never loved anyone before me. But the magnitude of this particular union—producing
a child
—resulted in a bond that could never be severed. Maybe I was looking for a way to diminish it.
    I never missed motherhood. For as long as I could remember, being a mother was as foreign a concept to me as being a safari guide. Both involved developing keen instincts for navigating the jungle (albeit one was metaphorical in nature) and discerning the difference between friend and foe. Unlike mothers, however, safari guides got to carry machetes.
    Aside from the fact that I was technically a virgin until my midthirties, I had always been honest enough with myself to know that I was a little too screwed up for parenting. In fact, both my brothers and I seemed to lack the parenting gene.
    When I married Sam, we had agreed that kids were not going to be part of our life plan. As professors we could mentor our students without having to pay their tuition too. Kids didn’t fit into our liberal, latte-drinking lifestyle, and the cat filled in just fine when either of us was in a nurturing mood.
    When Sam was killed, I was grateful that no child had been subjected to grieving the loss of his/her daddy. Of course, my friends saw it another way—had we had children, Sam would’ve lived on through them. But his writing did that, I argued.
    Besides, I was just plain awkward around kids. Babies cried whenever I held them. Sam (and more