LITMIR.BIZ

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girlhood dreams of becoming an actress, Brenda had named her firstborn after her favorite movie star, Ava Gardner.

      The irony: the real Ava Gardner lived a long, gilded life. A different brand of irony: once thriving Camden, New Jersey, has steadily deteriorated into poverty, urban blight, and staggering crime rates, notoriously dubbed the “most dangerous city in America.”

      Cam dimly recalls her mother’s face, her voice, her tears. Not much more than that, though. On the rare occasions her father was around, there were arguments and accusations—usually ending with her mother hysterical and Pop slamming the door behind him as he left.

      Then came the day that her mother was the one who left—for good. Cam was three years old; Ava a college freshman at NYU. When Ava arrived at their small Camden apartment, summoned in the crisis, she gently told her little sister that they’d never see their mother again.

      Pop protested.

      But as it turned out, Ava was right.

      “Don’t worry, baby girl,” Pop reassured Cam that night, holding her close as she sobbed. “I’ll take care of you. Lean on me. You can trust me.”

      “But you always have to leave.”

      “Not anymore. I never will. Never again. I promise. Not unless I take you with me.”

      And that was what he did.

      And she leaned on him. Trusted him.

      Yet in all those years the two of them spent together on the road, or down the shore, or in between gigs—somehow, she never found the nerve to tell Pop about the visions.

      Nor can she bring herself to tell her husband.

      Or, God forbid, her friends or coworkers.

      Cam wonders sometimes if she might have eventually confided in her big sister. But she never had the chance.

      Ava’s “tragic accident,” as everyone chose to call it—her “falling” to her death at NYU’s Bobst Library—happened less than a year after Mom left.

      As for Cam, she has no choice but to deal, silently and alone, with her hallucinations whenever they strike, reassuring herself that she has no reason to fear something that exists only in her imagination.

      November

      The day’s weighty stack of mail in her hand, Cam sinks her bulky form onto the maroon brocade couch.

      Ahhh…

      That’s better.

      Much better than the hard plastic seat someone offered her on the downtown number six train a little while ago. Not that it wasn’t preferable to standing, as she’s been forced to do lately more times than one might expect.

      As Cam told her husband just the other day, it’s amazing how invisible an eight-months-pregnant woman can be, on board the subway in New York City.

      Mike—the sort of guy who gives up his seat not just for pregnant women but for any random passenger who might need it—was predictably outraged.

      “You need to start taking a cab home from work,” he decided—as if they could possibly afford the rush-hour meter fare between the magazine’s offices on East 46th and their apartment on the unfashionable fringes of Chinatown.

      “Okay, I’ll take a cab, don’t worry.”

      “No, you won’t. You’re just humoring me. I can tell.”

      “Well then,” she said, “how about if I promise to take a cab on nights when I’m so wiped out that I really don’t feel up to the subway?”

      That would be every night—if she meant it.

      Of course, she didn’t.

      Mike has been treating her like an eggshell throughout her pregnancy, but Cam can handle the physical symptoms. Just as she can handle the fact that she and Mike are pretty much broke, same as always, even now that he’s working again.

      So she’ll have to suck it up and brave the subway until the baby comes. An extra mouth to feed will be enough strain on their budget.

      The pregnancy wasn’t unplanned. It just happened sooner than they expected.

      Cam had read—and edited, and, yes, even written—her share of articles on conception. She knew going in that a woman shouldn’t count on getting pregnant right away. Figuring it was probably going to take a few months, at least, she told Mike they should start trying the minute he got a job.

      So they did.

      Just weeks later, there she was: knocked up, due around Christmas.

      So much for the best-laid plans: scraping up enough money for skiing in Utah this winter, and taking Mike’s parents up on their offer for two plane tickets to visit them at their winter home in Florida over the holidays.

      Speaking of Mike’s parents…

      Here’s an envelope that bears the familiar loopy blue ballpoint handwriting of Cam’s mother-in-law, with a Vero Beach postmark and return address.

      Cam is struck by a familiar, and perhaps ridiculous, pang of wistfulness.

      It’s been years since she went through her mail thinking there just might be something from her own mother.

      Mom, wherever she is, intentionally erased herself from the shattered family she left behind. Still, Cam used to fantasize that one day she’d simply show up again, as abruptly as she’d vanished.

      Ava’s death made the papers in New Jersey and New York. Surely if Mom had seen it, she’d have come back. At the time, Cam felt as though she, and Pop, too, were holding their breaths for that—constantly looking around at the wake, the funeral, for Mom’s face in the crowd.

      Of course, it wasn’t there.

      Mom probably never knew, still doesn’t know, that she lost one of her children.

      She couldn’t have known, because if she had, she’d have come back to comfort Cam and Pop. Or so Cam managed to convince herself for awhile, anyway, back when she still clung to faith in her mother.

      That faith has long since vanished, though.

      Mom is as gone as Ava is; Cam and Pop both learned to accept that years ago. They stoically moved forward together, refusing to become victims of their tragic past.

      Cam no longer expects her mother to pop up in her life again, to send, say, a “Thinking of You” card filled with newsy handwriting, the way Mike’s mother does when they’re away for the winter.

      No, but she’ll always be wistful—and maybe a little envious—when her mother-in-law pops up in the mailbox. Her cheerful correspondence will always trigger the familiar aftertaste of loss and futile yearning.

      Marjorie Hastings didn’t send a card today, and this envelope is addressed just to her son. The only thing in it—Cam can see when she holds it up to the lamplight—is a small rectangle about the size of a check folded in half.

      That’s what it is, she’s certain. A check.

      Mike’s mom, God bless her, has been sending them a little bit here and there to help out. Probably siphoning it out of her grocery money.

      Mike’s father doesn’t believe in handouts to get grown children on their feet financially, though he can well afford it. Mike’s mom never worked; Mike’s father doesn’t believe in that, either. The woman, according to Mike Hastings Sr., should stay at home with the children while the man supports her.

      “Well, what if the woman loves her job?” Cam brazenly asked her father-in-law once, before she knew better than to get him started. Then what? Does she have to give it up when the children come along?

      The reply: “Of course.”

      And when she asked why, the answer was equally maddening: “Because that’s the way

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