Ernie's Ark by Monica Wood

made their murmured plans, lost in a form of drunkenness, waiting for James to skulk through the back door long past curfew, when they would rise from their nestled sheets to face him—their first child now, not their only—his splendid blue eyes glassy with what she hoped were the normal complications of adolescence, equal parts need and contempt.
    They did not tell him about the pregnancy, and by the first of September it was over prematurely, Marie balled into a heap on their bed for three days, barely able to open her swollen eyes. “Maybe it’s for the best,” Ernie whispered to her, petting her curled back. They could hear James ramming around in the kitchen downstairs, stocking the cupboards with miso and bean curd and other things they’d never heard of, counting off hislast days in the house by changing everything in it. As Ernie kissed her sweaty head, Marie rested her hand on the freshly scoured womb that had held their second chance. “It might not have been worth it,” Ernie whispered, words that staggered her so thoroughly that she bolted up, mouth agape, asking, “What did you say, Ernie? Did you just say something?” Their raising of James had, after all, been filled with fine wishes for the boy; it was not their habit to acknowledge disappointment, or regret, or sorrow. As the door downstairs clicked shut on them and James faded into another night with his mysterious friends, Marie turned to her husband, whom she loved, God help her, more than she loved her son.
Take it back,
she wanted to tell him, but he mistook her pleading look entirely. “She might’ve broken our hearts,” he murmured. “I can think of a hundred ways.” He was holding her at the time, speaking softly, almost to himself, and his hands on her felt like the meaty intrusion of some stranger who’d just broken into her bedroom. “Ernie, stop there,” she told him, and he did.
    It was only now, imprisoned on her own property by a skinny girl who belonged back in chemistry class, that Marie understood that she had come here alone to find a way to forgive him. What did he mean, not worth it? Worth what? Was he speaking of James?
    Marie looked down over the trees into the lake. She and Ernie had been twenty-two years old when James was born. You think you’re in love now, her sister warned, but wait till you meet your baby—implying that married love would look bleached and pale by contrast. But James was a sober, suspicious baby, vaguely intimidating, and their fascination for him became one more thingthey had in common. As their child became more and more himself, a cryptogram they couldn’t decipher, Ernie and Marie’s bungled affections and wayward exertions revealed less of him and more of themselves.
    Ernie and Marie, smitten since seventh grade: It was a story they thought their baby son would grow up to tell their grandchildren. At twenty-two they had thought this. She wanted James to remember his childhood the way she liked to: a soft-focus, greeting-card recollection in which Ernie and Marie strolled hand in hand in a park somewhere with the fruit of their desire frolicking a few feet ahead. But now she doubted her own memory. James must have frolicked on occasion. Certainly he must have frolicked. But at the present moment she could conjure only a lumbering resignation, as if he had already tired of their story before he broke free of the womb. They would have been more ready for him now, she realized. She was in a position now to love Ernie less, if that’s what a child required.
    The shadow of the spruces arched long across the door-yard. Dusk fell.
    Tracey got up. “I’m hungry again. You want anything?”
    “No, thanks.”
    Tracey waited. “You have to come in with me.”
    Marie stepped through the door first, then watched as Tracey made herself a sandwich. “I don’t suppose it’s crossed your mind that your boyfriend might not come back,” Marie said.
    Tracey took a bite. “No, it