Story of Regret

　　The snow started to fall several hours before her labor1 began. A few flakes2 first, in the dull gray late-afternoon sky, and then wind-driven swirls4 and eddies5 around the edges of their wide front porch. He stood by her side at the window, watching sharp gusts6 of snow billow, then swirl3 and drift to the ground. All around the neighborhood, lights came on, and the naked branches of the trees turned white.

　　After dinner he built a fire, venturing out into the weather for wood he had piled against the garage the previous autumn. The air was bright and cold against his face, and the snow in the driveway was already halfway7 to his knees. He gathered logs, shaking off their soft white caps and carrying them inside. The kindling8 in the iron grate caught fire immediately, and he sat for a time on the hearth9, cross-legged, adding logs and watching the flames leap, blue-edged and hypnotic. Outside, snow continued to fall quietly through the darkness, as bright and thick as static in the cones10 of light cast by the streetlights. By the time he rose and looked out the window, their car had become a soft white hill on the edge of the street. Already his footprints in the driveway had filled and disappeared.

　　He brushed ashes from his hands and sat on the sofa beside his wife, her feet propped11 on pillows, her swollen12 ankles crossed, a copy of Dr. Spock balanced on her belly13. Absorbed, she licked her index finger absently each time she turned a page. Her hands were slender, her fingers short and sturdy, and she bit her bottom lip lightly, intently, as she read. Watching her, he felt a surge of love and wonder: that she was his wife, that their baby, due in just three weeks, would soon be born. Their first child, this would be. They had been married just a year.

　　She looked up, smiling, when he tucked the blanket around her legs.

　　"You know, I've been wondering what it's like," she said. "Before we're born, I mean. It's too bad we can't remember." She opened her robe and pulled up the sweater she wore underneath14, revealing a belly as round and hard as a melon. She ran her hand across its smooth surface, firelight playing across her skin, casting reddish gold onto her hair. "Do you suppose it's like being inside a great lantern? The book says light-permeates my skin, that the baby can already see."

　　"I don't know," he said.

　　She laughed. "Why not?" she asked. "You're the doctor."

　　"I'm just an orthopedic（整形外科的） surgeon," he reminded her. "I could tell you the ossification15（骨化） pattern for fetal bones, but that's about it." He lifted her foot, both delicate and swollen inside the light blue sock, and began to massage16 it gently: the powerful tarsal bone of her heel, the metatarsals and the phalanges, hidden beneath skin and densely18 layered muscles like a fan about to open. Her breathing filled the quiet room, her foot warmed his hands, and he imagined the perfect, secret, symmetry of bones. In pregnancy19 she seemed to him beautiful but fragile, fine blue veins20 faintly visible through her pale white skin.

　　It had been an excellent pregnancy, without medical restrictions21. Even so, he had not been able to make love to her for several months. He found himself wanting to protect her instead, to carry her up flights of stairs, to wrap her in blankets, to bring her cups of custard. "I'm not an invalid," she protested each time, laughing. "I'm not some fledgling（无经验的人） you discovered on the lawn." Still, she was pleased by his attentions. Sometimes he woke and watched her as she slept: the flutter of her eyelids22, the slow even movement of her chest, her outflung hand, small enough that he could enclose it completely with his own.

　　She was eleven years younger than he was. He had first seen her not much more than a year ago, as she rode up an escalator in a department store downtown, one gray November Saturday while he was buying ties. He was thirty-three years old and new to Lexington, Kentucky, and she had risen out of the crowd like some kind of vision, her blond hair swept back in an elegant chignon, pearls glimmering23 at her throat and on her ears. She was wearing a coat of dark green wool, and her skin was clear and pale. He stepped onto the escalator, pushing his way upward through the crowd, struggling to keep her in sight. She went to the fourth floor, lingerie and hosiery. When he tried to follow her through aisles25 dense17 with racks of slips and brassieres and panties, all glimmering softly, a sales clerk in a navy blue dress with a white collar stopped him, smiling, to ask if she could help. A robe, he said, scanning the aisles until he caught sight of her hair, a dark green shoulder, her bent27 head revealing the elegant pale curve of her neck. A robe for my sister who lives in New Orleans. He had no sister, of course, or any living family that he acknowledged.

　　The clerk disappeared and came back a moment later with three robes in sturdy terry cloth. He chose blindly, hardly glancing down, taking the one on top. Three sizes, the clerk was saying, and a better selection of colors next month, but he was already in the aisle24, a coral-colored robe draped over his arm, his shoes squeaking28 on the tiles as he moved impatiently between the other shoppers to where she stood.

　　She was shuffling29 through the stacks of expensive stockings, sheer colors shining through slick cellophane windows: taupe, navy, a maroon30 as dark as pig's blood. The sleeve of her green coat brushed his and he smelled her perfume, something delicate and yet pervasive31, something like the dense pale petals32 of lilacs outside the window of the student rooms he'd once occupied in Pittsburgh. The squat33 windows of his basement apartment were always grimy, opaque34 with steel-factory soot35 and ash, but in the spring there were lilacs blooming, sprays of white and lavender pressing against the glass, their scent36 drifting in like light.

　　He cleared his throat—he could hardly breathe—and held up the terry cloth robe, but the clerk behind the counter was laughing, telling a joke, and she did not notice him. When he cleared his throat again she glanced at him, annoyed, then nodded at her customer, now holding three thin packages of stockings like giant playing cards in her hand.

　　"I'm afraid Miss Asher was here first," the clerk said, cool and haughty37.

　　Their eyes met then, and he was startled to see they were the same dark green as her coat. She was taking him in—the solid tweed overcoat, his face clean-shaven and flushed with cold, his trim fingernails. She smiled, amused and faintly dismissive, gesturing to the robe on his arm.

　　"For your wife?" she asked. She spoke38 with what he recognized as a genteel Kentucky accent, in this city of old money where such distinctions mattered. After just six months in town, he already knew this. "It's all right, Jean," she went on, turning back to the clerk. "Go on and take him first. This poor man must feel lost and awkward, in here with all the lace."

　　"It's for my sister," he told her, desperate to reverse the bad impression he was making. It had happened to him often here; he was too forward or direct and gave offense39. The robe slipped to the floor and he bent to pick it up, his face flushing as he rose. Her gloves were lying on the glass, her bare hands folded lightly next to them. His discomfort40 seemed to soften41 her, for when he met her eyes again, they were kind.

　　He tried again. "I'm sorry. I don't seem to know what I'm doing. And I'm in a hurry. I'm a doctor. I'm late to the hospital."

　　Her smiled changed then, grew serious.

　　Her smiled changed then, grew serious.

　　"I see," she said, turning back to the clerk. "Really, Jean, do take him first."

　　She agreed to see him again, writing her name and phone number in the perfect script she'd been taught in third grade, her teacher an ex-nun who had engraved42 the rules of penmanship in her small charges. Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect. Eight years old, pale and skinny, the woman in the green coat who would become his wife had clenched43 her small fingers around the pen and practiced cursive writing alone in her room, hour after hour, until she wrote with the exquisite44 fluidity of running water. Later, listening to that story, he would imagine her head bent beneath the lamplight, her fingers in a painful cluster around the pen, and he would wonder at her tenacity45, her belief in beauty and in the authoritative46 voice of the ex-nun. But on that day he did not know any of this. On that day he carried the slip of paper in the pocket of his white coat through one sickroom after another, remembering her letters flowing one into another to form the perfect shape of her name. He phoned her that same evening and took her to dinner the next night, and three months later they were married.

　　Now, in these last months of her pregnancy, the soft coral robe fit her perfectly47. She had found it packed away and had held it up to show him. But your sister died so long ago, she exclaimed, suddenly puzzled, and for an instant he had frozen, smiling, the lie from a year before darting48 like a dark bird through the room. Then he shrugged49, sheepish. / had to say something, he told her. I had to find a way to get your name. She smiled then, and crossed the room and embraced him.

　　The snow fell. For the next few hours, they read and talked. Sometimes she caught his hand and put it on her belly to feel the baby move. From time to time he got up to feed the fire, glancing out the window to see three inches on the ground, then five or six. The streets were softened50 and quiet, and there were few cars.

　　At eleven she rose and went to bed. He stayed downstairs, reading the latest issue ofThe Journal of'Bone andJoint Surgery. He was known to be a very good doctor, with a talent for diagnosis51 and a reputation for skillful work. He had graduated first in his class. Still, he was young enough and—though he hid it very carefully— unsure enough about his skills that he studied in every spare moment, collecting each success he accomplished53 as one more piece of evidence in his own favor. He felt himself to be an aberration54, born with a love for learning in a family absorbed in simply scrambling55 to get by, day to day. They had seen education as an unnecessary luxury, a means to no certain end. Poor, when they went to the doctor at all it was to the clinic in Morgantown, fifty miles away. His memories of those rare trips were vivid, bouncing in the back of the borrowed pickup56 truck, dust flying in their wake. The dancing road, his sister had called it, from her place in the cab with their parents. In Morgantown the rooms were dim, the murky57 green or turquoise58 of pond water, and the doctors had been hurried, brisk with them, distracted.

　　All these years later, he still had moments when he sensed the gaze of those doctors and felt himself to be an imposter, about to be unmasked by a single mistake. He knew his choice of specialties59 reflected this. Not for him the random60 excitement of general medicine or the delicate risky61 plumbing62 of the heart. He dealt mostly with broken limbs, sculpting63 casts and viewing X-rays, watching breaks slowly yet miraculously64 knit themselves back together. He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white heat of cremation65. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith in something so solid and predictable.

　　He read well past midnight, until the words shimmered66 senselessly on the bright white pages, and then he tossed the journal on the coffee table and got up to tend to the fire. He tamped67 the charred68 fire-laced logs into embers, opened the damper fully52, and closed the brass26 fireplace screen. When he turned off the lights, shards69 of fire glowed softly through layers of ash as delicate and white as the snow piled so high now on the porch railings and the rhododendron bushes.

　　The stairs creaked with his weight. He paused by the nursery door, studying the shadowy shapes of the crib and the changing table, the stuffed animals arranged on shelves. The walls were painted a pale sea green. His wife had made the Mother Goose quilt that hung on the far wall, sewing with tiny stitches, tearing out entire panels if she noted70 the slightest imperfection. A border of bears was stenciled71 just below the ceiling; she had done that too.

　　On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty72 hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued73 and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified74 and his voice somehow muffled75 by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed.

　　He stood there for a long time, until he heard her moving quietly. He found her sitting on the edge of their bed, her head bent, her hands gripping the mattress76.