They have never fought about it. “It’s your body,” her husband says, and means it. Only sometimes, when they’re out walking, a little girl will careen across their path roaring like a giggly tyrannosaurus, and he falls silent. “What’re you thinking about?” she asks, before she learns not to.
His voice goes soft, and he says, “About how cute a little you would be, roaring and stomping like a dinosaur.”
Inside her everything stops. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, like a reflex. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Eventually he learns not to answer, too.
• • • •
In autumn, baby season, she takes up running. While her friends are posting ultrasounds, tagging the grainy clouds with limbs and names, she flees up the city’s river-path into the silence.
Autumn is lonely along the ravine. Light fails early between the banks, and cold lingers over the water. Usually she sees no one.
But one night, as shadows flood the path, a man passes her at flying speed. No sound follows his dancing feet, and his haunches leap like a goat’s. On his head gleam two angles of moonlight.
Trying to see, she speeds up, but he’s already gone, slipped beneath the dusk, behind the wind.
At home, her husband has made dinner. Later they’ll spend the evening reading. She loves these quiet nights, their easy silences.
She says, “I saw a god on the river tonight. He had horns, was running fast. I couldn’t keep up.”
“Horns? Sounds like Pan.” He smiles carefully. “God of spring. New life.”
Her phone buzzes. Her friend has given birth: flushed and radiant, she sinks against the hospital pillows, a small red loaf at her chin.
As she swipes through the photos, inside, the panic clenches her stomach: never for me, never, never.
Beside her, her husband murmurs, “She looks so happy.”
• • • •
She has not always been this way. When they were first falling in love, and they wandered together in the summer dark of the ravine, she said, “I don’t know. Not now, but maybe later. I’ll probably change my mind.”
Some women do, she knows. Her mother, grandmother, both at the same age were tackled by the urge—suddenly, like being mugged. It terrifies her.
He smiled, squeezing her hand. “I’m unsure too. We’ll figure it out.”
Figuring it out: a conversation every month, at first, then every three, and now every six. They call it checking in. It always begins the same way:
“You haven’t changed your mind?” he asks.
“I’m sorry,” she replies. “I thought I would have, by now. I’m so sorry.”
“Please don’t apologize.”
They hug as he says this, chests clutched together, eyes carefully diverted.
She says, “But you want them.”
“Sometimes, yes. But I chose you.”
Their hug lingers, the pressure that replaces words when they can go no further. It always ends the same way, in this same unresolved silence.
Later, as they’re going to bed, she says, “I wish I could want them, for you.”
“Just be yourself,” he says sleepily. He kisses her forehead. “Love you.”
• • • •
After her friend gives birth, she begins running more often. To run feels like pursuing a goal, even if it always returns her to the same place. Her muscles crave the chemical accomplishment, the spent feeling that something has been decided.
As autumn sours into winter, the river-path grows too short. She follows it past its end, then up the ridge, continuing on asphalt. Warm light spills from the houses, its gleam puppeted with shadows: a toddler swooped into an airplane by her mother, chubby fingers smacking fogged glass.
Returning to the river, she flips on a headlamp. Above, black branches cup the path like fingers.
Every night Pan is there, running. He lopes soundlessly up out of the darkness, then passes her, leaves singing at his heels. She wonders why he lingers here through winter, this god of spring, of new life. No matter how hard she tries, she can never keep up.
Though that winter is fierce, she signs up for a 5k. Then a 10k. Then a half-marathon. She knows she is not fast enough, yet.
• • • •
Years ago, before they were married, she worked with a quiet man whose partner had just moved across the country. When she asked if they fought, his face fell. “No,” he said softly. “But she wanted kids. What else could we do?”
At home, she and her husband sit eating take-out together on the couch, watching a documentary about bats. She curls against his chest, smiling. With a chuckle he asks if she thought this was what married life would be like. She says, “Yes, exactly!”
“Oh,” he replies.
• • • •
As with all rituals, over the years the parts have become sublimated. What was once a thirty-minute check-in has contracted to ten. Ten to five. Five to a touch of glances. They both know their parts by heart. Maybe the ritual is more complete now that it happens on the inside.
It can’t last, she knows. People cannot sustain such tension; all conflicts reach their crisis. Life always catches up.
• • • •
As winter thaws, she signs up for a marathon. Grooves have scored her thighs like etchings. Her stomach pulls between her hips, white and taut as a drum.
“Are you all right?” her husband asks.
She smiles. “You have to be fast to beat a god.”
During the race, no one else can see Pan. He leaps before her, always out of reach, the race-tag scratching against his furred haunches.
When she hits the wall at mile twenty, she watches as he lopes beyond her, up the course, leaving hoofprints in the green pollen. In the last grueling six miles she launches off each print, as if, by matching his footsteps, she might match his pace.
By the time she reaches the finish line, he’s gone. There is only her husband, pitching forward to enfold her in a hug.
“I’m so proud of you,” he says.
He looks so happy.
• • • •
Her sister’s call comes on a wet spring morning, when she’s out running. As she skids to a stop on the mud, Pan passes her in a gust of rain. She has to shield her phone from his splatter as she answers.
When she reaches home, drenched and muddy, her husband is waiting in the car. A towel lines the passenger’s seat. He drives so fast it’s as if she’s the one in labor.
By the time they’re allowed in the delivery room, the nurses have wiped the sweat from her sister’s face and smoothed her hair. They have sopped the blood from the baby’s wrinkles, though his crunched face still reddens to yell. Her sister touches her lips to his bonnet, smiling.
After her parents have held the baby, it’s her turn. As she lays him awkwardly along her forearm, she can feel her husband watching her.
Their eyes meet. Beneath the bustle of the delivery room, the ritual cycles.
“Let me get a picture of the new aunt!” her father says. “Good practice, eh?”
She winces, smiling just in time for the phone’s flash. Her husband’s eyes fall. But he frowns at her father, just slightly.
In the car going home, she grips the steering wheel. Pan is nowhere to be seen. Maybe she passed him on the rainy freeway; maybe the crisis has finally come.
“I don’t know why you don’t leave me,” she says abruptly, into the rain. “Just get it over with.”
He does not look at her. “What am I supposed to say to that?”
“I don’t know. But if you stay with me you’ll always be unhappy.”
“In one way. But I’m happy with the rest of my life.”
“Is that enough?” They both know it means, am I enough.
His voice is hurt, will always be hurt. “I chose you.”
They drive the rest of the way home in silence. They’ve checked in.
• • • •
Summer returns. In the ravine, leaden air gags her lungs. She runs slower.
Sometimes on weekends, she flees with her husband to the neighborhood pool. Among a sea of wiry ten-year-olds, they wait in line for inner tubes. Her husband grins, setting his tube to whirl like a top on the water.
Through her evenings Pan leaps, god of new life, all life. He has slowed his pace to accommodate her, so that as she toils up the river-path he remains always ahead, just out of reach.
“Haven’t caught him yet?” her husband asks when she returns, soaked in sweat. She shakes her head.
He smiles carefully. “Maybe during your next race. Hey, your sister posted some new photos. Want to see?”
She cranes her neck over his shoulder, looking.
“He has her eyes,” her husband says.
For an instant the check-in shivers between them, a pause in the breath, a pulse of tension. But he does not turn, and she does not reply. They keep swiping through the photos.
Between them life runs on, uncatchable.