“Kelly?”
I was wrong,
she thought. So wrong. “It’s much harder,” she said. Her voice was flat. Amy Mayhew was staring at her. Kelly cleared her throat, dislodging another bit of lavender fluff. “This is so much harder than I ever thought it would be.” She cleared her throat. “Because, the thing is, even if you’re just working part-time, your boss is going to expect a full week’s worth of work, no matter how understanding she is. That’s just the nature of the working world—things have to get done, babies or not. And if you’re like me—if you’re like any woman who ever did well in school and did well at her job—you don’t want to disappoint a boss. And you want to do a good job raising your baby.” She shoved up her sleeves. “It’s not like you think it’s going to be.”
Amy Mayhew looked professionally sympathetic. “How is it different?”
“Babies need you. They need you all the time, unless they’re sleeping, and if you’re lucky they’ll nap for an hour, tops, and then you have to decide what you want to do with that time. Do you want to do work? Return phone calls? Empty the dishwasher? Take a shower? Pump breast milk for the feedings when you’re not going to be home? You usually wind up doing five things at once.”
“Multitasking,” Amy Mayhew said with a nod.
“Yeah. Multitasking,” she said. “So you wind up calling clients back while you’re hooked up to the breast pump, only you can’t take notes because you’re using one arm to hold the phone and the other one to hold the cups in place. Or you sit your baby on your lap and read him event proposals in the same voice you use to read
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
and hope he doesn’t notice the difference. And you eat a lot of take-out. And you don’t get much sleep.”
Kelly paused for breath, not much liking Amy Mayhew’s expression, which was beginning to look a lot like pity.
“What about your husband?” Amy Mayhew asked. “Does he help?”
The word
husband
snapped Kelly back to reality…or, rather, back to the false reality she was trying to perpetrate upon the unsuspecting readers of
Power
magazine.
“Well, he’s very busy,” she began. “He travels…”
“Do you mind if I stick this in here? Just to get it out of the way for the pictures?” The photographer was holding his jacket and gesturing toward the closet, the one where Kelly had stuffed six months’ worth of clutter: newspapers, magazines, a half-empty box of diapers that Oliver had outgrown, Steve’s golf clubs, the sandals she hadn’t worn in months, Lemon’s dog food and chew toys, a garbage bag full of baby clothes, a shoebox full of unsorted photographs, library books, one single pathetic-looking half-deflated
IT’S A BOY
! balloon…
“Oh, wait!” In slow motion, Kelly saw him reaching for the handle. She set Oliver down on the floor and got to her feet, but she wasn’t fast enough. There was a low rumble as the door slid open and then, in the blink of an eye, her life had avalanched down onto the freshly vacuumed floor.
“Oops,” said the photographer, as the cascade continued (a six-month free trial disc from AOL, a rubber-banded stack of unpaid bills, a broken pair of sunglasses, a copy of Dr. Ferber’s
Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems,
a copy of Dr. Sears’s
The No-Cry Sleep Solution,
a copy of Dr. Mindell’s
Sleeping Through the Night
). “Oh, man, I’m sorry,” David said.
“Don’t worry! No problem!” Kelly started shoving things back into the closet, but the more she pushed, the more stuff came pouring out (two copies of
Philadelphia Chickens,
three copies of
Where the Wild Things Are,
the ridiculously ugly knitted afghan from Mary that she didn’t have the heart to chuck or give away, a box of breast pads, a can of powdered formula). She bent down, breathing hard, pushing with her feet, scooping with her arms. It wasn’t doing any good. For every single thing she managed to put back onto the shelf or squeeze onto the floor, there were three more things waiting to take its place. And either she was imagining a loud clicking sound, or this whole thing—including her bent-over butt, encased, more or less, in a skirt with a gaping zipper—was being photographed for posterity. She finally straightened up, blowing wisps of hair off her sweaty face. “Let’s just leave it.”
Small potatoes,
she told herself, walking away from the detritus of the last six months of her life. “It’s small potatoes,” she said out loud, thinking about her friends. A baby who died, a baby who was sick, a husband who was cheating, those were all big deals. A messy closet and an undermotivated spouse? No big deal.
Then Oliver started to cry again, and Lemon was barking, and the front door opened, and Steve walked in, dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt, stubble on his chin, hair curling over his collar, with a puzzled look on his face and his arms full of discounted diapers.
“Kelly?”
No. Oh, no.
“You must be Steve!” Amy Mayhew said cheerfully.
He nodded, staring at the two of them. “And where’s your baby?” he asked.
Amy laughed dismissively. “Oh, no, no, no baby for me!”
Steve’s forehead furrowed as he looked at Kelly. “What’s going on?”
Lie, lie, think of a lie.
“You’re back early!”
“Yeah, Sam’s Club didn’t have half the stuff you wanted, so I thought I’d just come home and say hi to everyone.”
“We thought you were out of town!” said Amy.
“Huh?” said Steve. He looked at his wife. Kelly swallowed hard.
“This is Amy Mayhew and David Winters. They’re from
Power
magazine.”
Steve stared at them, his forehead wrinkled.
“They’re here to talk to me,” Kelly said.
“About what?” he asked.
She plastered her very best good-girl smile to her face and prayed with all her heart.
Cover for me,
she thought.
If you ever loved me at all, cover for me.
“Work and family,” she said. “Having it all.”
“Oh,” he said, repeating it slowly. “Having it all.”
“I told you, remember?” she said, feeling desperate. “I know I mentioned this. You must have forgotten. He’s so busy,” she explained to Amy and David.
“Well, he must be,” Amy Mayhew said. “Consulting’s hard work.”
Steve stared at his wife.
Consulting?
she could practically hear him think.
Please,
she begged him telepathically.
Please just go away.
“I’ll be in the office,” he said. He turned on his heel, stepped over the mess spilling out of the closet as if he didn’t even see it, and stalked out of the room.
“Steve, wait!” Her fingertips brushed his sleeve as he moved past her. “Will you excuse me?” Kelly said to David and Amy, and then she ran down the hall, put the baby in his crib, and hurried to the bedroom. Steve was standing in front of the closet in the bedroom. There was already a suitcase open on the bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh, gee, I don’t know. I guess I’m consulting. If that’s what you’re telling people these days,” he said.
“Well, what was I supposed to say?” she hissed. “That you’re unemployed? How do you think that would have looked in print?”
“You know what? I really don’t care. You’re the one who’s so big on appearances,” he said, gathering shirts and jeans from the floor where he’d left them.
“Steve…”
He glared at her, then crossed the room to the dresser, taking handfuls of underwear and undershirts, the ones Kelly picked up off the floor or fished out from underneath the sheets, the ones she washed, dried, folded, and replaced in the drawers.
What does he think?
she remembered asking Becky.
That there’s a Boxer Fairy who flies around magically replacing his underwear every night?
“All right, you know what? Go on, then,” she said. “Call me when you’ve got a new number. Or, better yet, call me when you’ve got a new job. I don’t think I’ll hold my breath.”
“Go back to your interview,” he said, snatching more clothes off of the floor. “Why don’t you just tell them you’re a single mother?”
“I might as well be!” she yelled, pushing herself between his body and the bed. “For all the help I get from you, I might as well be a single mother! Do you think I wanted to go back to work twelve weeks after our baby was born?”
“For the hundredth time, Kelly, you didn’t have to go back to work. You went back to work because you wanted to. And if you’d let me help—”
“If I let you help, you drop the baby!” she shouted. “If I let you help, you tell me his diaper’s dry when it’s wet, and you tell me he doesn’t need to burp when he does, and I did need to go back to work!”
“No,” he said, in a maddening singsong voice, as if he were speaking to a stupid child. “No, you didn’t.”
“I did because I didn’t want to burn through all our savings!” she shouted. “Because, unlike you, I’ve got a problem with sitting on my ass all day long! You know what,” she said, “I wish I were a single mother! Because single mothers don’t have to pick up their husbands’ dirty dishes and empty beer bottles every night. Single mothers don’t have to wash anyone else’s laundry, or pick up anyone’s messes, or, or put the toilet seat down at night because their husbands can’t be bothered to remember—”
“Keep your voice down,” he hissed.
“…because they’re too busy watching soap operas!”
He jerked as if she’d slapped him.
“Oh, yeah, I know all about that. Do you think I wouldn’t notice that suddenly TiVo’s taping every episode of
As the World Turns
?”
“That’s not me!” he yelled. “I watched it once, and the stupid machine started taping on its own!”
“Yeah, right,” Kelly said. “I’m out working, doing all the shopping, all the laundry, all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the everything…”
“…not because you had to.”
She ignored him. “I’m raising our son single-handedly except for the ten minutes a day you stop surfing the Internet long enough to read him one lousy book, and I…DO…EVERYTHING! And I’m tired!” She yanked hard at the hem of her sweater, which was riding up over her midriff. “I’m so tired.”
“So take a break!” he yelled. “Take a break! Take a nap! Quit your job! Or don’t!” He threw his hands in the air. “You want to have it all, you go right ahead.”
“I can’t take a break,” she said, as she started to cry. “You don’t understand. I
can’t.
Because then what? What if you never start working again? What happens when we don’t have any money left? What happens to us then?”
“Kelly…” He was staring at her, his expression somewhere between puzzled and…what was that look? She knew it in an instant. It was the same look Scott Schiff, her once-upon-a-time boyfriend, had given her when they’d pulled into her driveway in Ocean City. Pity. “Nothing’s going to happen to us.” He reached for her and pulled her against him, and she let herself lean into him, she let herself close her eyes. “What are you talking about? We’ve got plenty of money. I’ve told you that a million times…”
“Not enough,” she said and wiped her face again. “It’s never enough.”
“It’s plenty.”
“You don’t understand.” She pushed him away and wiped her face with one of the T-shirts on the bed. “You don’t understand me at all.”
“Then let me.” He reached out his arms for her, fingers spread wide. “Tell me. Talk to me.”
She shook her head. In high school, all eight of the O’Haras had been eligible for donated uniforms and free lunches. But to get your free lunch, you had to give the cafeteria lady a yellow ticket instead of the red one that kids paid for. On her first day of ninth grade, Mary had taken away her yellow ticket, torn it up, and shoved a can of Diet Coke into her hand. “Drink this,” Mary had told her. “We don’t need anybody’s handouts.” For years, she’d lived by that code, making her own way, paying her own fare.
We don’t need anybody’s handouts…
and she had ended up married to a man who was collecting unemployment, spending days on the couch, and proposing they live off their savings.
“I made a mistake,” she whispered, wiping her eyes again. “I made a mistake with you.”
“No,” he said and shook his head, “no, Kelly, you didn’t…”
“I made a mistake,” she said again. “Please go.” She wiped her eyes again and walked out the bedroom door, back toward her perfect living room, and the perfect nursery where her perfect baby waited, back into the life that looked almost exactly the way she’d pictured it and felt nothing like how she’d imagined.
She carried Oliver into the living room. Amy and David were sitting on her couch, their faces so carefully blank that she couldn’t tell—and didn’t care—whether they’d heard every word or nothing at all.
Sam had told me that I didn’t have to meet him at the airport. “It’s not a big deal. I can just take a cab.”
“No,” I said, feeling a sob rise in my throat at the sound of his familiar, faintly Texan voice. I just wanted to press the phone to my ear and listen to him forever. But I wanted to make a gesture, to give him a sign. I wanted to be there when he got to Philadelphia. I walked to Thirtieth Street Station, then took a train to the airport, an hour ahead of time. I paced back and forth in front of the baggage claim, thinking wistfully about the days before 9/11, when you could go right to the gate and greet someone you loved.
Time crawled by. I watched people walk by, old women in wheel-chairs, students with backpacks, frazzled-looking families pushing metal carts with teetering stacks of luggage. One family went past me with twins in a stroller and a baby, a newborn, riding on his father’s chest. When the mother caught me staring, I smiled at her. “Have a good trip,” I said. I could see the dark circles under her eyes, the way her hair had been dragged into a haphazard ponytail, how she was moving like her bones ached.
I remember that,
I thought.
“I’ll try,” she said. And then they were gone, and I felt a tap on my shoulder, and there was Sam.
“Hey.” At the sound of his voice, my blood felt warmer, my skin, too, as if I’d been cold and hadn’t noticed and someone had finally come along and offered me a sweater.
“Sam!”
“Shh,” he said, giving me a cockeyed smile. “Don’t want to start a riot.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. He held me out at arm’s length, inspecting me. “So here you are.”
“Here I am.”
And here he was, taller than I’d remembered, broad shouldered in his fleece-lined jacket, a knitted cap pulled down low on his forehead, the star-shaped scar in the middle of his chin from where he’d wiped out on his Big Wheel when he was five. I looked at his forehead, where the homeless lady had thrown an apple, then down at his hands, which had helped ease our son out of my body.
Congratulations, Dad,
the nurses had said, and Sam had bent down to kiss my forehead, resting his lips against me without saying a word.
I felt weak-kneed as he lifted a lock of my hair between his fingers and studied it underneath the airport’s bright lights.
“You changed your hair.”
I shrugged. “Well, it kind of changed on me. That’s what happens when you don’t stay on top of your highlights.”
“You mean…” He placed his hand against his heart. “You’re not a natural blonde?”
I felt myself blushing—blushing over such a silly thing. And over all the other things I’d told him that hadn’t been true. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“I’ll get over it. Somehow. It’s pretty.” He shrugged and slung his bag over his shoulder. “There are enough blondes in Hollywood already.”
“I…” My hands and knees were shaking. There were a million things I wanted to ask him.
Are you all right?
and
Do you forgive me?
and
Do you understand why I left, why I had to?
And, of course,
Do you want me back?
But all I could manage was. “There’s a train back into the city.”
“Nah. We ride in style. I ordered us a car.”
“Really?” I wanted to link my arm through his, to hug him or hold his hand, but I wasn’t sure whether I had the right to do it yet or whether I ever would again. I might have looked different, but, to me, Sam looked the way he always had, tanned and strong and sure of himself. “That was nice.”
“Don’t thank me, thank the network. I told them I’d stop by the affiliate and say hello, and they were only too happy to pay for the trip. Plane tickets, car and driver, hotel room at…” He paused to pull a folder of tickets out of his back pocket and consult a scrap of paper he’d tucked in there. “The Rittenhouse Hotel. Do you know where that is?”
I took a deep breath. “It’s right down the street from my apartment.”
“Ah,” he said. That was all he said. I looked at his familiar face and tried to figure out what he was feeling.
Angry,
I thought, as my heart sank.
God, he must be so angry at me. To lose a son and a wife in less than a month…
“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing how completely inadequate the words were.
He shrugged a little. His eyes were opaque, unreadable.
“Do you want to,” I started to say. Then I stopped. I wondered about where he was living, whether he’d moved or whether he’d stayed in the place where Caleb had lived, right down the hall from where he died and I felt my heart breaking for him. For my son. For all of us.
The driver, in a cap and dark coat, held a clipboard with the words
JAMES KIRK
. Sam held the door for me, then slid in beside me, and we pulled away from the curb.
“Nice alias,” I said.
He nodded. “Now, what were you trying to ask me?”
There were a lot of things I wanted to ask—will you stay with me had been on top of the list—but what came out of my mouth was, “Do you still love me?”
“Oh,” he said. And then I was in his arms, tight against him, and the smell of his soap and his skin were all around me, and I could hear his heart. “Oh, Lia.” I reached for his hands, wanting to hold them in mine…and wanting to answer a question. He was still wearing his wedding ring. I could feel it against my fingertips. So there was that, then. At least there was that.
“You’re Caleb’s mother,” he said. “I’ll always love you because of that.” He stroked my head again. “And the new hair’s pretty hot.”
I kissed his cheeks, his lips, his forehead, his hair underneath the cap. He held me tight.
“So you disappear for nine months, then crook your finger and have me come running?” he muttered into my hair. “Is this some radical version of playing hard to get?”
Words came tumbling into my mouth, but I kept them there. I slid into his lap, and I kissed him some more.
He pulled away to stare at me. “You missed me, then, I guess.” His voice was breathless, almost panting, and I could feel him tremble as he held me. We hadn’t made love since Caleb had died. We’d tried, once, one night when neither one of us could sleep, but we’d both wound up crying and lost our good intentions.
“I missed you so much,” I said, before bending my head to kiss him again. “So much.”
He pressed a button, and a plate of smoked glass slid up between us and the driver. “Don’t want to cause a scene,” he said, fumbling at my jacket, my sweater, my scarf. “All these clothes. My goodness. These East Coast boys must have a terrible time.”
“No East Coast boys,” I whispered. “Only you.” I leaned back, and with one swift motion pulled my jacket and my sweater off and over my head. I felt my heart race as he looked at me.
“Very helpful,” he said. “Here, let me…” He unbuttoned his own shirt. His fingers were shaking. His skin was so hot. “Come here,” he said, pulling me against him. “I need to feel you.”
I lifted myself off of his lap and yanked my jeans and underwear down to my knees. I gasped as I felt his fingers against me. I wanted to say something about how I’d waited for him, how I’d thought about him, how there hadn’t been anyone else, but then he was lifting me in his arms, holding me as if I weighed nothing until we fitted together like pieces of a puzzle. We rocked together, slowly at first, then faster and faster…
“Sir?” came the driver’s voice over the intercom. I looked out the window, seeing the trees and storefronts and sidewalks.
“We’re there,” I whispered.
“Just keep driving!” Sam gasped. I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing. “Just go…somewhere!”
The car stopped. Then the turn signal clicked and we were rolling again, and I rocked on top of him, my hands gripping his shoulders, looking into his eyes, slowly at first, and then faster, as our breath turned the windows gray. “Oh,” said Sam. His eyelids fluttered. “Oh.”
At the last moment, the last instant when he could find breath enough and control to ask, I heard him whisper the question in my ear. “Is it safe?”
I could have told him that nothing was safe and that no matter how careful you were and how hard you tried, there were still accidents, hidden traps, and snares. You could get killed on an airplane or crossing the street. Your marriage could fall apart when you weren’t looking; your husband could lose his job; your baby could get sick or die. I could have said that nothing is safe, that the surface of the world is pretty and sane, but underneath it’s all fault lines and earthquakes waiting to happen. Instead I just whispered the word “yes” into his ear. A minute later, he was groaning a word I couldn’t make out. And then everything was quiet except for the sound of our breath.