When I’d told him, Daniel was even more pissed than I was. He was fiercely protective of the twins, and me, too, for that matter.
“And adults,” Hanna said. “Adults can be very cruel.”
“Agreed.”
I felt a moment of kinship with her that I hadn’t felt since Leah and I had said good-bye after our last run together. Leah and I had only talked once since I’d left, and exchanged a few errant texts. How had I not felt the loss of that friendship more keenly? We used to talk every day. She knew everything about my life. I was lonely, I realized. I needed to reach out.
“Anyway,” Hanna said, “he’s kind of heartbroken, poor puppy. I should go.”
“Thanks so much for the cake.”
“You can toss it in the trash if you want to.”
She turned to walk away. I spoke from instinct.
“We should get a coffee sometime. Or a drink?”
She turned back, her scarf wiping across her face. “I’d like that.”
Ten days before Christmas, I stood with half-frozen feet at the children’s playground in Eden Park. It was next to a lookout over the Ohio River, a sunken circle lined with cedar chips and containing a row of swings and a rock-retaining wall Sam liked to climb. On a clear day, I could see far into Kentucky as I kept half an eye on the twins.
The twins, oblivious to the cold, were swinging on the creaky swings in a way that always made me nervous. They pumped their legs hard and swung so high, heedless of the danger.
That’s how you go through life when you’re six.
Fearless.
I often wished I could be that way, that I didn’t see the dangers hovering around me, my children, my family, that I could throw away the lanyard around my neck and leave my front door unlocked.
A normal life, I thought. That’s what a normal life would look like.
It was coming up on Christmas break, which would arrive at an unwelcome moment. I’d finally found some momentum in Book Two—23,298 words written, yeah!—and my deadline felt like it might be obtainable. The characters were so clear in my mind that I had to stop writing half an hour early each day so I could be sure I was present enough to focus on the circuitous drive to the twins’ school. Two and a half months in Cincinnati and I was still getting lost on the way to Walnut Hills, where their Catholic private school was located.
I’d also learned the hard way when I was writing The Book that if I didn’t leave myself some time to transition between the real world and the one in my head, bad things could happen. A seat belt left undone or a failure to check a blind spot. Nothing had ever come of these lapses, thank God, but each time I’d caught myself committing one of them, I was left shaken and sick.
The truth was, I hadn’t wanted to be a mother, not when it happened, maybe not ever.
I know that sounds awful, but I had a whole other life planned for myself with Daniel.
After too many aimless years in Tacoma, I’d finally found something like a purpose. We were saving up. When we had enough put aside, we were going to buy a boat and sail the Great Lakes in preparation for doing something more adventurous like the Caribbean or the Med. On the weekends, we’d take out a boat at the Tacoma Yacht Club—Daniel’s parents were members—and sail around Point Defiance Park looking for orcas. We’d eat seafood caught off the boat, slathered in garlic and butter, and then we’d make love below deck, moving in time to the sway.
I’ve made it sound better than it probably was. Memory does that—brightens some things and washes out others. But we had a plan, and that plan changed the day a plus sign appeared on the stick after two minutes of anxious pacing. A plus sign—an unsubtle symbol that meant I was supposed to think something was going to be added to my life, but it didn’t feel like that, not at first, and certainly not when I found out I was having twins.
That began to change the moment they started kicking. And when I held them in my arms for the first time and they suckled my breasts and looked up at me with wonder, I pushed the doubt aside and never thought of it again.
They were an addition to my life, the best addition, and this life wasn’t better or worse than what I’d imagined, it was just different. It was bigger and smaller and brighter and darker, and I certainly got way less sleep.
But on the days I caught myself behaving erratically, recklessly, putting their lives in danger, I couldn’t help but question myself.
Was some subconscious part of me trying to make something happen?
Spin my life onto some other track?
“You quit it! You quit it right now or you’re going to get a smack!”
My head snapped around in time to catch a hand rising, flashing through the air and landing on the backside of a kid about the twins’ age. The sound reached me a moment later, muted because it landed against the boy’s hands, already protecting his rear end from what he knew was coming.
I was shocked—not because I hadn’t wanted to give the twins a smack now and then when no amount of time-outs would achieve acceptable behavior—but because it was in the park, in public, where anyone could see.
The child was wailing at the woman’s feet, yelling, “Mom, you hurt me!”
I had one of those moments where I pull out of myself like I’m watching a movie.
I knew what happened in that movie. One of the shocked and chattering mothers on the other side of the swing set would pull out their phone and make a call. The cops would show up. They would arrest this mother. She would spend the next two years fighting for custody of her children.
I’d seen a whole thing about it on the Today show.
But instead, she took three quick, deep breaths and looked up at me as if she knew I was there all along.
“Please tell me you’re a bad mother, too,” she said.
“I’m the worst.”
I convinced the woman—her name was Susan Thurgood, and she lived down the block from us—to wait for me to collect the twins and follow me to the Bow Tie Cafe. I got the kids hot chocolates piled high with whipped cream, and pumpkin-spice chai lattes for us, a concoction I’d discovered a couple of weeks before when I’d needed to get out of the house to clear my head, and ended up stopping at the café because I was freezing. I’d been so delighted with it, I’d actually taken out my phone and posted a picture to Facebook with the caption BEST. DRINK. EVER., thinking, My publicist will be so pleased. (And when I checked, hours later, I was pleased, too; 485 Likes and no nasty comments. A miracle.)
The twins and Susan’s seven-year-old son, Nicholas, consumed their drinks in relative silence. They were in that lull before the sugar high sets in, a glazed look in their eyes I used to call “crack baby” when the twins were breast-feeding. (Yes, it is a miracle my children weren’t taken away from me by Children’s Services.) Susan, on the other hand, who’d been so composed at the park when I would’ve been a mess, started crying two sips into her chai.
“I’m so ashamed,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin. She had shoulder-length auburn hair—darker at the roots—and green-gray eyes. I liked how she kept her hair longer than most moms I knew. I hated how often women cut off their hair as soon as they had children, as if it were required to enter the priesthood. Or sisterhood. Or whatever.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.
“I did. You know I did. And it isn’t the first time . . . ever since I kicked Brad out”—her voice shuddered—“I haven’t been able to stop myself from giving Nicholas a spanking when he acts up.”
“It’s not illegal.”
“I know, but I don’t believe in it.”
“Look, maybe it’s not ideal, but . . . how many kids do you have?”
“Three,” she said as if she couldn’t quite believe it.
“Where are the others?” I was worried we might’ve left them at the park. It was something I could imagine myself doing.
“At a friend’s house.”
“Three is a lot to handle on your own.” I stole a glanc
e at Nicholas, who was eating the leftover whipped cream in his cup with an index finger. Sam started to reach for Nicholas’s cup. I stopped his hand and took a coloring packet out of my bag.
“You can share this,” I said sternly to Melly and Sam. “But if you start fighting, we are leaving immediately.”
They muttered their Yes, Moms and slipped to the floor.
“It’s awful dirty down there,” Susan said. “Says the woman who just slapped her kid in public.”
“Spanked. Slapped sounds so . . .”
“Criminal?”
“Serious, is what I was going to say.” I looked down at the kids. “I told you, I am a bad mother. I do not believe in Purell, and the five-second rule in my house is more like ten.”
“Five-second rule?”
“You know, if someone drops something on the floor, it’s okay to eat it if it’s only been there for . . .”
Her face was blank. I started to think this was all a terrible idea.
Then she burst out laughing. “Oh, God, sorry, I couldn’t resist. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.”
“Rough week?”
“Things have been rough ever since . . . do you speak French, by any chance?”
“I do, actually. I went to law school in Montreal. Why?”
“Nicholas’s father,” she said slowly in perfectly clear French, “is an alcoholic. He wouldn’t go to treatment, so that’s why I asked him to leave.”
“Mon dieu.”
“Indeed. But his son doesn’t need to know that.”
“We’re learning French in school,” Nicholas said. “Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq.”
“That’s very good, honey,” Susan said, not looking pleased. “Why don’t you color on the floor with the twins?”
His face lit up. He looked like he was about to question his good fortune, then thought better of it and slid from his chair.
I told the twins to share. They nodded. Melly gave him a crayon.
“Quelle horreur,” Susan said. “I’m going to have to learn a new language so I can speak without being understood.”
“Are you saying you actually learned French for that purpose?”
“Pretty much. I knew a bit from high school, but when his older sister was a baby and I was up late at night, I had these language tapes—you know, Berlitz?—and that’s how I really learned.”
“That’s genius.”
“You think so? My husband—ex—, Brad, thought it was weird. He doesn’t speak French, so all it meant was that I could speak to myself without being understood. And that might be our whole marriage right there, in a nutshell.”
“I’m not sure what to say to that.”
“Nothing to say, really. Hey, did that girl just take your picture?”
My head whipped around. A woman with her hair tucked up in a baseball cap was hurrying through the exit. Bile rose in my throat.
“Did you see what she looked like?”
“No, sorry, I . . .”
“Can you watch the twins for a second?”
“Sure.”
I leaped up, grabbing my phone. I ran out of the coffee shop, looking left then right. I couldn’t see her. The street was filled with lunchtime traffic. A gap opened up in the crowd. I thought I saw a baseball cap and started running up the hill.
“Heather! Stop.”
People turned to stare as I pushed through the crowd. The woman in the baseball cap was running, too, but I was faster, more determined. I caught her at the crest of the hill and slapped my hand down on her shoulder.
“Hey!” she said, and even before she turned, I knew it wasn’t her. Heather’s voice was much deeper.
“What the hell, lady?”
She was younger than Heather, too. A teenager who looked nothing like her. Nothing.
“I thought you were someone else.”
“Hey, wait. Aren’t you that kid’s mom? That Melly kid?”
“What, I . . .” It was Ashley. The girl who was supposed to be babysitting at the November block party. The girl who apparently broke John’s son’s heart. How could I possibly confuse her with Heather? “Were you taking a picture of me back in that coffee shop?”
“Of you? No. The coffee shop.”
“Why?”
“It’s for an art project. What do you care?”
“Forget it. Sorry.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I said I was sorry.”
I turned to walk back down the hill. I heard her mutter, “Crazy bitch.”
And what could I say?
Because that about summed me up right there, in a nutshell.
Password Protected
John
Ten months ago
I’ve heard that men are supposed to feel emasculated when they lose their jobs.
Breadwinner.
Man of the house.
Blah, blah, blah.
Me? When I got over the sting of being singled out in the first place, I felt joy.
I’d hated my job at P&G for as long as I held it. Basic IT work, adding levels of security to our network. Making sure people weren’t downloading porn or trading sexy texts with their office phones. Some of the guys in the department got off on that stuff, acting like they were NSA agents when they were really just gossips and snoops. Things only got interesting the couple times we’d been hacked by competitors looking for new product-development information. But even that had its limits.
How excited can one get about the latest formulation for earth-friendly shampoo?
Hanna was the one who loved her job. Who was anxious to get to work on Mondays. Who didn’t mind having to work nights and weekends when she was in trial. She loved puzzles, and that’s what her cases were to her. A large puzzle to put together, a piece at a time, until the picture looked like she thought it should. We were lucky, too, that as a partner she made good money and had great health insurance. So the fact that I was unlikely to find another job immediately didn’t mean financial ruin.
Once I got past the sticky moment of telling Hanna about it the morning after the block party, I spent the next couple of weeks doing all the shit around the house I’d let accumulate. Cleaning windows and tightening doorknobs. Replacing the burned-out lights in the kitchen that were difficult to reach. I brought Becky to get the cast off her leg, taking her to Graeter’s for ice cream after, even though it wasn’t ice cream weather. I raked all the leaves, cleaned out the gutters, and gave the lawn one last mow. Before the ground froze, I planted tulip and daffodil bulbs in the garden, something we’d talked about doing for years. Then I scraped the peeling paint off our front door. Sanded it down and repainted it a matte black that set off the shiny new address numbers I screwed into it.
Chris helped me with some of it on weekends and after school. By the time the third week of December rolled around, we’d strung Christmas lights on the front-door frame and wound them through the railing. He helped me pick out a wreath and a tree. The whole family spent an evening placing Christmas ornaments and tinsel on it, while Hanna’s favorite Christmas-carol CD played in the background.
But then a funny thing happened. When the tree was done and we stood back to look at it in all its tinseled glory, Hanna said, “I don’t think the house has looked this good since we inherited it from Aunt Wilma. There isn’t a thing left to do.”
She said that, and I felt the joy seep out of my body. Because she was right. There wasn’t anything left to do. And now, a whole lot of life stretched out in front of me.
A blank space I had no idea how to fill.
I spent the next two days glued to the Internet. Trying to come up with some kind of job possibility to rid myself of the panic. How did women stay at home with their kids all day? How had Hanna?
I remembered the wild-eyed look she sometimes had when I came home when she was on maternity leave. Especially after Becky was born and she had both of them all day. I thought it was because the kids were running her ragged
. She told me, years later, that it was the lack of adult interaction that was really driving her nuts. All those hours with nursery rhymes, and Barney, and primary-colored blocks. She wasn’t built for it. She had a sneaking suspicion no woman really was, only no one ever wanted to admit it.
Now I knew how she felt. Yet, on the last day before the Christmas school holidays began, when the kids would be tumbling about the house all day, it felt like the last day of something for me, too. I both hated and craved the solitude being at home afforded me. Like those minutes at the window in the morning: me and my coffee and the view. The solitude was something that belonged only to me. Something rare in a shared life.
Regardless, I kept telling myself, it wasn’t going to last for long.
I was in the middle of filling out a job application for a position at another personal-care company when our Wi-Fi went on the fritz. It had been doing that frequently, and I couldn’t source the problem. I turned the router off and on, then clicked to connect to a Wi-Fi network. My own wasn’t there, but there was one I hadn’t seen before, an unsecured one called “50/50.” I clicked on it out of curiosity, and it let me access it. I realized pretty quickly it was the Prentices’. A few more keystrokes brought me to their shared hard drive and an unorganized list of documents. The usual mishmash of stuff was there but also, tantalizingly, something called Book Two.
Without thinking about what I was doing, I opened it. I got an alert from Word that it was read-only because someone else on the network had it open, but I started reading anyway.
Whoever else had it open would be none the wiser.
“Did you want to come in?” Julie asked me, twenty minutes later. After my conscience kicked in and I closed the document, I’d slung on my coat and loped across the street to tell her that her network wasn’t secure. She should do something about it before someone saw something they shouldn’t.
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