by Zoe Fishman
Dedication
For my father, who taught me to never give up.
Ethan Michael Fishman
July 13, 1944–February 20, 2019
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One: Sylvie
Chapter Two: Teddy
Chapter Three: Paul
Chapter Four: Sylvie
Chapter Five: Teddy
Chapter Six: Paul
Chapter Seven: Sylvie
Chapter Eight: Teddy
Chapter Nine: Paul
Chapter Ten: Sylvie
Chapter Eleven: Teddy
Chapter Twelve: Paul
Chapter Thirteen: Sylvie
Chapter Fourteen: Teddy
Chapter Fifteen: Paul
Chapter Sixteen: Sylvie
Chapter Seventeen: Teddy
Chapter Eighteen: Sylvie
Chapter Nineteen: Paul
Chapter Twenty: Teddy
Chapter Twenty-One: Sylvie
Chapter Twenty-Two: Teddy
Chapter Twenty-Three: Sylvie
Chapter Twenty-Four: Paul
Chapter Twenty-Five: Teddy
Chapter Twenty-Six: Sylvie
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Teddy
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Paul
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Sylvie
Chapter Thirty: Teddy
Chapter Thirty-One: Sylvie
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
About the Book
Read On
Praise
Also by Zoe Fishman
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
Sylvie
Sylvie opened her bleary eyes and stared at the ceiling. Beside her, her husband, Paul, snored intermittently, his broken ankle wrapped in its dirty, beige cast. It was still dark outside, but a lone bird had begun to tweet, signaling morning’s imminent arrival.
She dreaded this day every year because of the memories that arrived alongside it, landing with an ominous thud right in the center of her chest. Three years out, and it didn’t get any easier to see it approaching on Teddy’s school calendar, which hung lopsided on the side of the stainless-steel fridge.
Gingerly, Sylvie sat up and swung her legs over the side of their king-size bed, pausing for a moment to look at the clock. Five thirteen. Great. There were approximately fifteen hours left to endure, give or take.
In the bathroom, she ran a washcloth under ice-cold water and plunged her face inside its folds, relishing the shock of its impact. Holding her breath, she held it there for a few seconds, imagining that when she removed it, her face would be young again. Her left eyelid, with its startling new Silly Putty consistency, would regain its elasticity; the permanent brow furrow her cynicism had cost her would smooth. She removed the cloth, hopeful for just a moment. Instead, her forty-six-year-old self stared back at her.
No, that wasn’t fair, she thought next, grabbing her moisturizer from the shelf. She unscrewed its cap and took a generous scoop, massaging it vigorously into her cheeks, down over her chin, and back up over her closed eyes and forehead before finishing with the sides, careful not to smudge it into her hairline. It wasn’t all bad.
She still had her big brown eyes and even bigger eyebrows, full lips and relatively lustrous head of black hair. She had never colored or straightened it, had barely blown it dry, and so she liked to think it was thanking her by staying shiny, with only the occasional gray surprising her. It hung in a wave against the faint outline of her collarbone beneath her olive, slightly rosy skin. Sylvie tried to smile at herself, but it felt too difficult, like the corners of her mouth were stapled to her chin.
She sighed, pulling open the immense drawer of their marble-topped vanity to retrieve her eye cream. An orange bottle inside rolled toward her, click-clacking its way to the inside edge. She picked it up, considering its contents. Paul’s pain pills. Say that three times fast. Paul’s pain pills, Paul’s pain pills, Pops paint pits.
He had fallen from his bike, her triathlete husband, and broken his ankle just two weeks before, although it seemed like two years. Sylvie had discovered that it was one thing to mother your son but quite another to mother your mate. She did not enjoy it, not one bit.
Several times a day she had to remind herself that this invalid version of Paul, this person who moaned and groaned through even the slightest shift of the pillow beneath his foot and frowned at the grilled cheese sandwich she made him for lunch claiming too many carbs, was not the real Paul. He was in pain, it was true, largely because he refused to take the pills she now held in her hand.
“I don’t like the way they make me feel,” he had said to Sylvie, handing the bottle over to her. “And anyway, you’ve seen the news. Oxycodone. What do they call it? Hillbilly heroin?” He shook his head, handing her the bottle. “Just give me some ibuprofen.”
“How do they make you feel?” Sylvie had asked.
“What? Those?” Paul nodded toward the bottle in her hand. “Groggy. Out of it.” He wrinkled his nose. “Not good.”
“Okay, three ibuprofen coming up,” Sylvie had replied, turning on her heel and walking toward the bathroom to retrieve them.
What was wrong with feeling groggy and out of it if all you were doing was sitting on the couch and telling people to bring you things? Sylvie wondered. You had to be cognizant for that?
She looked at the bottle now in her hand, the house as silent as a tomb around her. Her heartbeat sped up as she thought about how not being cognizant on this day, especially this day, might be nice.
Paul would approach her with sad, cartoon-character eyes, looking at her with the kind of manufactured sympathy she had always hated, even before she’d lost the baby. He’d put his hand on her shoulder, squeeze it ever so slightly and ask, How are you today, honey?, adding insult to injury.
She hated it when Paul called her honey—it felt so false, so pat. He couldn’t come up with a better nickname? One that possessed a shred of originality? She supposed things could be worse—he could have been the kind of husband who called her babe—but still. Just use her own damn name.
It had been a loss for Paul too, she knew that, but the pain belonged to her. He shouldn’t be allowed to access it. She had carried the baby, after all. She had had to feel her breasts fill with milk, engorged to the point of bursting, only to deflate in defeat a week later, with no baby to feed. What had Paul had to do? Sell the crib? Come on. She knew it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t the same.
Sylvie hated today. Being out of it seemed like the perfect remedy. She touched the bottle tentatively. She had refused them after the birth of her children, the first time because she was lucky enough to not be in that much actual pain and the second time because she was on enough anxiety medication to tranquilize a horse afterward.
Now, Sylvie held up this new orange bottle to the light carefully, like it was an ancient Egyptian artifact. She had seen the shows about addiction, with people shooting up inside their cars in abandoned parking lots, nodding off midsentence and smacking their faces against their steering wheels. She had seen the same news Paul had, with the segments about entire towns turning into zombie villages on this stuff.
Sylvie put the pills back inside the drawer and closed it. She dutifully applied her eye cream, patting it gently into her skin. She opened the drawer again, replaced her cream and picked the bottle back up, the plastic warm from her incessant fondling.
No, this was different, she told herself. She was not going to be nodding off in her car anytime soon; she was just cutting herself a break on a tough morning in the mi
ddle of a tough month at the end of a tough three years.
She unscrewed the cap, took out one of the tiny, white discs and placed it on her tongue. With a grimace, she swallowed it whole, turned off the light and began her day.
* * *
“PANCAKES?” ASKED TEDDY, approaching the table with a bewildered look on his face.
A face that had just recently begun its maturing transformation from circle to square. Teddy was his father in miniature: same blue-gray eyes, same sandy blond straight hair, same button nose. The least Jewish-looking Jewish boy in the world, she had thought to herself from the moment she’d held his tiny, naked body against her chest.
“Why not?” Sylvie answered, smiling slightly at her son as he shuffled toward the table.
The morning light filtered in through the wall of windows overlooking their deck, and below that the yard, which had burst forth with its green, purple, pink and yellow bounty months ahead of schedule thanks to the seventy-something-degree temperatures in February. Now, in April, dead petals littered the yard like confetti.
It had been almost two hours since she had swallowed the pill. Inside, Sylvie was an undulating ripple of goodwill, despite the fact that she was steeled for Paul’s unwelcome reverence and splattered with batter. It was a miracle, truly.
Teddy dropped his backpack on the floor with a loud thud and scrambled over and onto the bench lining one side of the enormous wood table that Paul had repurposed. Once upon a time, it had been a barn door in rural Georgia. Now they ate pancakes on it.
She sat down in a chair across from Teddy, watching him eat like he always ate, as though he hadn’t been fed in months. His hair flopped in front of his eyes slightly, and in the back, his cowlick stuck up and out, the same way it always had. If she squinted, he was four years old again, in matching pajama top and bottoms, the last of his adorable toddler tummy pressing against the patterned blue-and-green cotton of his shirt; his boneless feet swinging happily, nowhere near the floor.
To Sylvie’s horror, tears welled up in her eyes. She pretended to cough and covered her face with one of the blue-and-white-striped cloth napkins she had tossed onto the table, wiping them away as she stood again.
Teddy looked up, chewing.
“These are good,” he offered, as he forked three more onto his plate from the white platter in front of him. “Thanks, Mom.”
Sylvie nodded and placed her open palm atop his very warm head as she made her way back to the kitchen. She had forgotten her coffee. Sipping from her mug, she leaned against the enormous white apron sink, surveying the messy marble countertops covered with the remnants of her labor—a pancake-mix-covered yellow bowl and spatula, the still-slick griddle, an open carton of eggs.
“Syl?” Paul called from the top of the stairs.
For the first time in a long time, Sylvie did not cringe at the sound of his voice. And for the first time since he had broken his ankle, helping her husband down the stairs did not include a fantasy about “accidentally” pushing him instead. It was the pill, making her kinder, softer, more fluid. Bubbles of goodwill coursed through her bloodstream. It was a relief, to not quite be herself.
Her usual self was tired. Her usual self was complacent about what their marriage had become; what they had become: roommates with the shared responsibility of a child and a mortgage, not to mention the emotional baggage of a death. Her usual self was resentful about the fact that she worked full time, was the chief of Teddy operations and now nursemaid to a husband who shouldn’t have been on that goddamn twenty-five-mile bike ride on a Saturday in the first place. A husband who should have been hanging out with his son instead.
She hadn’t always claimed this as her usual demeanor toward Paul. When she had met him, she had fallen almost instantaneously head over rumpled bedsheets in love with him. He’d been fixing the sink of her then friend Ramona when she’d walked into Ramona’s kitchen, his denim-clad legs and gray sweatshirt comically splayed out on the floor; his head hidden in the dark recesses of the cabinet as he did whatever it was one did to fix a sink.
This is him, Ramona had whispered conspiratorially when Sylvie had arrived, wet and cold from the rain. The two of them were supposed to be going to brunch; this new boyfriend of Ramona’s was not supposed to be part of the equation. Sylvie had almost faked a stomachache and left—third wheel had not been on her agenda—but then of course Paul had squirreled out from his precarious position, victorious with wrench in hand, boy-like charm radiating from every one of his invisible pores. Sylvie had gone weak in the knees, had actually had to brace herself against Ramona’s IKEA kitchen table. She’d gone to brunch. A week later, Paul had broken up with Ramona. Three weeks later he had moved in with Sylvie and Ramona had never spoken to her again. The rest, as they say, was history.
Teddy turned around, looking at Sylvie now with the same wry smile of his father’s. Was that a smile of commiseration? Of empathy? Sylvie wasn’t sure, but she would pretend it was. She and her son hadn’t discussed Paul’s neediness since his accident, only because they didn’t discuss much of anything these days. Sylvie did a lot of talking at her son, but to call it conversation would have been delusional. To think that she had an ally in Teddy, that she wasn’t a horrible person and maybe Paul had indeed become a pain in the ass, that was something to hold on to.
“Coming,” she called, smiling back at Teddy.
She placed her mug on the counter and strode along the wood floors to the staircase, which wound up to the second floor like a giant corkscrew. Theirs was a house without any rooms downstairs, open concept before it was a bona fide concept since Paul was a contractor.
Vision Contracting, his business card read, a name they had worked on together so many years before. Paul had balked at it at first, saying it was too corny, but Sylvie had held her ground. She’d been right too. With every job he had taken, Paul’s confidence in his instincts had grown, and not without good reason. He was very good at what he did. So was she.
Built-in bookshelves lined some of the gray walls of their downstairs, filled to bursting with books, myriad tokens from their travels and the occasional treasure that looked as though it came from somewhere exotic instead of the HomeGoods down the street. Paul called it cheating; Sylvie called it shopping.
An L-shaped, tan corduroy sofa with cushions like toasted marshmallows faced away from her, toward a television that took up almost the entire wall on which it hung. Flung about haphazardly over the painstakingly sanded and oiled wood floor were Persian rugs. Paul was in charge of their home’s design, but he let Sylvie handle its wardrobe, albeit begrudgingly. Had it been up to him, they would have been living in a post-apocalyptic bunker.
Sylvie climbed up the stairs in her gray-and-pink-striped socks, to her husband.
“Good morning, P,” she said, looking at his cast, and then his red plaid pajama pants, then his navy-blue T-shirt and finally his face, as she stood before him.
His face. Salt-and-pepper stubble along his square jawline and around his lips, which were a little on the thin side, Sylvie had always thought, but not weird Muppet thin, just thin. Hers were rather plush, so maybe her judgment was off. No one else had ever mentioned Paul’s lips, not even her mother, who mentioned everything.
His nose was the same button nose as Teddy’s, small and perfect. And his eyes—a blue-gray hybrid that could have been scooped out of a summer sky right before a rain. And lashes as thick as canopies; the same sandy blond as his hair, which was thinning now, around his temples and at the back of his head, a bull’s-eye of age. For the first time in a very long time, Sylvie felt a swell of affection toward him.
“P?” Paul asked, taken aback. “You haven’t called me that in years.”
“I haven’t?” asked Sylvie, snaking her arm around his waist to help him down the stairs. His impossibly slim triathlete waist.
Paul gave her a sideways glance.
“What?” she asked. “I’m feeling nice today.”
“I lik
e nice,” replied Paul. He squeezed her shoulder as they began their slow descent. “Thanks. I know I’m a terrible patient,” he added quietly. “I’m sorry.”
Paul had always been an overapologizer, in Sylvie’s opinion, but with his injury had come a sense of entitlement rocketing into the stratosphere. Or maybe she was just a terrible nurse. Either way, it was good to hear.
“Thank you for saying that,” she said.
“You know what today is, right?” Paul asked, catching her off guard as they took the last step down.
Sylvie grabbed his crutches, which were leaning on the banister. “Oh, come on, Paul,” she answered, shoving them toward him. Ah, there it was, her anger. Still there. Still Sylvie.
“What?” he asked.
She shook her head and turned away from him, back toward the kitchen. Did she know what today was? Unreal.
After the first few months following Delilah’s stillbirth, Sylvie could not pretend her sadness away. The three of them had holed up together in a fortress of grief and shock, Sylvie and Paul doing their best to explain away the terrible unfairness of life to a nine-year-old but failing miserably under Teddy’s wise gaze. He was too smart, too present, too invested in who he thought would be his little sister, to buy it.
They were all in it together. Until they weren’t. At the three-month mark almost exactly, Paul had exited stage left, taking Teddy with him. Getting on with their lives as though her pregnancy—their almost family of four—had never happened. At least that’s how it had felt to Sylvie, although she knew Paul would argue otherwise.
A beat later, Sylvie had moved on too, because what else was she going to do? But moving on for her was a commitment, full stop. She did not talk about Delilah, not ever, which Paul considered unfair. Sylvie didn’t care if it was fair.
Back in the kitchen, she steadied herself against the counter and took a deep breath, her back to her family. She wanted the bubbles back.
“Hey, T,” greeted Paul behind her. “Pancakes!”
“Err,” Teddy grunted back, his mouth full.
Sylvie turned around, calmed by another wave of magic. Ask and ye shall receive, she thought, as it undulated throughout her body, unclenching her muscles one by one.
