“The response on my pages has been encouraging. If you want to take a look, maybe chime in—”
“Please.” Sela held up a hand, chagrined to find it shaking. She was touched by Doug’s frustration, even in this early-morning ambush. It meant he still cared. If only that translated to something that mattered. “I’d like to set this conversation aside for later before I say something that makes me sound ungrateful.”
A counselor had provided this script in the weeks after Brody’s birth, when it became clear that Sela’s condition was both escalating and irreversible—and that neither of them was handling the strain well. She suspected Doug found the line as enraging as she did, but neither of them could say so, since the words did at minimum acknowledge the sensitivity of the situation. Which was more than either of them had accomplished without them.
Doug looked at her now as if he couldn’t decide what he wanted more: to press her to talk or to get away as fast as he could. A well-worn combination—she already knew which would win out.
“Well, the email is a big step,” he conceded. “I’m glad I drove by at the right time to see you.”
She might have invited him in for coffee but figured she’d save them both the humiliation of him saying no. It was tough enough to be standing here at the far reaches of the porch light, staring into the eyes of the person to whom she’d be forever linked in catastrophic failure. They’d disappointed each other, let Brody down, even complicated the simple life of their perfectly innocent dog, who sat between them now, looking from one to the other with his ears cocked expectantly.
Doug meant well. He didn’t know how to let go all the way. But she found things easier without him. With no line of sight to this tormented look on his face, she could pretend, if she needed to, that he was gone temporarily, tending to a business trip or family issue as dutiful people like Doug did. When she knew he was coming, she could pull on a protective layer of numbness, a barrier to keep any particular feeling about him from touching her directly. But when he caught her off guard like this, when she didn’t have time to reach for that coat, it was like being woken from a bad dream to find out things weren’t as she’d feared after all.
They were worse.
“I’m glad you came by too,” she said.
With people like Doug, lies could be a form of kindness.
He bent to give Oscar one last pat. “See you Friday, pal. If your mom’s still okay with me taking this weekend?”
It made the most sense to treat Oscar and Brody as a package deal, keeping the same schedule for both. “Of course.”
She leaned into the thought of Brody asleep upstairs, resisting the cruel temptation to linger and watch Doug’s taillights fade into the fog. She’d recently converted the crib to a toddler bed, and ever since, Brody would randomly wake and come looking for her, simply because he could.
A powerful thing, really—to have someone rely so wholly on finding her where she was supposed to be. She liked to think it meant she could still rely on herself.
After all, she had no choice.
Neither of them had anyone else.
3
Caroline
“Mommy?” A little voice deposited the word so directly into Caroline’s ear, she could feel the vibrations carrying the sound. Her eyes flew open to find her younger daughter’s bleary face inches from her own, smiling expectantly. “What do you think?” As Caroline blinked properly awake, Lucy jumped back and twirled, showing off her outfit: a sparkly heart-covered cap-sleeved shirt, tucked into a metallic silver tutu that billowed around purple leggings, over which had been pulled candy-cane-striped knee-highs resurrected from the holiday drawer. Rainbow cowgirl boots that Caroline had learned too late shed more sequins than a Rockette completed the ensemble.
“Wow, you got yourself all dressed,” she said, sidestepping the question.
Lucy nodded proudly. “Everything but my underwear!”
Caroline squinted at her kindergartner, who was potty-trained, of course, but still slept in training underpants. “You put on all that without panties underneath?”
Lucy giggled. “Whoops!”
Behind her, the door to the master bath clicked open, and Walt stood buttoning his dress shirt in the dissipating humidity. He sniffed conspicuously. “Do I smell … glitter?”
Lucy let out a squeal. “Not the glitter monster, Daddy!”
His voice turned ragged, goofy, as he draped his bath towel over his head. “Daddy not here. Only me. Me want glitter!”
The pair took off running down the hallway, and Caroline pulled a pillow over her face, groaning. She was surrounded by morning people in this house. It was inhuman.
Sleep had eluded her for much of the night. As Walt’s breath had grown slow and deep, his arm draped across her turning to dead weight, she’d admonished her brain that worrying about this could wait until morning. Things would look clearer once she had answers from the test provider. No reason to exhaust herself in the meantime. But when she at last drifted off, it was to that off-kilter place where consciousness hovers and waits for an uncertain outcome.
Caroline couldn’t deflect the feeling that a stray cat had been let out of a bag that may or may not have been delivered by mistake. Even if it did have the wrong address, there was a decent chance she’d have to face off with the feral animal.
If only there was some way of knowing whether it had been contained here or escaped to Dad’s in-box.
Why had she not checked the other settings before she opted him into the database? Until that gaffe, she hadn’t thought of logging on as violating his privacy, only trying to disprove an erroneous claim he need not know about. But now, if this did find its way to him, she’d have some uncomfortable explaining to do.
Then again, so would he.
She tossed the pillow aside and grabbed her phone. No missed calls, no new texts, nothing but junk mail unopened in her in-box. She was not reassured.
Lucy trounced back into the room, wearing her most angelic poker face—and a pair of Hello Kitty underwear atop her head. “Fixed it, Mommy!”
Caroline yawned and sat up. The thing about morning people was, they always won. “How about pigtails today? I can pull them through the leg holes.”
“Mommy! I was joking!”
For all her resistance to the frenetic starts to her workdays, Caroline could say this: Their get-five-people-out-the-door-with-everything-they-need routine, or lack thereof, was distracting, whether you wanted it to be or not. This day, she threw herself into it, mediating arguments over toaster waffles and misplaced school library books with appreciation for small problems she could actually solve. Walt gave her a tight squeeze on his way out the door, mouthing, Call you later, but she didn’t meet his eyes to acknowledge the reason. It was easier—steadier—to be in her most natural, most capable state of busyness once she got going. She doodled notes in the girls’ lunch boxes and led Simon Says at the bus stop and lingered at Owen’s drop-off, chatting about an upcoming field trip for so long that she ended up volunteering to chaperone. When there was nothing left to do but go to work, she texted her boss an apology for running late—rarely a big deal, given how often she ran shows on evenings and weekends—and turned out of the preschool parking lot in the opposite direction.