When Olivia returned to her seat after a bathroom break, she found Spencer sitting in it, refusing to get up until she agreed to accompany him for a drink in the bar car. There was nothing especially distinctive about Spencer. In Olivia’s world, handsome, educated, wealthy, sporty guys with an entertaining undercurrent of immaturity were a common entity. There was really no one reason why Spencer had succeeded where others had failed. Maybe it was timing, maybe it was Florence, maybe it was the romance in the book she was reading at the time—the story of a somewhat serious young woman falling for a free-spirited young man—or maybe a combination of them all: a perfect storm.
She went for the drink, then dinner, then the rest of her time in Florence followed by a sunflower-flanked drive down the Tuscan coast to Porto Ercole. She was not one to deviate from a plan, nor to ditch her friends, but somehow she got caught up in Spencer’s deep blue eyes and the way he undressed her with them. By the time they reached the coast, she had fallen in love for the very first time. And, as it turned out, Olivia loved being in love. She especially loved the promise of it—being “taken” felt quite satisfying on many levels.
After their semester-long European courtship, they dated long distance throughout their senior years. She traveled to visit him at Duke for his formals; he met her in Boston, where they barely left their hotel room. By graduation they were pinned, two years later engaged, and six years later inhabiting their new home in Hudson Valley, with Olivia staring at the campy wedding portrait while their baby slept soundly in her nursery.
The two men stepped back to see if the painting was straight.
“What do you think?” one asked, bringing her back to the moment.
She took a beat. It was a funny combination of classic and modern, like her.
“I love it,” Olivia decided, right there on the spot.
“It’s a real nice picture, lady,” one of them said with sincere appreciation.
As Olivia escorted them out, a station wagon filled with a gaggle of babies pulled up to the house. She watched from the doorway as the woman she’d been expecting—their mother—stepped out. Olivia was pretty sure she was still in her pajamas. She went up to greet her.
“Hi!” she said, excited to possibly make her first suburban friend. It was obvious from the woman’s response, “Yeah, hi,” that she was not similarly interested. Her tone and the three babies strapped into car seats, two of whom were crying, made it quite evident that she was not in the mood for small talk. Her attitude, her attire, and the fact that she was selling Olivia her barely used Thule Urban Glide jogging stroller, all pointed to the fact that Olivia might never see this woman again, except possibly at the pediatrician’s office.
They exchanged the stroller for the agreed-upon hundred dollars and the woman was on her way.
“Nice meeting you!” Olivia tried again.
“Yeah, bye,” she scoffed at her, as if it were Olivia’s fault that she’d given up on jogging.
Olivia had found the notice for the prized stroller on the Hudson Valley Ladies’ Bulletin Board, which she’d joined the same day that they had closed on the house. There, she was happy to discover the source for everything she needed in her new life. She had no way of knowing then that it would also provide the seed for its destruction.
CHAPTER 3
Eliza
Eliza dropped her grocery bags on her kitchen counter and rummaged through them, carefully pulling out the frozen food and perishables before collapsing into a heap on her kitchen floor. She had made it through her shopping list and was thankful for that. But every bit of strength she’d summoned at the supermarket seemed to have declared mutiny and turned against her on the car ride home.
It would have been so much better for Eliza if her husband, Luke, knew what was going on, but she had made every effort over the past few months to cover it up. She certainly had practice. This may have been her first major flare-up since high school, but in the years in between, she’d still preferred the safety of home—often using the excuse of having something in the oven. It was hard to know if she loved to bake and loved running the bulletin board or just loved how they tethered her to her kitchen and computer.
So though it wasn’t unusual for her to be a bit of a homebody, hiding it all was like a job in itself. Her go-to list of fun things to do on weekends was substituted with a list of well-crafted excuses. She perfected the facade of the busy housewife coming and going—placing her tennis racquet by the front door on the days of her usual game and putting the things she bought online in old shopping bags strewn on the floor of the bedroom closet. Sometimes she would have to turn to illness: a stomach bug, a bad headache. Those were easy to pull off because both were actual symptoms of her anxiety. All she needed to do was come close enough to the estimated due date without a good excuse and she would soon find herself massaging her temples or vomiting into the toilet.
At first she missed Luke, really missed being close to him. For as long as she could remember they had looked forward to the empty nest phase of their lives. They loved being parents, but they also loved being alone together. They were lucky that way, lucky that the spark hadn’t fizzled and that they truly liked each other’s company. But lately she resented having to answer his solicitous questions, resented his unintended part in making her feel pathetic. When that happened, when she started wishing he would just leave her alone so she could stop dealing in excuses, that’s when she worried that she had done irreparable damage to her marriage and her family.
Eliza had held on to the notion ingrained in her since childhood that mental health issues were not to be spoken of. Though she was smart enough to know that being in a constant state of fight-or-flight was not good for her health, mental or otherwise, she never did anything about it.
Back when Eliza had missed four months of high school, the first time her agoraphobia rendered her nonfunctional, her mother pretended she was home with mono. Her daughter’s bout with mental illness, though it manifested itself differently, was the first time Birdie Reinhart had seen a glimpse of herself in her child. There was no way Eliza’s polished, stick-thin mother, with her shiny golden hair, would have admitted that her daughter, who did not receive her skinny gene or her shiny gene, had only inherited her crazy gene.
From the day Eliza was born, Birdie would stare at the chubby baby with brown eyes and dark curly hair and look for some reflection of herself, but none existed. Eliza inherited her looks from Birdie’s Jewish mother, while Birdie was an obvious by-product of her Protestant father. She had even changed her name from Bertha to Birdie at age eighteen, officially transitioning from Jewess to Wasp.
Back in high school, thankfully, Eliza’s problem departed as quickly as it had appeared. One day she woke up, got dressed, and went to school. Just like that. She never discussed with the psychiatrist, or her parents, or her best friend, Amanda, what had brought it on in the first place. In fact, none of it was ever mentioned again.