The Overdue Life of Amy Byler

by Kelly Harms

  Then I realize: I’m going home empty handed. I can’t go home empty handed. I need to buy some good New York stuff for the kids. Why haven’t I been shopping for them all this time? I have been acting as if I didn’t even have kids over these last two months. Dating old men and virtual children and everything in between, shopping for myself, and working out every day like a supermodel or something. Reading and the theater and art? A vacation love affair?

  Am I any better than John?

  John. I text him a heads-up as I whirl down to the street to find that cool Brooklyny clothing store. Cori’s size won’t have changed in a few months, but Joe . . . well, he could be huge by now. His dad’s not very tall, but my father is kind of a towering man. I should buy a shirt in Joe’s June size and one in the next size up, just in case. God, what if he needs new gym shoes? It’s good I’m going home early. We need time to outfit these kids before September. And Cori needs to be getting a lot of sleep as we head into diving season. What is Joe reading right now? I turn back to my phone to pepper John with all this and see that he has already texted me back.

  Why are you coming home now? The kids leave for their camps in the morning.

  My heart thuds. Camps? That can’t be right. There is no way I would have completely forgotten about camps. Did I sign them up for any camps?

  But of course, now I remember. Diving camp for Cori—more than a hundred dollars a day, but they’ve trained Olympians and all-Americans up the wazoo, and I know the price is fair. Fair, but impossible for me without John’s help. And for Joe, Space Camp. Space Camp! Like we are Silicon Valley millionaires or something. The regular, full-price kids at Country Day go to these sorts of camps. Not the scholarship kids. And I nearly forgot the whole thing?

  I feel so ashamed. My ex, their formerly deadbeat dad, giving them more in two months than I managed in three years. Will they even want to come back to me when I get there? Will he have already bought them their school clothes and Uni-Ball pens and the thirty boxes of lotion-free tissues from their class shopping lists? Did he take them to the doctor to get their school sports forms signed? Start Cori’s diving curfew early? Probably he has done all these things. Probably I am no longer needed.

  I let my phone slide into my handbag. Not my handbag—rather, Pure Beautiful’s. I am only now realizing that it came out of the fashion closet there. Look at me, standing in a teen store in my on-trend pants and borrowed designer bag trying to buy my kids’ love and forgetting their schedules and their shirt sizes and what next? Their middle names? This isn’t me! How did I get here? How do I get back?

  I think of the moment I saw John after that farmers’ market this spring. I didn’t have to talk to him. I didn’t have to give him a chance or let the kids visit him or extend the trip to the summer. I pretend I was coerced, but I went willingly, walking away from my responsibilities as easily as John did three years ago. I said I just wanted a short break, but I loved my momspringa from the moment I got on that train. I loved sleeping in and eating out and avoiding fights about skirt lengths and slammed doors and stifled tween-boy tears. I loved making love with Daniel and hanging out with Matt, and I even loved those first dates with all those various men and their various foibles. I haven’t really wanted to go back home this entire time, not once, not for real. And now I wish I could undo the whole thing. I should never have given up everything I had. Because now I’m afraid I won’t be able to get it back, and if I do, I’m afraid I won’t remember how to be happy with it.

  A sales guy comes over and asks me if I need help finding anything. I think about telling him I seem to have lost track of my life. Instead, I ask him for a “cool” shirt for a fifteen-year-old girl and another for a twelve-year-old boy, and he offers to give me some choices. He brings some shirts to me but also a canteen-case-style handbag with a water tower motif etched into the leather that even I can see is impossibly chic. “Yes,” I say. “That one. And can you get something as cool for my son?” and the thin mustachioed man brings me a square nylon satchel in orange and gray. I look at him. “Orange nylon? Are you sure? Does it really say, ‘I’m sorry I’m such a terrible mother’?” I ask him.

  “They all say that, ma’am,” he tells me, not unkindly. “Here, how about this.” He hands me a much sharper-looking backpack made of recycled sailcloth, insignias and all. It looks like something my rich students would have.

  “Yeah. That one. He’s going to Space Camp,” I tell the guy. I hand him my own credit card, think of how rarely I’ve used it these last months, with Daniel and the magazine and John paying my way. Another way I haven’t been myself. Letting other people pay my bills. Forgetting all my hard-won independence.

  “Space Camp. Right on,” says the guy. “We should get one of these satchels made out of old space suits. That would be tight.”

  Joe told me once that they use lasers to cut some of the layers of fabric for space suits. They’re not meant to be easily pierced or punctured. And only the arms and the joints are very flexible. The rest is rigid and heavy. Joe would laugh at the idea of a space suit backpack. I wish he were here right now. I wish instead of having a momspringa, I had brought the kids here with me for the summer and left John out of the whole arrangement. Why on earth did I think I had to get away from my kids?

  All these thoughts jumble around in my head as I rush back to Talia’s. I feel foolish and embarrassed, and also there are a few useful parts of my head saying, But you did like it here, and But you were falling for Daniel, and But you did need a break!

  But I am so wedded to feeling awful and guilty and bad that I ignore them. And when I turn the corner and find Daniel pacing nervously in front of Talia’s building, I am still coursing in those dark, scary feelings, and instead of running to him and wrapping my arms around him, I stop and say, “No, no, Daniel. Please don’t be here. Please don’t be nice to me.”

  His whole body seems to sag, like I have just dropped a lead apron around his shoulders. “Amy,” he says. “Tell me. What on earth is going on?”

  I open my mouth to try to explain, but nothing comes out. I have started loving this person, though there is still so much more to know about him, and I have to leave him now, and it hurts. I walk up to him and put my arms on his arms and lean my forehead in, in, in, until it rests softly against his. This close I can let a tear fall, because he cannot see.

  We stand this way a long time. Finally, a woman comes by with a small dog, and the dog starts to sniff around Daniel’s shoe with intent, and I say, “We’d better go inside before you’re mistaken for a fire hydrant.” We separate. I take his hand.

  “Are we . . . ?” he asks, and when his voice trails off, I jump in.

  “Daniel, listen, I have to go home. I’ll try to explain, but it may not make sense. It’s not about you at all. It’s just that I have to. I have to go home.”

  He nods but frowns. We go inside, ride the elevator in silence. He walks in, looks around Talia’s upturned apartment, starts righting the mess I’ve made. When he takes in the box with the smattering of his things inside it, he rubs the back of his neck, disappears into the bathroom, and returns with his razor and deodorant. It is a tacit agreement to my decision.

  “I do understand,” he tells me, when he has closed up his box and set it by the door. “Your kids need you.”

  And I shake my head and start to cry in earnest. He is kind when he sees me cry. He puts his arms around me and holds me there, sits me down on the edge of the bed, rubs my back, and asks nothing of me for a good long time.

  “That’s the thing,” I whimper when I finally catch my breath. “That’s what you don’t understand. I’m not going back home because my kids need me. I am going back because they don’t.”

  —

  Daniel kisses me goodbye at Penn Station. I get home at seven p.m. that night, and the kids are waiting for me, their last night home before their own big adventures. We have Chinese takeout that I have to privately acknowledge tastes awful compared to what I w
as eating in New York, and then we sit around the dinner table catching up, laughing a lot, dealing cards for chocolate chip poker from time to time, and then forgetting to play while we talk. I make the kids go to bed at midnight, back in their own beds for the first time in two months; we will be up at six tomorrow to meet John at the airport. There Joe will get on a plane to Huntsville, and then we’ll have a three-hour drive north to install Cori into a Team USA dorm for the week. Unbeknownst to me, John paid extra to get Cori a single. “So she can get a break from earplugs at night,” he explains, and I know he is talking about the way she is such a light sleeper she wakes even when we flush the toilet in the night, or if Joe is congested and snoring two rooms away. It’s a very thoughtful gesture, one that speaks of his attention to her needs over the last two months. All these things, these gifts of time and money and consideration for my kids, are like the long-overdue books we have to write off at school sometimes. If they somehow reappear after that, it is a cause for celebration.

  But because it is John and I am feeling so insecure, I ask, “How will she make friends if she doesn’t have a roommate?”

  He laughs. “How will she not? I am just hoping she gets some diving in there between all the new besties.” I am chastened, knowing just how right he is. That girl could make friends in a mannequin factory.

  Sure enough, we have barely dropped her sleeping bag and duffel in the dorm room when she’s off mingling with a gaggle of other divers in the TV room. “The single was a good idea,” I tell John. “You’ve been doing a very good job.”

  John looks at me carefully. “It is incredibly hard work. I don’t know how you did it yourself for so long.”

  I want to tell him that someone had to, to guilt him one more time, but why? I’m running out of the antagonistic energy that has powered my relationship with John since he left, as well as the wishful thinking that made for a heady cocktail when he first returned. I put the knife away, and the net, too, and fish around clumsily for an olive branch. “It has been nice to share the load this summer,” I admit, even though I feel that nagging sense of failure when I say it. “Thank you for coming back, and for talking me into taking a break.”

  John looks like he could be knocked over with a feather, but he recovers quickly. “Thank you, too, for coming back early. I don’t know how you knew you were needed, but you were. I’m not sure Joe would have gotten on that plane this morning without assurances from his mother.”

  “And Cori’s iPhone,” I add. “Speaking of, he texted twenty minutes ago. On the plane for Huntsville waiting to take off. The connection was a success. Now he can relax and enjoy his week.”

  “Is that what he was worried about?” asks John, clearly forgetting his long-ago tantrum in the airport, how he left me alone to manage with four suitcases and two kids on a six-hour flight because he couldn’t wait a half hour for a beer. “Weird.”

  —

  That night John has conference calls, so we stay over in two separate rooms in the nearest Marriott. He invites me to dinner; with no deliberation I choose room service instead, and in that moment I realize something powerful: any last shreds of longing for my ex are gone.

  The next morning we hit the road early, aiming to get John back to his desk before the London office closes.

  On the ride home, we talk about the kids for a long time. He tells me about all the wonderful things they did all summer, about the long weekends they took and how he forced Cori out for camping and how she ended up liking it in spite of herself. He praises my parenting a lot, which I appreciate, truly. But any kind words land on me with an asterisk: I have neglected these same kids for the last two months.

  Still, he presses on. He tells me I was right to make Cori stick out her first year of dive team five years ago, because she’s gotten so much happiness and growth out of it since. And he’s impressed with what a capable outdoorsman Joe is despite the fatherless years. “I was a fool to assume that only a man could teach him how to start a fire,” he tells me.

  John keeps chattering away. I like hearing the stories about my kids yet hate knowing how much I’ve missed. So I say nothing meaningful for an hour straight. Silence seems to be the only way I can avoid grabbing him by the collar and asking, “What happens now?”

  After all, my future seems to be held in the hands of this man once again. Will John stay in the States? Or will he go back to Hong Kong, to his old life, when this is all said and done? What will happen when I ask him for a divorce? Will he ask for shared custody?

  Will he ask for something more?

  The possibilities turn over and over in my head. I try not to compare his every move to Daniel’s. But wouldn’t I rather be in this car with someone else? With the kind of man who stays?

  The silence gets thicker as we drive. John runs out of funny kid stories. The puddle in my gut, the emptiness and uncertainty of what comes next, feels the same as a stomach bug. Every curve and bump and jostle on the highway feels like the thing that will finally make me vomit, and yet I never do. Even John finally notices.

  “Amy,” he says. “Amy, what is wrong with you?”

  I take a gulp of air. “I’m not feeling well. I think I might be carsick.”

  John sighs, and I know he’s a little put out by this frailty of mine. But he rolls down my window two inches, and the cool air makes me feel instantly better. “Thank you,” I say.

  “Do you need peanuts?” he asks me. He is referring to the way even the shortest drive made me carsick when I was carrying Cori and Joe, and the passionate love affair with mixed nuts and peanut butter that I had with every pregnancy.

  “Ha,” I say. Then I think carefully of the last time Daniel and I were together and say a silent thank-you prayer to my IUD. “I sincerely doubt it. But would it be so crazy if I did?” I suddenly want him to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I have been with another man.

  John doesn’t bite. Instead he says, “Do you remember when we took them to Disney?”

  Disney World. John and I had always planned to take them someday in the future, but Cori was a mature ten-year-old when we suddenly realized we were running out of the magic years. Neither of the kids was much into Disney movies, but I had been to Disney as a child, and it was such a special memory of my heart. And John had never been but dreamed of going.

  So we booked a park hotel and pointed our car south and drove. It was our first real car trip as a family, and unexpectedly I was carsick. We pulled over twice so I could vomit into the ditch. I chewed ginger candy and drank 7UP and finally persuaded John to let me drive for a few hours, convinced that his aggressive style of driving, or what I jokingly called “The Revenge of the Tractor Driver,” was what was making me ill. But even while driving I was queasy, and we still had another full day’s drive ahead. I couldn’t bear it.

  So when we reached a town big enough for a CVS, I went in to ask about the seasickness patch. The pharmacist grabbed it for me, saying it seemed to work great for most people, but then he hesitated for a moment. “If you’re pregnant or might be pregnant,” he said casually, “you need to check with your doctor first before using any of these.”

  And of course, I realized then. John and the kids were waiting outside the drugstore with the AC on, and we’d all been in that car for hours, with only vomit stops and a quick pee at McDonald’s breaking up the trip. I went out and told them to park and go into the Dairy Queen across the street, and I’d meet them there. Then I went back into the store and bought a pregnancy test and took myself off to the CVS bathroom.

  I was pregnant.

  The pharmacist sold me Unisom and vitamin B6 and some Sea-Bands to use during the drive. I added in a six-pack of ginger ale and a huge bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. And a Snickers. I ate the Snickers standing up in the vestibule of the drugstore and then walked across the street to the Dairy Queen and ordered a Peanut Buster Parfait.

  “Your appetite’s back!” John cheered when I brought the ice cream to the table. O
h, how high spirited he was that day. Things weren’t perfect between us, but that was one of our happiest times.

  “Yep,” I said and felt my heart lift to see his smile. “I think the medicine is working already. But I’m not supposed to operate a moving vehicle, so you get your keys back.”

  My ice cream tasted delicious. My stomach was already evening out. I was making my kids happy with this trip, and I was about to make my husband even happier. I didn’t want a baby, but I didn’t not want a baby either. I was surprised but not horrified. I thought John, however, would be tickled. He was from a huge family and would have liked twice as many kids, but I needed time between Cori and Joe to get my feet underneath me, and after Joe I felt too old. But apparently I was not too old.

  I was excited to tell him. I gave the kids quarters for a claw machine and took John by both hands, and my face cracked into a grin and I could feel the wide wetness of my eyes and the words bubbling up the moment the children were out of earshot. “We’re pregnant!” I told him. “We’re having a baby!”

  Now, in the car with John only an hour from home, I say, “I ate so many peanuts on that trip. And potato chips.”

  “God, so many potato chips. I was afraid for the global supply.”

  “And remember, you asked me how much weight I wanted to gain with this pregnancy.”

  “And you almost killed me.”

  “I would have been acquitted,” I say. And then, because there are so many questions I can’t ask him about the future, I ask him about the past. “Do you ever miss that baby?”

  John shakes his head. “No. I’m sorry, Amy. But that wasn’t meant to be.”

  “That’s what you always said. But you seemed so happy at first.”