Lillian was sitting on the cluttered sofa in the living room with Philip attached, as ever, to her breast. Tom could see four or five of Olivia’s books scattered around her and a giant jigsaw puzzle upended on the coffee table. On the carpet, in various stages of undress, lay several of Olivia’s dolls. It looked like the site of some sort of catastrophe, not the scene of domestic calm and tranquility he had been imagining when he ordered the food, when he chose the wine. Olivia was nowhere to be found.
Tom took a deep breath and presented the food and wine to Lillian. She looked up briefly, then returned her gaze to the top of Philip’s head.
“Oh, Tom,” she said reproachfully. “That’s sweet. But you know I can’t drink that. I’m nursing. And the food… well, isn’t it spicy? And it will only get cold. Olivia hasn’t eaten yet. Then she needs a bath. We won’t sit down for hours. And then”—this part she said to Philip, addressing him in a flimsy, cutesy voice Tom had rarely, if ever, heard issuing from her—“and then you’ll be ready to eat again, mister. Won’t you? Won’t you?”
Olivia appeared then. She was shirtless and without pants but wore a pair of pink ballet tights with a hole in the knee, a tiara, and a pair of Lillian’s old heels that she had recently seized for her dress-up box.
“Daddy!” she said. “Can we have mac and cheese for dinner?”
Lillian closed her eyes and leaned back into the sofa cushions. She waved her hand in Tom’s general direction and rubbed the other hand on Philip’s head. “Go ahead,” she whispered. “Make her mac and cheese. We’ll nuke ours later.”
He put the wine in the refrigerator and abandoned the Thai food on the crowded table among newspapers, moderately organized piles of mail, an incongruous packet of cucumber seeds and a child’s orange shovel crusted with dirt. While he waited for the shells to boil, and after he had opened the little packet of orange cheese powder and mixed it with the milk, and after he had answered a half dozen of Olivia’s questions (yes, when she was seven years old she could spend the night at Stephanie’s house; no, he didn’t think they had any bats in their attic like the MacAllisters across the street; yes, she would one day have the chance to ride in an airplane; no, they weren’t going to go to Disney World next week; no, one did not pick pumpkins from trees; yes, all the dinosaurs were gone from the earth, and no, they weren’t coming back), he retrieved the bottle of wine from the refrigerator, poured Lillian a glass, and brought it to her in the living room.
Surely one glass was permitted; he did not recall any no-alcohol policies when she was nursing Olivia. Philip had finished his meal and was reclining on the burp cloth on Lillian’s shoulder; his eyes were closed and his tiny shoulders were pulled toward his ears. Lillian’s eyes were closed too, her mouth was open, and her chin was tipped back. She was deeply asleep. He placed the glass on the table on a coaster and stood for a minute, considering them: mother and child. He felt a surge of emotion that later, when he examined it in the darkness of their bedroom, with Lillian asleep beside him, he could identify only as loneliness.
After the children were down (though down, as far as Philip was concerned, was a relative term; he slept fitfully at this time of night, waking without provocation, yelling out, then settling himself back down for a few minutes before beginning the routine again), they nuked the Thai food and watched an episode of Lost they had recorded on the DVR. Partway through the show Tom sensed that he was alone in the living room so he glanced over at Lillian: sleeping again. Nobly, he attempted to wake her by shaking her gently—one could not, after all, easily recover the story line after missing part of Lost— but she didn’t respond. Eventually he turned off the television and woke her enough to get her upstairs and into her pajamas and then into bed, where she slept soundly until Philip cried at eleven for his feeding.
When Lillian had disappeared into Philip’s room—Tom watched her stumbling progress down the hallway with a mixture of pity and irritation, because how could it not be forced for his benefit?—he lay there, blinking at the darkness, watching the shadows from a passing car move across the ceiling.
When Olivia was a baby, it had not taken so long to get back to something resembling normalcy, to the core of themselves, and to the sex. Had it? No, surely it hadn’t. And it wasn’t even the sex he was thinking of (well, okay, partly it was) but the physical contact that preceded the sex—the hint, at least, that the desire for sex was in there somewhere. Where had that gone, this time? Was it over between them? Was what he was witnessing here the slow, silent disintegration of his marriage, the inevitable march toward conventionality?
He was thinking about all of this the next morning, when he emerged from the shower and Lillian, standing there in the middle of the bedroom, said, “Sorry. For falling asleep last night.”
“That’s okay.” He looked at her, and found that if he looked past her stained T-shirt and sweatpants, past her uncombed hair, past the white-knuckled hand clutching the coffee mug, he could still find the woman he had fallen in love with. She was hidden, perhaps, underneath the fatigue and the mood swings and the concentration on nursing the baby. But she was there.
Walking through the empty rooms of the house now, with the outlines of the furniture rendered ghostly in the moonlight, he would have given anything to be back in the middle of the mess he found that night when he came home with the Thai food, the warm, chaotic center of his family, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it, how that was what he had, until he didn’t.
Lillian was calmer the next time Tom called, and better rested. It was late at night, and she always got a burst of energy after Philip’s eleven o’clock feeding.
She thought when she first heard Tom’s voice that she was capable of a reasonable conversation. She thought they could discuss the children, at least, and that she could tell him about Jane. But after she’d mentioned the sniffle Philip had picked up, and told him grudgingly about how Olivia had made friends with a little girl down the street, and filled him in about Jane’s bed rest… well, after that there was a space in the conversation, and into it bubbled all the rage that she thought she’d been pushing down.
“I’m sorry, Tom,” she said. “But I’m just not ready to talk to you. I’m still mad—I’m still so, so mad.”
“Really?” said Tom. She imagined him walking through the rooms of their empty home. She imagined him making the rounds: Philip’s room, Olivia’s room, their room. “Well, it’s not all up to you, Lillian, whether you interact with me or not.”
“Isn’t it?” She sat carefully in her father’s recliner. Philip, in the Pack ’n Play, had gone to sleep.
“They’re my children too. I get to talk to them, see them.”
She laughed bitterly. “Oh yeah? I think you gave up the right to make rules about that when you slept with your assistant.” She pulled the handle to release the recliner’s stool and stretched out her legs.
“Jesus, Lillian.”
“Well? Didn’t you? Isn’t that why I’m here?”
“It was an isolated incident. I was drunk. I made a mistake.”
“Pretty big mistake.”
“It’s not like you’ve been perfect throughout everything.”
She said, very carefully, very evenly, “What do you mean by that?”
“You can’t guess what I mean?”
“I can’t.” She thought, though, that maybe she could. She thought about the night after her six-week checkup when Tom brought home Thai food, a bottle of wine. And what had she done? Told him the food was too spicy for the breast milk, told him that she couldn’t drink wine. Retreated into her own little cocoon. Had she even thanked him? She didn’t think so.
“You’ve been mad at me ever since Philip was born!”
“I’ve been tired ever since Philip was born.”
“Tired is one thing. Taking it out on me is another.”
“You have no idea,” she said, “what it’s like to be this tired. You have no idea what this takes out of you, Tom. You can’t po
ssibly imagine. I am sick of thinking about you. I am exhausted. I am feeding the baby eight times a day, plus taking care of Olivia. You have no idea what goes into this, or you would have been there for me.”
“There for you! I tried to be. You didn’t want me. You were grouchy and unpredictable—”
She felt her heartbeat quicken; her cheeks grew warm. He continued: “Impatient. Half the time you act like you don’t even like me!”
“So,” she said. “Your wife has a baby and is too tired for sex and that gives you an excuse to sleep with someone else? Let me tell you, if that were the case there would be a lot of affairs going on!”
“Oh, come on.”
“Every single husband you know would be sleeping around.” She thought of the time she’d met Nina in the office. She barely looked up from the cell phone on which she was madly texting. She chewed gum like a teenager. She drank those frozen coffee drinks. Worse, she was actually pretty. Her legs were lean and tanned: no freckles, no sunburn. She looked like she might be fun. She looked well rested, up for anything. She looked, in short, like everything Lillian was not. “Whatever happened to ‘for better or worse’? This part right now that I’m going through? This is part of the worse.”
“Nothing happened to that, Lillian. I’m here. I’m waiting.” He paused. “I’m sorry. Come home.”
“They need me here. With Jane—” This wasn’t strictly true, of course. If anything, they needed her gone. The house was beginning to feel crowded.
“I need you more.”
“It’s nice here. They’re taking care of me, Tom. You can’t imagine what a relief that is to me, to be taken care of instead of doing all the taking care.”
“Oh, come on, Lillian. I take care of you. That night I brought home the Thai food—”
“That,” she said, “was just because you knew I was cleared for sex. That wasn’t taking care of. That was about the sex.”
“It wasn’t about the sex! The sex is an expression of something, that’s all.”
“Oh really? So what were you expressing with Nina?”
“Jesus, Lillian, nothing.”
“Tom, at home I feel like I’m drowning in other people’s needs.”
“Needs? That’s what I am to you, another need?”
She paused. She thought, Here we go. She said, “Yes, actually. Sometimes.”
“That’s harsh. You think I don’t get it—”
“But you don’t, not really. You don’t get what it’s like. I’m with them all the time. All day long. Every day! Not a moment to myself.”
“I know you are.”
“You don’t know!” Her voice rose desperately. “I eat every meal standing at the counter. If I eat at all. I can’t complete a thought. Every breakfast, every lunch! Hopping around like a waitress. You know I do. You get to eat with grown-ups any time you like. You go to restaurants. Even if you don’t go to a restaurant, you get to have a quiet sandwich at your desk. And then you go and do something like this—it’s like you’re getting all the good stuff, all to yourself.”
“How can you say that? I haven’t seen my children in a week.”
“You should have thought of that before,” she said, and then she clicked the phone shut.
Stephen stood outside Jane’s bedroom door. It was his room, too, for the time being, and he had as much right to be in there as anyone else, but something was stopping him from opening the door and entering. He had been in earlier in the morning, bringing Jane a tray with her breakfast on it, and he had sat in the chair next to the bed and watched her eat. She chewed slowly and carefully, as though any movement she made in haste or without thought was likely to be detrimental to the baby. He wouldn’t leave the room until she had eaten every bite: a bowl of oatmeal, three sizable strawberries, a small glass of milk.
“You don’t have to stare at me,” she’d said. “I’m not going to hide the food under the pillow when you’re not looking, like an anorexic.”
“I know. But I like being in here with you anyway.”
It had been two weeks since they’d come home from the hospital and settled Jane into this bed. She was allowed to get up to use the bathroom, but she was not allowed to go up or down the stairs, except to go to her checkups at the hospital.
“Could be much worse,” the nurse had said cheerfully, packing them up to go home.
“How?” asked Stephen. “Out of curiosity.”
“Could be bed rest in the hospital. Could have been that the bleeding didn’t stop and the baby came early.” She handed Stephen a xeroxed list of dos and don’ts for bed rest. (Do: Keep up your fluid intake to avoid constipation. Don’t: Try to do more than your doctor recommends. Do: Expect to feel helpless and frustrated, even angry.)
Yesterday a heat wave had settled on the region, locking the humid air so tightly over the lake that you could almost see it there in front of the Adirondacks, smoky and seditious. Stephen had ventured into the basement to retrieve an ancient black oscillating fan, which he set up on the dresser, pointing toward Jane. The fan was on now, and each time its oscillation sent the air in their direction it lifted Jane’s napkin and settled it back down onto the tray.
Placenta previa, the doctor had said. Partial placenta previa. But to Stephen it didn’t feel partial at all. It felt completely and utterly terrifying.
She was allowed one shower every other day, and, helping her into the bathroom, undressing her, sitting on the toilet while she showered and washed her hair, Stephen held his breath, willing the baby to stay inside her for at least a little bit longer. He had to stop himself from climbing in the shower with her; he couldn’t help but think that the farther he let himself go from her, the more danger she would be in.
And sex: well. Perhaps some time in the future, if the doctors documented that the placenta had moved away from the cervix, and if the bed rest restrictions eased, then maybe. But he had seen the look of horror on Jane’s face when the doctor said that, and he had to admit that he, too, felt terrified at the prospect.
He had borrowed Jane’s laptop to visit a variety of websites about bed rest. He had learned that frustration and anger were normal responses on the part of the patient. He had learned that he, as the caregiver, must not take any manifestations of that frustration and anger personally.
He had learned that Jane might find her cross easier to bear if she brushed her hair each morning and dressed in a pretty nightgown. He had presented her with that piece of advice, and she had shouted with laughter. He had learned that an astonishing number of mothers in Jane’s situation posted daily blog updates about their experiences with bed rest, and he had bookmarked the ones he decided were the most compelling, the least annoying and pity-seeking. He had offered these to Jane as reading material. She had declined.
Most difficult for her, he knew, was the knowledge that back in Manhattan, without her, the wheels were still turning in her company; the financial world had not, in her absence, come to a complete standstill.
She had joined two conference calls so far and had spent a significant amount of time on e-mail.
“Really?” Ginny, who had been dusting in the dining room, had said when he’d gone to fetch the cordless phone. “A conference call? Isn’t she supposed to be resting?”
“Well, she is. This is more restful to her than worrying about missing it would be.”
Ginny told him with a flick of her dustcloth that she disagreed.
Now he did his best to see into the bedroom without pushing open the door; if she was sleeping, he didn’t want to disturb her. He knew she didn’t sleep well at night; he could hear, from the spare mattress he’d laid down for himself on the floor by the bed, tiny, muffled movements and sighs all through the night. He wasn’t sleeping well either: with the darkness came the fears that something might happen to the baby.
“I can see you out there, peeking through the crack,” said Jane. “Just come in already.”
“I was just—”
“I kn
ow. But come in, why don’t you. No need to stand out there.”
He entered the room and stood by the bed.
She was tapping away at an e-mail. “You can sit, you know.”
He lowered himself onto the edge of the bed slowly, gingerly.
“You look good,” he ventured.
“God, no. I look like crap.” She wore maternity shorts and a giant gray T-shirt that had once been his. Her hair stuck to her forehead.
Be supportive and agreeable, one of the websites for caregivers had told him. No matter what.
“You look like crap!” he said cheerfully. “But so what. Embrace it.”
She rolled her eyes and kept on with the e-mail.
“What are you working on?”
She waved her hand at him and continued to look down.
“Just a thing. For my boss.”
He looked at the mound of belly. He thought if he could see some movement, if he could see, with his own eyes, a flicker of motion, he would feel better about the world, better enough to leave Jane alone. “Important?”
She met his eyes briefly, then looked back down. “Honestly? You have no idea how important.”
“Really? More so than usual?”
This time she didn’t look up. “Much more so. It’s crisis mode.”
“What’s the crisis?”
“It’s a lot of crises, all mixed up together. It’s… it’s too much to go into right now.”
“Anything you can’t handle?”
“Truthfully?”
He nodded.
“Truthfully, I’m not sure.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that before. About anything.”
“Well.” She continued typing.
“Everything OK in there?” he said, nodding his head toward the mound.
She looked up and sighed, irritated. “It’s okay. It’s fine. Same as yesterday, same as tomorrow, blah blah.”
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