Nicholas told her not to cancel the appointments, that it would be better, actually, if she didn’t come by tomorrow, or quite so often, as Stephanie found it difficult to entertain while taking care of a newborn—especially when guests dropped by announced.
“I see,” Laura said after a pause.
“I know you’re just trying to help,” he said. “I hope this doesn’t hurt your feelings.”
“Not at all,” Laura told her brother.
She knew better than to allow it to upset her. The problem was Stephanie’s: she needed to let down her guard—to figure out how to relax and be comfortable around people. It would be childish for Laura to take it personally.
* * *
DEPRESSION WAS AN ILLNESS, AND Laura felt for anyone who suffered from it, but there was something about the modifier, postpartum, that she wrestled with. The concept seemed vaguely Victorian, and she wondered about its scientific credibility. In any case, Laura felt terrible for Stephanie, but also vindicated. This explained Stephanie’s reaction to her visits. There was no need to feel foolish or guilty about having come over so often.
It was Bibs who called to let Laura know Stephanie had been admitted to the hospital. Laura didn’t want to bother Nicholas, so she called 136 for updates.
Laura had never heard of such a thing as a private psychiatric facility that had a specific program catering to mothers suffering from “PPD,” but apparently one existed, in northern Westchester, and after a few nights at Columbia Presbyterian, Stephanie went there.
“It’s the best,” Bibs said, the way she spoke about restaurants and hotels. They were completely booked, but Bibs’s longtime therapist, Dr. Clarke, had made some calls and gotten Stephanie a room.
Every Friday after work, Nicholas, who’d never learned to drive, took the train up to visit his wife and child. This went on for five weeks, and Laura was starting to worry. Finally Bibs called to say that Stephanie was doing much better and scheduled to be discharged that coming Friday. Laura dialed Nicholas at the office and offered to drive him up to get her so that they wouldn’t have to take the train back.
* * *
IN KEEPING WITH THE TREND of the last decade, it had been a prematurely warm spring. It was not yet June and the punitive humidity of summer was already upon them. The newspaper predicted today’s high would be ninety-four degrees—a new record for this date. By nine a.m. a fuzzy yellow haze had already descended upon the city, obscuring the horizon and enshrouding the tops of skyscrapers like tufts of steel wool. Stepping outside felt like entering the tropical bird section of the zoo. Rarely a day went by where Laura didn’t think about the greenhouse effect, and on days like this, rarely an hour.
The parking garage on One-hundred-and-third Street was only a few minutes from Laura’s apartment, but walking there in the heat, with Nicholas, it felt much longer. He didn’t say anything, but she could sense his disapproval that she would keep her car in Harlem. People didn’t believe Laura when she told them how little she spent on parking: one hundred dollars a month. She wanted to share this figure with Nicholas, but being ignorant of the cost of keeping a car in the city, he wouldn’t be impressed.
As they waited to cross One-hundred-and-first, something transpired that made Laura question whether the saved money was worth it. For the last block or so she’d been aware of the encroaching presence of what sounded like a group of teenage boys behind them. Apart from the occasional profanity, their rowdy, slangy banter was beyond Laura’s comprehension, though it put her on edge. As she and Nicholas waited for the light to turn, the group caught up to them, and Laura felt a hand on her bottom. The thin cotton fabric of her skirt was a flimsy barrier between the sweaty compress of the groper’s palm and her own skin, which hadn’t completely dried after getting out of the bath that morning.
Nicholas was either oblivious or shared Laura’s instinct that the best thing to do was avoid creating a scene. Too scared to turn and see who was touching her, Laura stood perfectly still and pretended nothing was happening. When the light turned and the hand let go, a trio of adolescent boys on bicycles rolled off the curb. They couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen years old. Their bikes were much too small for them. Laura felt a mix of fury and sorrow as she watched them pedal on, knees bent out at awkward angles.
Turning the car’s AC on was like opening the door of an oven. “It takes a few minutes for it to get cool,” Laura explained, adjusting the vents to direct the air away from them. “While we wait for that to happen, we can drive with the windows down.”
“AC and open windows,” Nicholas said with phony excitement. “How frivolous.”
“I admire people who never learned how to drive,” she told him. “Given the impact of automobiles on the planet, it must feel nice to know that you’re not contributing to that problem.”
It made her feel better to say this, knowing how much it would irritate him since he refused to believe in global warming.
“I can drive,” Nicholas said. “I simply prefer not to.”
Neither of them spoke for a while after that. Laura worried she’d gone too far; perhaps he felt emasculated that he wasn’t able to retrieve his wife and infant on his own. Her thoughts drifted to an afternoon more than three decades ago.
Bibs had been away at Seven Oaks—“summer camp for grownups,” as it was explained to Laura and Nicholas. It was her first of what would be several stints there and the only time that Douglas had taken the two of them to go see her. The four of them had had a picnic outside and gone for a walk to a pond. When it was time to say goodbye to their mother, Nicholas, who was just five years old, didn’t want to leave. Douglas had to carry him kicking and screaming to the car, and as they drove back to the city his howling continued. “That’ll be enough, Nicholas,” Douglas kept saying. “You’re giving me a headache.”
At a certain point their father couldn’t take it anymore and pulled over with a violent jerk on the shoulder of the highway.
“Enough!” he barked. “Enough! Enough! Enough!”
To see their father, who was normally so composed, like this was very upsetting. Someone at Seven Oaks had given them a balloon in the shape of an animal; Nicholas had been clutching it in his lap and now he squeezed it with such force it popped—first the head, then the tail, then the torso. He started crying even harder.
Douglas glanced at Laura. “You must calm him down,” he pleaded, an angry, desperate look on his face. “I simply cannot drive like this.”
Laura was at a loss for how to handle the situation. She felt like someone had taken a spoon and scooped out the inside of her chest, as one does a pumpkin to make a jack-o’-lantern. As they continued to sit there on the side of the Bronx River Parkway, their station wagon rattling in the turbulence of cars whizzing by, it started to rain—a sharp, prickly, slanted rain that landed on the windows in jarring splats. It was as though a curtain had been pulled back and something terribly ugly had been revealed and nothing would ever feel the same. They could never go back to how it was, to how life was supposed to be, because it had never really been that way. Everything up to that point had been a game of make-believe.
When they reached the Saw Mill River Parkway, Nicholas asked if she had a nail clipper. Laura said she might have one in her purse; she’d check at the next light.
“Never mind,” he said, picking one of Emma’s barrettes off the floor, which he used to extract the dirt from beneath his nails.
Laura asked if he’d made any special plans for Stephanie’s homecoming.
Indeed he had: tea at the Plaza, a horse-and-carriage ride through Central Park, dinner at the Boathouse—all of her favorite New York things to do.
“Assuming she’s up for it, of course,” Nicholas added.
“I’m sure it will make her very happy,” Laura said.
When they got off the exit, she asked, “Right or left?”
“Right,” Nicholas said. Laura put on her blinker, but as they approached the e
nd of the ramp, he changed his answer.
“Left?” she repeated.
“Right!” he said with conviction.
“You mean correct, go left, or take a right?”
Nicholas, who’d inherited their mother’s geographic dyslexia, held up both hands to make L’s with his thumb and pointer fingers, a trick to discern left from right which Laura had recently tried to teach Emma, who was already demonstrating signs of being similarly challenged.
“Go this w-w-way,” he said, tapping the passenger-side window.
After she made the turn, Nicholas casually mentioned that he didn’t know the directions from the highway. “Just drive to the village where the train station is,” he instructed. “I’ll know where to go from there.”
A mile later, no sign of a village, Laura pulled into a gas station that was also a general store to ask for directions. Stepping out of the car, Laura’s simmering frustration with Nicholas abated. The air smelled like warm gravel and honeysuckle; the country heat felt less apocalyptic, more recreational. The husky pulse of insects and the mindless twitter of birds had a pacifying effect. We could move here, she thought, walking toward the store’s entrance.
She envisioned a modest house with a front porch and a wood stove. They would buy a rake and a snow shovel, learn how to grow a vegetable garden and compost their leftovers. Each morning Laura would stand in the driveway and wave goodbye as a yellow school bus shuttled Emma to the public school, where her classmates would be the children of the local shopkeepers, plumbers, and policemen. Growing up, the children would spend time in one another’s house, which in a town like this people called a “home.” And the two of them wouldn’t be known by their family name, but simply as Laura and Emma.
A lifelong problem Laura had when receiving directions from strangers: so much energy went into smiling and nodding to convey her appreciation for their assistance that she struggled to retain what they told her. The man behind the counter had made it sound very easy, however, and Laura did exactly what she’d been told, but Nicholas objected to the final turn, claiming he did not remember the driveway being so rustic.
Laura thought it made sense for a psychiatric institution to have a driveway like this, long, unpaved, woodsy, and narrow; it created a sense of remove, discouraged the casual flow of traffic, generated the impression of being safely sequestered from the cold curiosity of those for whom places like this existed only in movies or as the punch line of jokes.
“Nope, doesn’t look right,” Nicholas kept saying.
“It has to be,” Laura insisted, though she, too, was starting to have doubts.
The farther up this driveway they drove, the unrulier it got. Sticks cracked and popped beneath their tires and bushes brushed against the windows like curtains of a car wash.
“I will say this driveway is awfully narrow,” Laura said, coming to a stop. She put the car in park, unbuckled her seat belt, turned the ignition off, and opened her door. Stepping outside, she noticed that the only tire treads on the ground were behind them; what lay ahead of the path they were on appeared to be unblemished. A sylvan green light filtered down through the canopy of leaves, creating the sense of a room.
“I think we may have made a wrong turn,” Laura conceded, getting back in. “It looks like this isn’t technically a road, but some sort of hiking trail, or a private path that cuts through someone’s property.”
Laura explained that there wasn’t enough room to do a three-point turn, which meant they’d have to reverse all the way out. Nicholas nodded, chewing the inside of his lip. She sensed that he was very frustrated, that he wished he’d just taken the train. But Laura refused to feel guilty. She had volunteered to do a nice thing; Nicholas should have thought ahead and come prepared with directions from the highway.
“Backing up has never been my forte,” Laura warned as she put her seat belt back on, “but I’ll do my best.”
Putting the car in reverse, she twisted around and gingerly lifted her foot off the brake. When the car didn’t move she gently pressed down on the accelerator. It was difficult to manipulate the rear wheels to make the car’s progression adhere to the trail, which was not straight. They’d gone a few yards before they came up against a tree.
“Whoops-a-daisy,” Laura said, adjusting the wheels and putting the car back in drive. She proceeded to give the accelerator a series of tentative taps. They were on an incline, so each tap of the accelerator would take them a few inches forward, and then they’d roll a couple of inches back.
“At this rate, we should be back on the road by tomorrow,” Nicholas remarked.
“Do you want to give it a try?” she asked, craning her neck around to see out the back. “You know, I never thought about it before, but of all the New Yorkers I know who never got around to learning how to drive—or simply prefer not to—they’re almost all men.
“It’s interesting, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” she continued. “Learning to drive requires a certain humility, and then there’s the additional humiliation of being late to the game.”
When it became obvious that reversing their way back out was hopeless, Laura pursued their only other option, which was to go forward and hope for the best.
The woods eventually ended, but the path continued onto a field of tall grass, which brought them to the foot of a freshly mown lawn, at the other end of which sat a house. Laura slowly nosed the car out of the field and onto this lawn. She paused before proceeding. There was a car parked in the driveway next to the house.
“I wonder what the people who live in that house are going to think when they see a car driving through their backyard,” she said.
“I imagine they’ll be a bit surprised,” Nicholas said. “And not so happy.”
“Well, how else do I get us out of here? Call a crane service? Pull a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?”
Laura rolled her seat forward as far as it would go and sat extremely erect. White-knuckled, her elbows gripping the wheel like it was the helm of a ship that was about to get carried out to sea, she set out across the lawn. So as not to frighten the residents of this house, or come across as a fugitive or a drunk, she wore a friendly smile and drove very slowly, prepared to stop at any moment and explain herself.
If anyone was home, they stayed inside, and if the police were called, Laura successfully vacated the premises before they arrived. The house’s driveway was wide and newly paved, and it delivered them back to the road they’d been on. Giddy with adrenaline, Laura made a right, and shortly after doing so, Nicholas spotted the correct turn.
“Well, that was an adventure!” Laura said, pulling up to the facility’s main entrance. She felt victorious—the hero of the day. Now that the ordeal was behind them, it was a funny story she couldn’t wait to tell.
Laura waited in the car as Nicholas went inside to collect Stephanie and the baby. She wanted the car to be cool for them, so she kept the ignition on and the AC running, though it made her wince. When fifteen minutes passed, she turned the car off and opened all the windows. After another fifteen minutes, Nicholas came back out on his own.
“Stephanie’s not in a great place right now,” he said, leaning in the passenger-side window. “It was decided she and the baby are going to spend a little more time here.”
Laura was confused. “They’re not letting her come home today?”
Nicholas shook his head. “I spoke to her this morning and she sounded great; I told her I’d be here by one, and apparently when we were late she thought I wasn’t coming and she got quite worked up.”
“Did you explain what happened? How you didn’t know where we were going and we got lost?”
Nicholas looked annoyed by the question. “Of course I did. But the point is she didn’t know that at the time, she felt abandoned, and she got quite worked up, and as I said, she’s not in a great place right now.”
“Oh, dear.” Laura bit her lip. “I’m so sorry, Nick. I feel responsible.”
Laura knew she was not responsible for what happened. Any rational person could see this. She waited for him to reject her apology as unfounded, to thank her for taking the day off from work to drive up here, to commend her courage and competence in getting them out of the woods—and in doing so acknowledge that the detour had been his own fault, as he should have come prepared with directions from the highway. But Nicholas expressed none of the above. Instead he reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet.
“What’s this for?” Laura asked as he passed her two fifties.
“Gas money,” he said. “I’m going to stick around for the afternoon. I’ll take the train home. You should get back to Emma.”
“She’s having a playdate with Charlotte. Margaret’s got her for the day.”
“Well, I’m sure you have things to do,” Nicholas said. Jaw clenched, he put his hands in his pockets.
“Nick,” Laura said, feeling her mouth go dry. “This isn’t my fault. You can’t be mad at me.”
“I appreciate your taking the day off from work and trying to help,” were his parting words.
But he didn’t appreciate it. He thought this was her fault and he was mad at her. Even before they’d gotten lost, his demeanor had been far from gracious. Laura had never experienced road rage, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to drive this angry. She sat in the parking lot, ignition running, AC blasting, trying to calm down. She tried to put things in perspective by thinking about today’s record-high temperature and how the earth was doomed. Normally the sobering reality of the trajectory they were on eclipsed whatever trivial thought or anxiety she’d been grappling with, or at least dulled its edge, but today it had the opposite effect.
There were steps leading to the building’s entrance. A righteous momentum carried her up these two at a time, then a pair of magnetically operated glass doors swooshed open in cowering deference to her clipped advance.
“I can’t let you in if your name isn’t on our visitors’ list,” the receptionist coolly informed her.
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