The Light We Lost

by Jill Santopolo

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think maybe today’s not the best day for this.”

  “Is everything okay?” you said. “I should’ve asked first. If you want to talk about anything—”

  “It’s just . . . today’s my wedding day.” I had trouble saying the words. Had trouble saying them to you.

  “Luce,” you said, sounding like I’d slapped you. “You’re getting married today?”

  “I’m getting married today,” I echoed.

  “Oh,” you said. “Shit.” I remember that exactly. The way you said it, your intonation. Oh. Shit. Like each word was a complete sentence all its own.

  I was quiet for a moment.

  There was silence on your end too. And I felt bad. “It’ll be okay,” I said. “You’ll find another Pegasus.”

  “What if—” You never finished the sentence, as if you were afraid to say it, or maybe it was that you were afraid for me to hear it.

  “You will,” I said. Then quieter, “I should probably go.”

  “Yeah,” you said. “I’m . . . I’m sorry I called.”

  “No,” I told you, “don’t worry about it. It’s fine.”

  “Sorry,” you said again.

  We hung up, but of course I was thinking about you for the rest of the morning.

  xlvii

  Without waterproof mascara, I don’t think I would’ve been able to get through my wedding day. As I was getting dressed, as my hair was twisted into a chignon, as a nice woman named Jackie was applying concealer to my face, I kept thinking about you saying Oh. Shit. I kept hearing your unfinished sentence: What if—? I was sure Darren was what I’d wanted. I’d thought I was sure. Up until that moment, I was certain. And then you got me thinking.

  When Jackie decided she was going to give up on the undereye liner because my eyes kept overflowing with tears, my mom asked everyone to clear out of the room.

  “Just give us a moment,” she said, touching the pearls around her neck, as if there were a reservoir of strength in that family heirloom.

  Once the room was empty, she leaned against the counter in the bridal suite. “Lucy,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  I didn’t want to admit the truth, that I was thinking about you on my wedding day, that I was questioning my decision.

  “I guess I’m just emotional,” I said.

  She looked at me hard, her icy eyes cutting through my lie, just the way they did when I was a kid. “Lucy,” she said, “I’m your mother. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

  So I told her something. I told her something I’d been worrying about for months, something I hadn’t admitted to anyone. “I think Darren loves me more than I love him,” I said.

  She hugged me, but carefully, so my damp makeup wouldn’t rub off onto her champagne silk dress. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Relationships aren’t always equal. The balance is forever shifting. Who loves whom more, who needs whom more. Your relationship with Darren today won’t be the same even a year from now.”

  She held me by my shoulders and pulled away so she could look into my eyes. “And I don’t think it’s so terrible if he loves you just a little more than you love him right now. Then you know he’ll treat you like a princess.”

  I laughed and wiped my eyes. But she was still looking at me with that lie-detector expression. “There’s something else,” she said.

  I looked down at my fingers, at the elegantly painted French manicure on my nails. “Gabe called this morning.”

  “Gabe Samson?” my mother asked.

  I nodded, my eyes welling with tears again. “What if he’s the man I’m supposed to be with, not Darren?”

  My mom leaned back against the counter again and rubbed her pearls. She was quiet for a while. Then she spoke: “I want you to think, truly think, about the relationship you have with Darren and about the relationship you had with Gabe,” she said. “And I want you to think about who would be a better partner—a better father to your children. If you think the answer’s not Darren, you don’t have to get married today. Even if it’s not Gabe. If you think there’s someone else out there who would make you happier than Darren does, you can walk away. It won’t be easy, but you can do it. Just say the word and I’ll tell your father, he’ll tell the guests. But you won’t get to change your mind again. If you say good-bye to Darren today, that’s forever. I’ve seen how much the two of you care about each other and how much fun you have together. But if this doesn’t feel right, no one is making you marry him.”

  I nodded. My mother walked over to the window. And I thought about you, Gabe. I thought about how wonderful you made me feel, but also how awful. How you cared so much more about yourself than you did about us. How in the end, your life was The Gabe Show, and to keep you I would’ve had to play the supporting actress to the star. I know it might be hard for you to hear this, but I’m just telling you the truth. That’s what I thought that day.

  I also thought about Darren. About the fact that he wasn’t perfect. That he still didn’t really take my job seriously. And sometimes I worried that he didn’t take me seriously. But I figured I could change that, I could work harder to show him what it meant to me. I could help him see that I wanted to be his partner, his equal. And I loved him. I loved his laugh, his sense of humor, his grin. He wasn’t dark and complicated—being with him was fun and easy. It felt solid and stable. He made me happy—most of the time. And we’d built the foundation of a beautiful future together. I could never leave him there at the Boathouse on our wedding day.

  I wiped my eyes. “Thank you,” I said to my mother. “I’m fine now. I’m ready.”

  My mom let out a huge breath and gave me a hug. “You know I would support you no matter what.”

  “I know,” I said, smelling the Shalimar perfume on her neck.

  “Just remember,” she added, “there’s a difference between infatuation and love.”

  I nodded.

  Was I infatuated with you? Were we infatuated with each other? Can infatuation last this long? Or has it always been love between us? I’d like to think it has.

  xlviii

  Even though I’d been working on It Takes a Galaxy for a while, researching real-life stories, trying to pull conflicts from as many countries and cultures as possible so the writers could use them as the basis of various episodes, I’d never traveled any farther than Europe. So Darren and I decided to go to Turkey on our honeymoon. I wanted to hear the call to prayer. I wanted to see a tiny piece of one of the countries I’d researched. And when we got there I couldn’t stop taking notes. I saw women with their heads covered walking down the street, talking to women with hair falling around their shoulders. I pulled out a ticket stub and scribbled a message to myself to suggest a scene like that in our next episode, but with aliens, of course.

  “Enough with the writing!” Darren said. “We’re here on our honeymoon. Work is back in New York. I haven’t checked in with the office once since we’ve been here, and you haven’t stopped scribbling and muttering to yourself.”

  I stopped midword. “My work is important to me,” I said. But then I remembered what I told you when you’d called. “But you and I are more important. I’ll stop.” And I did.

  Still, I couldn’t help thinking about what it would’ve been like if it were you and me on that trip. You wouldn’t have asked me to stop—you would have suggested things too. And we both would have been looking out for great opportunities for photographs, just like we did when we walked holes through the soles of our sneakers in Manhattan.

  • • •

  DARREN’S AND MY TRIP took us to Cappadocia, where we toured a landscape that looked like the moon and took off right before dawn in a hot-air balloon that rose up just in time for us to see the sunrise. It was exquisite—a swirl of pinks and oranges and purples—and Darren had his arms wrapped around me, keeping me warm, making me feel
loved in the middle of the sky’s majesty. But I couldn’t stop thinking about those women. I wished I had spoken to them, asked them what their lives were like, what they would want American kids to know about Turkey.

  • • •

  LATER, DARREN AND I were at a spot called Devrent Valley. Darren read from the guidebook, “‘Devrent or “Imagination” Valley is filled with rock formations that look like people and animals. Spend time discovering what you see in the rocks.’”

  I stood next to him, seeing a camel and a dolphin and a snake in a hat.

  “I think that one looks like the Virgin Mary,” he said, pointing to a pillar. “What do you think, Mrs. Maxwell?” He’d been calling me Mrs. Maxwell the whole trip, which at first I found sweet and funny but then started to irritate me. I’d told him I’d take his name personally, but I was still going to be Lucy Carter at work. Is that how I’m keyed into your phone? Or did you change my name when Darren and I married? Your boss called me Lucy Carter Maxwell. You did too, actually. I guess that’s how you think of me.

  I stared at the rock that Darren was facing, looking for a mother and child, looking for a veil. “I just see a man holding a camera,” I said.

  xlix

  I know so many people who spent years trying to get pregnant. Vanessa and Jay wound up with triplets after taking Clomid. Kate ended up going through in vitro, twice. Darren jokes that when he sneezes on me, I conceive. I smile when he says that, but I don’t find it funny. It makes me think of the Birthmothers in that book The Giver I read in high school, where getting pregnant over and over again was their assigned task, their only use in society.

  Not long after we got married, Darren started talking about having kids. He thought we were the perfect age to start a family. The same exact age his parents were when they had his oldest sister. Even though Kate had just told me that she was pregnant, I wasn’t so sure he was right. The triplets had been born a week earlier, prematurely but remarkably okay. Vanessa and Jay had a nanny and a night nurse—and Vanessa’s mom, who stayed with them for the first six months—and even still, when Jay called he sounded like a zombie. That first week, he rang me from the lab while I was still at work.

  “Can you talk?” he asked.

  “I’m at the office,” I answered, cradling my cell phone to my ear. “Is everything okay?”

  “Humans weren’t meant to have three babies at once,” he said. “Am I a terrible person if I don’t want to go home to them?”

  “You’re not a terrible person, Jay, you’re just tired,” I told him. “It’s understandable. Give yourself another thirty minutes, but then you have to go back. Those babies need you. Vanessa needs you.”

  “I can’t even tell them apart,” he said. “Unless they’re wearing clothes.”

  That one gave me pause, but not too much. Sometimes I wonder if my brother would recognize me if he saw me on the street, out of context.

  “Think about them like you do different viruses,” I told him. “Pay close attention. Notice their differences, not their similarities.”

  I hoped that would help. I felt bad for Jay. Three babies at once was definitely more than he and Vanessa had thought they would get.

  He took a big breath and let it out. “Like hydrogen loves oxygen,” he said. “I’ll let you work now.”

  “Love you too, Jay,” I said, before hanging up.

  So after that, after the triplets, I wasn’t completely convinced a baby was something I wanted to add to my life just then. But Darren was sure. He reminded me that parenthood was on both of our bucket lists.

  “And besides,” he said, “it’ll probably take at least a year, if we go by Vanessa and Kate.”

  It took a month.

  There were a few weeks of absolute exhaustion, going to sleep before nine p.m. Then way too many weeks of nausea, the kind where I would run out of meetings, sure that if I didn’t, I would hurl all over the writers’ room and the scenes they were revising. Then, once that mercifully passed, there were months of having to pee approximately once an hour.

  It took me about four months of being pregnant to be okay with it. To come to terms with what my life would be like once the baby arrived. But once I did, I was excited. I didn’t think I would react this way, but I spent my lunchtimes at the office looking at baby clothes and nursery furniture. I read articles about breastfeeding and water births and when the ideal time was to introduce peanut butter into your child’s diet. I became baby obsessed.

  I even started wondering if having a successful career really was all that important to me, or if being a mom trumped that. I wondered if I’d come back after maternity leave. I know, after everything I told you about not wanting to be defined by my role as a wife or a mother and hoping to make a difference in the world with my work—how my main complaint about Darren was that he didn’t understand that part of me—the fact that I was considering quitting might seem crazy. It felt crazy to me—like I was turning into someone else, an alternate Lucy whose priorities morphed and changed. But it was truly how I felt. Being pregnant did that to me. And Darren really wanted me to stay home too. He said that no one would take care of our baby better than I would, and I was starting to think he was right.

  • • •

  DARREN WAS DOING incredibly well at work. The deals he closed had impressed his bosses so much that they made him a director, and his new salary blew my mind. He was earning more than five times what I was, and I wasn’t doing all that badly myself. With all the extra income, he wanted to buy a big apartment in a great neighborhood.

  “Let’s move to Manhattan,” he said, one morning, with the New York Times spread across his legs and Annie at his feet. “Maybe the Upper East Side.”

  But Manhattan was our borough. Yours and mine. And ever since your phone call five months before, I’d felt more aware of that. Even though Darren and I had gotten married in Manhattan, we’d never really claimed it. Brooklyn was our place.

  “I like Brooklyn,” I told him. “How about Park Slope? Or Brooklyn Heights?”

  Even married with a baby on the way, I was thinking about you. I was making life decisions based on us. But I truly thought it would stop—that you’d fade from my mind again, the way you had before. And that turned out to be more or less true. But at that point, you were still there, front of brain, guiding my thoughts.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “P.S. 6 is a great elementary school.” Then he shrugged. “I guess we could always send the baby to private school.”

  “So Brooklyn?” I asked him.

  He was already looking at the Brooklyn Heights listings.

  “I found one!” he said a few minutes later. “Listen to this: four bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, two floors of a brownstone on Love Lane. How could we not live on Love Lane?”

  Then he pulled me over and kissed my stomach before he kissed my lips. I kissed him back. “Do we need four bedrooms?” I asked him.

  “We might one day,” he said with a smile.

  I knew he wanted a big family, like his. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that, but I wasn’t ruling it out either. “How about we check it out?” I said.

  We went to the open house. I’d never seen an apartment that big in the city before. There was a formal dining room, an eat-in kitchen—what am I saying, you know all these things. Obviously. You’ve been there.

  Once we bought the apartment, once we moved in, once we started decorating the nursery, once all of that happened, I felt like a mom for real. I couldn’t wait to meet my baby.

  l

  I’m not sure why fives and tens are big deals: thirtieth birthdays, twenty-fifth wedding anniversaries, five-year reunions—ours was the summer I was pregnant for the first time, a week after Darren and I had moved to our new Brooklyn Heights apartment. Darren couldn’t stop talking about filling all the bedrooms with babies, but I was too busy concentrating on
the one growing inside me.

  You’d come to town but hadn’t let me know. You hadn’t contacted me at all since I’d gotten married. That was probably the right choice. I thought about you enough without the real you making appearances in my world.

  But I guess you didn’t want to catch me off guard at the reunion, or maybe you wanted to prepare yourself, to see what kind of reaction I’d give before we saw each other in person. You texted me that afternoon.

  See you tonight? you wrote.

  I stared at the message on my phone for a good two minutes. You didn’t know I was pregnant. I thought I should tell you before you saw me.

  I’ll be the pregnant one in the blue dress, I wrote back, half an hour later.

  Probably not the most elegant way to give you the news. You didn’t write back.

  And, of course, for the entire rest of the day I wondered what you were thinking. If you were upset or happy for me. If you were going to avoid me at the reunion, or specifically look for me.

  “What’s going on with you today?” Darren asked, touching my shoulder. “I just called your name four times, it’s like you’re in a different world. Do you want me to zip your dress?”

  “Sorry,” I said, “just thinking about college. And yes, thank you.”

  Darren has a thing about zipping up my dresses. He thinks there’s something especially intimate about the act of dressing someone. More so than undressing. He says it showed love, not just lust.

  “Want me to tie your tie?” I asked.

  He smiled and said yes.

  How did you get ready for the reunion? Were you staying with friends? In a hotel room? I never had a chance to ask you.

  The reunion was a little insane—don’t you agree? People conspicuously holding on to their husbands or wives. A few of us wearing high-end maternity dresses. The same way I felt those jealous eyes on us in Bloomingdale’s years before, I saw women at the reunion looking at me with envy. I’d nabbed the successful husband, I was about to have the baby. It didn’t matter that we went to an Ivy League university, that the women there were lawyers and doctors, playwrights and bankers, consultants and academics—they all came up to me and asked about the baby, about the wedding. No one asked where I was working, what I’d been up to since graduation. No one cared that I’d just been promoted to associate producer, that I was developing a new show on my own called Rocket Through Time that took kids on an exploration of history and showed how it affected the present. It was just, “When are you due?” “Have you found out the sex?” “How long have you been married?” “Where did you meet him?” I wouldn’t be surprised if half the women I spoke to put in for share houses in the Hamptons that summer. I was starting to think that my college roommates had made the right decision in staying away.