“Would you want to give it up?” I asked. “And stay with her every day, all day, alone? I know she’s wonderful, and we both love her. But would you want that?”
“It’s not financially sustainable,” he said, while I washed Violet’s back with a washcloth shaped like a duck.
“That wasn’t my question.”
“It’s a ridiculous question,” he said. “We couldn’t live off your salary alone.”
“Pretend,” I said, through my teeth. “Pretend it’s financially sustainable. Pretend we could live off my salary in a way that would make you happy. Would you want to do it?”
“So many of my colleagues’ wives—” he started.
“I am not your colleagues’ wives,” I said. “I’m me. And you still haven’t answered my question: Would you want to stay home with her every day and quit your job? In theory?” Violet seemed clean, so I took her out of the bath. She cried until I’d swaddled her in a hot-pink hooded towel that had bunny rabbit ears attached to it. And a cottontail.
“This isn’t what I thought our lives would be like,” Darren said. “This isn’t what I wanted.”
I looked him full in the face while holding our daughter to my chest. I felt tears filling my eyes but was powerless to stop them. “This isn’t what I wanted either.”
He opened his mouth but seemed at a loss for words.
I didn’t look at Darren again. I didn’t say anything else. Instead, I rubbed Violet dry and brought her into her room, where I gave her a new diaper and snapped her into a pair of striped pajamas. “All better?” I asked her. She smiled and gurgled at me as I wiped the tears off my cheek with a burp cloth.
I heard Darren walk into the room behind me.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t want to quit my job and stay home with her every day.”
I nodded, pressing my lips to Violet’s hair, feeling her warmth against my chest, pulling strength from her, for her. She needed a mother who stood up for herself, who wasn’t afraid to go after what she wanted. I needed to be a role model for Violet. “You understand now,” I said to Darren.
He came over and wrapped his arm around my shoulders.
“I’m sorry I’m not one of those women,” I said, “like your colleagues’ wives. I’m sorry staying at home won’t make me happy. But this is me. And I need to work.”
“Don’t say that,” he said. “You don’t have to apologize for being who you are. I should apologize.”
I wanted to ask, For what? To make sure he wasn’t apologizing just to keep the peace. But instead I said, “Apology accepted.” Though looking back I realized he didn’t quite apologize. Just acknowledged he should.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY we started a search for a nanny. And about a month after that I went back to work. I did miss Violet when I was there—more than I expected, actually. But I was grateful for Darren then. Grateful that we had choices, that we could hire people to help us when we needed it, that in the end, he wanted me to be happy.
liii
There are some moments of my life I can picture so clearly, as if I could slip back into the memories and relive them word for word, and then there are long swaths of time—days and weeks—that seem indistinguishable from one another. The months after I went back to work, while Violet was still an infant, are a blur. I was barely sleeping and developing two new shows and pumping breast milk in my office and making sure I spent as much time with Violet as possible. I was barely on Facebook, and when I was it was just to post those obligatory “5 months, 6 months, 7 months” photos. So I missed seeing pictures of you and Alina. I missed the whole development of that relationship. If I hadn’t been so busy, I might have noticed that we hadn’t spoken at all since the reunion, but it didn’t even register. I’d gotten back to a place where you didn’t really matter, the place I’d been in before you called the morning of my wedding.
And then when I was posting Violet’s “8 months” photograph, and liking photos of Julia’s trip to Amsterdam, that little heart emblem popped into my news feed, and there it was. Gabriel Samson is engaged to Alina Alexandrov. There was a picture of you underneath it, with your arms around a beautiful woman with auburn hair, wide-set hazel eyes, and an enormous smile. My stomach flipped. This shouldn’t make a difference to you, I told myself. You’re married, you have a child, you haven’t seen him in more than a year, he hasn’t been yours in more than four years. But it did. It made a difference. In that photograph I saw my “might have been.” I saw the road not taken.
I spent the next hour clicking on your pictures and looking at the two of you on vacation in Croatia. I’d never been to Croatia. Then there you were in China, on top of the Great Wall. And in Egypt, dancing with Alina, who was wearing a belly-dancing skirt made of bright red chiffon and silver coins. I was surprised by how jealous I was of that life. I wanted to climb the Great Wall of China, I wanted to belly dance in Egypt.
You were based in Baghdad again, and it looked like she was, too, working for The Guardian. I clicked on its website and read every article she wrote. And then Googled her name and read her Wikipedia page. Then I discovered you had a Wikipedia page. And your pages were linked, with an update that someone must have recently added mentioning your engagement.
I checked myself. I did not have a Wikipedia page. Neither did Darren. Then Violet started crying, so I shut down the computer. But later that day I e-mailed you a quick note that said: Congratulations!
You didn’t write back.
liv
That September I was still in my post-Violet fog, but life was starting to enter a sustainable groove. She was sleeping through the night, finally, and we’d spent the last week of August as a family in a rented house in Westhampton Beach. Violet loved the pool, so we slathered her with sunscreen, dropped her in a little inner tube contraption that had an attached hood to block her from the sun, and let her bob around like a tiny buoy while we floated in the pool ourselves. It felt like a small slice of heaven.
“You like it out here,” Darren said later, as Violet bobbed and splashed and the two of us sat on the steps in the shallow end of the pool with cold glasses of Chardonnay.
“You like it out here, too,” I answered, leaning my head on his shoulder.
“I do,” he said. “We should buy a place.”
“Maybe one day,” I told him. “But for now, renting for a week or two each summer sounds pretty ideal to me.”
He nodded. “One day. It’s on my bucket list, remember?”
I hadn’t. “Of course,” I said. “We’ve been bucket-list remiss as of late, I’m afraid.”
He shook his head. “No, we haven’t,” he said. “This year we became parents. That was on our lists.”
I laughed. “That’s right,” I said. “I take it back. We are awesome at bucket lists.”
“We are,” he said, kissing me, while Violet splashed us both.
That’s what I was thinking about that morning on the subway—the week in Westhampton, the pool, how relaxing it was. And then I looked up. The man across from me was holding a copy of the New York Times. The article facing me said: More Bodies Pulled from Hotel Rubble in Pakistan. My mind went straight to you. Were you in Pakistan? Last I’d seen you were in Baghdad, but could you have moved? Or been covering something in Islamabad? Could you have been staying at that hotel?
I couldn’t breathe properly until I’d gotten to work, logged into Facebook and seen the Associated Press article you posted about the hotel. You knew people who had been killed in the explosion, but you hadn’t been. You were still in Iraq.
“Oh, thank God,” I whispered. Then I scrolled down your page, curious to see what you’d been up to. A little broken heart icon jumped out at me. You and Alina had broken up. I wondered what had happened, and truly, I felt bad. I wanted you to be happy. I thought for a moment about reaching out to you, but
I didn’t.
My day went on, my week, my month, but you were in my thoughts more than you had been since Violet was born. I kept my eye out for your photographs. I wondered if you were going to make it back to New York any time soon, and if you did, if you’d let me know.
lv
Ordinary days sometimes turn into extraordinary days when you least expect them to. It was a Friday in January. I was working from home, listening to Violet chatter to the nanny while answering e-mails from the office. Violet was fourteen months old at that point and could say only a handful of words, but that didn’t stop her from attempting to explain the secrets of the universe to us. At least that’s what Darren and I imagined she was doing as she monologued with nonsense sounds for minutes on end.
Maria, our nanny, was responding in Spanish—courtesy of Darren’s idea to try to get Violet to grow up bilingual. I figured trying to get her to speak one language was enough, but he felt strongly, and I said fine. I asked Maria to read her books in English, though, and bring her to music classes and play groups and story time at the local library. It felt like a fair compromise. And by the way, Violet never learned much more than hola, adiós, por favor, and gracias, until she started watching Dora the Explorer. The power of television! Other kids had limits on what they could watch, but Violet watched all my shows, and some of the competition besides. She was my own little focus group of one, and it was interesting to see what caught her attention, which shows she latched on to. I was secretly thrilled when Rocket Through Time kept her transfixed. And also when she walked out of the room when Guillaume came on. I detest that show. Kate swears it taught Victoria how to whine. She’s probably right.
While I was in the middle of typing a response about next season’s budget for It Takes a Galaxy, my Gmail pinged, and there was a message from you:
Hi Luce,
I know it’s been a while. More than a while. An eon, it feels like. But I’ll be in New York tomorrow, swinging through en route to the inauguration in D.C. Couldn’t miss a moment like that. Can you believe, our first African-American president? Everyone over here is ecstatic. I think Obama’s election is going to mean great things for our country—a new, better, kinder direction. Anyway, I’d love to see you. Any chance you’re free for coffee tomorrow afternoon?
-Gabe
I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t respond right away. In fact, I didn’t respond until that night, after I’d casually mentioned your visit to Darren.
“You’re still in touch with that guy?” he asked, genuinely surprised.
I shook my head. “I haven’t seen or spoken to him since my Columbia reunion. He e-mailed me out of the blue.”
Darren unbuttoned his collar. “Would you do me a favor?” he asked.
I steeled myself. Was he going to ask me not to see you? “What is it?” I asked back.
“Will you bring Violet with you?”
I sat for a moment, a bit stunned. “You don’t trust me?” I asked.
Darren took a deep breath. “I trust you,” he said. “But I don’t trust him. I don’t know why he wants to see you. And I think you should bring Violet.”
I nodded. I knew that saying no would send Darren a message I didn’t want to send. “Of course,” I said. “I’ll bring Violet. But I think he’s just an old friend who wants to catch up.”
I wrote you back that night:
Great to hear from you. How about 3 p.m. tomorrow in Brooklyn Heights? There’s a Starbucks on Montague.
I didn’t mention Violet.
You shot back: Sounds good.
We had a plan.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY I dressed Violet up in baby jeans, baby Uggs, and a gray sweater with a pink appliqué heart. I put a pink bow in her hair. I was actually wearing something similar, though my sweater was brown without an appliqué, and I didn’t have a bow.
Darren was at the gym when I zipped us both into our winter coats and we left.
I peered through the Starbucks’s glass door, and saw you sitting at a table, your head down, reading something on your BlackBerry. Darren and I had just made the switch to iPhones, but it made sense somehow, you still on a BlackBerry. I parked the stroller outside, adjusted Violet on my hip, and opened the door. You looked up.
“Hi, Lucy,” you said. “And hi . . .”
“Violet,” I supplied. “Violet, this is Mommy’s friend Gabe. Gabe, this is my daughter.”
“Hihi,” Violet said. It was one of her words, always doubled, though Darren and I couldn’t figure out why.
“She looks just like you,” you said, standing up. “Wow.”
What were you thinking just then? I’ve always wondered. Did the fact that she looked like me and not Darren make Violet more . . . exciting? Tolerable? Lovable?
Violet must’ve sensed something she liked, because she held out her arms, and you took her. “Hihi,” she said, and patted your cheeks.
“Hihi,” you said back to her.
Then you used your free arm to hug me. “It’s been so long; I’m glad you came.”
I took Violet back, and we sat down across from each other. I put some board books and a few blocks on the table, and Violet started playing with them.
“I saw you were engaged,” I said, “on Facebook.”
I didn’t know how much time we had, and I wanted to know what was going on. Because Darren was right, there was no obvious motive for this meeting, after so long.
You laughed. “Getting right to it.”
I shrugged and retrieved the book Violet had knocked to the floor.
“You want to know what happened,” you said.
“Only if you want to tell me,” I answered.
So you told me about Alina and the job she was offered in D.C. and how you both realized that your careers were more important than your relationship. She wanted to go to D.C., you wanted to stay abroad, and neither one of you was willing to compromise to stay together. I couldn’t help thinking about us, about how you left me for the same reason.
“It was a case of two very nice people not meant for each other,” you said.
I wondered if you said that about me.
“I’m sorry,” I answered.
“Sorr-eee,” Violet echoed, looking up. Another of her words.
You laughed. “Did you clone yourself?” you asked. “Make a Xerox? She’s fantastic.”
“Are you fantastic?” I asked Violet.
She smiled and clapped.
Then I laughed too.
“You’re happy,” you said to me. “With Darren, with Violet, you’re happy.”
“I am,” I said. And it was true.
“I’m glad one of us is.” It wasn’t sarcastic or malicious, the way you said it. Just kind of wistful.
“You’re the one who left,” I reminded you.
“I know,” you said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the choices I made. Why I made them. What life would have been like if I hadn’t.”
You seemed so contemplative, as if you were taking stock of your life, judging it.
“Do you think you would have been happier?” I ventured. “If you’d stayed?”
You sighed. “I don’t know,” you said. “On some days I think I would have been happier if I’d never tried photography at all. I think I was proud of my pursuit, proud of doing something important. But it’s been really hard. It’s taken a lot out of me. But . . . I don’t know. Maybe I’m not the kind of person who will ever be happy. Maybe I’m not the man I hoped I was.”
“Mama!” Violet said.
“Violet!” I answered her. She turned back to the toys in front of her.
“I just want so many conflicting things,” you said, your eyes on my daughter, watching her flip the pages of her book. “I don’t know if they’re compatible.”
“You’re jus
t in a bad spot right now,” I said. “You’ll figure it out.”
“I haven’t so far,” you said into your coffee cup. “And I miss us, you, what we had.” You looked up at me. “I watch your shows whenever I find them on the air. Whenever I’m afraid, I dream about you. Whenever I’m sad, I wish I hadn’t left.”
My heartbeat sped up slightly. “Please don’t do this,” I said, holding tight to Violet.
You ran your fingers through your hair. “I’m sorry,” you said. “Forget I said that.”
I flipped Violet around so I could pick her up. “Listen,” I said, “it was great to see you, Gabe, but Violet and I should probably go.”
You nodded.
“I hope you find everything you’re looking for.”
“Thanks.” Your voice cracked. “Me too.”
“Say ‘bye-bye,’ Violet,” I told my daughter.
“Bye-bye,” she said, and reached out to you again.
You hugged her. You looked at me, clearly wanting to hug me too. But instead, you looked down and walked away. I zipped us both into our coats and snapped Violet’s hood. Even though the day was overcast, I fumbled in the diaper bag for my sunglasses. I didn’t want anyone to see the tears in my eyes, just like you didn’t want me to see the tears in yours.
lvi
That summer, Darren and I got dressed up for the first time in a long time and went to Gavin’s wedding. We hadn’t seen him much since Violet was born, and I barely knew his fiancée at all.
Darren wolf-whistled when I walked into the living room in a navy dress with a plunging neckline. “Hot mama,” he said.
I smiled. “Let’s go, handsome.”
We had to get to the wedding early because Darren was a groomsman, and Gavin greeted us when we walked in. “I got my own paper doll now,” he said, laughing.
I hadn’t thought about that in years, how he’d called me Darren’s paper doll the first time we’d met. “So what does that actually mean?” I asked.
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