Seven Year Switch

by Claire Cook

  Seth wasn’t due to arrive for another ten minutes, but it still broke my heart to see Anastasia watching and waiting for him. I couldn’t help imagining the day he just wouldn’t show.

  She’d be sitting and sitting, checking the big old clock on the living room wall again and again. Then she’d start making excuses for him—maybe he’d lost track of time, maybe he was stuck in traffic, maybe he couldn’t find his car keys.

  Anastasia would begin to worry that Seth had been in an accident. And then, as the minutes ticked into hours, she’d get really worried. Finally, she’d insist I call the police and the hospital, and the whole time I’d be thinking: I just knew he’d let her down. I knew it.

  “He’s here!” Anastasia yelled. She jumped off the couch and practically flew out the front door.

  I slid my feet into an old pair of flip-flops and followed at a more dignified pace.

  By the time I got outside, Seth had already scooped Anastasia up into a big hug. He put her down on the ground, and she twirled around in her party dress. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled a long woo-hoo.

  Anastasia curtsied the way she’d curtsied in the play. “It’s a little bit small because we bought it in third grade. I had to have it, because I got picked to be a princess.”

  “I can see why,” Seth said. “You look exactly like a princess. Did you ever see Star Wars?”

  “Only like a hundred times,” Anastasia said. “But I’ll watch it again if you want. I’ve seen the original trilogy and The Clone Wars. It’s not as good, but at least it’s animated.”

  Seth leaned into his car and pulled out a large take-out bag. He reached back in and handed Anastasia a shiny purple gift bag.

  He finally noticed me. “Hey,” he said. He was wearing jeans and another button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, this one with soft taupe pinstripes, so subtle they almost weren’t there.

  “Hey,” I said. “Thanks for putting up the railings.”

  “The least I could do,” he said.

  “True,” I said.

  We looked at each other.

  He grinned. “So, tell me what you really think, Jill.”

  Anastasia managed to wait until we got inside the house to open her present.

  “Ohmigod,” she screamed. “It’s my very own Purple People Reacher Phone! My wish came true already!”

  “You didn’t,” I said.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Anastasia yelled. She was jumping all over the kitchen floor. In another minute, she’d trip and fall over the kitchen sink, and we’d all end up in the emergency room for stitches.

  “You’re welcome,” Seth said. He nodded at everything floating in the sink on the floor. “Did you do all that by yourself, Asia?”

  “Yes!” Anastasia yelled. She was still jumping, and her ears had already turned red. “It’s for Loy Krathong, and my wish came true already!”

  I started putting plates on the table, so we could at least eat the Thai food before it got cold. Instead of offering to help, Seth sat down and started trying to clip the phone onto the sparkly purple lanyard that came with it.

  “If you make a wish with someone on Loy Krathong,” Seth said, “it means the person will be in your life forever.”

  Anastasia opened the penny drawer again. “Come on, Dad, let’s make a wish.”

  I slammed a cabinet door shut. Seth and Anastasia both looked over.

  “I meant you, too, Mom,” Anastasia said. She held another penny out to me on her open palm.

  “Thanks, honey,” I said. I turned to Seth. “Don’t you think you might have checked in with me first?”

  “Why?” Anastasia said. “Why would we check in with you?”

  I ignored her and waited for Seth to answer.

  “I thought it would be a nice surprise,” Seth said. “I know you need the phone for work, so it seemed like it would help out. I added Asia to my family plan—”

  “Your family plan,” I repeated.

  “He’s allowed to do that,” Anastasia said.

  “That way we’ll have unlimited minutes together,” Seth said. “And I got a great promotional deal on the phone. Plus, it’s got a built-in GPS, which is an important safety feature for kids. I mean, we’ll always know right where she is.”

  “Yeah,” Anastasia said. “What’s GPS again?”

  I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “Right,” I said. “We haven’t seen you in seven years, and now you want to know where she is.”

  I stomped off to the bathroom. I stared at myself in the mirror and tried to decide whether I wanted to spit or cry. A phone call to ask if the gift was appropriate would have been nice. A check to help out with the monthly bills would have been even nicer. It’s easy to look like Santa Claus when you don’t have to buy the groceries.

  IT WAS THE SMELL OF THAI FOOD that brought me back to the kitchen. Anastasia and Seth had finished setting the table. They’d transferred the food from the take-out containers into bowls, something I had to admit Anastasia and I didn’t always bother to do.

  They’d also lit the little floating candles in the sink while I was gone and probably made a wish together, too. I made a silent little wish of my own that I could find a way to get through dinner without ruining it for all of us.

  I sat at the table and took a sip of the wine Seth had already poured. It was a nice chardonnay, dry and oaky, the way I liked it.

  Anastasia and Seth sat down, and Seth held up his glass. He smiled at me, and I did my best not to look away. “May you have warm words on a cold evening,” he said, “a full moon on a dark night, and a smooth road all the way to your door.”

  Anastasia held up her milk. “And may you always have a Purple People Reacher Phone within easy reach!”

  Seth touched his glass to hers. They both reached their glasses out to me.

  I touched my glass to Anastasia’s. “May your heart be light and happy,” I said. “May your smile be big and wide. And may your pockets always have a coin or two inside.”

  Anastasia’s face broke into a smile that was both big and wide. “Good job, Mom,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said. When I touched my wineglass to Seth’s, it made a musical little clink.

  Seth put his glass down and passed me the shrimp pad thai. “Your mother and I used to have toast contests,” he said. “Mostly Irish, but any ethnicity would do in a pinch.”

  Anastasia reached for the chicken satay. “Tell me the story of how you met,” she said.

  I could feel Seth looking at me. I took a bite of pad thai, then a sip of wine.

  “We met in Hiratsuka City, near Tokyo,” Seth said. “We’d both gone there for Tanabata.”

  I concentrated on my pad thai.

  Anastasia nibbled a bit of chicken off the skewer. “What’s that?”

  Seth put his glass on the table. “Tanabata means ‘star festival.’ It’s a Japanese festival that takes place every year on July seventh. It’s based on a Chinese folk legend about two stars, Vega and Alistair—”

  “Altair,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Seth said. “Anyway, Altair and Vega were lovers. All year long they were separated from each other by the Milky Way, but once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh month, and only if it didn’t rain, they could meet.”

  “Cool,” Anastasia said. “What if it rained?”

  “Then they’d have to wait for the next year,” I said.

  “There are Tanabata celebrations all over Japan,” Seth said. “Sendai has one of the most famous ones, but that’s way up in the north, so I went to Hiratsuka City, because it was closer, and so did your mom. The streets were all lit up and packed with people. And everywhere you looked, there were all these great big bamboo sculptures.”

  “People write their wishes on long strips of colored paper and hang them from the bamboo to make them come true,” I said.

  “That’s how we found each other,” Seth said. “I wanted to write a wish, but I didn’t have
a pen, so I turned around to borrow one from the prettiest girl there.”

  “What did the pen look like?” Anastasia asked.

  “I don’t remember,” Seth and I both said at the exact same time.

  We all laughed.

  “I think it was from the tour company I was working for,” I said. “I can’t even remember the name of it anymore.”

  “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Japan?” Seth said.

  I shook my head. “Ohmigod, that was the worst job in the whole wide world. I never thought I’d survive it. If I hadn’t met you that night…”

  I closed my mouth, because I didn’t have an end to the sentence. It was too vast, both the best and the worst of all things possible.

  “What wish did you write, Dad?” Anastasia asked.

  “I wished that the girl with the pen didn’t already have a boyfriend.”

  I took another sip of wine and pretended I wasn’t there.

  Anastasia reached for another skewer of chicken satay. “Did your wish come true?”

  “My wish came true,” I heard Seth say, even though I was staring at the candles in the sink and trying not to listen. “It was the second most magical night of my life.”

  “What was the first?” Anastasia said.

  I looked up at him.

  Seth reached over and tickled Anastasia’s cheek with her ponytail. “The night you were born, silly.”

  23

  SETH YAWNED. HE STOOD UP, PUT BOTH HANDS ON HIS lower back, and stretched. “What time is it anyway?”

  I yawned, too, then peeked in at the living room clock. The one on the stove had been broken since Anastasia and I’d moved in.

  “Wow,” I said. “It’s almost midnight. I’m really sorry—I had no idea it was this late.”

  Seth rubbed his eyes. “That’s okay. It’s one of those jobs you pretty much have to finish once you start it. Thanks for letting me read Asia a bedtime story while you ran out to buy the sealer, by the way.”

  “I can’t believe you got her to go to sleep,” I said.

  He smiled. “She conked right out while I was reading.”

  “I didn’t realize you’d have to cut the counter to install the sink,” I said.

  Seth ran his hands across the fluted ceramic front of the sink. “It was worth it. This sink is a real beauty.”

  He put the pink saw back into Cynthia’s silver and pink tool case. He snapped the lid closed and put it on the floor. “I have to admit, I was relieved to find out the Barbie tool case belonged to a neighbor.”

  We grinned at each other.

  “Not my style,” I said.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Seth turned back to the sink. “Okay, let’s test this baby out.” He twisted the drain and turned on the cold water. We both stood there and watched the sink fill up.

  Seth turned off the faucet. He picked up Anastasia’s Styrofoam krathong from the kitchen counter and floated it on the water.

  He reached his hand into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out some change. He handed me a penny.

  When his hand touched mine, I pulled back as if I’d been stung, but I was already holding the penny.

  I placed it in the center of the floating krathong. Seth put his penny next to mine. I wished for the courage to ask the question that had been burning a hole in my heart for the last seven years.

  “Why, Seth?”

  I waited for him to say why, what? Or even to turn and run.

  He gave the krathong a little push across the sink. “You don’t remember?”

  Now I wanted to run, but I didn’t. “Remember what?”

  He turned and looked at me with tired hazel eyes. “God, Jill. You knew I wanted it to be the three of us. I kept asking and asking you to come with me. I was suffocating. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I literally couldn’t breathe.”

  I was drawing a complete blank.

  He rubbed his hand back and forth across the dark stubble on his jaw. “I mean, it wasn’t the life we’d planned. We were going to keep traveling to exotic places until we found somewhere that felt just right and where we could make a difference. And suddenly, you’re all about getting Asia wait-listed for preschool and never missing Sunday dinner at my parents’. And then, don’t you remember, you wanted to move into their basement….”

  “Just long enough to save for a down payment on a house,” I said. “And it’s not like they didn’t offer.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “I didn’t think you were serious,” I said. “I mean, I knew you thought you were serious. But I thought you just hadn’t come around to facing reality yet. What if Anastasia got malaria? It was hard enough finding a good pediatrician here.”

  A cool breeze blew through the window over the sink, and the old white rolling shade made a snapping sound. I rubbed my bare arms to warm them up.

  “I’d spent my whole life trying to break away from my family,” Seth said.

  “I’d spent my whole life trying to find a family,” I said.

  Seth made a sound that was almost a laugh.

  I looked at him. “Why did you come back, Seth?”

  He looked up. I followed his gaze. There was an ugly outdated light fixture in the middle of my kitchen ceiling. The carcasses of several trapped dead bugs were clearly visible behind the round frosted glass globe. I’d never noticed them before.

  “Do you want the truth?”

  I wasn’t sure, but I nodded anyway.

  Seth was still staring at the light fixture. “There was this woman. We’d been together for a while, a couple years, and then one day out of the clear blue sky she wanted to move back to the States, get married, and have kids.”

  “So, what,” I said. “You thought you’d drop in again to invite Anastasia and me to the wedding? Or maybe you needed a flower girl?”

  “Don’t,” Seth said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It was this huge epiphany for me. I mean, how could I do that? I already had a family.”

  “Duh,” I said.

  I had no idea why I said it. Possibly too much time spent in the company of a ten-year-old. In any case, it cracked us both up. We laughed and laughed, in that slightly hysterical way that happens when your nerves have been strung tight for too long, and every time one of us would stop, the other would get us going again. A long time ago, Seth and I had laughed together a lot.

  I pulled a sheet of paper towel off the roll and dabbed at my eyes. “So,” I said casually. “Are you still with her?”

  “No, we went our separate ways right after that. It’s been over a year now.”

  Neither of us said anything. We stood there for a while. I was leaning back against the farmer’s sink, and the fluted edges pressed into my back like ceramic ruffles.

  “Well,” I said finally. “Thanks again for putting in the sink.”

  Seth stretched. “Yeah, I should get out of here.”

  I turned to drain the water in the sink, and Seth went to walk past me at the same moment. We bumped into each other. I stepped right. Seth stepped left.

  “Dance?” I said.

  He put his hands on my shoulders.

  When he kissed me, it was as if all the years just melted away. I knew the curve of his back; the ticklish spot behind his ear; the clean, earthy way he smelled. My brain shut down and let raw passion take over. He could have grabbed me by the hair and dragged me down the hallway to my bedroom like a caveman, and I would have loved it. Or, if he didn’t, I would have clubbed him over the head and dragged him.

  We made love in my messy bedroom quietly, careful not to wake our daughter. I flashed back to the times when she was a baby and we’d try to sneak off to the bedroom on the weekend, while she was taking a morning nap and we still had some energy before the day wore us down. We’d pull down the shades against the bright morning sun and make love quickly, furtively, a race against naptime.

  To night, we ran our fingertips up and down each
other’s bodies as if we were reading seven years of Braille. Finally I curled up against Seth and fell asleep with his arms wrapped around me.

  After a wedding in the Netherlands, couples sometimes plant lilies of the valley around their house so that they can celebrate the renewal of their love each time the blooms come around again.

  I dreamed that Seth and Anastasia and I moved to Holland. We bought a tall, skinny brick house with steep winding stairs in The Hague. The house was in a row of attached brick houses that all looked the same from the front and had narrow walled brick gardens in the back.

  Every day after school, Anastasia would join us in the garden, and the three of us would plant lilies of the valley together. Because we knew that even though the leaves and flowers of the plant were poisonous, somehow what we were really planting in Holland was happiness.

  24

  I WOKE UP JUST BEFORE MY ALARM WENT OFF. IF THE room hadn’t smelled of stale sex, I might have been able to convince myself I’d dreamed the whole thing.

  “Shit,” I said out loud.

  It was hard to tell whether I was talking about the fact that Seth was no longer in my bed or that he’d been there at all.

  I jumped up and slipped into my ancient terry cloth robe. Maybe Seth wasn’t really gone but only making pancakes or something. If so, I needed to get him out of here. Fast, before Anastasia woke up.

  My kitchen was empty, other than the new farmer’s sink. Its fancy fluted front seemed to undulate across the room at me like some porcelain cabaret dancer.

  Clearly, I needed caffeine. I made my way over to the tea-kettle, careful not to look at any surface that might possibly be holding a note from Seth. What ever had happened last night, whether it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened between us or the worst, I definitely didn’t want to have to read about it in a note that would be seared into my brain for the next seven years.

  I poured boiling water over an English Breakfast tea bag, because it was the strongest thing in my cupboard. I let it brew briefly, then gulped it down while it was still hot enough to burn my kiss-ravaged mouth.