“Hey,” I say.
Yep, that’s what I go with. The perennially helpful hey. Jade sounds a loud sniffle with an undercurrent of grunt, and then she sets about wiping her face. She knows she’s been caught. “I’m sorry,” she says, and when she turns back, her face is wet and red. Her cheeks are splotchy.
I shake my head. “No, no. Not at all, there’s nothing to be sorry for.”
She sits down on the edge of her chair, reaches into her bag, and retrieves a tissue.
“Hey, I cry like that about ten times a day,” I say. “Like, for no reason at all.”
She takes a deep, shuddering breath, and flumps back in her chair. She honks her nose into the tissue and rolls her blue eyes up to dry them. “I do it about ten times an hour,” she whispers, and then she tries to laugh, but it comes out flat. “The only time I don’t cry is when I’m at work. God, I can’t even wear mascara anymore, because my face is all in stripes every ten minutes. It’s so embarrassing.”
“It’s not,” I say, “not at all.” Even though we both know it totally is.
“Maybe we should go,” she says, standing up. “We can try it again another day, when I’m feeling better. I’m just so tired. They haven’t been sleeping well the last week. I think they’re teething.” And then she really disintegrates into tears. She plomps back down in her seat, and it rocks beneath her as she cries. Max and Madeline have stopped chewing on his feet, and have both turned toward the sound of their mother’s weeping. Their little faces are opened right up to her.
“No, please,” I say, lifting Emma off my boob and up to my shoulder to burp her. “Please stay.”
Jade blows her nose again, waves her hand in the air.
“I’m sorry,” she says again.
I shake my head. “Please, stop apologizing,” I say. “Here, wait here. I want to show you something. I’ll be right back.”
I walk with Emma up the back steps and in through the kitchen and living room. I fling the French doors to the office wide open and descend the two steps. I open the desk drawer and pull out the bottle of Ativan with my name on it. I take it outside and set it down on the table next to Jade. She seems to have recovered herself for the moment. Her eyes are red, but her breath is steady. She picks up the bottle. “What’s this?”
“Crazy pills,” I say. “I’ve been having a hard time, too. I’ve been crying a lot. Like a lot. Just trying to adjust to being a new mom, you know? It’s sort of not what I expected. So I’ve been seeing a therapist, and you know. She sent me to a psychiatrist, who gave me these pills to help.”
“And do they?” Jade is studying the bottle. “Help?”
I shrug, and Emma burps loudly in my ear. I lean back in my chair and unsnap the bra on the other side. She latches on.
“I don’t know yet,” I say. “I haven’t decided if I’m going to take them or not.”
Jade breaks the seal on the bottle and opens it without asking me. She tips the bottle up, shakes one little white pill out into her hand, and then pops it in her mouth. She swallows it back with coffee while I watch. Perhaps I should feel affronted by this, or at least surprised. But I’m not.
“I’ll let you know,” she says.
“Cool,” I tell her.
It’s quiet then, for a few minutes, but the silence is less awkward than before. She runs her hands through her hair. She rubs her face. And then she tells me this story:
“I started going to church on Sundays, right down here at Saint Pancras. I wasn’t raised anything. My mom was Catholic, but she never brought me. I don’t even think I was baptized. So I just started going after Paul left because Sundays were so long and empty. Mass took up an hour, and people there were nice to us, when they’d see me on my own with the two babies. And then like a month ago, I was there, and they were asking for prayers for this young couple whose five-month-old baby died. He had some awful disease, and he died, and the mother was just inconsolable. That baby was the same age as my twins. And all I could think about was finding that couple, and giving them one of my babies. Or maybe both of them, if they wanted them both.”
Jade looks at me to gauge my reaction to the story, and I’m careful to keep my face plain and open.
“I don’t mean that I thought about it in some theoretical, kind of abstract way,” she says. “I mean I actually considered it. I thought about which one to give them, if I gave them just one, and I settled on Max, just because Madeline is easier.” She glances over at the twins. “Cover your ears, Max,” she says, and then she blows her nose again. “I don’t even know what stopped me. I don’t know. I could still do it. It would be so easy, to only have to worry about me again.”
I don’t say anything, don’t press her. I just wait for her to talk it out.
“Do you think I’m a terrible person?” she finally asks.
“Not in the least,” I answer honestly. “I told someone my baby died.”
She laughs, and somehow that laugh does not offend me. It sounds like salvation. I laugh, too.
“You what?”
“Yep, told a guy she died,” I repeat. It sounds so absurd now, with the taste of mint lemonade on my lips. “I didn’t mean to. I was telling him about a dream I had, and he misunderstood, but I didn’t correct him.”
Jade pushes the orange pill bottle across the table at me. “I think you’re going to need these,” she says. And then we both laugh, and I love her more than I have ever loved another human.
When Emma is finished eating, I consider putting her in the Pack ’n Play with the twins, but they are both so big and strong, and it looks a little crowded in there. So I tuck her into my elbow instead, and she stays awake and looks at us. Jade sits back in her chair, and folds her legs beneath her. She finishes her coffee, and smiles at me. It is the first really genuine smile I have seen from her. She is beautiful.
“Mind if I grab another cup?” she says.
“Of course not, help yourself.”
Jade and the babies stay all afternoon, and we talk about everything. She tells me more about deadbeat Paul, who now works as a production assistant for some shit reality show in L.A.
“That just means he fetches coffee and tampons for the trampy women who come on the show to find love while he waits to get discovered,” she explains. “Pathetic.”
“Discovered for what? He wants to be an actor?”
“Yeah,” she says. “That’s why we came to New York, really. Or that’s half the reason.”
“What’s the other half?”
Jade shrugs, and I can sense her reluctance, but it’s much fainter than it was before, and she brushes it aside. “I wanted to be a writer,” she admits.
A writer! So I was right when I detected a well-concealed interest in my career yesterday. I am careful not to betray too much excitement.
“Oh?” I say coyly. “What kind of writing are you interested in?”
She shakes her head. “It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid at all, what are you talking about? Why should it be stupid? Plenty of people are writers.”
“Yeah, but I want to be a novelist,” she says shyly. Her cheeks pinken, and she suddenly looks years younger. “I’m a huge sci-fi and fantasy buff.”
“That’s terrific,” I say. “So have you done a lot of writing?”
“I have a finished trilogy, and I’m working on book one of the next series,” she says. “But I don’t know. When I first came to New York, I was temping at publishing houses, but they pay so little. And then I started temping at this law firm, and they offered me full-time, and since I was expecting, I felt like I had to take the job. But I still really want to write, and the best thing about the law firm is that I can sit at my receptionist desk and write all day. As long as I answer the phones and greet everyone who comes in, they don’t care what I do. Actually, one of the partners said he love
s me writing because I look so busy when the clients come in.”
“So it sounds like a perfect arrangement.”
“Yeah, I guess it is,” she says. “It just seems like such a pipe dream now. Like maybe it’s time to grow up and start living in the real world.”
“Well, if being a receptionist at a law firm isn’t the real world, I don’t know what is,” I say.
Jade smiles again. We spend the next hour passing the babies around, and discussing the relative merits of Tolkien versus Lewis. I tell her I can forward her trilogy to an agent I know, and she seems carefully excited. Before I know it, the sun has passed behind my house, and the late-afternoon light is leaking quickly from the back garden.
“Hey, you guys want to stay for dinner?” I ask. “My husband is working until late. Maybe we could order something in?”
“Yeah, why not?” she says. “Cool.”
• • •
It is dark by the time we have finished our falafel pitas. The babies are all fed and drowsy, and I feel like I have known Jade all my life. I wish we could put on some footie pajamas and make popcorn, stay up late watching trashy television and talking about boys, but she has to go home and put her babies to bed. I leave Emma’s bouncy seat beside the front door, and I follow Jade next door, so I can hold one of the babies while she unlocks their door.
“This was really fun,” she says.
“Yeah, I can’t believe you were living right next door to me this whole time,” I say. I kiss Madeline on top of the head, and give Jade an almost-not-awkward hug before they disappear inside.
It is the best second date I’ve ever had. On my second date with Leo, he took me to a car show at the Javits Center, where a lot of bimbos stood around in tight red dresses, rubbing their booties along shiny, revolving cars. It was so awful I almost turned down date number three, which turned out to be a day at Coney Island, and then a romantic dinner, followed by the world’s greatest make-out session under an awning during a summer downpour. I don’t expect that kind of chemistry the next time I see Jade, but I’m so excited about our budding friendship that I can’t rule anything out.
I skip back up the front steps to my house and wake Emma, who needs a bath before bed.
“We can’t let Daddy see that I dripped tzatziki on your head,” I tell her.
After she’s tucked in, I change into pajamas, and then flop down in front of the television. I flick through the channels, trying to guess which awful show Paul works on, which desperate women he caters to for a living. I wonder if he’s even met his beautiful babies. I wonder how much production assistants make, and how often he sends Jade money. Emma cries out briefly, arcing a bright red spike on the monitor, but she’s only talking in her sleep. I am asleep on the couch when Leo comes in around two o’clock.
“Hey, Jelly,” he says, sitting down on the coffee table and leaning over to kiss me. “What are you doing up?”
I sit up. Yawn. “I wasn’t really up,” I say. “I guess I fell asleep down here. How was work?”
He is walking into the kitchen and taking off his jacket.
“Good,” he says. “Busy night. How about you?”
“Great!” I say. “I have terrific news!” He fixes the jacket on a hanger and then comes back to the doorway. “My scar is just a scar now,” I announce. “It’s not an incision anymore.”
He laughs, and then disappears to hang the jacket in the closet. “How do you know?”
“I just do,” I said. “I ran upstairs today and everything. I’m almost back to normal. Except for being enormous, I mean.”
“You’re not enormous,” he says, coming back to sit beside me on the couch. “You’re beautiful.”
I decide not to contradict him, but it’s only for the sake of peace. I lean my head against his shoulder, and hand him the remote. He flips to ESPN.
“Hey, did that girl come over today?”
“Yeah, Jade,” I say. “Her name’s Jade.”
“How’d that go?”
“It was amazing,” I say, and then I try to temper my reaction, and I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m afraid Leo will caution me, somehow. That he’ll ruin my euphoria. So I go with a noncommittal, “She seems like a really nice girl. I think we have more in common than I originally thought.”
“That’s good,” he says.
“Yeah.”
We watch a couple of men make conflicting predictions about tomorrow’s football games and then, during the commercial break, Leo asks me, “Did you think any more about the pills?”
I pick at some nonexistent fluff on the afghan I have draped across my knees. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m not going to take them, at least not yet. Not now.” And then I lean away from him reflexively. I prepare for a battle.
“Good,” he says. Which totally throws me off kilter.
“Good?”
“Yeah, maybe you don’t need them,” he says. “I mean, I think it’s great you have them, and there is nothing wrong with taking them if they help. But just . . . I was thinking about it all day. I was thinking about you all day, how amazing you are.”
“Well, it’s true that I’m amazing,” I laugh.
“You are. And maybe if I was just a little more supportive when you need me to be . . .”
“Like when I freak out crying and stuff?”
“Exactly, you freakazoid,” Leo says, but then his face turns serious, and he says, “I don’t know. Just maybe all you need is for me to listen more, without making my own judgments about what you’re going through.”
“Leo, you’re so wise,” I say suspiciously. “It’s almost like you’ve been watching Dr. Phil or something.”
“Dr. Phil wishes he were as wise as me,” he says. “Dr. Phil can kneel at the temple of my superior marital wisdom.”
“Leo, Dr. Phil is an idiot.”
“True. But there’s something else I keep thinking about. That conversation I had with my brother last week, when I told him that life hasn’t changed that much, since we had the baby?”
“Yeah,” I sigh. I’ve really been trying to forget about that.
“I get how unfair that is,” he says. “It’s sort of ridiculous. When I stop and think about it, I can see how much everything has changed for you. I have to remember that. Just because my life is still the same: I get up, I go to work, I come home and play with Emma . . . I don’t know—it’s hard for me to appreciate how much everything has changed for you.”
I look hard at him. Does he truly comprehend this? I don’t want to be fooled. He taps on the side of his head.
“I have a lot of time to think now, with my long commute,” he explains. “I know it’s not just moving to Queens and the hormones and the sleep deprivation. It’s everything—it’s your whole routine, your work, your friends, your whole life has been upended.”
God bless him. Maybe he does get it.
“Sometimes it feels like my life isn’t even my own anymore,” I whisper, “because every moment of the day revolves around Emma now.”
“I know,” he says.
“But I don’t even really mind that so much. It’s more than that. It’s like my sense of identity has just dropped out from under me. Like I’m not even a writer anymore. My palate is shot.” For a harrowing moment, I consider telling him about the Fritos, but I press past it. “I used to be such an overachiever, but motherhood has kind of obliterated that. I’m not super good at this. I’m not even sort of good at it. And then, my body and brain are both out of control. It’s like I don’t know who I am anymore. I feel like I’ve kind of disappeared.”
I can see Leo struggling with all of this. I can see him battling his own irritation. He wants positive thinking only.
“I know you don’t like to hear me talk like this,” I say, “that it bothers you when you think I’m being hard on myself. But instead of arguing
with me, or trying to convince me I’m great, and everything is fine, maybe I just need you to listen. And empathize.”
Leo nods. “And maybe it will help when you get back to work, too. Instead of me reminding you how awesome you are all the time, maybe you need to remind yourself. You feel ready to start writing again?”
I shake my head. “Not without child care. It’s impossible. I don’t have the headspace.”
Before Emma was born, we had these crazy ideas that our professional lives were flexible enough that we could work around her, that we might not need child care. We had delusions of me fitting in my research and writing around Leo’s work schedule and Emma’s sleeping. We failed to account for an actual live, human baby. There is nothing part-time about her.
“Yeah, we’re going to need at least part-time child care, huh?” Leo says.
I feel like it’s Christmas—no, better than Christmas. Between falling in love with Jade, and now Leo’s dawning enlightenment, this could be the best day of my entire life.
“If we want me to make any money, we are.”
Then we make out on the couch until Leo wriggles out of his checkered chef pants. I guess I did tell him that my incision was a scar now. He probably thought that was code for something. He’s tugging at my pajama bottoms, but I’m nervous. If he thinks I’m doing this without birth control, he is insane. He’s kissing my neck, and I have to admit, it feels good, even though his hair smells like meat frying, with a nuanced hint of vegetable steam. I dig my fingers into his shoulder blades, and remember the new package of condoms in my nightstand drawer.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
Chapter Eighteen
Crooked Branch (9781101615072) Page 29