“I haven’t been myself lately, Karl. I haven’t been myself for a long time. I’m exhausted and run-down. I needed to do something just for me. I’m trying to reset.” There was more, but I couldn’t get it out. I felt crazy, practically bipolar. I craved time for myself even as I was desperate to be with my family. But those competing impulses were a part of being a mother and wife—the constant push and pull between two different identities.
“Can I talk to the girls?” I asked before he could respond, partly because I was afraid of what that response would be.
“They’re still asleep. It’s a school day. It’s probably not the best time. I don’t want to disrupt their day.” Karl was back to being Karl, even-keeled, rational Karl. “Kate, I’m worried about you.”
“Can I just have a little time?”
“Why are we talking about this now?” His voice was low and heavy with sadness. “Why are you telling me this after you’ve already gone?”
“I tried to call you. I tried to talk to you.”
I heard a distinctive squeal in the background. The girls were usually good about not leaving their beds until 7:00 a.m. They each had their own night-light that stayed red until seven on the dot. When the light turned green, no matter what day of the week it was, they were allowed out of their rooms. “Daddy, you promised to make pancakes,” Tilly whined in a bright falsetto.
“I hear Tilly. Please, let me talk to them,” I whispered again. “I’ll be fast.”
I heard Karl tell Tilly to go get her sister. Once she was out of earshot he spoke quickly.
“Kate, I really don’t know what’s gotten into you. If you needed a break this badly, I wish you’d told me. We would have figured something out. Getting on a plane and blindsiding me isn’t fair.”
“I know,” I said. He was right. What I had done wasn’t fair. But maybe, just maybe, this was exactly what we needed—both of us—something dramatic to shake things up. The alternative was trudging along, maintaining the status quo, and that increasingly felt like it wasn’t an option at all.
“Mommy, mommy, mommy.” Both girls shouted to me in unison. They sounded so cheerful, so delighted to hear my voice. I wanted to tell them that I’d be on a plane and home by dinnertime. How could I explain to them that I was so far away? That I wasn’t coming back soon.
“I’m putting the girls on now,” Karl said. He’d shifted his tone the second they came into the room. “I’m putting both of them on speaker.”
“Hi, babies,” I said. Hot tears now rolled down both my cheeks. “I miss you.”
“I miss you too, Mommy. How is Caleefornee,” Tilly replied first.
“It was nice. It was very pretty. I’ll send you more pictures. I found you a seashell shaped like a unicorn horn. I have it wrapped up in tissue, safe in my suitcase.”
“Can I have it tonight?” I could hear Tilly clap her hands.
“Not tonight, baby. I won’t be home tonight.” I squeezed the edge of the desk, drilling my nails into the soft wood, forcing my voice to sound cheerful. “I’ll be home in a week, maybe two. I have some work to do. But I’ll talk to you while I am here. We can talk every day.”
“You don’t work, Mommy,” Isabel said with a squeak. “You’re not one of the mommies who works.”
Before I could respond, Karl jumped in. “Of course Mommy works. All mommies work. Sometimes Mommy works at home, and now she is working away from home on a very special project.”
I’ve never been more grateful to him as I was in that moment, for both acknowledging that what I did in our home was work and for explaining my absence to the girls.
“That’s right,” I said. I knew I couldn’t keep this facade up much longer without my voice cracking. The key was making sure that Karl and I both sounded OK. As long as we could do that the girls would believe the world was exactly as it should be.
“Say good-bye to Mama,” Karl said. “If you get the milk and the eggs out of the refrigerator I’ll make you pancakes in just a minute.”
The promise of pancakes facilitated a quick good-bye.
“I love you,” I said.
“Love, love,” Tilly yelled, already halfway down the hall.
“Love you, Mama,” Isabel said, and I heard her kiss the receiver of the phone with a sloppy smack.
I heard Karl close our bedroom door. When he spoke again there was fear in his voice. “I still don’t understand what’s going on, but I understand you need time. Take the time, Katie. I love you.”
“I love you too.” I said it emphatically. I meant it.
But he hung up so quickly, I wasn’t sure he’d even heard me.
• • •
I stared at the flimsy walls for more than an hour before a pain in my stomach reminded me I needed to eat. I thought about texting Karl. There was so much more I wanted to say, but I couldn’t figure out how to craft a message on the ancient phone. Besides, no matter how concerned he had sounded, I knew Karl would find a way to pack his feelings away, to maintain the discipline needed to go on with his day. He’d just be getting to the office now, answering e-mails, preparing for the morning team meeting. I’d never known someone so good at compartmentalizing as my husband. The day his father died, he’d signed one of the most important authors of his career. He’d cried to me that morning, his head in my lap while I stroked his hair and felt his tears soak my thighs. Within hours he had negotiated a five-million-dollar sale. It was how he coped. We were similar that way. We both needed to keep moving.
I pulled my jaunty new headlamp down over my brow, adjusting the band to fit my skull, and began the journey up the stairs. The moist air clung to my skin. The thrumming and buzzing of insects filled the otherwise silent jungle. My muscles ached from so much climbing. It was the satisfying kind of ache, born out of moving my body with a distinct purpose rather than just jogging in place on a treadmill with episodes of This Is Us to keep me going.
The reception area was empty. I noticed a lone computer on the desk and remembered that Kevin said the Wi-Fi sometimes worked up here. I sat down and tried to remember how to turn on a PC and cursed Apple for reprogramming my brain. There was the faintest of signals, just enough to let me check my Gmail in super basic html mode. That was fine by me. There were only two people I wanted to hear from anyway.
A wave of relief washed over me when I saw Nina’s name in my in-box. It took five minutes for the damn e-mail to load.
Hey Katie. Got sidetracked! Ended up hopping a flight to Lamu with Alex. Crazy story there. Will fill you in later. Enjoy Thailand. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do . . . lol.
I reloaded the e-mail three times to see if there were words I was missing, but that was it. Classic Nina. I felt like a fool for ever thinking she’d meet me. I’d been so desperate to be back in touch with her, to have a real connection with someone who knew me before I became some boring stay-at-home mom, that I’d forgotten all the reasons I’d lost touch with her in the first place. The truth of it was that Nina was terrible at being a friend and I had no reason to believe that had changed.
My need for food trumped my desire to send a scathing e-mail back to Nina. I wandered toward the meditation deck. I heard the sounds of dinner—wine being poured, glasses clinking. A long rustic farmhouse table, its surface covered in bowls of noodles, rice, grilled meat and vegetables, and sauces of every imaginable color, now took up almost the entire length of the meditation room. A line of votive candles sparkled like little diamonds along the walls. The meal had clearly been in progress for some time. Empty bottles of wine huddled in the center of the table. Diners’ eyes were glassy, their jaws slack, their laughter slightly slurry.
“Kate!” Kevin’s jovial voice boomed when he saw me. “Join us. Plenty of food. Plenty of wine.”
I pulled a chair from beneath the table and let loose a primal howl as a lizard the size of a cat fell off the seat and onto my foot. Everyone else at the table thought this was hilarious.
“I didn’t think there
would be wine here,” I said as I poured myself a generous glass. “I guess I thought a zen center would be all about abstinence.”
Kevin chuckled. “Oh no, Kate. We drink. I like to say we pray hard and we play hard.”
Now I understood why Nina liked this place. I helped myself to noodles and veggies and some kind of sticky pudding that I thought would be sweet, but was actually quite salty and spicy. I picked up snatches of information about the other guests. Some had only been there a few days, some for a few weeks. They were a motley crowd; everyone seemed to be escaping something or someone. I shouldn’t have been surprised, right? You don’t travel all the way to Bangkok and then drive to the middle of nowhere in the jungle if you’re happy with your life.
Saul, a man about twenty years my senior with an enthusiastic gray comb-over and a Magnum PI mustache, explained that he was dodging an ex-wife who was, in his words, “stealing my money and my soul.”
Prithi, a petite Indian woman with the most beautiful green eyes I’d ever seen, said she escaped an arranged marriage to a man she hardly knew. Thom, a stocky dead ringer for Mark Ruffalo wearing a Star Wars T-shirt with a Wookie on it, was mourning the failure of his start-up. Steven, a pudgy Korean in his twenties, hung his head and slurred, “I got fired for looking at Internet porn in the office.”
The pretty, young maiden who I’d wrongly assumed was studying art theory at Vassar turned out to be slightly older than I thought and explained with a wry look why she fled the States in a single sentence. “I was Harvey Weinstein’s assistant. Let’s just say I had to get out from under him.”
The old Thai woman from the closet shuffled in with a bowl of noodles almost as big as her torso.
“Boop, sit down,” Kevin said, pulling out the chair next to him. “Take a load off.” He looked at me. “Kate, you’ve met my mother-in-law, Buppha.”
Buppha swatted him away and shook her head before returning to the kitchen.
“She’s your mother-in-law?” I said. “Your wife’s Thai?”
When Kevin first mentioned his wife was back in the West Village, I’d pictured a statuesque blonde in skinny jeans, a scoop-neck tee, and an oversize Fair Isle sweater clutching the hands of two equally towheaded children while walking down the street in camel suede ankle boots.
“She is. Well, half Thai. Buppha raised Aly all by herself. Her dad was an American who came here for the wrong reasons, and after Boop got pregnant he split and left her with the baby. She worked three jobs to put Aly into an international school and ultimately sent her to the States to William and Mary. Then Aly came back for her PhD.” He clearly liked bragging about his accomplished wife and his fierce mother-in-law. It made me wonder what kind of tone Karl took when he talked about me.
He continued. “We met here. She was doing a PhD in botany and I was a fucking bum backpacking around Thailand. She grew up here on this mountain. We tried to move Buppha to New York, but she wasn’t having it. After three months in the United States, Boop booked her own ticket right back to Bangkok and came back here. Aly, my wife’s name is Aly, works for Body Botanicals in New York, extracting oils from plants for ridiculously overpriced lotions that promise to make you look twenty-five. That’s why I come back here alone. She’s really busy with work.
“So why didn’t your husband come with you?” Perhaps he was emboldened by the wine or maybe he was just this blunt, but it caught me off guard.
There were plenty of answers I could give. I decided to start with the simple one, if not the entirely honest one. “He couldn’t take off work.”
“What does he do?”
The last thing I wanted to do was explain Karl’s job. In fact, I’d recently grown to despise explaining his job. The second you admit your husband is a publisher everyone excitedly tells you they’ve written a book. Seriously. Everyone and their mother thinks they’re going to write the next The Goldfinch. And then I’m in the uncomfortable position of having to dodge their next question, which is inevitably, “Do you think your husband wants to read it?” The answer was always no.
“He’s in finance.” No one ever asked questions about your husband being in finance. I changed the subject back to him. “Does Aly miss living here?”
“She comes back during the summers and holidays. I love it here more than she does. She’s a big fan of air-conditioning and Shake Shack.” He smiled in a way that conveyed he thought Aly’s affection for modern conveniences and chain restaurants was endearing.
“She helped me build this place, though. There was hardly anything here when we started. We built one room at a time for ten years.”
“I’m impressed,” I said.
“Thank you,” Kevin said, clearly proud of what he’d done. “I am too. But what about you, Kate?”
I could feel two dozen eyes fixed on me. “What about me?”
“What’s your dream? What are you running away from? What do you want to accomplish while you’re here? Et cetera, et cetera.” He waved his hand through the air as if to emphasize the infinite range of possibilities.
I suddenly drew a blank. I chose the simple answer:
“I just needed a break.”
“Cheers to that,” a sad-eyed woman in her fifties croaked with a thick Russian accent. “We could all use a fucking break.”
I finished my glass of wine. Magnum PI Mustache refilled it. I looked at all the friendly faces sitting around the table, this intriguing random assortment of strangers, with their vast array of stories and secrets and desires and regrets.
Fuck it.
“Well, actually, that’s not my entire story.”
I got into it then. I told them how I needed a break . . . from my marriage, from my kids, from New York.
As I drank I got funnier, more animated. I told the story about Lois Delancey and the baby food. I admitted that I called her waterproof panties Stinx behind her back. I became a different woman, a woman I liked, one I would have wanted to be friends with.
“Have more wine,” Kevin said. And I did. I already liked it here.
• • •
A few hours later I woke up in a jumble of meditation cushions in the corner of the room. There had been more wine, then some dancing, someone had pulled out a limbo stick. My head throbbed. I stepped over Prithi and the Mark Ruffalo look-alike, the two of them tangled in a chaste embrace. Someone had drawn a set of pert boobs on the Russian woman’s forehead with a black marker. She lay faceup in the center of the room snoring like a donkey.
I’d flown thousands of miles to end up at adult sleepaway camp. I could have done this in the Berkshires.
I stumbled down the stairs to my room. My head throbbed. I dug into the bottom of my bag for a bottle of Advil and lay down on the thin mattress and closed my eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. I did everything I’d read about on Goop to will myself back to sleep—visualization exercises, counting backward from one hundred, alternate nostril breathing, picturing Gwyneth Paltrow doing alternate nostril breathing.
Finally, I stopped fighting it and resigned myself to being awake awhile longer. Kevin’s question echoed over and over in my head: What did I want to accomplish here?
I rolled over, picked my notebook off the floor, and flipped to a blank page. There was just enough moonlight that I could see the faint lines. I’ve never been one for mantras, gratitude lists, or vision boards. I only read Oprah magazine when I was waiting for a teeth cleaning. But I figured, what the hell. I’m here in a zen center. I might as well just write down what I hoped I’d accomplish during my stay.
I chewed on the end of the pen until it became warped and soggy. What I wanted seemed so simple written out in front of me:
• Be less cynical.
• Relax.
• Be happy.
• Reboot.
• Write.
• Remind your husband that he needs you.
• Be the hero of your own story.
Chapter Six
* * *
Dear Karl,
Time is a slippery thing. It’s as if I blinked and the girls had gone from infants to walking and talking and then telling me what to do. The days felt long, but the weeks and months pass in a blur. That’s how it feels now. Impossible that I’ve been gone two months. But now, just ten days and counting, and I’ll be with you guys. I can’t wait to surprise the girls on Christmas Eve. Will they be more excited for me or Santa Claus do you think? He’s tough competition. Remember when we took Izzy to Macy’s when she was a baby and I’d put her diaper on backward and she peed all over angry department store Santa? At the time I never thought we’d laugh about it, but it seems hilarious now.
I’ve been buying presents for weeks now—a teak xylophone for Izzy, brightly colored silk pajamas embroidered with baby elephants for Tilly, coconut shell monkey statues and tiny hand-carved silver bracelets for both of them. Thanks for letting me know the tree arrived. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pick it out and have it delivered all the way from here, but that’s the magic of the Internet. I’m sorry I’m not there to decorate it with you.
Last night I was thinking about our first Christmas together. You’d convinced me to come back from Paris for good and move into your West Village bachelor pad. We’d only been a couple, a transatlantic long-distance couple at that, for less than six months, but going back to New York with you, snuggling in bed in your fifth-floor walkup, watching the snow pile up on the windowsill, and making love first thing in the morning made for a warm homecoming. You were so pleased to adopt my family’s old tradition of forgoing traditional wrapping paper in lieu of covering presents with old newspapers and pretty ribbons we reused year after year. We did it in my house because wrapping paper was expensive and my mother was a champion at cutting corners in ways that didn’t feel like a sacrifice. You thought it was adorable, and I loved you even more for that.
I don’t think your mother thought it was nearly as adorable. I remember the look on her face, like I’d handed her a piece of trash, when I presented her with her very first present wrapped in the Styles section of the New York Times. It was that first edition of the autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that we had found in that antiques shop in Carré Rive Gauche. I was desperate for her to like me. Your dad was easy. Your dad liked everyone. Like you, he had an innate curiosity about other people. He’d talk to the dry cleaner for an hour and know the names of all his children. But Alyse, well, she was something else entirely. I never told you how intimidated I was the first time we walked through the imposing black door of your parents’ house on Eighty-Second Street, how even my knees shook as I took in the grandest home I’d ever set foot in. I know plenty of women who would have died to live in that kind of house. All I could think was “this looks like so much work.” Still, I wanted to run through the rooms, touch everything, smell everything, taste everything. I didn’t want to do it because I coveted any of it. I needed to do it because this was the place where you grew up and I wanted to consume every bit of you. The house itself, though, terrified me, as much as your mother did. The formal Christmas dinner that afternoon, with the serving staff, the five courses, the brick-hard plum pudding, was nothing like the raucous family gatherings of cousins and friends and neighbors I’d grown up with, where Uncle Eddie played the accordion and someone always passed out on the couch. I don’t belong here, I thought.
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