“Straight from the horse’s mouth,” Violet muttered.
“I feel like I interrupted.”
“No.” Wyatt needed to be picked up from sports camp in an hour. Eli was undoubtedly on cloud nine playing Simon Says with Caroline, the babysitter he was supposed to not need because his mother had chosen him over her career. Matt had kissed her goodbye this morning, but in a distant and perfunctory way. And Wendy, good God, her trainwreck sister, had successfully enrolled Jonah in a—albeit dubious—recreational activity because she had all the time in the world to be there for him. And didn’t that make sense—surprising and inevitable—since he was the boy whose existence Wendy had not only fostered but encouraged? “No, it’s nice to see you.” She felt as though she’d exerted more emotional energy in the past fifteen minutes than she had in the last decade. She watched her sister and the boy she couldn’t bring herself to call her son, and she allowed herself, despite the alarm bells that always accompanied Wendy, to appreciate the ease they had around each other. She swallowed the last of her cappuccino, whose excess milk would sit heavily in her gut for hours to come. “Both. It’s good to see you both.”
1978–1979
Violet was born four days before Thanksgiving, and David’s most selfish thought after she’d arrived was thank God. Thank God, obviously, that she was healthy and perfect. But then, next: thank God Thanksgiving could be canceled. Thank God he wouldn’t have to go back to Albany Park. Raising a son alone, his father had adhered to ritual with determination; and for Thanksgiving that meant turkey, bourbon, football in the front yard. Whenever he returned from Iowa to visit his dad he was reminded of how much he preferred his new life, the vibrancy and warmth of it, and it made him resent the comparative chill of his childhood. When he called his father from the hospital to tell him about his new granddaughter, his dad had asked the requisite questions, and then: “So, are we still on for Thursday?”
He blinked. Marilyn was drifting in and out of sleep beside him. “Actually, I don’t think so. Marilyn’s not going to be up for such a long trip. And with two babies now—it’s just a lot.”
His wife stirred, shifted Violet in her arms. What are you doing, she mouthed.
“Well, I wish you would have told me sooner,” his dad said.
“We didn’t know when the baby was coming, Dad. That’s kind of how it works.” As though he, newly a father of two, was now the wiser one.
“Let me talk to him,” Marilyn whispered. She reached for the phone and David handed it over uncertainly. “Rich? Hi.” She smiled into the receiver. She loved his dad, said from the first time she met him that she could tell he had a good soul. “I’m doing well,” she was saying. “I’m great. We’re over the moon. She’s David’s spitting image.” With this she looked up at him, winked. “So I’m not going to be able to make Thanksgiving,” she said. “I’ll be at home with the little one. But you’ll have David and Wendy. The next best thing.” David stiffened, reached up his hands in a soundless what the fuck. She frowned at him. “I know they’re looking forward to it. I wish I could be there, but—” She paused to let him speak and then she laughed. “Exactly. Life has been known to get in the way.”
“Why on earth did you do that?” he asked when she’d hung up, not quite hostile—she’d just given birth to his daughter, after all.
She fussed with Violet’s blanket, cupped a palm over her skull. She was in an idyllic haze, coursing with hormones, high on exhaustion and in love with the world. Next to her joy, he knew he was being childish and obdurate. She just smiled at him. “Honey, it’s one day and it’ll mean the world to him.”
“You just had a baby, Marilyn,” he said stupidly.
“Did I? I wondered who this was.” She kept smiling at him, then looked down at Violet. “You’ll go for the day and then you’ll come home. If you won’t go for your dad, go for me.”
He went for her; four days later, he drove with Wendy to Chicago. She’d been much clingier since Violet was born and she burrowed into his neck as he and his father sat in the living room.
“How’s Marilyn?” his dad asked. “The baby?”
“They’re great. It’s utter chaos but it’s— Marilyn’s so good with them. I don’t know how she does it.” Was he doing this on purpose? Rubbing their thriving family life in his dad’s face? Ashamed, he reached for a coin from his pocket, handed it to Wendy to play with.
“I remember your mother transforming when you were born,” his dad said suddenly, and David startled. Mentions of his mother were infrequent. “She seemed to know all of these things—just instinctively. Baffled me. I felt like a caveman.”
“Yes, it’s humbling,” he said. He felt his speech change when he was around his dad; his language became more flowery, his jokes more pretentious. He couldn’t figure out why or how he did it, but it seemed cruel.
“I was thinking I’d like to do this again in a couple of weeks. If Marilyn’s up to it.”
“Another—Thanksgiving?”
“Another dinner. Give the little one a proper welcome. Just for the day.”
“A second Thanksgiving?”
His father smiled. “Yeah. Sure. Second Thanksgiving.”
And this—though the sentiment was nice; though he knew his wife would find it wildly charming—annoyed him as well. “I’ll get back to you.”
“You shouldn’t let her play with that,” Richard said. “She could choke.” Sure enough, Wendy had the quarter halfway in her mouth. He yanked it away and she started to cry.
“No, it’s okay; you’re okay,” he hummed. Wendy wailed, and he rose, trying to distract her. “Look, little lion, a mirror. What’s this, kiddo? This is a box of Kleenex.” It was ultimately a spool of thread that diverted her attention. Did his father sew? He had a sudden image of his father hemming his own pants and it made him so sad that he almost felt dizzy. As he thought about it—did his dad own a pincushion? One that looked like a tomato, like Marilyn’s?—he was aware of a hot disgrace swirling around in his belly. How odd that his delight over his new daughter, his healthy growing family, could exist in such close proximity to the sorrow his father had been living with for years. What an asshole he was for avoiding this day, for trying to deprive his dad of one of the few bright spots in his life.
He felt a rough hand on his shoulder: his father, behind him. “You’re doing just fine,” he said, and he sounded fatherly in a way that he normally didn’t, and David felt like a teenager again, he and Marilyn just a couple of fumbling know-nothings, entrusted with two babies, ignorant of all the ways that life could go wrong. “Your girls are very lucky,” Richard added, and David just nodded because he couldn’t bring himself to speak.
Dinner was a single turkey thigh split between two people, a table with two place settings, a pumpkin pie whose leftovers would be eaten for four subsequent days.
“She’ll go down for a nap soon,” David said as he cleared the table. “Should we throw the ball around for a while?”
His dad looked surprised, pleased. He nodded. “I’d like that.”
* * *
—
His wife was a good actress. He watched her, across the room in a showy three-story neoclassical belonging to the dean of the medical school, Violet wrapped against her chest in a sling, swaying slightly from left to right, sipping modestly from a glass of red wine, smiling in a way that was at once sleepy and beatific as she said, “I just love being a mom. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had.”
He begged to differ. At home, she seemed skittish and miserable and crazy, cooing maniacally to either baby or hand-washing bibs and onesies with the demented ferocity of an old-world Italian grandmother. She slept hard and fast, in short bursts, in a way that seemed both deeply unhealthy and innately functional—he did the same thing, working so much that he could no longer distinguish a Tuesday from a Friday, dusk from dawn. She came to visit
him at school sometimes with the babies, and she accepted the hugs he gave her like a junkie, clung to him like Velcro and didn’t let go until he did. It always pained him a little to pull away from her.
She was talking to one of his professors, a neurologist in his forties. He wasn’t sure what version of her Dr. Fletcher was seeing—the charming, beautiful, confident woman who made him feel protective and jealous? Or the sleep-deprived, hormonally flimsy, unoccupied housewife who had the audacity to say things like It’s the most fun I’ve ever had?
“High praise,” his teacher said, and David felt an immediate stab of pity for his wife. She was still so young and looked it suddenly. He could see her façade starting to buckle, and he excused himself from a circle of classmates and went to her, touching the small of her back.
“Just hearing about the joys of new parenthood,” Dr. Fletcher said, smiling in a way that might have been mocking—mocking Marilyn? His wife looked at him with something like desperation: please don’t sell me out, not in front of all these people; I know I was crying in the shower this morning but please just play along.
“It’s the most gratifying, terrifying, wonderful thing in the world,” David said, unusually flowery, and Marilyn smiled at him, leaned back into his hand.
“Do you have children?” she asked Dr. Fletcher. Wendy was at home being minded by a neighbor; Violet was ten weeks old and too young to be left with a sitter; it had seemed like too much to bring both girls, but he knew that Marilyn felt Wendy’s absence like a phantom limb.
“God, no,” the doctor said. “I always thought it would be unfair, given the hours I keep.”
Marilyn flushed; David watched her.
“But hey,” Dr. Fletcher said. “Some people make it work.”
“Indeed,” David said.
The doctor leaned in conspiratorially. “I’d advise you guys to stop at two, though. Corrigan’s got four kids and he can barely stay upright.” He nodded over to one of David’s supervisors at the hospital, who was standing beside a woman David presumed to be his wife, both of them looking like the walking dead, wide-eyed and used up, their defeated bodies slouched away from each other.
“Four?” He cupped his hand more firmly around his wife’s hip.
“Fell asleep standing up during an appendectomy last week,” Dr. Fletcher said as Marilyn excused herself. He couldn’t tell what it meant when she squeezed his hand and slipped away.
She was quiet on the way home.
“Nice house, huh?” he asked as they walked across the lighted bridge over the river. “I didn’t realize there were houses like that around here.” Immediately he realized he was opening a door he’d worked hard to barricade closed.
“Yes, such a far cry from our neighborhood,” she said, lifting her hand to shield Violet’s sleeping face from the passing headlights. Their corner of Iowa City was on the run-down side but it was quiet; there was a park a few blocks from the house where she could take the girls. It was warm and safe. He bristled, but before he could take offense she reached for his arm, wove hers through the bend in his elbow.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m in a mood.”
“Fletcher’s a condescending asshole,” he said. She pulled him closer, their hips bumping together a few times until they found their stride.
“He must think I’m— What did I say to him? The most fun I’ve— What an asinine thing to— Ugh. I just hope I didn’t embarrass you,” she said dejectedly. She wasn’t looking at him, had her eyes fixed on a blinking light down the river.
He shook his head vigorously. “Of course not. Never.”
“I wonder if I’ll ever have something interesting to say again.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself,” he said.
“You’re placating me.” She swung her bag around her arm. “I would kill for a cigarette.” It was a habit she’d ramped up when they moved to Iowa, though she’d given it up when she’d gotten pregnant with Wendy and was abstaining still, while she was breast-feeding Violet. “Yet another earthly pleasure that would arguably help to keep me sane, and yet…”
“We’re not earthly?” he asked. “Me and the girls?”
“The girls and I,” she corrected. “No. You’re ethereal. My intangible everything.”
The statement seemed both incredibly romantic and unbearably sad.
When they arrived home, he dispatched the sitter while Marilyn went to check on Wendy. He made a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, knowing that Marilyn hadn’t eaten much at the party. When he brought them to their bedroom, Marilyn was nursing Violet, holding her in one arm while the other hand traced lines up and down Wendy’s back—Wendy, who was curled in the crook of Marilyn’s knee, breathing deeply. And there she was, his wife, home again, back with her babies, freed from having to needlessly justify her existence to the likes of Fletcher. She raised her eyes to him and he weakened at the knees.
“Would I know if I had mastitis?” she asked him, frowning down at herself. “Also, Wendy needs to be changed if you don’t mind.”
They would repeat it for years to come in times of strife: the most fun I’ve ever had.
CHAPTER NINE
Violet remembered, from her days as a litigator, the rule of contending with a PR scandal: head it off at the pass and it could remain thereafter within your control. This was the approach she was taking for their dinner with Jonah. Matt was gravely concerned about it; he met every mention leading up to the evening with an Are you sure you want to do that look, the kind of look that said, I’m not going to stop you but only because I’d rather you stop yourself. For this reason, proceeding with the dinner also gave her a certain satisfaction, that childish fuck-you logic present in most marriages, the contrarian impulse to do something simply because your husband didn’t want you to.
There was no extant protocol for how to introduce your relinquished child to your husband, or for how to introduce him to the children you’d had on purpose, the children you’d never given a second thought to keeping. So Violet ordered pizza—everyone liked pizza, didn’t they?—and made sure there was an ample supply of wine on hand for herself and Matt, and she explained to Wyatt and Eli, as best she could, that families came in all forms, that she’d been a different person fifteen years ago, that she didn’t even know Dada existed back then, and that they had a half brother named Jonah who was going to join them for dinner. The boys took the news stoically—though she assumed their quietude stemmed less from acceptance than from lack of comprehension—and Matt, seemingly dissatisfied with this, crouched down before them and said, “Let’s keep this between us for now, okay, my buddies?”
“Matt,” she said, surprised, because they weren’t raising their children to lie.
He rose to his feet and lowered his voice. “You really want this getting out at school?”
She ceded his point, picturing the Shady Oaks moms encircling her like a flock of turkeys marching around a dead body. “Yeah, little loves, this’ll be our family secret for now, okay? Like that silly story we heard at the library, how the bear’s whole family plans the secret party for him and they all keep their lips zipped?” She made an exaggerated zipping motion across her mouth and Eli laughed, but Wyatt still looked skeptical. “We just don’t want Jonah to feel overwhelmed, okay, sweetie? So let’s keep this between us. He’s got a lot of new things going on in his life.”
She went alone to pick up Jonah from Wendy’s house, and as they drove back to Evanston, she pointed out their familial landmarks—“We did a fund-raising thing to install that Little Free Library”; “There’s the boys’ school”—and it wasn’t until she looked over and saw his blank expression that she remembered how dull her life had become. She wondered how he would guide her around a tour of his past locales—This is where I tortured squirrels, perhaps, or I almost set fire to this place just for the hell of it. They spent the re
st of the ride in silence.
When they pulled into her driveway, he let out a low whistle. “Damn.”
She turned to him suspiciously. “What?”
He smirked. “Nothing. Nice house, that’s all.”
Of course she was aware that a person she’d created had been living in a group home while she lorded over six thousand square feet of lakeside Tudor swankiness, but it wasn’t as though she’d deliberately orchestrated the disparity. “It was a fixer-upper,” she said defensively.
Inside, she introduced him clumsily to her family: “This is my—your—a—Jonah.”
“A Jonah, huh?” said Matt, who usually didn’t have much of a sense of humor. He extended his hand and she wondered what he was seeing, if he recognized her in Jonah’s face, if he was thinking about her with someone else, carrying another man’s child before he ever knew her. “Really nice to meet you,” Matt said, and he sounded genuinely welcoming, and she touched his back gratefully. Jonah had moved on to the kids, giving them each an awkward little wave. Eli hid behind her leg, peering at him between her knees.
“Don’t worry,” Wyatt said conspiratorially. “We won’t tell anyone about you.”
Jonah looked over to her and she could see, past the smirk on his face, that of course the remark had wounded him. “Thanks, dude,” he said to Wyatt.
He had an ease with the kids, as it turned out. He was the kind of person who talked to children as he’d talk to anyone, a trait she knew her boys admired. They were introducing him to their abundant roster of Lego people, and Matt impelled her into the kitchen.
“You know, I wasn’t suggesting that we should tell them to lie about him,” he said, “just that we don’t want them going around telling everyone when we’re not even sure—”
She turned to face him, offering him her wineglass. “No, I understand. It makes sense.”
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