Sleepless Nights (35 page)

So things have changed at home, but perhaps they haven’t really; there are just new worries, new things to check for. (“Well, that’s mothering, dear,” says Alison.) Still, I think we’re understanding him better now, and he seems to be making better sense of the world. The improvement we’d begun to notice around the time Kent fell off the wagon continued, and now it’s a rare day that begins, and ends, with crying. He loves his daycare, loves tumbling about on the floor with the other children, loves battling for the best toys, and when we pick him up after work (Tom, and I, on alternate days), his face lights up at the sight of us, then he yells at the sudden realization he can’t take every single yellow truck home.

I went down to New York to clear out my desk at Schuster on a chill November morning. I knew, as soon as I walked into the office, that something was seriously wrong. People were clustered in little groups, talking nervously in the corridors; several people actually jumped when they saw me, as if I was a ghost from another world. “Oh Q, hi, what are you—doing here?” asked Julie, who was standing irresolute in the corridor, a stack of files in her arms; she looked as though she hadn’t slept in months. When I explained, she shrugged her shoulders, her face twisted into a painful smile. “Looks like we’ll all be doing the same thing soon,” she said. “You got out just in time, you know.”

“You mean—?”

“You haven’t been reading the blogs? Watching the news? Good God. Well, seventy-five—yes, seventy-five—associates were fired three days ago, and the rest of us—put it this way, Q, the news from the top isn’t good. We’ve had about six town hall meetings, they keep telling us the firings will be ‘proportional to the firm’s needs.’” She laughed mirthlessly. “Marta’s out, of course. Michael jumped to
Badden and Scutzer two weeks ago, as did Fay—nice to be a partner, I suppose. Although—I suppose you haven’t heard—Caroline—”

She fell abruptly silent as a shadow appeared in the doorway; Caroline herself, dark rings around her eyes, stumbled out. Her white silk shirt was crumpled, and there was a stain on the hem of her skirt. “Oh, Q,” she said vaguely. “How—are you doing? Good, good. I’m er—very busy. I have—lots of papers to—deal with, and—stuff. Need to get back to—work.” She pulled her phone out of her breast pocket, glanced at it for a second without seeming to take anything in, then walked off down the corridor. “So—y’know, bye. See you around.”

Julie waited until she was out of sight. “As I was saying. Caroline hasn’t been able to find another firm to take her on. I mean, she’s got the wrong skill-set for this economy, and besides, no one likes her. Turns out that actually sort of matters.” She laughed grimly. “Who’d have guessed it? So she’s all tied up in Schuster, for good or for ill. If the firm goes down, which it looks like it will, she goes down too. She’s been drinking hard for a good week now. People say she did really badly in the stock market crash too. She’s probably going to lose that house.”

I felt sorry for Caroline, I decided, listening to Julie, watching Caroline’s retreating back and bowed shoulders. But not that sorry.

I cleaned out my desk and walked out of the building into the fresh, cold air, feeling as if the whole world had changed.

The world has changed for Jeanie, too. She went home in early October to interview for her job, which she got, then started the following week. She’ll worry her local borough councilors into miserable submission over the course of the next five years, I’m sure, and the older people of south London will be better off because of it.

Paul flew out to London two weeks after she left, to stay for almost three months. He’s taking up a temporary placement to help set up a new British branch of Prince, which has just opened in London (Prince is one of the few firms, like Badden and Scutzer,
that is actually managing to thrive). And there’s an opportunity for him to stay in England in the longer term if he wants. I don’t know whether Paul would have gone to Britain anyway, or whether something about Jeanie’s “go away” a while back convinced Paul that it could become a “come hither” with a touch of persuasion and the undoubted convenience of a London home (contract signed, rent and six weeks’ deposit already paid). But if it was the latter, it was brave of him, I think, to go ahead with the plan, and she thinks so, too, “but also terribly nice of Prince to move into the London market, don’t you think, Q? It’ll be very easy for me to commute into Southwark, or maybe we’ll just live halfway in between…” And then she stopped herself, and blushed, and looked as conscious as she did that first night, when she came inside from a walk in the garden, holding Paul’s hand as if she’d never let it go.

Alison, of course, was fascinated to know every detail. “I take a bit of credit for the whole thing,” she said airily. “Their relationship, I mean. I played my cards very close to my chest. I knew if I told you everything you’d put your oar in, Q, then Jeanie would get all defensive and find some loser just to make us cross, and the whole thing would be
ruined.
It was hard for me, obviously, but I just watched, and waited…”

“You just didn’t want
me
to be the one to get them together!”

“Nonsense!”

“It isn’t nonsense, Alison. That’s typical of you. If you’d told me what was going on I might have been able to sort out the mess long ago, but oh no—”

“It’s just like Mummy always says, you think you’re the only person in this family who makes sensible arrangements. Q the career woman, always in charge. I may be a full-time mother but that doesn’t mean I’m utterly impractical, Q.”

“I would never say that! I would never think that!”

“Oh really? You don’t secretly think that your advice to Jeanie is weightier than mine because you have an office job, and I don’t?”

“I don’t. Alison, honestly!” I said, and we only managed to make peace when I remembered to ask after Serena’s croup.

This morning, I woke up in our brand-new Connecticut home, and was immediately invaded by a sense of strangeness. I sat bolt upright in bed, and looked around me. My husband was lying still, face collapsed into the pillow, arms scissored beside him; warm, heavy, unconscious. My son was lying in his bassinet on the other side of the room, a hint of sprouting hair just visible above the rim of the basket and—I lengthened my spine and craned to see—chest gently heaving his sleep sack.

I looked at the clock, glowing blue on the wall in the gloom created by the heavy blanket we’ve put up to help Samuel sleep. Around the edges of the blanket I could see the creeping light of an early morning winter sun, orange pricking through the thick navy woolen threads. It was seven a.m. Eight hours had passed since we last switched off our light.
Eight whole hours!

I almost woke Tom up to share this incredible news with him. But then, just as my hand was about to touch his shoulder, I stopped myself, and looked down. Tom smacked his lips gently in his sleep, then settled a little deeper into his warmed cocoon of mattress, sheet, and pillow. I smiled at his childlike pose, then lay down again, curving my own body carefully toward his, knees and foreheads gently touching. And as I closed my eyes, and felt his steady, hot breath on my face, I enjoyed the tiny miracle of a morning lie-in with the man I love.

Sarah Bilston
is the author of
Bed Rest.
Originally from England and married to an American, she teaches at Trinity College in Hartford.
Sleepless Nights
is her second novel. She lives in Connecticut.

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Bed Rest

Excerpt from “At Last” from AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER by Jamaica Kincaid. Copyright © 1983 by Jamaica Kincaid. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. First Published in “At Last” from
At the Bottom of the River
by Jamaica Kincaid. Copyright © 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983 by Jamaica Kincaid, reprinted outside of the US and electronically with permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS
. Copyright © 2009 by Sarah Bilston. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Digital Edition July 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-195776-5

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