I fingered the edge of my book’s paperback cover, feeling
it thicken and round slightly. I looked back at her, but I didn’t respond. She settled herself gingerly in one of the ubiquitous blue chairs, and I tried not to let myself concentrate on what seemed like such a deliberate attempt on her part to appear fragile. Maybe early pregnancy did that to you. I wouldn’t know. And, thanks to her, probably never would. She was growing a brand-new life inside of her while my life had hit a wall …
I ordered myself to ease my death grip on my book, before I hurt myself. Or mangled the book itself into pulp.
‘I really appreciate what you’re doing,’ she said in a low, deliberate voice. ‘You’re making this all go smoothly and I know you don’t have to do that. I just want you to know that I’m grateful. I know Tim will be, too.’
I hated her so much in that moment that if she’d been even an inch closer to me I would have launched myself at her. I almost went ahead and did it anyway. I’d never raised my hand to another person in my life, but I wanted to pummel my sister’s face in. I wanted to make her
hurt
. I could feel a throbbing sort of violence in me that I’d never suspected existed, flooding through me like wildfire, making my pulse race and my breathing go dangerously shallow.
‘I know it doesn’t seem like it now,’ she continued in the same quiet way, clearly meaning every single word, wholly unaware of the danger she was in, ‘but some day, all of this will be behind us and no matter how messy it
all seems, I think we’ll all agree that it was for the best. I really do believe that.’
I hated her so much I thought my head might explode from it. So much that my throat felt like it was on fire, as if I’d ripped it to shreds with all the screams that hadn’t passed my lips. I felt consumed by it. Altered by it. I couldn’t believe she couldn’t see it distorting my face.
‘Anyway,’ she said, patting her own knees with her hands, as if to congratulate herself on such a good little speech, ‘I wanted to make sure to thank you.’
I sat there, frozen into impotent, furious immobility, because I knew if I even blinked I would try to choke her to death. With my bare hands, the very ones that shook slightly now. I sat there and watched her settle back against the chair, and pull out some cheerful magazines to wile away the time. She didn’t seem to have any trouble reading. She didn’t seem to have any trouble at all. She was stealing every single thing I loved about my life – she’d done it before I’d even known to look, before I’d had any inkling there was any danger – and now she was thanking me for my witless help in letting her go right ahead and do it.
And I wasn’t beating the life out of her because I was worried about making a scene. I was pathetic.
It was clear to me then, as all of that violence and fury sloshed around inside of me, making me feel sick to my stomach, that I knew nothing at all about my life. Not really. It had gone completely off track, and I hadn’t even noticed it was happening. I’d been wandering around in
some dream of what it should be for far longer than I wanted to admit. Clearly. Carolyn had been making babies with my husband while I had been … what? Defending horrible, over-entitled rich kids like Benjy Stratton – arguing that they should be allowed to continue driving drunk through the streets? Fantasizing about winning the ongoing war with my office manager? About yoga classes and pastries? What kind of life was that? It seemed to me now, surrounded by the truth of it, of its sad detritus, that I was almost criminal in my own obliviousness.
How had this happened? How had I become …
this
?
‘I can’t remember why I didn’t go on that backpacking trip,’ I found myself saying out loud as Tim lay there in his cubicle, still so unresponsive, the same machines still surrounding him, their little sounds almost like background music to me now. The beeps and sighs, the scrape and squeak of nursing shoes on the linoleum out in the hall. ‘Do you remember? I was going to take a leave of absence and see the world. Just me and a backpack, and maybe a journal to write in.’
This was the first time I’d actually talked to him. Out loud.
I’d felt too self-conscious before – as if it would have been too forced, too much of a performance, too much the sort of dramatic thing I was sure Carolyn would both do and be really into, and what would I say, anyway? The wild need to harm Carolyn physically had faded somewhat,
but my horror at how blind I’d been about my own life had only grown more intense as the hours ticked by in this latest endless day. I frowned, not sure why I was talking now, and folded my own hands hard against each other in my lap.
‘I wanted to wander,’ I told Tim, all my grand plans coming back to me in a rush, all the nights I’d spent poring over maps and guidebooks, all the websites I’d visited and travel journals I’d spent hours upon hours reading.
My college room-mate and I had taken a much less ambitious trip the summer after we’d graduated from NYU, before we started at the positions we’d been sure would lead us into our glorious futures – me as a legal assistant in the law firm I hoped would get me into a good law school and Brooke in the publishing house where she dreamed she’d one day be an editor. We’d spent a month wandering in Costa Rica, and it had been life-altering in ways I’d never been able to explain to anyone who hadn’t had the same kind of experience themselves.
I’d planned my own, much more involved and intrepid journey, all through law school – all over Australia and New Zealand, then up into Africa and India, or maybe Japan and China to start, I could never quite decide – and even after I’d taken a job that no sane person could possibly have turned down in one of New York’s top law firms, I’d told myself I was only putting it off for a little while, not cancelling it altogether. It had been the major defining dream of my twenties, that trip.
But in the end, I’d never taken it.
‘I wanted to go on a safari in Botswana and sleep beneath the sky,’ I said, as much to remind myself as to Tim’s prone figure on the bed before me. ‘I wanted to get lost in Hong Kong and eat foods I couldn’t identify in Budapest. I wanted to drive the Great Ocean Road in Australia. I wanted to spend a Christmas in Prague.’
Tim’s machines offered the only response, in wheezes and beeps. He stayed still. Silent.
When had I given up on that particular dream? I couldn’t really remember. I couldn’t recall making any kind of conscious decision to stop working towards my big trip. It was as if, once Tim and I had started dating when I was a brand-new junior associate, I’d just shifted all of that attention and blistering focus to Tim instead, and the trip had sort of stopped being important.
Not that I’d thought about it that way. Not in so many words. Not at all, really. But the more we’d spent time together, the more it seemed to make sense that I should focus on other things – like the careers we were building, rather than formless dreams of knocking around the planet by myself, for no other reason than I thought it would be fun.
And Tim and I took our own trips. Together. New England in the fall, to marvel at the autumn leaves. Napa. St Croix. To more on-the-beaten-path places, perhaps, but they were still places worth seeing. It was still
travel
. And then we’d gotten engaged, some six months after we’d started dating,
and I’d thought it all made so much
sense
. We had
plans
. We were ambitious in exactly the same ways, for exactly the same things. We made a checklist and we both wanted every single thing on that list.
And we loved each other, of course. That most of all. We’d gotten married eight months after that, because, like I’d heard all my life, when you knew, you knew. And I knew. Tim was like a key finally turning in just the right lock.
I’d been so
sure
.
I let my eyes travel over Tim then, taking in every detail of his poor, struggling body. He was paler than I’d ever seen him, and the more he lay there, so quiet and so still, the more he seemed to diminish. Sometimes I sat right here, in this ever more uncomfortable chair, and wondered what would happen if he never woke up at all. Would he just disappear? Would the bed swallow him whole?
Would I disappear with him?
The fact that I didn’t know how to answer that last question shook me. Hard.
‘I wanted to be a public defender,’ I said then, my voice sounding surprisingly loud in the small, curtained-off area. ‘I can’t remember if I ever told you that.’
I must have, surely. In the very beginning, if never again. I had never planned to stay at that fancy, high-blooded firm for long. I’d wanted to pay down my school loans, that was all, not surrender myself to the notorious ‘golden handcuffs’ that chained so many young lawyers to the big
corporate firms. But it was as if I were reading him a story – as if I were talking about some fictional character, not myself. As if I had no emotional connection to my own memories.
‘I wanted to save the world,’ I whispered, and it was true, though it made me feel something too close to embarrassed to say it out loud, after all this time. Now that I was older. In my thirties. Settled. I should know better than to think there was anything one person could do to save the world. I could hardly think up a way to save myself.
But I remembered that wildness inside me, that feeling that the sky wasn’t big enough to hold me, or all the things I wanted to do. I remembered when it seemed as if all the songs spoke to hidden pieces of my soul, and that deep-down conviction that there was greatness out there, waiting for me, if I could just find it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt that way. Or anything close to it.
I blew out a breath, and couldn’t tell if the shake in it was laughter or something else, some emotion I was afraid to name.
‘And here’s the funny part.’ I leaned closer to the bed, to Tim’s ear – half of me feeling ridiculous because there was no one listening, not even the person I was supposedly talking to. But only half. ‘I don’t know when I stopped wanting that. When I started wanting only our life instead. Or why. Did you do that, Tim?’
I laughed then, a little bit, though I couldn’t have said why. Nothing was funny. I was frozen right through, and I had no hope of that ever changing, not as that baby grew daily inside Carolyn. Not while all of this continued to be so grim and sad and true. And Tim only lay there, healing. Or dying.
I didn’t know what it said about me that I couldn’t tell which one I wanted more. Or that when I’d sobbed in that far-off, battered little corner of this terrible hospital, I’d been crying for the babies I would never carry and the life I hadn’t really been living, after all. But not for him. What did that say about me? Did I really want to know?
But I worried that I already did.
‘Did you do that?’ I asked him again, tears in my voice if not on my cheeks. ‘Or did I?’
‘I’m really glad you came over tonight, Sarah,’ my father said all of three bites into his signature lasagne, the one he usually slaved over for days, and which he only made on very special occasions.
The fact that this supposedly casual dinner, just me and my parents on an unremarkable Thursday evening in December, gathered around the cosy little round table in their kitchen like all the dinners of my childhood, qualified for the lasagne treatment alarmed me. To say the least. I mustered up a smile and tried to kerb the paranoia, without much success either way.
My mother, who notoriously didn’t like to eat heavy meals in the evenings, even if the meal in question was Dad’s famous lasagne – the recipe handed down from his Italian mother who had spoken only a few words of English – had been picking at her usual small bowl of salad, but she put her fork down abruptly then, as if she expected things to get ugly. It occurred to me that my assumption
that this dinner – to which I’d been invited by my father in curiously formal language two days before – would involve any clearing of air, long-overdue apologies for the production of their first-born daughter, Ruiner of Lives that she was, or, at the very least, expressions of support from my parents was, perhaps, naïve.
I tried to tell myself that was just paranoia, too.
‘Thanks for the invitation,’ I said as lightly as I could, ignoring the clear signs that my parents were ready to
have a talk with me
. ‘You know I love your lasagne, Dad.’
‘We just want to check in with you,’ he said, smiling warmly. The warmth was definitely alarming. ‘See how you’re doing. This must all be so hard on you. It’s hard to believe it’s been going on this long now. Three weeks, isn’t it?’
I swallowed the forkful of lasagne I’d tossed into my mouth, though I hardly tasted a thing. Certainly not the explosion of flavour and cheesy goodness that this dish was supposed to deliver in spades.
‘Something like that,’ I muttered.
‘This is such a terrible situation,’ Dad continued, frowning down at his plate. At least the frown was more normal. The attempt at warmth only made me nervous. I loved my cerebral, professorial father, but he had never been much in the way of an arbiter of justice in the family. No one had. The Stone family motto was
Ignore, Repress, Pretend
. ‘Just terrible.’
‘A terrible situation all around,’ Mom chimed in, shaking her head as if at the enormity of it all.
I waited, but nothing else seemed to be forthcoming. I wanted to ask what, exactly, Mom meant by
all around
. But maybe I was hearing support for Carolyn under every syllable when it wasn’t necessarily there. It was possible, I could admit. I’d promised myself on the drive over that I wasn’t going to pick a fight with them, and by
them
I mostly meant my mother, because what was the point? They were my parents. They didn’t change – maybe they couldn’t. And that meant it was the very definition of insanity to keep acting as if one day, left to their own devices and apropos of nothing, they might.
I was determined to stick to my plan. To any plan, at this point, just to prove that I could. That there was something left that couldn’t be taken from me.
‘Do you remember that I wanted to be a public defender?’ I asked, deciding it was better to talk about other things. Safer things. Things so far in the past that they couldn’t possibly hurt anybody now. ‘I wanted to travel all over the place, save the world. I’d forgotten all about that.’