He hugged me as tightly as ever and said all the right things, but I felt a subtle shift in the energy between us. I recalled how we took a walk in the park near our home shortly after our wedding and had seen a father playing catch with his son, who looked to be about eight or nine. They wore matching Yankees baseball caps.
Richard had paused, staring at them. “I can’t wait to do that with my boy. Hope he has a better arm than I do.”
I’d laughed, aware that my breasts were just the tiniest bit tender. It happened before my period, but it was also a sign of pregnancy, I’d read. Already, I was taking prenatal vitamins. I filled my mornings with long walks and I’d bought a beginner’s yoga video. I’d stopped eating unpasteurized cheeses and drinking more than a single glass of wine at dinner. I was doing everything the experts recommended.
But nothing worked.
“We’ll just have to keep trying,” Richard had said early on, back when we were still optimistic. “That’s not so bad, is it?”
I’d thrown the sixth pregnancy test into the bathroom trash can, covering it with a tissue, so I wouldn’t have to see it.
“I was thinking,” Richard had said. He moved away from me to look in the mirror above the dresser as he knotted his tie. On the bed behind him was an open suitcase. Richard traveled frequently, but usually just short trips, for a night or two. Suddenly I knew what he was going to say: He was going to invite me to come with him. I felt the darkness start to lift as I imagined escaping our beautiful, empty home, in a charming neighborhood where I had no friends. Of putting distance between me and my latest failure.
But what Richard said was “Maybe you should stop drinking altogether?”
The pregnant woman moves away from me and I blink hard, reorienting myself. I watch as she heads toward the tracks and the roar of the approaching subway car. The wheels screech to a halt and the doors slide open with a weary exhale. I wait until the crowds have pushed inside, then I walk forward, feeling a tinge of unease.
I step over the threshold and hear the warning chime signaling the doors are closing. “Excuse me,” I say to the guy in front of me, but he doesn’t move. His head bobs in time to the music blasting over his headphones; I can feel the vibrations of the bass. The doors close, but the train remains still. It is so hot I can feel my trousers sticking to my legs.
“Seat?” someone offers, and an older man stands up to give his to the pregnant woman. She flashes a smile as she accepts. She’s wearing a plaid dress; it’s simple and cheap looking, and her full breasts strain against the thin fabric as she reaches up to lift her hair off the back of her neck and fan herself with one hand. Her skin is flushed and dewy; she is radiant.
Richard’s new love can’t be pregnant, can she?
I don’t think it’s possible, but suddenly I imagine Richard standing behind her, his hands reaching around to cup her full belly.
I suck in shallow breaths. A man in a white undershirt with yellowed armholes is holding on to the pole by my head. I tilt my face away but I can still smell his pungent sweat.
The car lurches and I fall against a woman reading the Times. She doesn’t even look up from her paper. A few more stops, I tell myself. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.
The train rumbles along the tracks, sounding angry, threading through the dark tunnel. I feel a body press against mine. Too close; everyone is too close. My sweaty hand slips off the pole as my knees buckle. I collapse against the doors, crouching with my head close to my knees.
“Are you okay?” someone asks.
The guy in the undershirt leans close to me.
“I think I’m sick,” I gasp.
I begin to rock, counting the rhythmic whirring of the wheels along the track. One, two . . . ten. . . . twenty . . .
“Conductor!” a woman calls out.
“Yo! Is anyone here a doctor?”
. . . fifty . . . sixty-four . . .
The train stops at Seventy-ninth and I feel arms around my waist, helping me up. Then I am half carried through the doors, onto the solid platform. Someone leads me to a bench a dozen yards away.
“Can I call anyone?” asks a voice.
“No. The flu . . . I just need to get home. . . .”
I sit there until I can breathe again.
Then I walk fourteen blocks back to the apartment, counting all 1,848 steps aloud, until I can crawl into bed.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Nellie was late, again.
She felt perpetually a beat behind these days, groggy from her relentless insomnia and jittery from the extra coffee she drank to offset it. It seemed as if she was always trying to cram in one more thing. Take this afternoon: Richard had suggested they drive back to their new home as soon as preschool ended to meet the contractor who was building a patio off the English basement.
“You can pick the color of the stones,” Richard had said.
“They come in shades other than gray?”
He laughed, not realizing she was serious.
She agreed, feeling guilty about cutting short their first trip to see the house. That meant canceling the blowout she’d been planning to splurge on with Samantha in preparation for the bachelorette party Sam was throwing her that evening, though. Her friends from both the Learning Ladder and Gibson’s were attending—one of the few times Nellie’s divergent worlds would collide. Sorry! Nellie had texted Sam, hesitated, then added, Last minute wedding errand . . .
She couldn’t think of a way to explain it that wouldn’t make it look as if she was choosing her fiancé over her best friend.
“I just have to be home by six to get ready for the party,” she’d told Richard. “We’re meeting everyone at the restaurant at seven.”
“Always with the curfew, Cinderella,” he’d said, lightly kissing the tip of her nose. “Don’t worry, you won’t be late.”
But they had been. Traffic was awful, and Nellie didn’t walk into her apartment until close to six-thirty. She knocked on Sam’s door, but her roommate had already left.
She stood there for a moment, taking in the white Christmas lights Samantha had wound through the slats of her bed’s headboard, and the fuzzy green-and-blue rug the two of them had found rolled up by the curb of a posh apartment building on Fifth Avenue. “Is someone actually throwing this out?” Samantha had asked. “Rich people are nuts. It still has a price tag on it!” They’d lifted it onto their shoulders and carried it home, and when they passed a cute guy waiting to cross the street, Sam winked at Nellie, then deliberately turned so the end of the carpet swung into his chest. Sam ended up dating him for two months; it was one of her longer relationships.
Nellie had thirty minutes to make it to the restaurant, which meant she’d have to skip a shower. Still, she poured a half glass of wine to sip while she got ready—not the expensive stuff Richard always ordered for her, but she couldn’t really taste the difference anyway—and cranked up Beyoncé.
She splashed cold water on her face, then smoothed on tinted moisturizer and began to line her green eyes with a smoky-gray pencil. Their bathroom was so small that Nellie was forever banging into the sink or the edge of the door, and every time she opened the medicine cabinet, a tube of Crest or can of hair spray tumbled out. She hadn’t taken a bath in years; the apartment had only a tiny shower stall that barely afforded her enough room to bend over to shave her legs.
In the new home, the master bath’s shower featured a bench and a rain-forest spray nozzle. Plus, that Jacuzzi.
Nellie tried to imagine soaking in it, after a long day spent . . . doing what? Gardening in the backyard, maybe, and putting together dinner for Richard.
Did Richard realize that she’d drowned the only houseplant she’d ever owned, and that her cooking repertoire was limited to heating up Lean Cuisines?