Left Neglected

Chapter 19





Bob is driving us home. Home! Even riding in my mother’s two-door Volkswagen Bug, which I’ve never been in before, feels like home. I’m in a car again! There’s the Museum of Science! I’m on Route 93! I’m on the Mass Pike! There’s the Charles River! I greet the passing of each familiar landmark like I’ve just bumped into a dear old friend, and I feel that escalating excitement I get whenever I’m driving home from Logan after a long business trip. But today, multiply that excitement by ten. I’m almost there. I’m almost home!

Everything feels heightened. Even the afternoon light of the outdoor world feels exceptionally bright and gorgeous to my eyes, and I see now why photographers prefer natural light. Everything looks more vibrant, more three-dimensional, more alive than anything I’ve seen for a month under the flat, fluorescent indoor lighting of Baldwin. And it’s not just the bold beauty of the outside light that I’m taken with. The sunlight shining through the windshield feels deliciously warm on my face. Mmm. Fluorescent lighting doesn’t do that. There’s no comparison.

And the air at Baldwin was always stale and stagnant. I want to feel real air again, its fresh crispness (even if somewhat polluted with exhaust) and the movement of it. I “roll” the window down a crack. The chilly air whistles into the car through the slit and dances through my short hair. I draw it in through my nose, fill my lungs, and sigh pure bliss.

“Hey, it’s cold,” says Bob, zipping my window back up with the driver’s master control switch.

I stare out my closed window, but within seconds I can’t resist the urge to feel a wild breeze again. I press the button, but my window doesn’t budge. I press and press and press.

“Hey, my window’s stuck,” I say, whining and blaming, realizing that Bob must’ve clicked the lock button, deciding for everyone in the car that the windows will remain up. Now I know how the kids feel when I do it to them.

“Listen, before we get home, I want to talk about your mother,” says Bob, ignoring my complaint. “She’s going to stay with us for a while longer.”

“I know, she told me,” I say.

“Oh. Good,” he says.

“Nooo, not good. I do not want her to stay. We don’t need her. I’ll be fine,” I say.

He doesn’t say anything. Maybe he’s mulling this over. Or maybe he’s glad to finally have my very strong opinion on the matter (which he should’ve asked for long before now), and he agrees with me 100 percent. Maybe he’s smiling and nodding. But I have no idea what he’s doing or thinking. I’m too mesmerized by the scenery outside my window to redirect my attention to my left, so I don’t know what his silence means. He’s in the driver’s seat. He’s a voice in the car when he talks, and he’s an invisible chauffeur when he’s silent.

“Sarah, you can’t be home alone yet. It’s not safe.”

“I’m fine. I can handle it.”

“What do we need—some sort of twelve-step program for you? You’re not ready to be home alone yet. All the doctors and therapists said so.”

“Then we can hire someone.”

“We really can’t. You’ve used up all your sick and vacation time, and your disability insurance isn’t even half what you were making before. I’m hanging on to my job by my fingernails. Hiring someone is expensive, and your mother’s here, and she’s free.”

Well, my mother may not charge an hourly wage, but I guarantee if she stays, I’ll pay a high price for it. There’s got to be another solution. I do understand how terrifying our financial situation is becoming. I make more money than Bob does, and now my income is slashed, and I can’t pinpoint with any accuracy when exactly in the future I might get it all back. The possibility that I might never get it all back waltzes across the floor of my worried thoughts at least once a day now, flaunting showstopping leaps and pirouettes, taking center stage for too long before exiting into the wings. I need to get my salary back. This has to happen. Even if Bob manages to cling to his job, and the economy manages to turn around, we won’t be able to afford our life without my full contribution.

I have to confess that I’ve been praying for Bob to lose his job. Even more specifically, I’ve been praying for him to lose his job and for him to not find another one for four months. I know this is playing with fire, and it doesn’t sound like the kind of prayer that God would pay any attention to anyway, but I find myself getting desperately lost in this wish many times a day. If Bob gets laid off now, he’ll get four months’ severance pay, and if he doesn’t have another job lined up straightaway, he can stay home with me. And if he’s home with me, we won’t need my mother’s help, and then she can hop in her Volkswagen Bug and drive back to the Cape. And at the end of four months, when Bob starts his new, stable, even-better-paying job, I’ll not only be ready to stay home alone, I’ll also be ready to go back to Berkley. But so far, none of this is happening. If God is listening, He has a different plan.

“What about Abby? Maybe Abby can be around a little more,” I say.

Silence again. I stare out the window. The thick snow on the trees and fields is glowing in the late-day sun. I didn’t notice any snow back in the city, but now that we’ve ventured west into the suburbs, there are trees and golf courses and open spaces where snow can settle peacefully without being pushed aside or removed.

“Abby’s leaving us right after Christmas for a teaching internship in New York.”

“What?”

“I know. It’s awful timing.”

“It’s the worst timing imaginable!”

“I know, and she was all torn up about the decision, but I told her to go. I told her that you’d want her to go.”

“Why would you tell her a crazy thing like that?”

“Sarah—”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I knew it would stress you out.”

“Crap!” I say, completely stressed out.

“Right. So with no Abby and no time to find a replacement and your mother always hinting around that she’s in no rush to leave, I asked her to stay. We need her, Sarah.”

I continue to look out the window, the landscape whizzing by, as we fast approach home. Almost home. Almost home with my mother and soon no Abby. The sun is now directly at eye level in the western sky, hanging just below where the visor would block it out, blinding me. Its rays through the wind-shield, which felt gloriously warm on my face at the beginning of the ride, are now uncomfortably hot, and I feel like an ant under a magnifying glass about to be incinerated.

“Can I please have control over my own window?”

I press the button and hold it there, “rolling” my window all the way down. Cold air whips into the car. It feels great for a few seconds, but then it’s way too cold and way too windy, but I leave the window where it is, determined to have my way about something.

Bob turns onto our exit, and then we turn right onto Main Street in Welmont. The center of town is all dolled up for Christmas. Wreaths are hung on the streetlamps, garland and white lights line the windows of the storefronts, and, although not lit up at this hour, the magnificent two-hundred-year-old spruce tree in front of the town hall is strung to the top with colored lights. The sun is low now, no longer blinding. It’ll be dark any minute, and Main Street will be aglow with postcard-perfect holiday cheer. Nearing the shortest day of the year, it changes from day to night in the blink of an eye, reminding me of how everything can change in an unnoticed moment.

Bob turns onto Sycamore Street. We drive up the hill, around the bend, and onto Pilgrim Lane. He pulls into our driveway, and there it is.

Home.