Left Neglected

Chapter 4





I’m strolling through the Public Garden, past the statue of George Washington on his horse, past the swan boats in the pond, beneath the giant willow trees, past Lack, Mack, and the rest of the bronze ducklings.

I’m wearing my favorite Christian Louboutin, black patent leather, four-inch, peep-toe shoes. I love the sound they make as I stroll.

Clack … Clack … Clack … Clack … Clack … Clack.

I cross the street to the Common. A tall man in a dark suit crosses behind me. I walk through the Common, past the baseball fields and the Frog Pond. The man is still behind me. I walk a little faster.

Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack.

So does he.

I move quickly past the homeless man asleep on the park bench, past the Park Street T, past the business tycoon talking on his cell phone, past the drug dealer on the corner. The man follows me.

Who is he? What does he want? Don’t look back.

Clack, Clack, Clack, Clack, Clack, Clack.

I pass the jewelry stores and the old Filene’s Basement building. I weave and wind through the crowds of shoppers and turn left down the next side street. The cars and crowds are gone now. The street is empty except for the man pursuing me, even closer. I run.

CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! CLACK!

So does he. He’s chasing me.

I can’t shake him. On the side of the financial building ahead of me, I see a fire escape. Escape! I run to it and start to climb. I hear the man’s footsteps echoing mine on the metal stairs, bearing down on me.

CLINK! CLOMP! CLINK! CLOMP! CLINK! CLOMP!

I crisscross up and up and up and up. My lungs are screaming. My legs are burning.

Don’t look back. Don’t look down. Keep going. He’s right behind you.

I reach the top. The roof is flat and empty. I run to the far edge. There’s nowhere else to go. My heart is hammering against the bones in my chest. I have no choice. I turn to face my attacker.

There’s no one there. I wait. No one appears. I cautiously make my way back to the fire escape.

Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack.

It’s not there. I walk the perimeter of the roof. The fire escape is gone. I’m trapped on the top of this building.

I sit down to catch my breath and think. I watch a plane take off into the sky out of Logan and try to imagine a way down other than jumping.





W E D N E S D A Y


I’m a Boston Driver. Traffic regulations like speed limits and do not enter signs are more suggestion here than law. I navigate the city’s one-way, helter-skelter streets, dodging potholes and nervy jaywalkers, anticipating the next construction detour, and gunning every yellow light with experienced bravado. All in the space of four blocks. The next traffic light turns green, and I’m on my horn in less than a blink of the eye when the Honda in front of me with New Hampshire plates doesn’t move. Like any self-respecting Boston Driver would.

Driving home at the end of the day requires infinitely more patience than coming in, and having any patience at all has never been my virtue. There is always traffic both times of day, but the evening exodus is significantly worse. I don’t know why this is. The whistle blows, the gates open, and we’re all off, like a million picnic ants converging onto one of three trails of cookie crumbs—Route 93 for those who live on the North or South Shore and the Mass Pike for those, like me, who reside west of Boston. The civil engineers who planned and designed these roads probably never conceived of this many commuters. And if they did, I’ll bet they live and work in Worcester.

I accordion along the Pike, wearing out my brake pads, swearing that one of these days I’ll start taking the T. The only reason I subject myself to this daily erosion of my brakes and sanity is so I can see my kids before they go to bed. Most people at Berkley don’t leave before 7:00, and many order dinner and stay well past 8:00. I try to leave at 6:00, right in the thick of the Going Home parade. My early departure doesn’t go unnoticed, especially by the younger, single consultants, and as I walk out of the office each night, I have to resist the urge to remind all their judging eyes just how many hours a night I work from home. I have my faults, but I’m not, and never will be, a slacker.

I leave “early” because I hope to muddle through the traffic and get home in time for dessert, baths, stories, and tucking the kids into bed at 7:30. But every minute I now sit unmoving in my Acura is another minute that I won’t get to see them today. At 6:20, it’s already been dark out for over an hour, and it feels even later than it is. It’s started to rain, which is slowing down progress even more. I’ll probably miss dessert at this point, but we’re creeping along, and I should get home in time for bath, book, and bed.

And then everything stops. It’s 6:30. Red brake lights glow in an unbroken chain all the way to the horizon. Someone must’ve gotten in an accident. I’m not anywhere near an exit, so I can’t even bail out early and take the back roads home. I turn off whoever’s complaining on NPR and listen for sounds of an ambulance or police siren. I don’t hear any. It’s 6:37. No one is moving. I’m late, I’m trapped, and my barely contained anxiety breaks open. CRAP! What is going ON?

I look to the guy in the BMW next to me, like he might know. He sees me, shrugs his shoulders, and shakes his head in disgusted resignation. He’s on his cell phone. Maybe that’s what I should do. Use this time wisely. I pull out my laptop and start reading case team reviews. But I’m too aggravated to be productive. If I wanted to work, I would’ve stayed at work.

It’s 6:53. The Pike remains paralyzed. I text Bob to let him know. 7:00. Bath time. I rub my face and breathe in and out into my hands. I want to scream the stress out of my body, but I worry that the guy in the BMW will think I’m crazy and gossip about me on his phone. So I hold it in. I just want to be home. I just want to click my Cole Haan heels and be home.

It’s 7:18 when I arrive in front of 22 Pilgrim Lane. Fourteen miles in seventy-eight minutes. The winner of the Boston Marathon could’ve beaten me home on foot. And that’s exactly how I feel. Beaten. I reach up to the visor and press the button on the garage door opener. I’m inches away from pulling in when I realize that the garage door didn’t open, and I slam on the brakes. I made it through the gnarly streets of Boston and a gridlocked Pike without a scratch but almost totaled the car in my own driveway. I repeatedly click and curse at the stupid garage door button a few times before I get out of the car. As I run through puddles and freezing rain from my car to the front door, the saying “The straw that broke the camel’s back” comes to mind.

I pray that I’ve at least made it home in time for bedtime stories and good-night kisses.



I’M LYING IN BED WITH Lucy, waiting for her to fall asleep. If I get up too soon, she’ll beg for one more book. I already read Tacky the Penguin and Blue’s Best Rainy Day. I’ll tell her no, and she’ll say please, stretching the eez out for several seconds to show me that she’s being extra polite and that her request is extra important, and I’ll say no, and in the course of this arousing tête-à-tête, she’ll wake herself up. It’s just easier if I stay until she’s out.

I’m spooning her small body, and my nose is on her head. She smells like heaven—an elixir of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, Tom’s of Maine Strawberry toothpaste, and Nilla Wafers. I think I’ll cry the day all my kids stop using Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. Who will they smell like then?

She’s so warm, and her deepened breathing is hypnotic. I wish I could let myself drift off with her, but I have miles to go before I can sleep. This is the trick every night, to leave after she’s surrendered the fight to be up, but before I give in to the desire to close my eyes. When I’m convinced she’s fully unconscious, I slide out from under the covers, tiptoe around all the toys and crafts (land mines) strewn on the floor, and steal out of her darkened room like I’m James Bond.

Bob is eating a bowl of cereal on the couch.

“Sorry, babe, I couldn’t wait.”

No apologies necessary. I’m relieved. I love it when I don’t have to think about what we’re going to eat for dinner, and I love it even more when I don’t have to cook anything. Well, I should admit, I don’t exactly cook. I microwave. I heat up already prepared and cooked food. And the Takeout Taxi phone number is programmed into our speed dial. But cereal might just be my favorite dinner at home. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a sumptuous and elegant meal at Pisces or Mistral, but dinner at home on the couches with Bob isn’t about ambiance and fine dining. It’s about getting rid of the hunger pangs as quickly as possible and moving on.

We spend the next three hours in the living room on separate couches with our laptops on our laps. CNN is on the TV for background noise and the occasional interesting sound bite. I am mostly emailing our offices in China and India. Boston is twelve hours behind China and ten and a half hours behind India, so now is tomorrow morning for them. This still blows my mind. I’m a time traveler, doing business in real time on Thursday when it is still only Wednesday where I sit on my couch. Amazing.

Bob is clicking around the internet and networking for jobs. He’s at a promising information technology start-up, and the payoff is potentially huge if they get acquired or go public, but as with most fledgling companies in this economy, things aren’t looking so good. The recession is hitting them hard, and the skyrocketing growth trajectories Bob projected when he signed on three years ago feel like a distant, silly fantasy. At this point, they’re simply trying not to bleed to death. He just survived a second round of layoffs, but he isn’t planning on sticking around and holding his breath through a third. The problem is Bob is picky, and not many companies are hiring. I can tell by his pinched mouth and the vertical ravine between his furrowed brows that he isn’t finding anything.

The uncertainty of his job, both current and future, has been really weighing on him. When he starts sliding down What-If’s slippery slope to Doomsville—What if I lose my job tomorrow? What if I can’t find another? What if we can’t make the mortgage payments?—I try to brush them all off and make the load lighter for him. Don’t worry, honey, you’ll be fine. The kids will be fine. We’ll all be fine.

But the What-Ifs take up residence in my head, and in my head, I’m captain of the champion luge team, barreling at record speed to Doomsville. What if he does get laid off and can’t find another job? What if we have to sell the house in vermont? But then what if we can’t sell it in this depressed market? What if we can’t pay the student loans, the car payments, the heating bill? What if we can’t afford to stay in Welmont?

I close my eyes and see the word debt written in all caps and red ink. My chest tightens, and it feels like there’s no air in the room, and my laptop is suddenly unbearably hot on my legs, and I’m sweating. Stop thinking about it. Take your own advice. He’ll be fine. The kids will be fine. We’ll be fine. Deluded mantra.

I decide to watch TV for a minute to take my mind off of Doomsville. Anderson Cooper is reporting about a San Diego mother who accidentally left her two-year-old toddler in the backseat of her locked car for eight hours while she worked at her job. When the mother returned to her car at the end of the day, her toddler was dead from heat exhaustion. Officials are deciding whether or not to press charges.

What was I thinking? CNN is the capital of Doomsville. My eyes fill with tears thinking about this woman and her dead child. I imagine the two-year-old, helpless to escape the car seat’s five-point harness, terror and fevered desperation giving way to organ failure. How will that mother ever forgive herself ? I think of my mother.

“Bob, can you change the channel?”

He flips to a local news station. One of the anchors is listing today’s news from bad to worse—banks begging for bail-outs, soaring unemployment rates, the stock market in free fall. Doomsville, U.S.A.

I get up and go to the kitchen to look for some chocolate and a big glass of wine.

We both surrender the day at eleven. Before the sun rises in Boston, consultants in the various European offices will be sipping their first espressos of the day, adding their emails to my inbox with their morning’s questions, concerns, and reports. And, at about the same time, Linus will wake up. Groundhog Day all over again.

It used to take me a long time to fall asleep, anywhere from twenty minutes to a full hour. I used to have to read something totally unrelated to my day, like a novel, to distract and calm my racing thoughts. And Bob’s snoring used to drive me crazy. It’s truly nothing short of miraculous that he can sleep through all his own growling and whistling. He says he’s protecting our cave from predators. While I appreciate his idea about the origin of the man snore, I believe that we as a species have evolved past the need for it. Like the dead-bolted front door, to begin with. But his Fred Flintstone snore will not be phased out by modern technology. There have been many nights when I wanted to suffocate him with my pillow and take my chances with the lions, tigers, and bears.

But no more. Since about the time that Lucy was born, I’m asleep within five minutes of my head hitting the pillow. If I try to read, I don’t get past the page I start on. I can’t remember the last time I finished a novel. And if I happen to surface into a light sleep during the night and notice Bob’s snoring, I roll over and sink unperturbed back into slumber.

The negative side to this is its impact on our sex life. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I can’t remember the last time we had sex. I like sex with Bob, and I still want to have sex with Bob, but I don’t seem to like and want it enough to stay awake long enough to make it happen. I know we’re both busy and tired at the end of the day, but I’m not too busy and tired to read to Lucy, email China, and go through the piles of bills. Yet every night, I draw the line at sex. And so does Bob.

I remember when we used to have sex early in the evening, before we were too tired, sometimes even before going out (when we used to go out). Now, when we do manage to fit it in, it’s always just before bed, always in bed, a pre-sleep activity like brushing teeth or flossing, although never with that kind of regularity.

When I was single, I remember reading in Vogue or Cosmopolitan or one of those magazines I only read at the hairdresser’s that married couples with advanced degrees report having sex the least of all married couples. Only ten to twelve times a year. That’s once a month. That will NEVER be me, I thought. Of course, I was twenty-something, single, without children, far less educated than I am now, and getting laid at least two to three times a week. I used to read the surveys in those magazines and think they were entertaining but pure fiction. Now I hang on every brilliant word.

I hope Bob doesn’t doubt whether I’m still attracted to him. Ironically, if anything, I’m more attracted to him now than when we were dating and having sex all the time. Watching him feed Linus a bottle, kiss Lucy’s boo-boo, teach Charlie over and over again how to tie his shoes, moments when I see him utterly unself-conscious and absorbed in loving them, I feel like I could burst with how much I adore him.

I regret the nights when I’m so tired that I fall asleep before telling him that I love him. And I’m irrationally angry with him on the nights that he falls asleep before he tells me. If we’re too unmotivated to eat a grown-up dinner, too preoccupied with emails and job hunting to snuggle on the couch and watch a movie, and too tuckered out to consider three minutes of sex, then we can at least say we love each other before we pass out.

I lie in bed alone and wait for Bob. I want to tell him that I love him, that even if he loses his job tomorrow, I’ll still love him. That wherever What-If takes us, we’ll be okay because we love each other. But he takes too long in the bathroom, and I fall asleep before I get a chance to tell him, worried for some reason that he doesn’t know.