She did not like vegetables of any kind. She was wary of dogs. She hated being tickled. She was begrudging about hugs, unless she was sleepy or upset.
Her entire life was a primal binary of yes and no, with no maybes or sortas or it’s-complicateds, and something about this was soothing to me. The simplicity of it was a balm after so many years of living in the gray areas, in which every decision I had ever made seemed to require hours of explanation and analysis.
But childcare, it turned out, was exhausting. Mind-numbingly dull and repetitive, and yet requiring a heightened consciousness at all times. I wasn’t used to being so alert. Charlotte’s plump little legs were remarkably fast—she could cover a football field before I’d registered that she was gone—and I spent most of my time with her worried that she might accidentally get washed away by a wave or fall off a concrete ledge or get run over by a car.
At the end of each day I’d hit up an AA meeting and then collapse into bed with a low-grade stress headache and nerves that still jangled. No wonder my mother needed her chakras realigned after a week of this, I thought; no wonder my sister had run off to Ojai and didn’t want to come home.
I took photos of Charlotte and texted the most charming ones—Charlotte digging in the sand, Charlotte eating a cupcake—to my sister. If Elli was going to run off to a dubious retreat, there was no point in tiptoeing around the fact that I was now taking care of Charlotte. Sometimes I’d add a message: When should I tell her you’re coming home? Or If you’re not home by Friday I’m going to let Charlotte watch Breaking Bad with me. And Are you at a GenFem retreat? What the hell have you gotten yourself involved with? The blue check marks let me know that Elli had read my texts, but she never answered them. I took this as a mildly promising sign: If she didn’t think I was trustworthy enough to watch her daughter, surely she would be racing home by now.
Maybe it even meant she’d forgiven me.
Then again, maybe there was a decidedly more upsetting reason that she hadn’t come back to save Charlotte from me.
Maybe she wasn’t allowed to leave.
* * *
—
On my fourth morning home, another day looming bright and endless before us, I decided to give Caleb a call. I hadn’t seen him at an AA meeting since that first night; each evening I’d scanned the heads, looking for badly chopped curls, and felt a twinge of disappointment when I realized he hadn’t come.
That morning, I left Charlotte eating toast in her high chair while I stood on my parents’ stoop and called the number that he’d typed into my phone. His voice on the other end of the line was still thick with sleep when he answered.
“Not that I’m not happy to hear from you, but it’s a bit early, don’t you think?”
I glanced at the time. It was 7:30 a.m. “I’ve been up for two hours. Isn’t this when parents usually get up?”
“Not me. My daughter is a night owl. I can barely drag her out of bed before lunch.”
“Sorry. I’ll call back later.”
“No, no. It’s OK, I was just getting up anyway.” I heard him rustling around, water running in a sink. “You need childcare advice? Suggestions of things to do with a two-year-old?”
Through the window I could see my father enter the kitchen, already dressed for work in his suit. He sat down next to Charlotte and peeled a banana with one hand as he read the newspaper, placing the fruit on the tray of her high chair. She proceeded to drop the banana on the ground, then soberly peered over the edge of her chair at the mess she’d made. Her tiny mouth formed a word I could read from here: Lello.
“I need adult company,” I said. “Someone I’m not related to. Someone who speaks in complete sentences. Maybe we could meet somewhere? A playground, maybe? Assuming you don’t have work today. Actually I have no idea what you do for a living.” I realized that I was the one babbling this time.
He laughed. “I’m a high school English teacher. I’m on summer break. And so is my daughter, so you’ll get two for the price of one. Cool?”
“Very.”
* * *
—
We met at a playground that he suggested, with an elaborate, castle-like play structure that sprawled under the shade of an enormous oak. Charlotte took an immediate shine to Caleb’s daughter, Mae, a gamine little girl with paint in her hair and scabs on her knees. The two took off for the fort, Mae holding Charlotte’s hand as they wobbled across the swinging bridge and toward the fortress tower.
“She loves little girls,” Caleb said. “She keeps asking when she’ll be allowed to start babysitting.”
“How grown-up.”
“She’s a ruthless capitalist. She goes through my pockets every night and takes all the change. She tells me that she’s saving up to buy a helicopter.”
“Much more useful than a plane, if you ask me. Easier to land.”
We sat on a bench with a view across the playground. I studied him as I drank my coffee. He was wearing track pants and a battered T-shirt that read Cedar Forest Ultramarathon 2018. His hair had been repaired since I saw him last, trimmed into a severe symmetrical cut, almost military in length, that revealed a disarmingly delicate bone structure. The fabric of his T-shirt was so thin that I could see the wiry muscles in his shoulders, bunching and flexing.
I pointed at his chest. “You run ultramarathons? Aren’t those, like, a hundred miles?”
“Not all of them. I’ve never run farther than fifty.”
“Still. Sounds awfully time-consuming.”
“It keeps me busy, but I need that. Plus, you know what they say. Addictive personalities always need something to fixate on. So I run until I collapse. Endorphins are a much healthier high.” He gave me a sideways glance. “You? Do you have a vice?”
I lifted my coffee cup. “Caffeine and self-flagellation.”
He laughed at this, and then we fell silent, watching the children that swarmed over the play structure like locusts. It was ten a.m. on a summery Tuesday morning and every swing was full, children were jostling for a turn at the slides, and every bench was claimed by a diaper bag or an abandoned sippy cup. I’d wondered if meeting Caleb here would feel awkward, like a particularly G-rated Tinder date, but he exuded a kind of meditative calmness that was in sharp contrast to the mothers and nannies who surrounded us. They circled the play structure like sheepdogs, herding their charges away from danger as they wielded tissues and fish crackers and Band-Aids and disinfecting wipes. Caleb was one of the only men in the park, but he didn’t seem particularly bothered by his minority status.
“Is Mae’s mom”—I wasn’t quite sure how to phrase this delicately—“around?”
“Yes and no. We’ve been divorced since Mae was two. We split custody for a while but now Mae’s mostly with me. Her mom is…unstable.” He studied his hands, and I noticed that his cuticles were bitten to the quick. “It’s why I got sober. Mae needed someone who could be responsible. So.” He shrugged.
“How long have you been sober?”
“Six years, more or less.” Ah. So he was really sober. “You?”
“A year.”
He gave me a smile that I had grown familiar with, one of encouraging approval mixed with faint trepidation. A year was long enough to prove admirable commitment, but not long enough to be out of the woods. “You stopped acting,” he said abruptly.
I flushed. “I didn’t know that anyone had noticed. What, you looked me up on IMDB?”
Now it was his turn to flush. “I don’t know any other famous actors. So I paid attention, and yeah, I’d check IMDB to see if you’d been in something and then I’d watch it.”
“Even the horror movies?”
“Even the horror movies.”
“Yikes.” Something twisted in my stomach: Embarrassment, yes, but was it my own embarrassment at the state of my career, or embarrassment for him, for revealing his hand so quickly? What kind of person would stalk me like that and admit it?
I snuck a look at his face, trying to decide if he was a creep. He smiled back at me. “I’m not a creep,” he said. “I swear.”