And then when I was posting Violet’s “8 months” photograph, and liking photos of Julia’s trip to Amsterdam, that little heart emblem popped into my news feed, and there it was. Gabriel Samson is engaged to Alina Alexandrov. There was a picture of you underneath it, with your arms around a beautiful woman with auburn hair, wide-set hazel eyes, and an enormous smile. My stomach flipped. This shouldn’t make a difference to you, I told myself. You’re married, you have a child, you haven’t seen him in more than a year, he hasn’t been yours in more than four years. But it did. It made a difference. In that photograph I saw my “might have been.” I saw the road not taken.
I spent the next hour clicking on your pictures and looking at the two of you on vacation in Croatia. I’d never been to Croatia. Then there you were in China, on top of the Great Wall. And in Egypt, dancing with Alina, who was wearing a belly-dancing skirt made of bright red chiffon and silver coins. I was surprised by how jealous I was of that life. I wanted to climb the Great Wall of China, I wanted to belly dance in Egypt.
You were based in Baghdad again, and it looked like she was, too, working for The Guardian. I clicked on its website and read every article she wrote. And then Googled her name and read her Wikipedia page. Then I discovered you had a Wikipedia page. And your pages were linked, with an update that someone must have recently added mentioning your engagement.
I checked myself. I did not have a Wikipedia page. Neither did Darren. Then Violet started crying, so I shut down the computer. But later that day I e-mailed you a quick note that said: Congratulations!
You didn’t write back.
liv
That September I was still in my post-Violet fog, but life was starting to enter a sustainable groove. She was sleeping through the night, finally, and we’d spent the last week of August as a family in a rented house in Westhampton Beach. Violet loved the pool, so we slathered her with sunscreen, dropped her in a little inner tube contraption that had an attached hood to block her from the sun, and let her bob around like a tiny buoy while we floated in the pool ourselves. It felt like a small slice of heaven.
“You like it out here,” Darren said later, as Violet bobbed and splashed and the two of us sat on the steps in the shallow end of the pool with cold glasses of Chardonnay.
“You like it out here, too,” I answered, leaning my head on his shoulder.
“I do,” he said. “We should buy a place.”
“Maybe one day,” I told him. “But for now, renting for a week or two each summer sounds pretty ideal to me.”
He nodded. “One day. It’s on my bucket list, remember?”
I hadn’t. “Of course,” I said. “We’ve been bucket-list remiss as of late, I’m afraid.”
He shook his head. “No, we haven’t,” he said. “This year we became parents. That was on our lists.”
I laughed. “That’s right,” I said. “I take it back. We are awesome at bucket lists.”
“We are,” he said, kissing me, while Violet splashed us both.
That’s what I was thinking about that morning on the subway—the week in Westhampton, the pool, how relaxing it was. And then I looked up. The man across from me was holding a copy of the New York Times. The article facing me said: More Bodies Pulled from Hotel Rubble in Pakistan. My mind went straight to you. Were you in Pakistan? Last I’d seen you were in Baghdad, but could you have moved? Or been covering something in Islamabad? Could you have been staying at that hotel?
I couldn’t breathe properly until I’d gotten to work, logged into Facebook and seen the Associated Press article you posted about the hotel. You knew people who had been killed in the explosion, but you hadn’t been. You were still in Iraq.
“Oh, thank God,” I whispered. Then I scrolled down your page, curious to see what you’d been up to. A little broken heart icon jumped out at me. You and Alina had broken up. I wondered what had happened, and truly, I felt bad. I wanted you to be happy. I thought for a moment about reaching out to you, but I didn’t.
My day went on, my week, my month, but you were in my thoughts more than you had been since Violet was born. I kept my eye out for your photographs. I wondered if you were going to make it back to New York any time soon, and if you did, if you’d let me know.
lv
Ordinary days sometimes turn into extraordinary days when you least expect them to. It was a Friday in January. I was working from home, listening to Violet chatter to the nanny while answering e-mails from the office. Violet was fourteen months old at that point and could say only a handful of words, but that didn’t stop her from attempting to explain the secrets of the universe to us. At least that’s what Darren and I imagined she was doing as she monologued with nonsense sounds for minutes on end.
Maria, our nanny, was responding in Spanish—courtesy of Darren’s idea to try to get Violet to grow up bilingual. I figured trying to get her to speak one language was enough, but he felt strongly, and I said fine. I asked Maria to read her books in English, though, and bring her to music classes and play groups and story time at the local library. It felt like a fair compromise. And by the way, Violet never learned much more than hola, adiós, por favor, and gracias, until she started watching Dora the Explorer. The power of television! Other kids had limits on what they could watch, but Violet watched all my shows, and some of the competition besides. She was my own little focus group of one, and it was interesting to see what caught her attention, which shows she latched on to. I was secretly thrilled when Rocket Through Time kept her transfixed. And also when she walked out of the room when Guillaume came on. I detest that show. Kate swears it taught Victoria how to whine. She’s probably right.
While I was in the middle of typing a response about next season’s budget for It Takes a Galaxy, my Gmail pinged, and there was a message from you: Hi Luce,
I know it’s been a while. More than a while. An eon, it feels like. But I’ll be in New York tomorrow, swinging through en route to the inauguration in D.C. Couldn’t miss a moment like that. Can you believe, our first African-American president? Everyone over here is ecstatic. I think Obama’s election is going to mean great things for our country—a new, better, kinder direction. Anyway, I’d love to see you. Any chance you’re free for coffee tomorrow afternoon?
-Gabe