Chapter 19 #2
Florencia was silent. Through the lobby doors, they saw the black car drive up. Florencia said, “Are you coming to Argentina?”
“Of course.”
“Call me if you need anything. Anytime.” Florencia kissed Emily’s cheeks. “Don’t be a mummified cat.”
“Are you nearly finished with the manuscript?” Jack asked during intermission as they mingled with other donors at a gala for the ballet.
“Yes.”
Jack was quiet, then said, “I wish I could do something like that. I wish I could write a book for you.”
“You already do so much for me.” She was moved by his wish.
It would be difficult for anyone to write a book, but especially for him, with his disability.
She also recognized in the enormity of his wish’s difficulty a proportionate claim on her indebtedness.
She didn’t want to think like that: to slide so easily from being touched to being wary.
Still, was what he said sweet or a way to make her obligated to him? Could it be both?
“So, Em, since you asked me to check in with you before making big plans, I want to talk about November.”
“November?”
“New York gets so dull and cold. I thought: Saint Lucia. We can’t do the end of the month because we have Thanksgiving with my parents, but before that I can sneak a week or so off work for a getaway.”
“What dates, exactly?”
“November eighth through the nineteenth or twentieth would be ideal.”
“I can’t.”
“I found a resort right on the water. They have babysitting and a spa. Our suite would have its own pool. It’ll be good for us to have some alone time.”
“I’m going to Argentina then.”
He seemed genuinely confused. “Argentina?”
“You saw me book the tickets. I forwarded the information to you. It’s in the calendar.”
“Because you forgot to remove it. You’re not seriously planning on visiting Florencia. After how she behaved?”
“How you behaved.”
“Not this again.”
“I’ve had enough of you trying to keep me from my friends.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You insulted Violet.”
“We’ve gone over this. I wouldn’t do that. You’re imagining things.”
“You won’t let me see Rory.”
“ Let you? When did I say you couldn’t see Rory?”
“Florencia probably will never visit again.”
“That’s on her. I was pretty nice, considering how rude she was. I even apologized. You asked me to apologize and I did.”
“Then you should have no issue with me going to see her.”
“Shouldn’t family come first?”
“I booked the tickets! I’m going!”
“Whoa, calm down. You always criticize me for losing my temper but just listen to yourself. You’re no angel. That’s how you want it, though, don’t you? I’m the monster and you’re the angel who never does anything wrong. Meanwhile I work my hardest to make you happy.”
“It would make me happy to go to Argentina.”
“Go, then,” he said, “if that’s what you really want.”
“It is.”
Jack’s eyes were full of hurt. “You’re not the person I thought you were.”
A few days later, she took Connor to the park.
Summer’s end that year was ruthless. Leaves were scorched and brown.
Emily left the apartment early in the morning so she and Connor could enjoy a few relatively cool hours before the heat came down like a lid on a pot.
Jack was home, getting ready to leave for work, when she left.
He was gone when she and Connor returned.
The gossamer curtains were drawn against the sun.
The AC whispered. The kitchen gleamed. Their housekeeper had come and gone.
Emily bathed Connor, who had played in a sandbox, and wrapped him in a white towel, which he shucked off, running naked into the living room.
Normally, she would have gone into his bedroom to fetch clothes, but she let him be naked.
It was hot, and she liked seeing him proud and free and joyful.
It was rare for him. Connor was a quiet child.
He followed her into the kitchen, and as she prepared his lunch he pressed his feet fully flat against the tiles and lifted them, one at a time.
“They stick,” he told her, and pointed to his steamy footprint as it faded.
It wasn’t until they had finished lunch and she was ready to put him down for his nap that she realized that something was wrong.
She set him in his bed, her skin prickling.
She left his bedroom and checked every room in the apartment, but nothing was out of place.
Everything was as it should be. No one else was in the apartment.
She even opened, with trepidation, every closet door.
Instinct drew her back to Connor’s bedroom. It was here that she first had had that feeling. Connor stood in his bed. “Mama?”
Her gaze swept the room.
Her notebooks were missing. They weren’t on the shelf. There wasn’t even a gap where they should have been. Connor’s picture books ran together in a closed line.
She pulled his books off the shelf. She emptied closets.
She went to the bedroom she and Jack shared, and dragged the mattress off the bed to see if the notebooks were hidden on top of the boxsprings.
She pulled Jack’s clothes off hangers even though the notebooks couldn’t have fit in his pockets.
The suits lay limp on the floor, arms flopped as though broken.
She flung cushions off the sofa, emptied kitchen drawers of every culinary tool Jack had collected.
Connor called for her. She rolled up rugs.
She yanked art off the walls. Bile rose in her throat and soon she was no longer looking for something she knew wasn’t there but destroying things just as something she loved had been destroyed.
“Mama!”
She returned to Connor’s bedroom, hands shaking. She sat him on her lap in the rocking chair where she used to write at night. His room was mostly in order; she didn’t want him to see the chaos of the rest of the apartment. She called her mother. “Mom? It’s me.”
“I know. I got caller ID.”
“Can I visit? With Connor?”
There was a pause. “When?”
“Tomorrow. Today.”
There was a longer pause. “Okay. But I’ve got work, so if it’s babysitting you’re after, you’re out of luck.”
Stung, Emily hung up. She called Florencia and hemorrhaged the entire story, not just about how Jack had taken her notebooks but also about the past few years, the slow vise of his adoration, his skill at blaming her for his faults.
It baffled her, how his manipulation was so successful that at first she didn’t recognize it, and still wasn’t sure he knew that it was manipulation.
“Emily, breathe,” said Florencia. “You can tell me everything later, but first I’m going to take care of this. We’re going to hang up and I’m going to make some calls and you’re going to lock the front door with the chain and wait. It won’t be long.”
Florencia hadn’t said, I’m sure there’s some explanation . She didn’t say, as Emily had feared her mother would say, They’re just notebooks. Florencia believed, as Emily believed, that this was an act of revenge.
Connor squirmed out of her lap to play with his toys. A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was Rory. “Hey, babe,” Rory said.
Emily began to cry.
“Don’t do that,” Rory said. “Here’s what you’re going to do.
Take Connor’s birth certificate and your passports.
Don’t bother with anything else. Go down to your lobby.
I called a car for you. It will take you to my apartment.
I’m in L.A., so my doorman will let you in.
Violet’s on her way there. Elizabeth’s talking about coming back from India or wherever the fuck she is but I told her that I’ve got this. I’m taking a plane as soon as I can.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Have to? I want to. I want to kneecap your husband.”
Emily said the thing she feared everyone would say. “They’re just notebooks.”
“They were you . And if he could do that, what else?”
Three years later, when Emily was twenty-seven, Connor was five, and Stella was a baby sleeping in the stroller, Emily stopped at an outdoor café near their house on the Upper East Side.
Connor was bored and fidgety, so she gave him a pencil and napkins.
He drew something with pointy feet that was almost definitely a bird. A pigeon, he said.
“Mommy, look.” He opened the fold of the napkin. Inside its flap was another pigeon—larger, with a zigzag across its head.
“What’s that?” Emily said.
“King Pigeon.”
“Does the little pigeon grow up to be King Pigeon or are they two separate pigeons?”
“You decide,” said Connor. “It’s for you.”
Emily remembered her first date with Jack, how there was an Emily before and an Emily after.
She wondered whether the person she was before that day at the library became the person who was Jack’s wife, or if the closer truth was that they were two different people. Emily didn’t know. She couldn’t decide.
She would wonder the same thing about the Emily who showed up with her son at Rory’s apartment and lived there for two weeks, and the Emily who realized that she had missed her period.
The first Emily resisted Jack’s calls, his frantic texts, the voice mails that swerved between blaming her for their rift and begging her to come back.
Where are my notebooks? she texted.
It is not my fault you lost them.
The first Emily watched Rory and Violet play with her son.
She didn’t know what she had done to deserve her friends.
She and Violet cooked while Rory poured wine.
“I got out of that awful piano studio,” Violet told Emily.
“I took your advice and went to the president.” When Rory heard the story of Ilse Visser, she said, “I wouldn’t have lasted a day.
I would have told Visser to eat a musical dick.
” To Emily, Violet said, “I wish I’d known what was going on with you at home. I wish you’d told us sooner.”
The second Emily walked with Connor to the pharmacy and bought a pregnancy test.
Come home, Jack texted. Ill do anything
Everything feels empty
I miss you so much
She wrote back: Give me my notebooks
Three dots appeared and disappeared. He wrote, Lydia must have thrown them out.
Lydia, their Polish housekeeper, cleaned everything within an inch of its life and had an improvisational grasp of English, but made up in enthusiasm for what she couldn’t express clearly in words.
She must not have understood that the notebooks were important, Jack added.
Emily remembered how clean the apartment was when she came back from the park. For a moment, she believed him. Then her fingers flashed over the phone: YOU ARE A LIAR. You are a LIAR and a BASTARD for blaming someone you can fire for what YOU did. GIVE ME MY NOTEBOOKS
For a while there was no response. He wrote, I can’t give you what’s gone.
“I never liked him,” Rory said.
“Yes, you did,” said Violet.
Connor opened and shut doors in Rory’s apartment. “What are you looking for, baby?” said the first Emily.
“Dada,” he said.
The second Emily saw what she had known she would see: the pink line that told her she was pregnant.
Her phone buzzed. It was a series of photos of the ransacked apartment.
Ive sent these to my lawyer, Jack texted. Ive told him that youve taken our son and wont tell me where he is
let me tell you how this will play out, he wrote.
you wont get custody
you wont get my money
your fucked
The phone rang. Emily answered. “I’m sorry,” Jack said. He was weeping. “I didn’t mean what I said. I don’t know what to do. Tell me what I can do. I made a mistake but I love you, I love you, I love you.”
Several months after she went back to Jack, Emily lost the baby.
She had been mid-term, late enough that she had to go to the hospital for the delivery of a baby she knew had no heartbeat.
The baby was a boy. Jack grieved. Emily did, too, a double grief: for the baby, and for a different choice she could have made—could still make, though she no longer believed that was possible.
It seemed to her that there had briefly been a portal of possibility that shrank to a diameter too small for her to fit through even if it was large enough to give a glimpse of an alternate life.
She thought about her choice as she sat in their Upper East Side townhome, purchased in anticipation of the new baby.
Jack looked older, the way people do after loss.
A nursery had been decorated, the crib built.
Jack made certain that everything in the nursery was gone when Emily came home from the hospital.
She hadn’t known he would do that. When she stepped into the room, it was as though she had stepped into a void.
The wallpaper with its colorful hot-air balloons had been stripped away.
He had painted the walls white and found an antique secretary desk made from rosewood.
“I thought it could be your office, for writing,” he said.
He meant it as a kind gesture but Emily felt it like a blow.
She never used the room. She didn’t write.
She didn’t go to Argentina. She avoided her friends, who disapproved of her decision to go back to Jack. It was easier to forgo their friendship than to confront the mistake that they said she was making.
Connor adored his father. Jack returned from a business trip with a pin that had wings.
A pilot had given it to him, he explained to Connor, because Jack had told the pilot how much his son loved planes.
That night, Emily checked on Connor and saw him asleep, one hand resting loosely on his pajama shirt, covering the pin as though it might crawl away.
Emily became pregnant again and gave birth to Stella.
Her marriage resumed its patterns, deepened them.
When Emily thought about it, time didn’t change Jack but rather made him grow more fully himself, to become even more the person at the bar in Boston, the man at the library, in his bed in the Back Bay apartment.
He had always been himself. She hadn’t seen clearly who he was.
Emily chose to stay with Jack because there was just enough to make that choice. Enough loyalty, enough habit—including the habit of love, its reflex and ingrained training—enough happiness, enough moments of the four of them together, the intimacy of family, each child with each parent.
And enough fear. She didn’t know how angry Jack would become if she ended their marriage, or what he might do.
Jack, in becoming ever more himself, had learned to go unpunished. He had learned that his behavior could slip further from his control, so long as he eventually reeled it back.
One day he went too far. He pulled her son into their pool and held him underwater an instant too long. At the pool’s edge, Jack looked down at Emily, his red hair aflame. “Who are you to put me on trial?” he demanded. “How dare you criticize me, after all I’ve done for you?”
Emily—finally—told him to fuck off.