Chapter Twenty-Six
Was the plate dirty or clean? Rose pressed her face up against the shiny white porcelain and turned it this way and that.
Clean. It was clean. Was that a speck of food?
She couldn’t think straight. Tasks that had once been mechanical were now minefields; the perfect breeding ground for her spiraling thoughts.
It will never be the same, it will never be the same, it will never be the same.
Months later, and still they spiraled. It will never be the same. How could it ever be the same?
She picked up another plate. Dirty or clean? Dirty. That was dried-on spinach, or green bean. Or maybe peanut butter? She couldn’t see straight.
Landon had left his sweater draped over an island chair when he’d come home from work, one of hundreds of reminders that he still moved through their shared space like nothing had happened.
It was what he kept saying every week in couples therapy, too, so she knew there was a part of him that believed it.
“Nothing did happen,” he’d say, emphatically and with flair despite the sheer number of times he’d said it.
“I know that I’m wrong. I should never have spoken about Rose and what we were going through with Olivia.
I took things too far. But even if you want to call what happened a flirtation, that’s all it was: just a flirtation.
I was just flirting. I shouldn’t have done it—of course I shouldn’t have done it.
And I shouldn’t have built the kind of friendship where she felt comfortable sending me a picture like that.
I know I was in the wrong. But we didn’t do anything. Nothing actually happened.”
They were trying to fix what was broken, to work through the trauma that Rose had experienced but had affected them both.
He was trying. He wanted, so badly, to prove to her his wandering would not define them.
She was trying, too. She’d seen what happened when a family unit that was once a three-legged stool loses a leg.
If she could help it, she would not subject Cordelia to that.
But Landon was wrong about his most basic premise.
Something had happened. She could not convince her body otherwise.
Rose heard Cordelia’s sparkling laugh from the other room.
She released a long breath, instantly soothed.
Cordelia’s laugh was like medicine, her sweet smile a steady hand pulling her out of the waves.
Landon had made her laugh in there, no doubt.
It was his favorite pastime now that Cordelia was at the age where she found his physical humor the funniest thing in the world.
He’d bend over backward, twist himself into pretzels for any reaction he could get.
But the laughs were the most precious, to both of them.
It was the only thing they’d been able to connect over with any conviction the last few months.
The giggles grew louder, came closer, and Landon’s deep voice echoed through the long hallway separating the playroom from the dining room.
Rose used to hate that hallway—too long, too dark, too empty.
Now it seemed just right. You stay there and I’ll stay here, she thought.
Until we can find our way out of this mess, or back to each other.
Landon popped Cordelia’s head out playfully from behind a corner. “Is that Mama over there?” he said, drawing out Mama in a way Rose wished she found charming. “Should we go get her?” He flew Cordelia like an airplane over the island chair, over his careless, crumpled sweater, and into her arms.
“There you are, my sweet girl,” Rose said, kissing the top of her head three times in rapid succession. “What have you two been talking about in there?”
“Oh, this and that,” Landon said. “Her first word is coming, I can feel it.”
“What do you think it will be?” Rose couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t ever help herself where Cordelia was concerned.
“Mama, if I have anything to say about it. Moon if I don’t.”
“My first word was moon,” Rose said.
“I know. I can see it on the tip of her tongue, too.”
“Well, that would be kind of amazing, wouldn’t it.” Rose held her daughter tighter and grabbed one of her hands, touching each of her tiny fingers and counting compulsively: one, two, three, four, five.
“Amazing,” he agreed. “Just like her mama.”
They talked to each other through Cordelia. Rose assumed other parents did this, too, but she also assumed it was, mostly, for different reasons. She worried that they were ruining Cordelia already—that her body would remember this time and the way they’d used her like a conduit.
“Are you ready for a nap, my little Delia?” Delia, Lia, Cora, Cory—they’d just begun trying them all on for size.
Rose loved that the name they’d given her was the kind that could grow with her as she wore the many different hats of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
She could play with the letters, move them around until she felt the name belonged to her.
And no matter which letters she pulled, Rose would keep the original meaning safe with her. My beloved daughter.
“I’ll take her.” Landon opened his arms, and Cordelia grabbed for him.
Rose had wanted to be the one to read her The Very Hungry Caterpillar and sing her a lullaby, but the pendulum of desire had swung recently from Mom to Dad, and she was working hard not to take it personally. It almost made her miss breastfeeding.
“Hey,” he said, “I was thinking maybe later we might do something together. As a family?” He said it like a question, testing her defenses to see how far he could push her.
Rose thought he would likely be satisfied with her answer, though she wasn’t going to say it out loud: They might be broken, but they were still connected.
Cordelia’s presence in this world ensured that. They would always be her parents.
“Like what?” she asked, pointedly not shooting him down.
She’d been working on this in therapy, both individual and couples.
If they were going to have a shot, she would need to not only try to invite him into her life, but take him up on his offers to be a part of his.
Anything else was stagnation, which was a painful waste of time.
“We could go to the park?” When she didn’t shoot that down either, he brightened. “Would you like to go to the park, Deedee?” Rose did not care for that particular nickname.
“Maybe we could stop at the coffee shop and pick up a few croissants,” Rose added.
Their couples counselor was always looking for ways Rose could push herself to yes, and to Landon’s suggestions to spend more time together, but she hadn’t felt any genuine compulsion to until now.
And it may only have been because he was holding Cordelia so sweetly, or maybe it was the six straight hours of sleep Cordelia had gifted her with the night before, or perhaps it was their last couples counseling session where they had each taken turns recounting the reasons they’d fallen in love in the first place, but she felt the ice in her veins begin to thaw. Just a little.
“I would love that,” Landon said. “Croissants, coffee, and a day at the park.”
Cordelia gurgled, which usually preceded a massive wail, and Rose’s breasts tingled. “What if we did nap time together?” she asked, slipping the suggestion in casually while she reached into the fridge for one of the bottles she’d pumped early that morning.
“You mean it?” Landon asked. Rose was trying, but the way she held herself still kept Landon at a distance for much of their waking hours. Shared time of any sort had been hard to come by.
“Yeah,” she said, because her stomach had not turned at the thought when he’d prodded her to double check. “You read, I’ll sing.”
If he wasn’t careful, that grin was going to take off running.
It reminded her, so much, of simpler times.
“You hear that, Deedee? Mom and Dad are both coming to tuck you in. You’re going to have the best sleep of your little life.
That book is going to hit so hard you’re going to sleep for an hour straight: no crying, no gas, no nothing. ”
Rose chuckled. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“I’m working on that,” Landon said. “I am. I’m going to live in the moment. I promise you, Rose, I’m not even thinking about tomorrow. Hell, I’m not even thinking about this afternoon. We don’t even have to go to the park. Nap time is enough.”
The chuckle turned into a genuine laugh. “We’re going to the park,” she said.
How she wished she hadn’t. Oh, how she wished she hadn’t.