47 Days
Rhea pushed a shopping cart through her local hardware store.
She collected nails, a hammer, a ladder, a stud finder, a drill, and something called a level.
The woman behind the counter talked her through what she would need to rebuild shelves and shared a YouTube clip that could guide her through the process.
She got home and began pulling everything out of the closet.
She made a pile to bring to the coalition and a pile to be reorganized and put back on the shelves.
She took in her vision board and felt proud: She’d fixed up her backyard and started volunteering; she’d made her future brighter all by herself.
She made a mental note to start working on becoming the next Jenni Kayne; maybe she could open another Topanga General Store in Ojai or Santa Barbara…
she put her vision board aside before she got too distracted.
She found an outdated denim jacket, an old hair dryer, and a barely used blanket.
She put them in the donation pile and felt positively charitable.
She came upon an old memory box and wondered if there was anything inside worth donating.
She found an apron from when she was a waitress in a West Hollywood diner and an old black and white wig from when she went as Cruella de Vil for Halloween in her twenties.
She smiled at the wig; turns out, she had not always hated Halloween.
Almost at the bottom of the memory box, she pulled out a rolled-up piece of white poster board.
She unrolled it, and her hand slowly moved over her mouth as she took it in.
It was a vision board…one she must have made in high school.
She had a vague memory of making it, but the images glued on it were astonishing.
A magazine cutout of a cliffside cottage that was eerily identical to the cottage she currently owned.
A cutout of a chic boutique that resembled Topanga General Store. Rhea remembered that her high school dream was to open a boutique, before she went to fashion school and they filled her head with the idea of a big, fancy career.
A cutout of women laughing together, clearly meant to be her with Tiny, Zoe, and Ada, the women she still laughed with regularly.
There were images of women hiking; she had always loved hiking. Images of women surfing; she had always loved the ocean.
There were no children on her vision board.
Her high school self had not imagined a future with children in it. Had she not always wanted children? She tried to remember when it began, her frenzy, her need for a family.
Rhea Darby had managed to successfully manifest everything on her vision board, and she hadn’t even known it.
She had been living her high school dream life, and she’d never once stopped to appreciate it.
She always wanted more, always obsessing about some deficit that had to be filled, never present, always looking ahead, trying to achieve new life goals.
Was having children just another goal? And once she had them, would she continue to be unsatisfied and start gluing images of a vacation home to yet another vision board?
Would starting a family actually make her happy?
All the years of watching her friends struggle with parenthood slowly shifted into focus: Tiny’s debilitating pregnancy, Tiny and Jason’s newly strained relationship, the disorganized chaos of the Achebe-Miller house.
They had sacrificed so much for their children. Ada almost died.
The only person who seemed to be completely unbothered by marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting was Zoe, but that might have been because her nervous system was a circuit board and electrical wires.
Whenever anyone talked about the negative side of marriage or motherhood, Rhea refused to hear it.
She would not fully take it in and instead just filed it away under Facts that do not line up with my goals at this particular moment.
She had been pushing all that information to the wings; she felt light-headed as it rushed to center stage.
Her friends were having amazing experiences full of meaning and connection, but it was also really hard.
Rhea saw them as the lucky winners of life and would not accept the fact that life can be a challenge for everyone, and life can be delightful for everyone, regardless of marital status or offspring.
She refused to embrace her life as it was and kept planning for it to be better someday.
She replayed everything Danny had ever said about raising children.
Part of the reason every word hurt so much was because somewhere deep down, she agreed with all of it.
She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but it did seem too hard to raise a child in this modern world; it was all utterly terrifying.
What other truths was she keeping hidden from her own view?
One small cutout in the bottom corner of her old vision board took her breath away. There was so much going on around it, she’d almost missed it. She looked closely at the image, threw on her plaid blanket coat and sheepskin boots, grabbed the vision board, and raced down fifty-two steps.
She jumped into her car, moved her gearshift in and out of drive six times, backed out of her driveway, and inched her way through rush-hour traffic.
Almost two hours later, she parked in Pasadena.
She got out of her car and walked toward Danny’s house, taking deep breaths in an attempt to soothe her blinking.
She knew she should have called first, but she needed to see him; she needed to look into his eyes. She approached his front porch but saw a dark-haired woman pass by his window. Rhea dropped down on all fours and crawled into a bush.
She prayed to the goddess of earthquakes to make that woman be one of Danny’s sisters.
She begged the goddess not to make her too late.
Danny couldn’t have moved on this fast, not while he was still the first thing she thought of in the morning and the last thing she thought of at night…
and the only thing she thought of all day.
She crawled closer to the window. Before she knocked on the door, she had to confirm the woman was one of his sisters.
She slowly stood on tiptoes to peek inside…
. Danny’s sister locked eyes with Rhea and screamed at the top of her lungs.
Rhea flew backward and fled toward her car. She heard the front door open.
“Is someone out here?” Danny asked in a deep, harsh voice, clearly trying to intimidate whoever had just scared his sister. Rhea was almost to her car when she heard, “Rhea?”
She turned around and saw her perfect Daniel Beckett, Jr., standing on his perfect porch.
“Hi,” she said.
“Are you okay? What’s going on?”
Danny moved quickly down the steps. He seemed to be examining her as if looking for signs of injury. His pulse was racing, and his pupils were dilated.
“No, nothing, I’m fine. I just…wanted to talk to you. I didn’t mean to scare you—”
“You’re all right?”
“Yeah, I’m totally fine.”
That seemed to calm him down.
“I just didn’t want to call you ’cause I didn’t know if you would answer, but I needed to talk to you.”
“I’ll always answer. I’ll always talk to you. I just…needed space to move through some stuff…. But I’m always here if you need me. I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear.”
“I just…I’ve been thinking about things and…sometimes I…I make vision boards,” she blurted out.
“Okay…,” he said gently.
“I started making them in high school—one of my many therapists thought they would be a good way to soothe my anxiety. I’ve always felt like the future was so unpredictable—since my mom died—and probably before she died—actually, since I was born.
But this was a way I could be in control of the future.
So, I would cut out images from, like, magazines and glue them to poster board.
Just, like, I don’t know, an image of the house I wish I lived in or the job I wish I had.
But I think I became obsessed with planning the future.
I started always focusing on the things I didn’t have, instead of acknowledging what I did have…
. And what I just realized is…I got everything I used to dream of, I was living my dream life, but I didn’t know it. ”
Tears formed in her eyes and began to spill.
“I was so caught up in the idea of wanting kids because I thought I was supposed to want them—like everybody else—but the truth is…I don’t know what I want ’cause I’m always measuring myself against other people and judging myself.
I’m pretty cruel to myself, actually. I do love children and I love hanging out with Chichi and telling her jokes, but do I want to spend my life cleaning up after her, cooking her meals, sitting at her mind-numbing ballet recitals, watching her destroy my house?
I don’t know…. I actually…don’t know. I certainly did not enjoy fishing Ekele’s crap out of the bathtub.
He’s kind of an insensitive little jerk, if I’m being honest. I think most kids are too loud and rude, and they’re always covered in ketchup, and being pregnant seems horrible, and breastfeeding grosses me out… .”
She reached into her car and pulled out her old vision board. She held it up with a shaking hand.
“I just found this…. I made it in high school and—and it’s exactly my life right now. I somehow manifested everything on this board…except…this.”
She pointed to the small image in the corner: a woman and a man sitting in front of a campfire, the man a spooky Danny doppelg?nger.
“In high school, I really wanted this. I wanted to meet my soulmate, my person, someone who made me feel less alone in the world, like I wasn’t crazy, like I wasn’t broken and my flaws only made me more perfect.
I wanted to find a man I could laugh with—someone smart, and trustworthy, and dependable.
I wanted to find you, Danny. And I did. I found you. I had you. And I lost you.