5. Margot
Margot
Becca gets lost on the way to the bathroom.
It's the downstairs bathroom, which is less than twenty feet from the kitchen and has a door you can see from the island. But apparently she has a bad sense of direction and gets lost in my closet. Fifteen minutes later she returns, looking sheepish.
"Sorry. I went the wrong way and then I saw all your clothes and I couldn't help it. I had to spend a few minutes in there.” She laughs. "You have a whole wall of shoes. Like a store."
“Yes, it's a big house. But I don’t think it’s big enough to get lost in,” I reply, as calmly as possible. “Especially because you had to go up the stairs.”
"It's a really amazing house,” Becca replies almost dreamily.
She missed my irritation all together. She runs a hand along the edge of the island, the quartz I picked with a contractor named Hal in the spring before Anders.
"Anders has done so well for himself. I always knew he would. Even back then you could tell."
Back then. Seven nights. A fling with my husband doesn’t make her an expert on Anders, but the way she says it implies otherwise. It’s irritating.
But I don't correct her. I stand at my counter and let her believe my husband built this. I let her look at the range and the double ovens and the light fixture over the island that took eight weeks to ship from Copenhagen, and I let her file all of it under Anders.
I don't know yet why I'm doing it. It's an instinct. When someone is measuring a room, you don't tell them where the walls are.
Later that week she admires my watch. Then a pair of earrings on the dresser when she comes up to change Milo on our bed, which I did not agree to and Anders did. Then the bracelet.
"That's pretty. Is it new?"
"No."
"What's the date?"
"Personal."
She smiles like I've said something charming and goes back to Milo.
Milo's things accumulate. A basket of his toys by the sofa. A second pack of wipes in the downstairs bathroom. A sippy cup in my dish rack that I wash and put away every evening and find again every Tuesday.
Nora’s nursery still has no curtains.
I order the stroller online at eleven at night, alone, and feel ridiculous about how much it helps.
There are still good nights. I can’t pretend there aren’t.
Wednesday there's no Becca. Anders comes home at six with a bag of the ginger candies I've been eating by the fistful and he finds me on the floor of the nursery, sitting against the crib with my legs out because it's the only position that doesn't hurt.
"What are you doing down there?”
“I’m too big to get up."
"Mar."
"I've been here twenty minutes. It's fine. I've been looking at the ceiling."
He laughs and gets down on the floor next to me and puts his back against the crib and his shoulder against mine, and we sit there looking at the ceiling together. After a while he takes my hand. He turns it over and looks at the bracelet and runs his thumb over the flat link with the date.
"I'm going to fix this," he says. "All of it. The test'll come through and we'll know and it'll get normal."
"I know."
"I know it's been a lot."
"It has."
"I know I've been." He stops. "I'm here. You know that, right? Whatever else. I'm right here."
He's right here. His shoulder's against mine and his thumb's on the date and Nora's kicking his hand through my shirt and I believe him. I do. I lean my head on his shoulder and close my eyes and think, this is what we are underneath it. This part's still true.
He has to help me up. It takes two tries. We laugh about it.
His phone buzzes in his pocket while he's got both hands under my arms, and he doesn't check it.
I hold onto that too. I'm holding onto a lot of things lately.
It's a Thursday when she asks about the room.
Milo's on the rug with a stack of the blocks Anders bought. Becca's on my sofa with her feet tucked under her. Anders is on the floor with the baby. I'm in the armchair with my laptop because a lease is due Monday and I've stopped pretending these evenings are for me.
"So I was thinking," Becca says, to Anders, not to me. "Eventually. If Milo starts staying over sometimes. Could he have a room here? Like, his own? I know you've got the nursery for the baby, but there's the room across the hall, I noticed it's just boxes."
The room across the hall is my office. The boxes are files.
Anders opens his mouth.
"We'll discuss arrangements after paternity is established," I say.
I don't say it hard. I say it the way I'd say it in a meeting. It's a sentence with no emotion in it, which is why I chose it.
Becca's face crumples.
Right there. Right in front of the baby. She puts a hand over her mouth and her eyes fill and she says, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," in a small voice, and she gets up and goes to the bathroom, the correct one this time, and shuts the door.
Milo looks up from his blocks.
Anders looks at me.
"What?" I say.
"You didn't have to say it like that."
"Like what? I said we'd discuss it. That's what I said."
He gets up and goes to the bathroom door and knocks softly and says her name.
She leaves at nine. Anders walks her out. He's gone longer than it takes to walk to a car.
When he comes back he stands in the living room with his hands in his pockets.
"You made her feel like Milo isn't welcome here."
I close the laptop.
"I asked for a DNA test in your office weeks ago.
She's cancelled it five times. She's in my kitchen three nights a week.
She's got a highchair that costs more than her car and was supposed to be Nora’s.
She's in my closet rummaging through my clothes.
And now? She's asking for my fucking office.
" I hear my voice climbing and I bring it down. "Milo isn't the problem, Anders."
I mean: it's her. It's Becca. It's what she's doing and the fact that you can't see it.
He hears: I don't want the baby.
I watch it happen. His face goes flat and careful, the way it does when a client says something he's decided not to argue with.
"He's a kid," he says. "Whatever's going on with her, he's just a kid."
"I know that."
"Then maybe try to remember it when you're talking to his mother."
He goes upstairs.
I sit in the armchair for a while. Then I go up too, because I'm eight months pregnant and my body doesn't care about my pride.
In the bathroom I take off my earrings. I take off my watch. I reach for the clasp on the bracelet, and my fingers close on my bare wrist.
I look down.
It isn't there.
I check the sink. The floor. The pocket of the cardigan I wore today. I go back down and check the armchair, the sofa cushions, the kitchen counter, the little tray by the door where I put my keys. I go out to the car in my socks and check the console and the seat and the floor mat.
I stand in the garage under the fluorescent light and think about the last time I felt it on my wrist.
This afternoon. Two-thirty. I was at the island, and Becca was next to me with Milo on her hip, admiring my earrings, and she'd touched my wrist and said, that's pretty, and I'd pulled my hand back, and she'd smiled.
I go inside and up the stairs. Anders is already asleep, or pretending.
I lie down beside him with my left hand closed over my right wrist, holding the place where it used to be.