Chapter 2 Eloise #2
I hold it together until Molly disappears behind her bedroom door, then wipe my eyes with a free hand.
Sitting down on the couch, I am flooded with such a rush of emotion for this tiny human.
I stare down at the twitch of Adie’s features as she dreams, the purse of her lips as she suckles at air.
Meanwhile, I sort through the emotions coursing through me: devotion, pride, purpose, possibility.
The only one missing, I realize, is the fear I could ever hurt her.
My phone buzzes, a daily reminder I’ve set.
Reaching for my purse with my free hand, I joggle the zipper loose and remove a little plastic pillbox. I carry Adie into the kitchen, pour myself some water, and take my meds.
It has been so long since I’ve been truly happy that, at first, I do not recognize it.
Joy continuously fizzes through my bloodstream.
It’s being able to text Molly every morning to ask how she feels.
It’s offering to take a night shift, feeding the baby breast milk from a bottle, so that Jesse and Molly can sleep.
It’s getting a photo of Adie staring with awe at a panda mobile over her bassinet. It’s knowing that I’m needed.
I also try hard to leave room for Evie to help out.
Today Jesse and Molly are taking Adie to the pediatrician.
With my free time, I drive out of town to a strip mall with a Michaels.
It’s not the kind of art store where I used to buy supplies, but they have nippers and cutters and pliers and picks.
I buy one of each, along with diamond files and grout sponges and spatulas, Weldbond and mounting mesh.
I’ve ordered online a rainbow of Italian smalti and Orsoni gold, which arrived yesterday—-tesserae now heaped in bags on my kitchen counter.
I have not crafted a mosaic in twenty--five years, but I’m going to make one for my granddaughter.
Adie is seven days old, and so far, Molly has shown signs of frustration and exhaustion, but not psychosis. I haven’t told her that the voices came to me at the end of the first week. I don’t want her to be waiting for them, dreading them.
When I get home, I clear my kitchen table and line up all my shiny new tools. I spread a roll of brown butcher paper across the secondhand--oak surface, and I start to sketch.
Even just picking up that pencil sparks happiness; delight buzzes through me.
In the past I’ve punished myself for moments of joy, as if they might diminish the horror of survivor’s guilt. But I am starting to wonder if joy and grief aren’t opposites, but rather flip sides of a single coin. The only reason you can recognize one is because you’ve felt the other.
My phone buzzes with a text, and I realize that an hour has passed while I’ve been sketching out the design for Adie’s mosaic.
Molly: Home. She gained weight! We got Al Forno for lunch and there’s extra . . .
I look down at the image I’ve drawn on the butcher paper. It’s a familiar one—-a sprawling tree, in the branches of which is a nest. A baby phoenix, mouth gaping, sits inside. Hovering above it is its mother.
It’s the same image I had been crafting when I gave birth to Molly, before everything had gone wrong. But there’s one addition. A third bird hovers in the sky, farther away. Her firestorm wings will blaze against a field of blue. You will not be able to tell if she is flying away, or coming home.
I watch Molly vigilantly. It is like trying to see behind a curtain, wondering if a ripple in the fabric is simply the breeze, or a monster emerging.
When her eyes go vacant as she’s holding Adie, I ask a question to see if she can focus on me.
When she takes out her car keys instead of her house keys to open the door of the condo, I assess if it’s a simple lack of sleep.
I watch for signs of mania—-obsessive cleaning, hyperfocus.
I make sure she lies down when the baby lies down.
That is what I remember the most about my own journey into Hell—-the lack of sleep, the flip of the switch when exhaustion transformed into a power surge and the delusion that I no longer needed rest.
We spend the days patching up the holes in our history, spackling over the gaps with stories.
I learn about how awkward she felt as a college freshman who was nearly two years younger than the rest, about the first boy she kissed.
Sometimes, other people visit: Jesse’s family, colleagues of Molly’s from work, Evie and Adam.
When Evie is here, she fawns over Adie of course, but in the lulls when it is just the two of us folding baby clothes or drinking coffee, our conversation falls a bit flat.
I think we both have good intentions, but I am sure she can see the way I stiffen when Adam puts his hand on the small of her back; just as I can see her expression tighten when Adam says something kind to me.
Adam starts dropping by at lunchtime when he’s not out of town for work, and when Evie is at her job at Hasbro.
With him, everything is easy. I would never have expected how effortlessly he can make me laugh; how quickly we fall into the habit of finishing each other’s sentences.
When he helps me into my coat and his hands brush mine it doesn’t startle me. My body remembers his.
We walk to a nearby pizza place, a deli, a dumpling shop to get takeout for Jesse and Molly. Sometimes we take the baby along in her stroller. With every day, the air smells more like spring; we marvel at the first crocuses and daffodils, signs of winter ceding its grip on the world.
It is fascinating to watch Adam with Adie. I cannot help but watch the tenderness and the time he showers on this baby and wonder where this side of him was when I had Molly. Maybe it’s just different when you aren’t the mom and dad; maybe, like me, he is just more alert.
It is strange to watch him, period. Unlike other couples who grow old together, I have not had the luxury of seeing him change: his thick blond hair now paling to white, his eyes crinkled with laugh lines, his body ripening into middle age.
Sometimes I cannot recognize the Adam I knew; sometimes he reemerges in a gesture or a look.
By the third week after Molly comes home from the hospital, the days I get to see Adam are the ones I look forward to most.
Although neither of us has been anything but proper, the fundamental ease we have with each other is a reminder that Adam may feel like a stranger . . . but he’s not.
He’s someone with whom I planned a future.
He’s someone who has been sleeping with my onetime best friend for decades.
“Do you remember the time the pigeon got into the apartment?” Adam asks one day, as we sit on a bench in Federal Hill, waiting for our pizza order.
I grin. “And you tried to get rid of it with a baseball bat—-”
“Why did we even have a baseball bat?”
“Because you were playing in some corporate softball league—-”
Adam chuckles. “Oh God, you’re right. But we couldn’t open the windows because they were safety locked—-”
“—-and you had to herd it into the trash chute down the hall . . .”
“I still have nightmares about that pigeon,” Adam says.
“At least we didn’t have roaches.”
“Oh, we did,” he replies. “I just didn’t tell you.”
“What!” I smack him on the shoulder. “I would have packed up and moved.”
“Which is why I didn’t tell you,” Adam says, and I smother a laugh.
We sit in comfortable silence, as if we are sharing a blanket. “Do you think it’s strange?” I ask. “That we wound up here?”
“In Providence?”
I shake my head. “No. Babysitting. For our granddaughter.”
Adam blows out a long, slow breath. “Ellie, there is so much about this that is strange.”
He is the only one who still calls me my former name. And for some reason, I don’t correct him.
Adam tugs the blanket from Adie’s little moon face. “You think she’s too hot?”
I lean down, frowning, and unwrap her a bit. “There.”
“I think she looks like you,” Adam says.
To me, she’s the spitting image of my Adie, but with Jesse’s darker cobalt eyes. “Really?”
He nods. “If you weren’t here . . .” He clears his throat. “If you hadn’t come back, it would have broken me apart to see so much of you in her.”
Until now, we have mostly spoken superficially about things that do not matter. “I’m sorry,” I say. “For . . .” Well, for all of it, really.
He leans forward, hands clasped between his knees.
“I knew you were sick, but I didn’t want to admit it,” Adam confesses.
“I convinced myself if I didn’t see it, it wasn’t happening.
” He grimaces. “I guess that’s kind of my MO.
After 9/11, I got obsessed with all the truther theories.
Kept files on them, listened to podcasts, the whole thing.
I was sure it was an inside job by the government, done in the name of oil. ”
We’re both quiet for a moment. Then I say. “Conspiracy theories? Really?”
He glances at me, chagrined. “I figured if you were really dead, I’d know. I mean, when your wife dies, shouldn’t you feel it? Like, a rip in the world?”
“Maybe you were right,” I point out, “since I was alive.”
He shoots me a sidelong grin, one that reminds me so much of college--age Adam it makes my breath catch.
It is as if we have both formed shells, pearls built around the grit of trauma, and if we could only crack those open, we would be the young man and woman just starting their lives instead of the two fifty--something people we are today.
“Can I ask you something, if it’s not too much? What was it like . . . after?”