Chapter 2 Eloise #3
Adam looks at me. “A war zone,” he says.
“I remember flying to California a week later and looking out the window of the plane, and it was like someone had punched the front teeth out of the city. Having a job, having a baby, having to keep going felt . . . impossible. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, until one day, when I woke up, you weren’t the first thing I thought of.
” He looks at me, sheepish. “And that was a whole different level of guilt.”
“When did you move?” I ask.
“When Molly was two.” His cheeks stripe with a flush of pink. “Evie and I wanted her to have a yard to play in.”
We had talked about that, too. About moving to Westchester or White Plains, if we could save up the money to buy a place.
“How did you afford it?”
Another blush. “With the money from the Victim Compensation Fund. We got $1.7 million from the government.”
So that’s what my life is worth.
Adam hurries to fill my silence. “We used it for the house, and Molly’s college fund, and the rest was put into a trust for her after she turns thirty. I thought that was what . . . what you would have wanted.” He hesitates. “Can I ask you a question? Why haven’t you asked me about Evie?”
My chest tightens. “I think maybe I don’t want to know.”
He covers my hand with his, and I freeze. “It was a relationship of convenience,” Adam says quietly. “Until it wasn’t.”
Soft as they are, those words dent my armor. “I guess as long as I’m Georgia, your marriage to Evie is legal,” I offer, trying to sound blithe.
I start to pull my hand away, but Adam turns my palm over in his as if it is a broken bird, fallen from a nest. “I guess,” he says.
I clear my throat and stand, putting the stroller between us. “Have you told Evie that you and I have been talking?”
He shakes his head. “Did you want me to?”
From the pizzeria, I hear my name being called. Order up.
I think of the breathless secret of sneaking around with Adam behind Evie’s back when I was at RISD. Of the seam of our bodies, pressed tight in the confines of a twin bed.
“No,” I confess.
One warm May day, we bundle Adie in her stroller and walk her downtown to Molly’s office.
Everyone coos over the baby, but I keep an eye on Molly as she and her deputy, Toby, move to the edge of the room.
I only hear snippets of their conversation, and the words don’t make sense to me—-pan flu and MiFi and NEDOCS—-but Molly’s soaking in every bit of it.
When a gas leak requires a wing of a hospital to be shut down, I watch the tension on Molly’s face as her team mobilizes; the pride when she realizes they are doing fine without her; the regret when she is left standing with me and an infant.
“It’s too nice to go back to the condo,” I say to distract her. “Let’s walk to RISD.”
As we wander through the college’s art museum, Molly’s attention is focused inward.
She pauses at a Mary Cassatt print, a mother nursing a child.
“I remember this one from college,” I muse.
It always bothered me that the child was fully sketched in three dimensions, while the body of the woman holding her was nothing more than the whisper of a few lines.
“Is it weird that I want to go back to work?” Molly asks. “Does that make me an awful mother?”
“It makes you an honest one,” I reply.
“Did you feel that way?”
“When I was pregnant, I was asked to have a gallery show. I didn’t have enough pieces, so I thought I’d push it till after you were born. But by then, there wasn’t room in my head for art.”
“Sometimes I feel like my brain is just . . . dying off from disuse,” Molly says. “I love Adie, don’t get me wrong. But there are only so many times you can play peekaboo with a napkin.”
“It’s a different kind of work, with higher stakes for the end product.
I remember watching Adam leave every morning for his job, while I sat in the same spot where I’d been holding you all night.
Sometimes I wanted to shove you into his arms, run out the door barefoot, and just keep running.
” I look at Molly. “As women, we’re not supposed to admit to that.
It’s expected that we’ll put ourselves last. But I think each woman should get to figure out what balance of work and home life makes her the best mom. ”
Molly seems to consider this—-permission to be greedy for the person she used to be, before she was Adie’s mother. “Did you take up art again?” she asks. “After you left?”
I shake my head. “No, but I started a mosaic this week. For Adie.”
Molly brightens. “Really? What’s it going to be?”
I glance at her sidelong. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
Adie wakes up and starts fussing, so Molly changes her in the bathroom and nurses her before we leave the museum.
I watch the way she makes eye contact with the baby; the frustration when Adie gets too lazy to latch on; the rhythm of her movements as she unpacks the diaper bag.
I feel like I’m an evaluator for one of Molly’s emergency preparedness exercises, except the test today is on Molly herself and whether she is of sound mind.
But mostly I look at her eyes, windows through which I see love, humor, aggravation.
She looks like a mother is supposed to look.
Outside, the spring grass is jeweled with dew and the air buzzes with birdsong.
It’s one of those days when the students have turned out en masse to sprawl in the courtyards or play Frisbee, aspirationally wearing shorts.
“Show me the places you used to go when you went to school here,” Molly demands, so I do.
I walk her past the buildings where I studied, the studios where I worked.
I show her the space where my final project, the mosaic of the heart, was installed—-although it has been long spackled over.
“Know Thyself,” Molly says.
My jaw drops. “How did you know that’s what it was called?”
“I went hunting for pieces of you,” she says simply. “There are pictures of the mosaic in the RISD archives. There was a quote from you: It’s much easier to see what we want to see, to tell ourselves we are moving forward, and not in circles.”
“I don’t remember saying that.” I laugh. “And clearly I was wrong, since I’m standing on the RISD campus again.”
“I thought the piece was beautiful. I liked how the whole thing was made of broken mirrors.”
I remember shattering them for the mosaic, setting them so that even while people were looking at the art, they were seeing a distorted picture of themselves. Now, I realize that’s how I saw myself, after giving birth.
We stop in front of a building. “This was my dorm,” I say with surprise. The window through which Evie once threw my clothes is now crowded with plants and a Pride flag.
I feel Molly’s gaze on me. “It’s a little like Goldilocks, isn’t it?” she says softly. “Someone’s been sleeping in my bed.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Maybe not,” Molly says. “But it has to still be weird for you.”
“And for her.” I shrug. “Whatever your father and I had, it was a long time ago.”
“But I see how he looks at you, when you’re not watching.”
“Don’t try to Parent Trap us,” I warn. “You’ll only be disappointed.”
This is dangerous territory. Stealing moments with Adam is like looking at a blank pad of paper to see the faint impression of a story that has already been written on a previous page.
All I have to do is brush my fingers over it to read it clearly.
But Evie put in the work and the time to raise Molly when I could not.
I can’t repay that kindness by uprooting the life I pushed her into in the first place.
Before I can scramble for a new topic of conversation, someone calls Molly’s name. “Oh crap,” she says under her breath. “I can’t stand this guy. He’s an acquaintance of Dad’s who’s always creeped me out.”
A man with salt--and--pepper hair wearing a tweed jacket approaches, holding a cardboard box with some books and a dying plant. “Chad!” She smiles, even as the man comes closer and addresses her breasts instead of her face.
“This is unacceptable. If you’re old enough to have a baby, then I can’t be thirty anymore.”
Molly forces a laugh. The scent of alcohol hangs in the air with his words. “You moving offices?”
“I’m taking an extended leave of absence,” he says, spitting out the words. “Because academia’s become so woke. I give a student one compliment about her outfit, and next thing I know I’m being kicked out without a pension. And no one wants to hire a professor in his fifties.”
Only after his semidrunken tirade does he seem to notice that I’m here. When he turns to face me, I realize that I know him, too. He’s older, sure, but this is the same Chad from Sigma Chi who pawed me in the Sciences Library the night I first kissed Adam.
“Hi,” he says, holding out a hand to me. “Chad Beekman.”
I will my hand not to tremble as I shake his. “Georgia Gilligan,” I reply, hoarse.
“Chad teaches chem at Brown,” Molly explains.
“Taught,” he corrects.
Never in a million years would I have believed that the Sigma Chi beer pong champion would go on to be a professor. Chad stares at me. I know I am older and my hair is a different color, but I can’t risk him remembering me as Eloise. “You look so familiar,” he says. “Have we met?”
“I don’t think so,” I say, blinking rapidly. “Shoot. Something in my eye. Excuse me a sec?”
I hurry to the nearest building, entering as a student exits. Inside, I lean against the wall and try to calm my racing heart.
I should have realized that there was a chance of running into people who knew me when I was Adam’s girlfriend, Adam’s wife.
People who—-unlike strangers in Atlanta—-knew me before.
Chad is the first since I’ve returned, but he surely will not be the last. How many other acquaintances from our college days do Evie and Adam keep in touch with, now that they live near Providence again?