Chapter liii
liii
THAT NEXT WEEK WAS A ROUGH ONE. WHEN I ASKED the kids on Sunday night to tell me their best, worst, and wished, Violet said no thank you. Actually, what she said was, “Mom, I don’t want to do this anymore.” And then Liam said, “If she doesn’t have to, I’m not doing it either.” And then Sammy looked at all three of us and burst into tears, running off into his room.
I followed and knocked on his door. “Sam?” I said. “Do you want to talk?”
“You can come in,” he said, still sniffling. I pushed open the door and noticed he’d taped a new drawing he’d made to the wall next to his bed. It was a drawing of you as a kid next to a drawing of him now. He did an amazing job of cataloging your similarities and differences.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He looked up at me, anguish in his eyes. “It’s just that everything is changing,” he said. “First you told me about Gabriel, and now Violet and Liam don’t want to do best, worst, wished. And Violet’s annoyed all the time, and Dad and Courtney are weird and mad, and nothing is the same as it used to be.”
He threw his arms around me, and I held him close. “I’m so sorry things are changing,” I said. I was thinking about Dax. About whether I could really spring that change on my kids, too. What Sammy would say.
“Sometimes things can’t change back,” he said, his voice muffled against my shirt. “Even if you want them to. Once you know things, you can’t not know them.”
“That’s right,” I said. “But I still think it’s better to know. Even if it means you can’t go back to who you were before.”
“Everything is just so hard,” he wailed.
“For me too, sometimes,” I told him, pulling him even closer to me, leaning my cheek against his forehead, feeling his soft curls against my skin, his warm little body against mine.
We stayed like that for a moment.
“I saw you hung up a new drawing,” I said. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
He looked up at the one next to his bed. “I just wanted to see how the same we were,” he said. “Our hair is the same.” He pointed to the hair in both the images. “And the shape of our noses and eyes. But our eye color is different. And I think my chin is shaped a little more like yours. My lips, too. See how my top lip is a little thicker than his?”
I nodded. “I do,” I said. “I guess there’s more of me in you than I realized.”
He smiled. “It’s nice to find you in my face.”
“It’s nice to be in your face!” I said. Then after a beat I added, “Do you want to go back to dinner now?”
He nodded. “But first I want to do best, worst, and wished.”
“Go for it,” I said.
Sammy cleared his throat. “Best,” he said, “was our conversation just now because it made me feel a little better. Worst is Liam and Violet not wanting to do best, worst, wished. And wished is … wished is that ” He looked at me. “You won’t be mad?”
I shook my head. “I’m never mad about best, worst, wished.”
“Wished is that I always knew the truth.”
“I wish that, too, Sammy,” I said.
He nodded, then stood up and took my hand. We went back to the kitchen to salvage dinner.
The rest of the week was rocky, too. Violet was clearly furious with me, more than when we first told the kids, and she was acting out in predictably teenage ways—not doing the things around the house she was supposed to do, not calling when she was supposed to call, not turning out the lights when she was supposed to go to sleep. Essentially, trying to push my buttons, an attempt— conscious or subconscious—to make me as mad as she was. And Liam seemed extra quiet, barely speaking to me or his siblings at all. I called Darren and told him I wanted to get them all into therapy. I was waiting for pushback, but he agreed, and I called one of the providers Dax had recommended to set up appointments. That was when I called Julia for the name of her therapist so I could set up my own appointment, too—that’s who I’ve been seeing now, for a while, but it took more than a month to get that initial appointment, a month during which things spiraled even more.
The only thing that kept me together was the idea of seeing Dax again. We texted a few times the week my kids started melting down, but not nearly enough— which was my doing, not his. And when I finally fell into his arms that Sunday, it felt like such a relief.
“I made it,” I said to him.
“You made it,” he echoed, giving me a sweet kiss. “What do you think?” he asked, indicating the apartment behind him.
I stepped in.
The apartment was a one-bedroom, prewar, with high ceilings. It was sparsely decorated mostly in simple, neutral furniture. There were maps and a few photographs of Dax and Zac hanging on the walls. But the most marvelous part of the apartment was the huge wall of windows overlooking Central Park.
“What a view!” I said as Dax bent to hug me.
“It’s why I bought the place,” he said.
It was interesting to me that he’d bought a one-bedroom. A real statement that he wasn’t planning for a future with many more people in his life, wasn’t looking for visitors. If he could afford this building with this view, he clearly could have bought a bigger place without such a spectacular view, if space had been important to him.
“I ordered us some Italian food from my favorite local restaurant,” he said. “It’s in honor of where we met.”
I laughed. “I’m so glad we met, and even gladder I’m here with you right now,” I said. “I adore my kids and would do anything for them, but it’s been a hard week.”
“Here,” he said, handing me a glass of wine. “Do you want to talk about it?”
We sat down on the couch, and I leaned into him while we talked. I felt the stress leave my body, felt myself relax against him.
“I just I’m worried that they’ll never feel the same way about me again,” I said.
“They probably won’t,” Dax said, his hands massaging the knots out of my shoulders.
“What?” I interrupted, turning my head to look at him. I thought he was on my side.
“And that’s not a bad thing,” he finished.
“It’s not?” I asked, closing my eyes as his massage got deeper.
“As they grow, their view of you will always shift and change,” he said. “I’m sure the way Violet felt about you two weeks ago was very different from when she was five or ten. At some point, our parents become real people, separate from us. And once that realization happens, kids see their moms or their dads in a more three-dimensional way. And out of that comes real respect, admiration, and a deeper appreciation for the people who raise them.”
“And you think that’s what will happen here?” I asked.
“I imagine so,” he said. “And once your kids see what I see—what a strong, brave, kind woman you are, they will respect and admire you, just like I do.”
My heart squeezed and I couldn’t come up with the right words to convey my thanks, so instead I put my gratitude into a kiss. He kissed me back, then traced my jawline with his fingers.
“You feeling a bit better?” he asked. “Ready for dinner?”
“I am,” I told him. “Thanks to you.”
He smiled, then stood up and led me to the dinner table. He’d set it so we’d be sitting next to each other, overlooking the park.
“I keep thinking about something Darren said when he was telling me why he didn’t want to tell Sammy the truth,” I said to Dax, as we sat down.
“What’s that?” he asked, passing me a serving dish of tortellini with basil and parmesan.
“He said that he was worried Sammy would compare him to Gabe, like he always felt I did, and that he would lose that competition, too.” I served myself some tortellini.
Dax turned to give me his full attention. “Listen,” he said. “You will compare me to Darren, you will compare me to Gabriel. Even if you don’t say it, you will. It’s natural. I’ll compare you to Aviva. But comparison doesn’t mean competition.” He picked up tortellini with his fork. “You will compare these tortellini to other tortellini you’ve eaten in your life, but it’s not a tortellini competition. You can appreciate them all. You can enjoy them all. For a long time, my marriage to Aviva was great. And then it wasn’t. But there’s space in my heart to acknowledge what was great about being with her, and also what’s great about being with you.”
“I like that,” I said. “I know you loved Aviva. I’m glad you had that love in your life. I’m not competing with that love.”
He took a sip of wine. “I imagine it’s like having more than one child—you probably compare what they like, how they act, what they did at the same age—but they’re not competing. You can love them all. There’s always more room in your heart.”
The particularly lovely thing about sitting next to each other was that it was easy for him to lean over and kiss me. Which he did, and I felt my heart expand. I kissed him back, hard.
“You know,” I whispered flirtatiously. “There’s room for you in more than just my heart.”
“Oh yeah?” he said softly.
“Oh yeah,” I replied, my lips close to his ear.
“Mmm,” he said, pulling me onto his lap. “Should we take a brief intermission, then? Finish our dinner later?”
I kissed his neck, then his lips. “I like how you think, Dr. Armstrong.”
I climbed off his lap, and he led me to his bedroom. There was a big king-sized bed inside, with a blue-and-gray-striped comforter on it. Far fewer pillows than mine had. “Looks comfortable,” I said, echoing his response to my bed.
“It is,” he answered, planting kisses on my neck and my wrists and my fingertips. I imagined each of those kisses would bloom inside me, expanding my heart even more. He tugged me onto his bed, and I could feel how luxuriously soft it was.
We shimmied out of our jeans and sweaters, our socks and underwear, and he planted more kisses on my breasts before making his way down to where I was soft and wet and wanting him.
“Ohhh,” I said when he touched me with his tongue, shivering at the sensations he was already causing in my body.
“I love how you taste,” he said.
I smiled, my eyes closed. It was like he was a wizard with the power to make my worries, my anxieties melt away with a single touch.
“Let me taste,” I said.
And he kissed me.
“I want you inside me,” I whispered into his mouth.
He leaned over to his nightstand and rolled a condom down onto his erection.
“I love knowing what you want,” he said.
I looked down at him. “I know what you want, too.” I kissed him again and then guided him inside me. “You feel so good,” I whispered as he entered.
“You too,” he said, his voice made of breath and air more than sound.
We rocked into each other, the city lights twinkled outside his window, and I had this overwhelming feeling that I was just where I was supposed to be, in that moment, at that time, in that place.
I kissed him harder, he thrust faster, and we both came, looking into each other’s eyes.
It felt like exploding into stars.