Chapter Nine
NINE
I wake in a panic in the middle of the night, sure someone else is in the room.
It takes a few seconds to orient myself.
There is no one here, no one besides Miguel, who is snoring in bed next to me.
I lie on my back trying to return to sleep, but I can’t shake the fear that saturated my dreams. With my heart pounding like this, I know I won’t be falling back asleep anytime soon.
I open the bedside table drawer and reach for the bottle of Ambien, but then stop myself as I recall the look on Officer Jankowski’s face when he learned I had a prescription.
No, no pills. I shut the drawer and get out of bed.
In the upstairs hallway I peek inside Zach’s room.
Nothing has changed since he left for UVA two years ago.
A vintage Fugazi poster hangs on the wall above his single bed.
Next to it is a small bookshelf crammed with everything from Camus to Stephen King, the top shelf piled high with trophies and ribbons from science bowls and cross-country races.
I’m happy he found a position this summer in a lab at school doing research on aging, but I miss him.
Rachel’s room also looks how she left it when she rushed out the door for her camping trip. Piles of laundry and books, self-care products and craft supplies litter the floor. Her bed is unmade, her precious koala lying on his back staring at the ceiling.
Their empty rooms echo the strange emptiness I feel.
Although Rachel will be back from her hiking trip on Tuesday, it’s only for a short while.
Then she’ll head off to tennis camp to work as a counselor.
This is how it will be from now on. I know that from my experience with Zach.
I’ll have snatches of time with Rachel, a few weeks here, a month there, but the days of my daughter living here under the same roof as me are gone.
Down on the first floor I pad around to all the doors and windows and check that everything is locked and secure.
Sometimes we get careless. On nonhumid days, we leave the windows open to allow a breeze.
Or after letting Kugel out, we’ll forget to lock the back door.
It was never like that when I was a child growing up in Queens in the eighties.
The threat of crime was ever present. I learned to take off my earrings before I rode the subway and to hold my house keys between my fingers in a fist, ready to jab a guy’s eyes out.
But in Eastbrook? I have never felt unsafe. Even after that poor nanny was killed a few blocks away last year. It was a tragedy, of course, but an aberration. Perversely it was the random horror of the act, a girl shot dead in the middle of a robbery, that drove home how safe the neighborhood was.
“It’s so unlike our neighborhood,” people said. “Things like that just don’t happen here.”
I peer out the window at the tranquil street. Nothing. Not a soul out on this night.
I curl up on the couch, pull a throw around me, and drift off into a restless sleep. A few hours later, I wake to the whir of the coffee grinder in the kitchen. I pop up.
I need to get Rachel up or she’ll be late for school.
Once I am standing, I remember—Rachel has graduated. She’s not even in the house. No one needs me to get up. No one needs me to do anything.
“Coffee?” Miguel asks when I appear in the doorway to the kitchen.
Without waiting for an answer, he grabs the moka pot from the stove and fills my favorite mug, the one with a photo of Zach and Rachel as toddlers.
I watch him whip in the sugar and add steamed milk, just the way I like it, the way his parents used to make it for him when he was a little boy growing up in Union City, a Cuban enclave in northern New Jersey.
He puts the mug on the island in front of where I usually sit.
“I saw you ended up on the couch this morning. Everything okay?”
I lower myself onto a stool and bring the mug to my face to breathe in the rich coffee scent. “I’m just not sleeping well.”
“Did you take an Ambien last night?”
“What?” I put the mug down, annoyed that he’s starting in on me before I’ve even had my coffee. “No. I told you. I don’t take them anymore. That’s how I know I did not take one Saturday night.”
“You don’t know that, mi amor.”
“Actually, I do know it. I’m very careful about not mixing Ambien and alcohol.”
He sighs. “Look, I don’t want to upset you, but what’s the point in having the same conversation over and over? You don’t even remember ordering Millie’s.”
“Because I didn’t! I need you to entertain the possibility I am telling the truth.”
“It’s not about truth, Car. It’s about memory. Memory is very unreliable.”
“I know what I know.”
He holds up his hands in surrender. “Let’s just drop it. In the end, it doesn’t matter. What matters is you healing.”
“But it does matter. If someone came in here—”
“Whoa, whoa.” His grin is sly and disarming. “Slow down. Came in here?”
“Yes. And put that empty bottle of wine in the garbage.”
He stares at me but says nothing. Finally, I break eye contact and avert my gaze, focusing on the red LED clock on the microwave as it changes from 8:03 to 8:04.
I don’t want to have this conversation with him, especially not first thing in the morning.
How can he not know that I need his full and unconditional support?
Miguel puts a plate of buttered raisin toast in front of me. “You’re not planning to work today, are you?”
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“No,” he says carefully. “What about the support group the doctor mentioned?”
“Why? I’m not going crazy.”
“I didn’t say you were. But you’re talking about people breaking in and planting empty wine bottles. You asked the police to fingerprint it.” He cocks his head. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras’?”
“Yes, because you say it all the time.”
He grins. “That’s because it’s true. Don’t search for the most outlandish explanation, because the obvious one is usually true.”
“But sometimes it is zebras. Zebras do exist, you know.”
“Do you want me to call your client and tell her you’ve suffered a concussion and won’t be available for a few days?”
“Who, Petula? No, I don’t want you to do that,” I snap. “She already thinks I’m old. I don’t want to give her any excuse to go hire someone else.”
“That’s not going to happen. You’re great at what you do. You’re not going to lose a client because you take a few days.”
I chew on my toast rather than argue with him.
Those first grueling three months of applications with no responses, interviews that went nowhere, and networking events that drained me made it clear that I wasn’t going to get a job that paid what I had been earning.
I needed to pivot, so I finally launched as a freelance events coordinator just to have something to do.
You’d think more than twenty years in the corporate sector as an events planner would count for something, but the jobs I am qualified for are fewer, and no one seems to want to hire an overqualified Gen Xer, especially one who added two spaces after every period on her résumé before she discovered that aged her more than leg warmers.
“Petula is already hinting that I’m too old and out of touch.
When I took her to an event space a few weeks ago, she started to take the stairs and then said to me, ‘Oh sorry, you probably want to take the elevator.’”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“She thinks I’m old! If I tell her I’ve had memory loss, it’ll be like blood in the water. I have to get back to work by the end of the week. Plus, I have a screening interview at the Asher Museum today. I really want that job.”
“Just keep in mind what the doctor said.”
When he kisses me on the top of my head, I try to relax and enjoy the affection, but it’s difficult when I feel this gulf between us.
Doesn’t he get it? Bit by bit, my identity is being stripped away.
I sit at the island drinking my coffee as the sound of drawers being opened and closed in the upstairs bedroom drifts down.
I know he loves me, but I’ve never felt further away from him than I do now.
Over the past few years, we’ve spoken openly about how to reconnect once the kids are gone.
We aren’t distant like some couples, but we aren’t like Kenya and Shawn, who can’t keep their hands off each other.
No one tells you the toll that parenting takes on a marriage.
In theory, now is the time to refocus on us—we are free to travel, I could finally learn pickleball and join the neighborhood team, we could have regular date nights at cool restaurants in downtown DC.
But this morning that vision seems more distant than ever.
I feel betrayed by his skepticism. Even if he does harbor doubts about the Ambien or the bottle of wine, I want him to defend me, believe me, or at least try to.
Fight for me. After more than twenty years of being a good partner and wife, I deserve as much.
After he leaves for work, I take my own shower and dress. If I can’t get ride-or-die loyalty from Miguel, I’ll have to go somewhere else.
“I believe you.” Yumi raises her coffee cup and smiles. “Of course you’d never take Ambien if you’d been drinking. Duh.”
The words are a balm to me, and I soak them in.
Yumi’s screened-in porch sits high in the trees, wrapped in the hum of early summer—the buzz of crickets and back-and-forth of chirping birds.
A fan above turns lazily, moving air that smells faintly of newly mown grass and the fresh pot of coffee between us.
A blue mug for me, a delicate white porcelain cup for Yumi.
Mismatched, but then again so are we in a way.