Chapter Thirty-Five
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The tears really start to come now. I close the bathroom door in Leo’s apartment and vomit and cry and cry and vomit into the trash can between my knees.
I’d called Leo because he was the only person I knew who wouldn’t ask any questions.
He hosts a podcast with a guy who used to work for Rick Rubin and writes a Substack in the style of an old Esquire editor’s letter.
Or maybe it’s Vanity Fair. Either way, it is pretentious and uses the word “leitmotif” a lot.
Leo lives in a brownstone apartment in Fort Greene.
Maybe he had a couch I could sleep on for the night.
My voice cracked. “Hey. It’s Emily. Are you alone?”
Leo wasn’t alone. Leo had a serious girlfriend, a bisexual divorcée named Phoebe, who taught women’s studies at Fordham and had shared custody of her three kids.
But when I called, and Leo explained to Phoebe that one of his old students would be sleeping over, they had a big fight and she stormed out. Once a dog, always a dog.
It was almost midnight when I made it to Leo’s apartment. I had seventeen missed calls from Roman and several from Marcela. (“Roman is home so I leave now, Miss Emily.”) I hadn’t called Daisy and she hadn’t called me.
Leo puts on a Sonic Youth album and heats up a kettle to make hot tea. “I’ve been writing again,” I tell him.
“Can I read it?”
“It’s just ramblings really. Can I make sure it’s coherent first?”
Leo nods. Of course. He gets a couple of blankets out of a closet and tucks them onto a futon. He is too old to have a futon. “You had a kid, right?”
I smile. I can’t even believe that my body has this reflex.
I have sad beyond anything I have ever felt before, and yet when Leo asks about Holden, when I think about Holden, I smile.
“Thirty-seven weeks—” I stop myself. “Almost nine months.” I show him my phone.
The wallpaper is a picture of Roman and Holden at the pumpkin patch.
I see Roman’s face and I rush to the bathroom and vomit.
“Hey. You okay in there?” Leo asks.
I don’t answer. I hold my mouth to muffle the sobs.
I don’t come out until Leo is asleep. I crawl onto the futon.
I stare at his collection of old issues of The New York Review of Books and the literary magazine he used to run—and it occurs to me that the greatest thing Leo will ever have is that he edited Jonathan Franzen in the early aughts. I have a child who needs me.
—
I let myself into my apartment. I walk straight into Holden’s room and lift him from his crib.
He is awake and hungry. I give him a bottle.
I sit in the rocking chair in the nursery with the shadows of marsupial stuffies and the view of the playground.
I rock him and kiss him and cry, counting forward and back to three hundred.
I put him in his crib, and then, for the first time in nine months, I get into bed with Roman.
In the morning, I will take Holden to Texas.
I have no choice but to see my mom, to finally let her meet her grandson.
I will stay in the home that I once ran away from and think about what to do next.
But for now, I will sleep next to my Australian husband who is slightly snoring and who has a pet turtle and who, in the morning, will misplace his wallet.
Roman detects my scent. He cracks his eyes.
“Hi, you. Where were you? I was worried.”
“I just needed to walk for a while.”
Roman rolls over and, without being fully awake, realizes that I am in bed again. Nine months later. “I missed you.”
He holds me. He hasn’t held me in so long, and even though he has destroyed me, I forgot how good this feels.
I forgot what it feels like to be touched and to not think about pain.
To not think about the bright lights of the OR and the forceps and the thirty-five stitches and the possible catheter in my thirties and pelvic-floor therapy.
Because tonight, tonight, when my whole body aches with a different type of pain, for the first time since I can remember, I do not feel that other pain.
“Love you,” Roman says, wetting his mouth and rolling over again.
I lie on my side in his arms and stare at Turtly, hidden under her shell.
I stare at the gallery wall of family photos that Roman recently installed.
Photos of the three of us together, on the carousel in Dumbo, crowded around a Santa in the Winter Garden by the accounting consultancy with more layoffs coming, eating cotton candy on the pier in Coney Island.
The three of us, a family. Why had I ever needed Daisy? Why had I ever needed anyone else?
“I loved you, too.”