“Like the one I just told,” I’d said.
“Exactly,” she’d replied.
I step closer to the window to see if I’ve gotten better, and hear a floorboard creak beneath my foot. I stop and test it with the toe of my shoe. It rocks a little. I kneel down and run my hands over the old worn planks. They’re wide and weathered, worn in the center of the room as if someone had paced over them. The one I stepped on is definitely loose. I dig my fingernails in between two boards and pull up the loose one. Dust motes fly up into the air, catching the light. I cautiously reach my hand down into a shoebox-sized space, a perfect hiding spot. A silverfish scuttles away, sliding through a crack at the bottom. Clearly it hasn’t been used in years—if it ever was.
I put the extra set of car keys with my monogram on the fob into the hiding space. Then I take the envelope out of my back pocket and lay it next to the keys. I keep my hand on it for a moment, picturing the little boy in the photograph. I feel a pang at leaving him here. Even though I know the boy is Peter, there’s something in his expression that expects just this—being abandoned.
“It’s only temporary,” I say out loud.
When I take my hand out I brush something loose from the rough wood, something silky that sticks to my sweaty skin. I flinch, thinking it’s another silverfish, but it’s not. It’s a pale-pink ribbon, frayed and faded with age. Like something that might have belonged to a baby doll.
Or to a baby.
Daphne’s Journal, July 8, 20—
Sometimes I wonder if it’s only mothers’ hormones that change when a couple has a baby. Peter’s been really nervous and touchy lately too, like he’s on super-high alert like I am. Take what just happened tonight. It all started with my new haircut. I was nervous he wouldn’t like it or he’d guess how expensive the highlights were, but he loved it! He said it made me look ten years younger.
I should have just said thank you and left it at that but something about how he said it—like I must have been looking old and haggard before the haircut—made me say, “Like a college girl? Too young for you.”
Right away I knew I’d said the wrong thing. His jaw tightened and he gave me one of his sideways looks. Sometimes I forget how touchy Peter is about his age. When we first met at the gym I thought he was in his early thirties. I was surprised when I saw on his driver’s license that he was in his forties. I’d made a joke about it later and he’d gotten angry that I’d looked at his license. He was right, of course, I shouldn’t have been snooping in his things, so I apologized and we made up.
I couldn’t help noticing afterward, though, how he never makes any reference to his childhood. Nothing that would clue you into how old he is, like the TV shows he watched or where he was on 9/11 or the sports teams he grew up rooting for. I’d known him a year before I found out he’d gone to a state college way upstate. He says he doesn’t like to mention it because the people he works with all went to fancy boarding schools and Ivy League colleges. He’s proud he’s a self-made man and that he started his fund with seed money that his landlady gave him to manage. And he should be proud of it! He traded a tiny fund up to a small but respectably sized one in only ten years and he did it all on his own. He says, though, in the finance world it’s better to look like you’ve always had money, not like you’ve had to scrape and claw your way into it.
So he was probably just feeling a bit testy when he told me that maybe I was too young for all of this. He had his arms open wide as if he meant our nice Westchester house, the living-room furniture I’d picked out of Pottery Barn and the curtains from Country Curtains. I thought it was all the height of suburban luxury until I saw Laurel’s white carpeting and Roche-Bobois sectional and custom-fitted window treatments. Now I think our house looks like a child’s playhouse version of adulthood, like the dream house a teenager would design by cutting pictures out of a magazine—like I did as a teenager when my mother was working nights at the Ramada Inn bar. It even looks like a teenager lives in it: couch cushions askew, mugs on the tables, dust coating everything. When Peter and I decided I would stay home, we’d agreed to do without a house cleaner. After all, if I’m home all day I can theoretically do the housecleaning. Only I never seem to get around to it.
I told him I could do better with the house, but he shook his head.
“I don’t mean the house, Daph,” he said with that tired, patient look he gets when he’s explaining something—like how our taxes work—that he thinks I should already understand. “I mean Chloe. I mean being a mother. Maybe you’re too young for all the responsibility. Maybe I rushed you into having a baby because I wanted one. Maybe that’s why you keep forgetting things and leaving your stuff everywhere. You’re acting out your resentment.”
“I don’t resent Chloe!” I said. I’m afraid I might have shrieked, because Peter winced. Or maybe he winced because it was so obviously a lie. I do resent Chloe—her constant crying, her tantrums, her demands. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love her. Does it?
“It doesn’t matter,” I told Peter. “She’s here now and I’m managing just fine . . .” But my voice wobbled on fine and that made it sound like I was anything
