First Comes Love (5 page)

“So what's up with Meredith?” he says, changing the subject.

I sigh and tell him the latest—that she and my mother have some big plan they're working up for this December. “You know, it's been fifteen years….”

An intent listener, he looks at me, waiting.

“They want to visit Sophie. In New York,” I continue.

“Sophie?” Gabe asks.

“You know, the girl he was dating.”

“Oh, right…” Gabe shakes his head and whistles.

“Exactly,” I say. “So unhealthy, isn't it?”

“It's a little strange…I'll give you that.” I can tell he is treading carefully, the way he always does around any mention of Daniel.

“It's very strange. Bizarre. They all need to move on with their lives, already.”

He raises his eyebrows and looks at me, and I can tell that he is thinking about Will again. I can almost read the bubble over his head:
Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?

“What?” I say, feeling defensive.

“Nothing,” he says with such purposeful wide-eyed innocence that I'm forced to take drastic measures. I pick up my phone and bang out an email, both my thumbs flying.

From:
Josie

Sent:
August 18

To:
Andrea Carlisle

Subject:
Re: Room Mom

Dear Andrea,

Thank you so much for your kind note. Edie is a pleasure, and I can't wait to get to know her better this year. I hope the Tooth Fairy is good to her tonight! Thank you for volunteering to be our room mother—I would love to accept your kind offer. Look forward to meeting you at Open House. And yes, it is a small world!

Best,

Josie

I scan it quickly for errors, then send it, listening to the sickening swooshing sound of an irreversible decision.

“There,” I say, showing him the sent message.

He quickly skims it, then hands me back my phone and smirks. “Whoa. Look at you, Little Miss Well Adjusted.”

“I
am
well adjusted,” I say, and for one second, I actually believe it.

T
HAT NIGHT,
I
wake up around two and can't fall back asleep. I tell myself that it's just first-week-of-school jitters, or adjusting to an earlier bedtime, but as morning approaches, I know it runs deeper than that. I know it has something to do with Daniel and Sophie, Mom and Meredith, Will and Andrea. And maybe, most of all, it has something to do with Edie, fast asleep at this very moment. I imagine her blond curls spilling over her pillow, the shiny coin underneath it, as she dreams her magical dreams. I think of my conversation with Gabe, the person who knows me best and the only one who knows my secret. My heart aches with regret over so many things, big and small, including mistakes that have relegated me to manufacturing boyfriends on faraway continents who are as imaginary as the Tooth Fairy herself.

O
n Friday night, forty-five minutes before Nolan and I are leaving for dinner with friends, our babysitter cancels via
text
.
So sorry I'm sick and can't watch Harper tonight. I have food poisoning.

“Liar,” I say before slamming my phone onto the bathroom counter, hard enough so that I check to make sure I haven't cracked the screen. Even if I believed she were sick, which I do not, her flippant “so sorry” along with those three emojis would still have pushed me over the edge.

“Who're you calling a liar?” Nolan calls out from our closet, where he is getting dressed.

“The sitter,” I answer. “She just canceled.”

“Who is she?” Nolan asks, emerging in boxers, socks, and a new light blue linen shirt. One of the many luxuries of being the husband, at least in our household, is that Nolan does not concern himself with domestic logistics like hiring sitters. All he has to do is pick out his own shirt.

“The middle Tropper girl,” I say. “I bet she's canceling because of a boy.”

“She
could
have food poisoning,” Nolan says. “People do get food poisoning, ya know.”

“No way. Who gets food poisoning at six-forty-five on a Friday night? And by the way—if you truly
do
have food poisoning, then lie and say it's anything
other
than food poisoning. Because food poisoning
always
sounds like a lie when you're canceling.”

“It really does,” Nolan says with a laugh. “Why is that, anyway?”

“Because it usually
is
….I should call her out on it. Tell her to go ahead and come anyway, since it's not contagious.”

“You can't babysit with food poisoning,” Nolan says, missing the point. I watch him unbutton his shirt, then put it back on one of the padded hangers from my end of the closet.

“What are you doing? Put that back on,” I say. “I'll see if my mother or Josie can come watch Harper.”

“Really?” he says, looking disappointed.

“Don't you
want
to go out?” I say, thinking that I've been looking forward to our plans with the Grahams all week.

“I guess,” he says. “But I'm just as happy to stay in. We could order Chinese and watch
Homeland
. We have three episodes left.”

I cross my arms and glare at him. “We hardly
ever
go out,” I say.

“That's not true,” he says. “We just went out to dinner last Saturday.”

“Yes, but that was with work people. That doesn't count,” I say, knowing that if we stay in, Nolan will watch TV while I put Harper to bed, an arduous, frustrating task that can take hours. I stop short of telling him that I'm desperate to have a few drinks and a grown-up evening without our daughter, in no particular order, and instead say again that I'm going to try my mother and Josie, maybe one of them is free.

“You
know
Josie's going to be busy. When has she ever
not
had plans on a Friday night?” Nolan says, in shirtless limbo. Always in good shape, he's even more fit than usual, gearing up for his next triathlon, his morning training conveniently conflicting with getting Harper ready for school and out the door.

I text them both just in case, but just as Nolan predicted, Josie types back immediately that she is otherwise engaged. My mom writes that she would love to, but already has plans to go to the movies with Kay, her friend from church.

“Dammit,” I grumble to myself.

“We could call the Grahams and ask them to come hang out here instead?” Nolan says.

I shake my head, feeling annoyed by the suggestion. “The house is a mess, and we have nothing to eat here.”

“So what?” he says. “We can order a pizza.”

“I don't want to do that,” I say, thinking that I will still be the one stuck putting Harper to bed. “Besides, the Grahams don't want to pay for a sitter for their children only so they can spend the evening with ours.”

“All right,” he says. “Well, I'm sure we can think of something else fun to do.” He gives me his little double-finger gun and wink, and although I know he's trying to be funny, it's also a serious suggestion on his part.

I give him a little noncommittal grunt, wondering where I'd rank sex with my husband these days—before or after putting our daughter to bed.

I
KNOW HOW
I sound. I sound like a shitty mother and wife. Or at the very least an inadequate wife and ungrateful mother—which is in stark contrast to the image I try to portray on Instagram.
Hashtag happy life. Hashtag beautiful family. Hashtag blessed.
Sometimes, like tonight, I find myself wondering which is more egregious, to pretend to be happy when you're not, or to feel so consistently dissatisfied when you
should
be happy. My therapist, Amy, tells me not to be so hard on myself—which probably has a lot to do with why I keep going back to her. She says that everyone creates a version of her life that she wishes were true and tries to believe. In other words, everyone lies on social media, or at least puts her best foot—and photos—forward. Amy also points out that although I have a lot to be thankful for, I
did
lose my brother in a tragic accident that rocked my family to the core, either directly or indirectly caused my parents to divorce, and left me with a sole sibling who is some combination of selfish and self-destructive. In other words, I'm entitled to my frustration and deep-seated sadness, regardless of how many positive things have happened to me since that horrific day.

As an aside, I also appreciate Amy's forty-something perspective that the thirties are a grind for many, and motherhood isn't the constantly blissful journey everyone thinks it will be when they attend their pink or blue or yellow baby shower. She swears that things get easier as your kids get older and become more self-sufficient, but she also maintains that no matter what their age or yours, motherhood is hard.
Really
hard. Stay-at-home mothers have it rough; working mothers have it rough; and part-time working mothers, like myself, have it rough, even though the first two camps annoyingly insist that we have the best of both worlds when I think we actually have the worst of each. There. I just did it again. Bitch, bitch, bitch. And I mean that as a noun and a verb.

To be clear, I love my daughter more than anything or anyone in the world. She is the best thing I have ever done or will ever do with my life. It's just that taking care of a small child often feels tedious to me, a fact I can admit only to Amy, the person I pay to give me one-hour increments of complete honesty. I can't tell my husband, who labeled me
unmaternal
in a recent argument. I can't tell my friends, because it would undermine my perfect Facebook façade. I can't tell my sister, who desperately wants a child of her own. And I can't tell my mother, because I know she'd do anything to get back a few moments with her firstborn, even the kind of miserable, exhausting moments that I routinely gripe about. Besides, my mother
needs
me to be okay. The child she doesn't have to worry about. The only one who hasn't fucked up or died.

The more pressing issue, and even more closely guarded secret, is the way I feel about Nolan, my husband of nearly seven years. I'm not sure where to begin, other than at the beginning, with the answer to that question
So, how did you two meet?
Every couple has their canned answer, their story that's told again and again. Sometimes the husband will take the lead in the retelling; sometimes the wife will. Sometimes it's a tandem effort, scripted down to the smallest one-liner, suspenseful beat, wistful glance, fond chuckle, serendipitous plot twist.
And then he said this. And then I did that.
And now here we are
.
Happily ever after
.

Sometimes I wonder if part of my problem with Nolan isn't our story itself, the how and why we got together. Because even if I stick to the abridged, upbeat, dinner-party version, and avoid maudlin details such as “Nolan was a pallbearer at my brother's funeral,” we always return to Daniel.

Growing up and for as long as I can remember, Nolan was my brother's best friend, although with a four-and-a-half-year age gap, I actually didn't pay much attention to either of them, at least when I was really little. He was just a fixture, like the tweed sectional in our family room or my father's workbench in the garage, part of the backdrop of my childhood, one of the many older boys who came to trade baseball cards or throw a football in the backyard or spend the night, sleeping in the trundle pulled out from under Daniel's twin bed.

By the time I reached middle school, it was harder to ignore Daniel and his friends, if only because Josie was paying such close attention to them. I remember her carrying on about Nolan in particular, and I had to agree that he was easy on the eyes. With wavy blond hair, bright blue eyes, and the kind of skin that easily tanned, he had such obvious Malibu lifeguard good looks that Daniel teasingly called him Baywatch. He also happened to be Daniel's most athletic friend, a natural at every sport he played, though he didn't have Daniel's drive or work ethic, which evened things out for them on the playing fields. But what stood out to me the most was Nolan's sense of humor, the laid-back way he approached everything, in stark contrast to my type A brother. In many ways, they really were opposites, their differences becoming more pronounced over the years, as Daniel graduated as Lovett's valedictorian, then headed north for Harvard, while Nolan focused on girls and parties at Ole Miss, barely eking out a 2.0 GPA (all he needed to return to Atlanta to work at his family's printing business). Yet despite their divergent paths, the two stayed close, always picking up right where they left off. In fact, just a few days before Daniel died, I overheard him telling Sophie that Nolan would one day be his best man.