The Comfort of Lies (23 page)

She held out the bag as though offering appeasement. “I got a present for Savannah.”

Peter turned off the television and tossed the remote on the coffee
table. “For God’s sake, Caro. Savannah has about three million toys. What she doesn’t have enough of, it seems, is you.”

“That’s not fair. Do you know what I was doing tonight?”

“I’m sure it was important. That’s the problem. Everything about your work is important. When do we get to be at the top of the list?”

Please shut up, Peter.

Caroline longed to look at the miniature Johnny Town-Mouse in the bag, just the right size for tucking in a pocket. Savannah loved tiny toys. Caroline planned to put the stuffed animal next to her daughter’s slippers for a morning surprise. Driving home, she’d anticipated waking Savannah the next morning and watching her delight when she saw the mouse, wearing a tiny blue blazer, just as he did in Savannah’s Beatrix Potter books. Maybe if she wasn’t too tired, Caroline could fashion a little mouse bed . . .

“Are you going to answer me?”

“Sorry. I thought it was a rhetorical question.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t help, you know.”

“I didn’t know I needed help,” Caroline said. “That we needed help.”

“See. There you go.” Peter sighed.

“There I go
where
? What? What?”

“We’re drowning here. I feel like our family is sinking under the weight of your work.”

She dropped the small bag on the table and fell on the couch, too tired to stand, too exhausted to keep the argument going. “Perhaps I should look at my work schedule and figure out a better way to handle all this.” Caroline waved her hands as though “all this” hung on the walls.

Peter dropped down next to her. He put a hand on her knee. “Have you ever thought that maybe you could stop working,” he said. “Just for a little while?”

She shook off his hand and turned to face him. Did her husband know her at all?

“I think it might be better for Savannah,” Peter continued. “I’m not sure about this whole nanny thing. Savannah seems—”

This nanny thing?
Nanny Rose had been with them since Savannah was three weeks old.

“I think of how I grew up, with my mother always there, always available. It was a good way to grow up. I’d like that for Savannah. I think she should have it.” Peter cleared his throat. “Your mother was always home. Didn’t that mean a lot to you?”

“I didn’t know anything else.” Caroline could barely squeeze out the words.

“You had security. You never knew worry.”

This was how you murdered a marriage. A husband brought up something so awful to the wife that it could end their world, and he presented it as a serious option.

“Maybe
you
should stop working.” Caroline spoke in a dead voice. He’d become such a stranger at that moment that she didn’t much care about his answer.

“I know you love your work.” He squeezed her knee. She tried to control her reflex to slap away his hand. “But so do I, and we have to be honest about this. I make—what?—ten times the money you do?”

“I could take a different job,” she answered, as though anything about this ridiculous discussion deserved serious consideration. That’s what he’d done: put garbage on the table and made her pretend it could be dinner.

“Even if you could find work paying anywhere in my ballpark—not even mentioning for the moment that I own the company—can you imagine me home all day?”

“No, Peter. I can’t.” Caroline rose. “What scares me is that you can imagine it for me.”

 • • • 

Caroline crept into Savannah’s room with the tiny toy clutched in her hand. Savannah slept wrapped in her quilt, her thumb resting near her lips.

After patting the blankets tighter around Savannah, Caroline sunk to the floor. As she sat cross-legged beside the bed, watching her child’s chest rise and fall, she considered Peter’s idea. Perhaps she
shouldn’t have jumped down his throat. Maybe she should at least consider the possibility.

Maybe everything would come together for them, for the entire family, if she stayed home. She’d fall back in love with Peter and stop holding her breath each time he touched her. She’d fall into sparkly parent-child love with Savannah, like Peter had with her, instead of trudging through motherhood.

“Mommy?” Sleepy surprise infused Savannah’s words. “What are you doing?”

“I told you I’d kiss you when I came home, right?” Caroline pressed her lips to Savannah’s satiny cheek.

“Cuddle me?”

Caroline dropped the mouse on the rug and climbed in with Savannah. The little girl inched as close as possible, all warm flannel and sturdy little girl. “You feel good, Mommy.”

“So do you, sweetness.”

A welcome torpor overtook Caroline. She closed her eyes.

“Are you going to stay with me?”

“I am, pumpkin.”

“All night?”

“All night.” Caroline could barely form words.

“You are my good mother.” Savannah patted Caroline’s arm. “Just like the fairy godmother. In
Cinderella
.”

CHAPTER 21

Caroline

An internal alarm rang in Caroline’s head at four forty-five the next morning, reminding her of the eight o’clock consult she had for a suspected case of necrotizing enterocolitis. If it were that severe intestinal inflammation, they needed fast diagnosis to get treatment started.

She carefully untangled herself from Savannah, grateful for the child’s sodden sleep. She snuck out before six, leaving a note where Peter couldn’t miss it, showering in the guest bath and dressing quietly.

The Mass Pike was blissfully quiet compared with the usual time she commuted. Within forty-five minutes of leaving home, she’d grabbed a coffee and yogurt at the cafeteria, slipped behind her desk, and powered up her computer.

She combed through her mail, separating it into Attention, Trash, and File.

Her cell phone blinked. Caroline had turned off the ringer. The text message alert came soon after. She tried to ignore it, but she became frightened of a crisis; something horrible that she’d forgotten. “Whre are u?” Peter had texted.

“Emrgcy,” Caroline responded. She’d already written that in her note: “emergency at the lab.”

“We mst tlk. Tnite,” he texted back.

Email pinged on her computer.

Mixed in with notes from colleagues, lab notes, and requests from schools and hospitals, an email from Jonah stood out.

They’d written numerous times since the conference in San Diego: innocent communications about mud season in Vermont, the Red Sox opener in Boston, but mostly about their work. They had an online collegial coffee break relationship. In the weeks since she’d met him, she’d learned that a young woman in his practice suffered from denied anorexia. That made Jonah concerned for her life, which led Caroline to write him about a case she’d seen recently—unfortunately, at the autopsy stage.

She told Jonah that she lived her quiet widowed life surrounded by books, which led to Jonah confessing that he spent most of his nonpatient hours reading by the fire. Detective mysteries and thrillers were his favorites, he’d written with an abashed air. In response, she’d admitted to her soft spot for celebrity biographies when she needed total escape.

Caroline clicked on Jonah’s email with more anticipation than she thought appropriate. She scanned it quickly and then reread it for the details. He was in Boston, and he wanted to see her. Excitement and fear rushed in a lethal emotional mix.

There was no question that Jonah wanted more than conversation and that Caroline should back away. Still, she lingered over the email. The idea of spending simple time with someone who didn’t see her as a mother, a wife, and a failure enticed her, although the thought of another person wanting attention held zero temptation. What she craved was hours lost with her slides and her journals, slowly uncovering answers until everything crystallized into near immutability. In her work, even the worst truths had clarity. Home life held murkiness that threatened to suck her down permanently. Each morning, she woke to living an ill-fitting role until she reached the hospital.

Nanny Rose called during an online conference to say she’d need a day off in three weeks, and, by the way, did Caroline think it was
normal for a woman her age to still be breaking out? Should she go on that birth control pill they said helped?

Peter called to repeat that they needed to talk and to point out that Caroline should at least give his idea some consideration. “Just rent the idea,” he said.

Caroline’s mother left a message reminding her about the fitting for Caroline’s sister’s wedding. The dressmaker expected them all on Saturday morning at eight sharp.

Her sister-in-law Faith wrote for Caroline’s help in preparing her grad school application.

Caroline’s secretary whispered that her time reports were late. Two days had gone by with nobody knowing how many hours Caroline had put into which project. Caroline shocked herself by barely caring.

Worst of all, Caroline had to duck into the ladies’ room after lunch because she’d looked at her feet and started crying. Her shoes were scuffed and ugly. The hem of her slacks looked worn. Her knees felt bony and old. She’d never cared about how she looked before, knowing she wasn’t beautiful, but she was fine. Perfectly okay. It never mattered much because she’d always had a more-than-fine mind. Now her psyche felt like a blanket with holes, allowing facts and ideas to slip through.

By the time she arrived home—on time—she was ready to take a shower and climb into bed with a book. The day hadn’t been difficult, filled with the usual, but the usual had become a constant snafu: situation normal, all fucked up.

She didn’t take the shower or go to bed. She threw together Annie’s Whole Wheat Shells and Cheddar, tossed in peas, and called it a balanced meal.

She bathed Savannah for an extra long time—allowing the Bitty Twins to join in, and even blow-drying their hair, to Savannah’s delight.

Instead of talking to Peter about his idea, she kissed him with a pretence of passion, poured them each a glass of wine, and then initiated lovemaking, putting him to sleep as efficiently as she had Savannah.

 • • • 

Surfing porn would feel less threatening than the sites Caroline visited behind the closed door of her home office. At three in the morning, loneliness turned into total isolation, the sort that allowed her to visit Web sites such as Insight: Open Adoption. Juliette’s visit, coupled with Peter’s insane ideas, kept her awake in a way that begged for attention. Another Ambien terrified her; she was weary of meeting life by shutting down. It was time to research her life.

After Googling repeated iterations of “adoption,” Caroline returned to Insight. She opened a file, labeling it “Adoption Psych,” and began taking notes and highlighting information to which she felt connected. Entire passages begged to be cut and pasted into a Word document.

“No matter where your child is adopted from, you will, as adoptive parents, need to ‘deal with’ your child’s birth family whether you know the birth family or not. This birth family is a part of who your child is.”

She thought of Juliette talking about the grandparents Savannah would never know.

“Many adoptive professionals encourage prospective birthparents and adoptive parents in the preplacement process to choose the level of contact ‘they are most comfortable with having.’ The philosophy of comfort does not take into consideration several very important factors, one being that open adoption should not be based on making the adults involved comfortable; rather it should be about providing for the needs of the child.”

Caroline considered this for quite a while. Wasn’t it weird, even unfair, that she and Peter, Tia, Juliette and her husband, that all of them knew more about one another than Savannah knew about any of them? Was limiting her daughter’s knowledge to fairy tales and children’s stories of “we chose you” for Savannah, or was it comfort for her and Peter?

“Much of the open adoption experience is uncomfortable and awkward, especially in the beginning . . . Patricia Martinez Dorner,
author of
Children of Open Adoption
and
Talking to Your Child About Adoption
, encourages us to see open adoption as just another form of blended family . . . The adopted child is also able to know his birthparents as they are, rather than creating a fantasy birthparent. Instead of spending countless hours conjuring up an image of a person they do not know, they can use that energy for other things. Two, it gives the child a sense of wholeness.”

Caroline copied these words into a document and then ordered the book. It was old—maybe out of date—but it was a beginning.

CHAPTER 22

Tia

The phone might as well have rung from the roof for how muted it sounded, competing with a too-loud episode about skin cancer on
The Doctors
. Tia, stretched out on the couch with the remote in her hand, didn’t move except to pull the pilled blanket tighter over her legs. The fleece throw had hung over her mother’s couch for years before Tia inherited it. Not that it was some family heirloom: her mother probably got it for five bucks at Old Navy after Christmas. But that it had once warmed her mother offered Tia a bit of peace.

Tia’s days consisted of watching television and checking on her unemployment case. Katie—who would have imagined?—had convinced Richard not to fight Tia’s claim. She’d even called Tia to let her know that it looked like Sam would definitely survive. Mrs. G wouldn’t be going to jail, just to an assisted living home, with a guarantee of psychiatric care. Of course, that might as well be jail for Mrs. G.

Tia glanced at the clock, wishing it would spin forward to three, when she’d let herself think about adding Kahlúa to her coffee. After that, she’d shower in readiness for Bobby’s nightly arrival.

Tia let the call go to voice mail. Bobby was the only one she wanted to speak to, and he’d call back. Or she could call him. Bobby’s store of patience seemed infinite, even in bed, and what man had
patience there? Sometimes she couldn’t bear his touch; other times she’d cling to him as though he were her only source of sustenance on the planet.