Wishful Thinking (21 page)

He cut her off. “I finally found someone I can love,” Norman said. “Someone who makes me believe I can have a family again.” At the word
family
, Jennifer’s chest felt like a real wooden chest—tiny, hard, and brown—that had suddenly snapped shut. She was fighting back tears. She could not let him see her cry. She could not let him think that she was crying because she still loved him, when she would have been crying because the day they split up she had lost her dream of a certain kind of family too.

“I’m sorry I didn’t warn you before, but you’ve just been dropping them off, and we figured …”

“What?” she said, groping for her indignation again to steady her. “What did you figure? Can you imagine if I had been dating someone for months now and hadn’t told you? And if that guy was sleeping in my bed while the boys were
around, and you had no idea? What if they had asked me about Dina and I’d had no clue who they were talking about?” Jennifer wondered, briefly, why they hadn’t. Jack probably hadn’t thought of it, but Julien might have guessed she’d be upset. “Do you know how humiliating that would have been for me, and how confusing for them?” For the first time, Norman looked remorseful. She was getting somewhere. She kept it up. “Not only that, but have you thought about what it will be like for them if it doesn’t work out with her? If they start to feel like they
are
part of a new family, and then that family breaks up too?”

Norman was silent for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry. But unless Dina leaves me, and I don’t think she will, because we are talking about marriage now, just so you know, and she stays here most of the time—”

“Are you guys
living
together?” Jennifer demanded, feeling pathetic as her voice rose but past caring.

“Let me finish, Jen.” She tried. She dug her fingernails into her palms. “No, we aren’t living together. Not yet. But frankly, I’m not worried about her ever not being in their lives, or mine. Obviously I can’t guarantee that it won’t end. But I know that I don’t want it to end. I feel sure about this. As sure as I’ve felt about anything since … You know.”

He bit his lip.
Acting again
, she thought angrily. And then she thought,
No
.

She knew. Since her. Since the woman he’d loved and married and had two children with, who had left him. It was a betrayal he’d never been able to forgive, perhaps because it was a betrayal he’d never been able to understand. How can you explain to somebody that you once loved him but you don’t anymore, when he still loves you? You can’t. But Norman didn’t love her, not anymore.

“That’s wonderful,” she said, as calmly as she could. “I’m happy for you.”

“You know I’d be happy for you if you told me you were seeing someone,” he said.

Jennifer laughed, more bitterly than she would have liked. “Please,” she said. “I don’t have time.”

“You’d have time if you let me have the kids more often. They love Dina, and we’ve made the apartment a great place—”

“Norman,” she said, cutting him off, “if you think that my getting a boyfriend or your getting a girlfriend is going to get you more custody of the boys—”

“I’m not talking about me or my time with the boys. I’m talking about you.”
Oh God.
She could feel her emotions swelling again. She didn’t want to feel this way—or any way, for that matter—in front of him. She wanted him to stop, but he kept going. “Don’t you miss having a partner? Someone you can tell your daily story to? Someone who knows what’s going on in your life, who takes care of you, who is your best friend?”

“I’m a mother, Norman,” she said, mustering what was left of her authority. “I take care of our boys. And for a long time, I did it without any help from you. I’m sure I will meet someone someday. But I don’t need someone else to make me feel whole.”

“Not to feel
whole
,” Norman said, his condescending earnestness making her hair stand on end. “To feel
happy
.”

J
ENNIFER CAME HOME TO
an apartment that was empty, dark, and quiet, and flipping on the lights didn’t make it feel more cheery. The sink was full of breakfast dishes, including a bowl rimmed with pancake mix that had hardened into a patina of gummy glue (how had she forgotten to soak it?), and the detritus of peppermint-Styrofoam–Christmas tree making
covered the kitchen table. Jennifer was still carrying the peppermint tree the boys had made for Norman in its white paper bag, having been too embarrassed to give it to him in front of Dina. She set it on the counter carefully, despite herself.

Jennifer took each cushion off the couch one by one and stacked them onto the floor, then wearily unfolded the sofa bed, retrieved the down comforter she stowed in a zippered cube in the corner, and laid it across the mattress pad and flannel sheets that just barely made it habitable. After taking off her boots, jeans, and sweater, she climbed into the bed in her T-shirt, did the gym-class bra-through-the-sleeve trick, and pulled the comforter up around her neck. She drew her knees into her chest and clutched a pillow in her arms. She tried not to think. She needed to sleep. But it was impossible to banish the sight of Norman, one arm around the tiny waist of his new “best friend”—she of the petite, perky butt and prebaby belly—guiding the boys as they carefully sprinkled red and green sugar onto gingerbread men, completing a picture in which Norman’s last name would be not Bideau, but Rockwell.
A family
, Norman had said. Dina was likely to want to have babies of her own. And then they’d be perfect: husband, wife, baby, and two adorable boys (
her
adorable boys) too. The emptiness of her life without the boys frightened her. The romance propaganda Norman had fed her stuck with her, and stung.
A best friend. Someone to tell your daily story to. Someone who takes care of you.
She tried to laugh. A boyfriend would be just another boy to take care of, she told herself, not someone who would take care of her. But she knew—or hoped, at least— that that wasn’t really true. Norman hadn’t been that man. But Norman had moved on, and where was she? Living a double life that was doubly bereft of grown-up sleepovers or grownup love.

Could it be that Norman was the one evolving, while she was frozen in time?

She needed to cry. She needed to talk to somebody. The healthy thing to do would be to call someone, get herself together, and go out. Instead she took out her phone and pulled up the video of Owen playing “Wish You Were Here.” As soon as she pushed
PLAY
, however, she wished she’d shot it so that she could see his face. Staring at the frets of a shiny red electric guitar was not what the doctor had ordered. She stopped the video. But the song. She wanted to hear the song. Maybe if she heard the song, she could feel like Owen was keeping her company, just a little bit.

On YouTube she found a video of David Gilmour playing “Wish You Were Here” in an
MTV Unplugged
performance from 2009. At first, as she laid her head on her pillow and cradled her headphones to her ears, it was just right. The muscular strumming, the full chorus of two guitars, with Gilmour on lead and another guitarist playing rhythm, soothed her. Heartened, she cranked the volume up high and felt her balled-up fists relax. “A smile from a veil …” Gilmour’s soulful voice filled the little living room, and the aching, enigmatic, Cambridge-boy lyrics were transporting. But then there was the guitar solo. The lyric suspended, Gilmour began to riff, softly, in a high, winsome scat, echoing each note of his guitar, his voice so full of sadness it was as though he had to remember to use it to make a sound. And in that pause, Jennifer’s heart began to ache. When the whole band joined together for the chorus, her heart broke all over again.

How I wish, how I wish you were here.

She began to cry. Suddenly she was filled with a memory of her own little family two winters ago, in her tiny kitchen, cheery then, sprinkling colored sugar onto Christmas cookies, using the cookie cutters she and her mother had used when
she was a little girl. Her, Julien, Jack, … and her mother, together.

Her mother. Her mother, her mother, her mother.

W
HEN SHE WOKE UP
, it was 4:00 a.m. An empty box of tissues sat next to her, and her eyes were still sore from sobbing. Waking up at this time on Saturday night, however— though it was technically Sunday morning—was not unusual. Even when her body was terribly sleep-deprived after a week of using the app, her circadian rhythms prevented her from simply banking the sleep she needed in one big twelve- or fourteen-hour chunk. Vinita had tried to help her, giving her suggestions about light and hydration, as well as bottles of melatonin and valerian root. She’d refused to prescribe a pharmaceutical sleeping aid, however, saying, with typical bluntness, “You are already walking around with your head up your app, and you want me to put you on Ambien so you can have sex and drive at the same time too?” (Vinita had been unmoved by Jennifer’s objection that she was not having any sex.) Jennifer had finally had to make peace with her new sleep cycle, and had been encouraged by an article she’d found in the
New York Times
suggesting that the eight-hours-of-sleep standard was a relatively new invention, tied to the eight-hour workday. Apparently, the article said, it had once been commonplace for people to have a “first sleep,” wake up for a few hours, and then settle back into their “second sleep,” as Jennifer was now wont to do. Experiments had shown that subjects put into a sensory-deprivation chamber eventually settled into this pattern, too, suggesting it was the most natural one for human beings. Jennifer took comfort in this despite the fact that the reason for her first and second sleeps was about as far from natural as blue Gatorade.

This 4:00 a.m. awakening, however, came with a numb sense of sadness. Depression, her mother had once told her, could be like a warm blanket you pulled over yourself. It was hard to throw it off, because when you did, you were met not with a blast of happiness but with a blast of cold air. Jennifer had struggled with depression before, too, though nothing as crippling or long-lasting as the episodes that had plagued her mother, and she could feel it coming over her now. Her body felt immobilized, affixed to the bed like an insect with a pin through the thorax; her mind squirmed with anxious thoughts, painting the circumstances of her life progressively darker. She passed an hour this way, angry that she hadn’t managed to extract at least one sleeping pill from Vinita, suffering and stuck and longing for the blackout of a truly restful sleep, the kind of sleep, frankly, that she hadn’t known since Wishful Thinking had entered her life. These days her brain seized every sleeping minute to process and sort all that had happened during her double day, tossing through the jumble like a valiant but battered little brain ship trying not to capsize.

But there she lay. The world was asleep, and at least one of her children was very likely in bed right now with Dina, a stranger, who Jennifer prayed always wore a nightgown. (With sweatpants underneath.) The thought of this was enough to rouse her to a sitting position. She knew she should text Vinita. Throw up a flare. It was still dark, and she didn’t bother with a light, instead squinting at her phone and typing like a drunk.

Norman has GF,
she managed (autocorrect suggesting
God
for
GF
, causing her to snort),
29, sleeping in bed with the boys. Help!
She hit
SEND
. At least she had reached out to somebody from under her depression blanket. Vinita would see it first thing in the morning. That was enough for now.

To her surprise, however, Jennifer immediately heard a corresponding
ping
.

Norman has a 29 y.o. GF?
came the reply.
How unoriginal!

“How unoriginal?” That didn’t sound like Vinita. Jennifer looked at the phone more closely. She had texted Dr. Sexton by mistake. Dr. Sexton was the last person she had texted that day, as they had been attempting to set up a check-in time to discuss the app. She laughed.

Sorry, Dr. S
, she typed.
Meant to text V.

The response was again immediate.
Would you like to come over for tea?

Tea? At 4:00 a.m.? She wasn’t likely to get another such invitation. She usually spent the hours between her first and second sleep reading. But given that she was currently reading a nonfiction book about a child trapped in the slums of Mumbai, where teenage girls routinely swallowed rat poison to escape the horrors of their impoverished lives, reading seemed unwise.

Yes please
, she replied.

Excellent
, Dr. Sexton wrote.
See you soon.

Jennifer lay still for a moment. Did she really want to get up?

Then she heard it. Her mother’s voice.
You may not want to get up,
the voice whispered,
but you have to.

Shaking a little, Jennifer threw off the blanket and got dressed. Just as she was about to walk out the door, she glimpsed the white paper bag with the peppermint Christmas tree in it. She grabbed it by the handles, tucked it under one arm, and headed for apartment 19D.

J
ENNIFER KNOCKED LIGHTLY ON
Dr. Sexton’s door. After hearing her unmistakable, ringing voice call out, “Come in, my dear!” Jennifer entered the apartment, placing the white paper bag with the peppermint tree on the table in the foyer. Upon entering the living room, she was greeted by an astonishing sight: Dr. Sexton, curled up with Lucy, in front of a crackling fire. It was a lovely picture, except that Jennifer was quite certain Dr. Sexton didn’t have a fireplace. When a log suddenly lurched downward to join the growing bed of ashes beneath the grate, however, and the smell of wood-burning smoke drifted toward her, spurring her to quickly close the door so as not to set off the smoke alarm in the hallway, Jennifer could only stammer.