With stiff jerks of his arms, Dave pulled the decorative pillows off the guest-room bed and tossed them on the floor. “I’m going to sleep,” he announced.
“Wait,” I said. He didn’t answer, just lay on the bed, on his side, knees drawn up toward his chest, hands folded. He might as well have donned a sandwich board reading CLOSED. “Dave.” He didn’t answer. I stood there, wringing my hands, and then I stepped back out into the hallway and closed the door. After the miscarriage, he was the one who’d handled the business of telling both sets of parents that there would still be a wedding but there wouldn’t be a baby. I’d never asked what he’d said, and all he told me was, “There’s nothing for you to worry about. Just concentrate on getting better.” He’d never made me feel like I’d trapped him, and, if his parents had decided I was a gold digger and told him this was his chance to slip free of the handcuffs and make a better choice, he’d never let me hear about it.
I walked back to the master bedroom, remembering when Ellie was six weeks old and barely sleeping two hours at a time and Dave had found, on his own, a little cottage at Bethany Beach. “Maybe the sound of the water will calm her down,” he’d said, and I’d been so frayed, so exhausted, shuffling through my days like a zombie in need of a shower, that I’d agreed, thinking that anything had to be better than the nights of screams we’d endured. Dave had packed for all three of us, considerately choosing only my most comfortable leggings and sweatpants, nothing with an actual waistband or buttons or zippers, because my scar was still tender and my actual waist was still buried under rolls of water weight and pregnancy bloat. He’d picked out onesies and tiny cotton pants for Ellie, as well as the dye-and-scent-free detergent we washed her stuff in; he’d packed my breast pump and bottles and ni**les and pacifiers, rattles and board books and burp cloths and diaper cream and the dozens of items, big and small, that the baby required. He had loaded up the little Honda, slotting the Pack ’n Play and the suitcases, the bassinet and the jogging stroller into the trunk as if expertly engineering a game of Tetris.
In the cottage, a pair of sunwashed rooms plus a galley kitchen, he’d instructed me to nap on the daybed on the porch while Ellie, who’d fallen asleep after a hundred miles of wailing, slept in her car seat beside me, and he made the beds and set up the Pack ’n Play. He’d held the baby while I swam. The cottage was on the bay, and there was a little island, just a clump of trees and shrubs and wild blackberries, maybe a quarter of a mile out. I’d done the crawl all the way there, then br**ststroked back, feeling my heart beating hard, the muscles of my chest and shoulders working, and then I’d flipped on my back and let the salt water buoy me and the waves rock me. “Don’t worry, I’ve got her,” he said after I’d rinsed off in the outdoor shower and had nursed Ellie on the porch. He clipped her into the jogging stroller and trotted off to town, returning an hour later with cartons full of shrimp and fries, clams and coleslaw—a feast, exactly what I was craving. “I’ve got her,” he said again that night, and I’d collapsed onto the crisp sheets just after seven, falling almost instantly into the deepest sleep I could remember.
When I woke up to the rosy glow of the sunrise, it was just after five in the morning. Ellie had slept through the night—there she was, blinking calmly from the center of the bed, where Dave had put her. He was on her other side in his familiar position, curled up with his knees pulled toward his chest, in his T-shirt and his boxers, dark hair sticking up in unruly cowlicks, breathing deeply, not quite snoring as he slept. I could hear the sound of the waves through the window, and of Ellie smacking her lips while she wiggled her fingers in the air and stared as if they were the best movie she’d ever seen. Now we are three, I thought. That thought filled me with such unalloyed delight that it took my breath away. This was what it meant to be a family; all three of us, so close. This was what I’d worked for and wanted since I was a little girl.
Now my husband was taking some other woman to lunch. He thought that I was spacey. No, actually, he thought I was a junkie. Worse, he was discontented with his life, our life, in a way I couldn’t understand and, thus, couldn’t fix. Had we ever really been that happy, I wondered, remembering that morning at the beach, or had I still been taking the post-C-section Percocet?
The bottle of OxyContin was still in my purse, but there were Vicodin on the bedside table. I crunched two pills between my teeth and lay back on the pillow, remembering to set the alarm on my phone so that I could wake up at six the next morning, when the life I’d always wanted would start all over again.