Landline

This changed everything.

Didn’t it?

If Neal had already proposed to her in the past, then Georgie must have already convinced him in the future. It didn’t matter what happened now. What she said. Whether he called her back.

Whatever Georgie did next had already happened. She was walking in her own footsteps—there was nothing she could mess up.

She leaned close to the phone and lifted the receiver to her ear, slamming it down again as soon as she heard a dial tone.

Is that what this whole week was about, preserving the status quo? Maybe she should be grateful for that. . . .

But Georgie had thought—she’d hoped—that this wrinkle in time was offering her a shot at something better.

God, what good is a magic phone, anyway? It isn’t a time machine.

Georgie couldn’t change the past—she could only talk at it. If Georgie had a proper time machine, maybe she could actually fix her marriage. She could go back to the moment that everything started to go bad, and change course.

Except . . .

There hadn’t really been a moment like that.

Things didn’t go bad between Georgie and Neal. Things were always bad—and always good. Their marriage was like a set of scales constantly balancing itself. And then, at some point, when neither of them was paying attention, they’d tipped so far over into bad, they’d settled there. Now only an enormous amount of good would shift them back. An impossible amount of good.

The good that was left between them didn’t carry enough weight. . . .

The kisses that still felt like kisses. The notes Neal stuck to the refrigerator when Georgie got home late. (A sleepy cartoon tortoise with a word bubble telling her there were leftover enchiladas on the bottom shelf.) Shared glances when one of the girls said something silly. The way Neal still put his arm around her when they all went to the movies. (He was probably just more comfortable that way.)

So much of what was still good between them was through Alice and Noomi—but Alice and Noomi were so solidly between them.

Georgie was pretty sure that having kids was the worst thing you could do to a marriage. Sure, you could survive it. You could survive a giant boulder falling on your head—that didn’t mean it was good for you.

Kids took a fathomless amount of time and energy. . . . And they took it first. They had right of first refusal on everything you had to offer.

At the end of the day—after work, after trying to spend some sort of meaningful time with Alice and Noomi—Georgie was usually too tired to make things right with Neal before they fell asleep. So things stayed wrong. And the girls just kept giving them something else to talk about, something else to focus on. . . .

Something else to love.

When Georgie and Neal were smiling at each other, it was almost always over Alice and Noomi’s heads.

And Georgie wasn’t sure she’d risk changing that . . . even if she could.

Having kids sent a tornado through your marriage, then made you happy for the devastation. Even if you could rebuild everything just the way it was before, you’d never want to.

If Georgie could talk to herself in the past, before the scales tipped, what would she say? What could she say?

Love him.

Love him more.

Would that make a difference?

When Georgie was eight months pregnant with Alice, she and Neal still hadn’t settled on a day care.

Georgie thought maybe they should get a nanny. They could almost afford one. She and Seth had just started working on their third show, a CBS sitcom about four mismatched roommates who hung out in a coffee shop. Neal called it Store-Brand Friends.

Neal was working in pharmaceutical research then. He’d thought about graduate school for a while but didn’t know what he wanted to study, so he got a job in a lab. Then he got another job in another lab. He hated it, but at least he worked better hours than Georgie. Neal was done every day by five—and home making dinner by six.

There was a nice day care they were considering on the studio lot. They went and visited, and Georgie put their name on the waiting list.

It was going to be fine, Neal said. It was all going to be fine.

It was just happening so fast.

They’d always assumed they’d have kids someday, but they hadn’t really talked through the details. The closest they’d come was on that first date, when Georgie said that she wanted kids and Neal hadn’t argued.

After they’d been married for seven years, it seemed like they should probably get on with it—the trying, not the talking. Georgie was already thirty, and lots of her friends had had fertility problems. . . .

She got pregnant the first month they stopped using condoms.

And then it was happening. And they still didn’t talk about it. There was no time. Georgie was so tired by the time she got home from the show, she fell asleep most nights on the couch during prime time. Neal would wake her up and walk behind her up their narrow staircase, his hands supporting her hips and his head resting between her shoulder blades.

It was all going to be fine, he said.

Georgie was thirty-seven weeks along when they went out to celebrate their eighth wedding anniversary. They walked to an Indian restaurant near their house—their old house in Silver Lake—and Neal talked her into having a glass of wine. (“One glass of red wine isn’t going to hurt at this point.”) They talked about the studio day care some more; it was Montessori, Georgie said—for probably the third time that night—and the kids had their own vegetable garden.

There was an Indian family sitting one table over. Georgie was terrible at guessing kids’ ages before she had her own, but the family had a little girl who must have been about a year and a half. She was toddling from chair to chair, and she reached out and grabbed Georgie’s armrest, smiling up at her triumphantly. The girl wore a pink silk dress and pink silk leggings. She had a cap of black hair and gold studs in her ears. “Oh—sorry,” the girl’s mother said, leaning over and sweeping the child up onto her lap.

Georgie set her glass down too hard, and wine splashed out onto the yellow tablecloth.

“Are you okay?” Neal asked, his eyes dropping to her stomach. He’d been looking at Georgie differently since she started to show, like she might split open at anytime without warning.

“I’m fine,” she said, but her chin was wobbling.

“Georgie—” Neal took her hand. “—what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know what we’re doing,” she whispered. “I don’t know why we’re doing this.”