I’d planned on staying in bed indefinitely, but now Nana was here, ushering the girls into my bedroom, where they found me showered, in a clean nightgown, on clean sheets.
“Mommy!” cried Delaney, racing across the room to vault onto the mattress and into my arms. Her hair was done in a fancy French braid—courtesy of Aunt Katie, I assumed—and she was wearing strawberry-scented lip gloss and her favorite maxi-dress.
“Why are you in here?” asked Adele, whose book-crammed backpack was still hanging from her skinny shoulders.
“I have taken to my bed. It’s like an in-service day.”
“Yay!” Delaney whooped, and went dashing to her bedroom. Delaney was a pistol. Older people said she looked like Shirley Temple; people my age saw a brunette Annie. She was delightfully plump, with light-brown ringlets and a constant smile, the adorableness of which was only enhanced by the gap where her front teeth used to be.
“You want us to wear our nightgowns in the daytime?” asked Adele. She had the same light-brown hair as her younger sister, only hers was thick and straight, cut, at her insistence, in an old-fashioned ear-length bob. She’d been sober, reserved, thoughtful, and cautious ever since she was an infant, when she’d squirm away from hugs and cuddles in order to gaze at dust motes in a beam of sunshine, or a bug batting itself against a window, or her own baby fingers wiggling in the air. Some days I thought she’d be a scientist, because of the way she’d assess every situation, considering every potential outcome before committing, whether the action in question was jumping into a swimming pool or blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.
Some days I wondered what had made her such a pessimist, perpetually braced for disappointments: the wrong kind of sandwich in her lunchbox, the wrong color tights laid out on her bed, the scary sixty-year-old first-grade teacher instead of the pretty Miss Rose, who had a tiny, glittery stud in her nose and a tattoo of birds on her shoulder. Delaney loved sweets; Adele had been known to dismiss desserts as “too rich.” Delaney left a litter of toys and shoes and clothing wherever she went. Adele kept her room hospital-neat, and had told me more than once that we didn’t need to spend money on a cleaning lady when we could just clean up after ourselves. On vacation, Delaney adored ordering room service, and would watch eagerly while the waiter wheeled the white-draped cart into our room, then opened up its wings, turning it into a table. Adele, meanwhile, would scrutinize the bill, purse her lips at the 18 percent delivery surcharge, and tell her sister that it would be much less expensive to just eat in the restaurant. “Or we could just bring food from home!”
Once, after a five-year-old classmate’s birthday party where Adele had refused to play in the ball pit—“because there are germs in there,” she’d earnestly explained, “and because also, what if somebody pees?”—I’d been so concerned that I’d taken her to a therapist, who reassured me that children were different, that to a large degree their personalities were hardwired, and that I should love Adele the way she was while doing my best to show her that the world was not a terrible place full of bad things just waiting to happen. I wondered how I could get her to believe that now.
“Why do we need our nightgowns?” she asked.
“We are taking to our beds,” I repeated. “Well, my bed, technically.”
“I have homework,” Adele protested.
“You are lying,” I said. “I know for a fact that your teachers didn’t give you anything over the weekend.”
Adele fidgeted, frowning. “I want to read ahead.”
“Can I watch Victorious?” Delaney wheedled, skipping back into the bedroom in her flannel Lanz nightgown with the iPad already in her hand. I shut my eyes. I couldn’t remember if that was a show we let her see or something we’d decided was too mature, but I knew that Jay and I had discussed it, probably in this very bed. Probably I hadn’t been paying attention. More likely than not, I’d had my phone on and my earpiece tucked into my ear and I’d been solving some other mother’s problems.
“You’re in charge of the entertainment,” I told Delaney, ignoring her big sister’s gasp. Then I pointed at Adele. “You’re in charge of dinner. You can pick what we’re having. There’s money in the cookie jar.” “Seriously?” Amy had once asked when I’d told her I kept my money in the cookie jar. “That is so 1950s.”
When Delaney was engrossed in her program and Adele was sorting through menus, her straight hair obscuring her cheeks and the tip of her tongue poking out, I found Nana in the living room. She was dressed in one of what I’d always thought of as her New York outfits—tailored tweed pants, low-heeled leather boots, a cream-colored pullover, clothes she’d bought at Saks Fifth Avenue when she came to the city (there were, of course, Saks stores in Florida, but Nana said they didn’t have the inventory of New York City). I looked at myself, in my stretched-out ten-year-old nightgown and my hair that I’d washed and combed but hadn’t dried or styled.