so eventually—with the help of your parents, your cajoling friends, and a romantic co-conspirator—you do. That was my state of mind before I went to Iraq. By the time I got back, I knew that life could be snatched away at any moment, and the only sensible thing to do was get married and start procreating.
Molly and I were still in the glow of infatuation when we walked down the aisle. The first year was a good one. But after she got pregnant—a planned decision—the reality of having a child started to come home to us, and particularly to her. To my consternation, as the fetus grew inside her, and she ballooned up in the later months, she began to feel that our baby was a parasitical being, sapping the life from her, changing her irrevocably. At first I thought Molly was only half-serious. And surely, I reasoned, such feelings must be common among professional women? They would inevitably pass. But within two weeks of delivering Adam (yes, I named my son after my dead brother), I witnessed something I had never quite understood before: postpartum depression.
With the clarity of hindsight, I now believe Molly never recovered from that condition—not while we were together. We consulted a parade of medical experts, tried several promising therapies, and went to great lengths to get first-class child care so that Molly could return to her career. Nothing worked. Two years passed like that—a mostly wonderful time for Adam and me, but for Molly a sort of shadow play that never quite became real. She stayed emotionally muted, exhausted, and irritable when she did feel alert. She resented the demands of motherhood, but also the demands of her job. And then—just as I was considering a radical job change to try to improve the situation—I discovered that death had been hovering over us once more, just as it had when I was fourteen.
In late August, I was working in the main offices of the Post, on Fifteenth and L, where Woodward and Bernstein did the work that made me want to follow in their footsteps. I was supposed to be home by six thirty, to take over caring for Adam so that Molly could attend a network event. Then I got a call from CNN. Could I run over to their studio and appear on Lou Dobbs Tonight to discuss President Bush signing the bailout bill, and the suspension of trading on both Russian stock exchanges? This was before the era of ubiquitous pundits on television every night, so it was something I felt I should do. Molly agreed, though she let me know she wasn’t happy about giving up her evening to babysit our two-year-old.
I was in the midst of the interview when my cell phone vibrated an emergency code in my pocket. By the time I got off camera and checked it, the emergency was over. Molly had taken Adam to a friend’s condo about fifty yards up the street from ours. She and Taryn Waller had started drinking wine and commiserating over their husbands’ unreasonable work hours, while Adam—comatose after an ice cream cone—slept in the TV room down the hall. Taryn was pouring their fourth glass of wine when Molly realized she hadn’t checked on Adam in a while. When she went to the TV room, she didn’t see him.
They found him behind the condo, at the bottom of the Wallers’ swimming pool. While Molly and Taryn were talking, our son had awakened and somehow crawled through a homemade pet entrance set in the Wallers’ back door. He wandered onto the patio, where there was no pool fence or motion alarm. The police report said it appeared that Adam had simply walked off the edge of the swimming pool into six feet of water. He never made a sound. None that Molly heard, anyway.
Our marriage did not survive his loss.
You hear all the time how the death of a child always leads to divorce. In truth, most times it doesn’t. Sometimes that kind of tragedy strengthens a marriage. I can see how it would happen, if you were married to the right person. I wasn’t. For four years I had tried to convince myself that I was, but the fissure that opened in our relationship after Adam died proved me wrong. I tried not to blame Molly. Whether I was successful in that effort or not, she believed that I blamed her, and that—combined with her own sense of guilt—had