Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,104
of what?” she asked.
When Andrew didn’t reply, she understood: he meant their life together, all of it.
Andrew said he was tired, that he was going to bed, even though it was only eight o’clock.
“I’ll sleep in the den,” he said.
“Seriously? Honey, I—”
She saw something flicker in his eye.
“What?” she said.
“When we were doing IVF, you wanted a second baby. Then all of a sudden, you didn’t. Is this why? Because you thought you’d have to go on supporting Charlotte? You kept talking about how expensive another kid would be.”
“Yes,” she said, though it was another lie. What was wrong with her?
She needed Andrew on her side. He had never not been on her side before.
Elisabeth felt terrified, watching him climb the stairs, like he might not come back down.
She wondered what Charlotte was doing now. Elisabeth imagined her in some dive bar, crying to Davey about how unfair it was.
She looked at her Instagram for clues, not that Charlotte would ever share a photo from this place, with its gray skies and suburban houses and fully clothed people.
The latest picture had been posted twenty minutes earlier.
Charlotte in a metallic one-piece, the sides cut out to reveal her abs to such an extent that it was somehow more revealing than a string bikini would have been.
She was laughing, head thrown back in a solid impression of joy. It was nighttime. Behind her was a palm tree, strung with white Christmas lights. The text beneath said: Merry + Bright xoxo @ Renaissance Island, Aruba.
Where was Charlotte when she typed those words? In the passenger seat of her weird boyfriend’s rental car? When was the picture taken? Elisabeth thought of typing a comment along the lines of Don’t believe her. She’s full of shit. She’s probably eating her feelings in a Taco Bell parking lot right now.
Elisabeth took a deep breath. Her eyes landed on a silver gift bag on the kitchen counter. A bottle of wine poked out from the top. It was the present Sam brought on her last day of work.
She thought of Sam, how these rooms were usually theirs, and felt so tranquil.
Elisabeth imagined Sam presenting her mother with the portrait she’d made, her mother bursting into tears at the sight of it. She would be crying at the memory of her own mother, the woman in the painting, only because she was gone; the memories all happy ones.
She pictured Sam in the bosom of her good, solid family on Christmas. Eggnog—but not too much—and homemade cookies, and more cousins than you could count. Elisabeth was long past wishing she could have all that, since there was no point. But now she wished it for Gil.
The thought even made her a bit sad for her own mother, whose father died when she was twelve; her mother went into a psych ward and never came out. She was raised by indifferent relatives, bounced around until she turned eighteen. Treated by all, she had told them, like a burden.
Could Elisabeth blame her mother, without considering what she had been through? Without weighing the sins of the mother who came before her, and the one before that? She didn’t want to carry it, but she had no choice. She was made up of women she’d never met. How to escape them and become something new?
She remembered a night, a year ago, when she was pregnant and walking home from a book party, thinking of what kind of mother she would be. She was too like her own mother, she feared, but softer edged. In her mother’s stories of a younger self, she was soft too. Maybe Elisabeth needed to try to be the person her mother would have become had her life not been so harsh.
That’s what she’d been thinking then.
Now, she looked again at the gift bag on the counter. She went toward it, as if toward the light.
* * *
—
In the morning, she woke up with a headache. She had had too much of Sam’s wine before bed. Elisabeth had thought that maybe Andrew would be there when she got upstairs, but he had been serious about sleeping in the den. For the first time ever, they slept in separate rooms under the same roof. There was something so alarming about it. That after ten years, a shift like that could occur.
When she got to the kitchen, Andrew was already there, washing dishes.
“Hi,” he said.
She tried to assess his tone. Neutral, she decided.