new casts of characters. Elisabeth had only recovered from the real thing when she went away to college and met her best friend, the person who understood her better than anyone.
She missed Nomi more than she had since the day she left Brooklyn.
* * *
—
They had to walk through campus to get to town. Elisabeth noted a small group of college girls standing at the bus stop, wearing basically nothing. She wondered where they were going dressed like that in the middle of the week. They had on far too much makeup, and shoes they couldn’t walk in. They looked like overgrown toddlers, unsure of their footing. Sometimes she was so glad to be old.
Pam hooked her arm through Elisabeth’s, in a show of forced intimacy.
“Tell us about your husband. He’s—an inventor? I think that’s what someone told me. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Elisabeth said. “He was a consultant until recently, but he’s had this idea in mind for years, and he decided to go for it.”
She tried to sound enthusiastic.
“What’s the idea?” Karen said.
“It’s a solar-powered grill.”
She expected them to ask her to explain, as most people did when the grill came up.
But Melody exclaimed, “He was on Shark Tank!”
“No,” Elisabeth said.
“Yes! I remember the solar-powered grill. It had a clever name. Fun Sun? Bun Sun?”
“That wasn’t him.”
Melody frowned. “Oh.”
They reached the edge of town, and Stephanie tripped in the crosswalk, teetering into a food-delivery guy in his twenties. Stephanie grabbed hold of him to steady herself, then said out loud, “Debbie, feel this arm, it’s like a hunk of marble.”
The kid appeared to be as horrified as Elisabeth felt.
When they got to Lanchard’s and sat down at the bar, the Laurels were so loud and rude and annoying that people kept giving them dirty looks, and Elisabeth had the urge to shout, I’m not with these women!
She glanced around the room. There, at a table in the corner with half a dozen other girls, was Sam.
Elisabeth’s relief upon seeing her was perhaps out of proportion with how close they were. Sam had only been watching Gil for a month. Still, Elisabeth was fond of her.
The sight of Sam felt like being rescued.
On Sam’s first day, Elisabeth had purposely scheduled a therapy session at ten so she would be forced to leave the house. But it felt too soon to go to the office space she had rented as a place to write. After therapy, she went to the campus art museum. Standing in front of a painting of what looked like a blood-splattered mermaid, she began to panic. What had she been thinking leaving her precious child with a stranger, a virtual child herself?
She nearly jumped when a wrinkled woman with white hair touched her elbow and whispered, “How old is your baby?”
Was she a mind reader? Had Elisabeth hallucinated her?
“The way you’re swaying,” the woman said.
Elisabeth realized that she was moving her hips left and then right, left and then right.
“All new mothers do it, even when the baby isn’t there,” the woman said. “Like when you get off a boat and still feel it rocking.”
She didn’t sound judgmental. But Elisabeth imagined she was wondering why the mother of an infant was alone in a third-rate art museum on a Monday.
“Have a good day,” she said, and walked straight home.
The closer she got, the faster she moved. Her nipples pricked with pain. Sam wasn’t expecting her. She might have stuck the baby in the crib and gone off to study in another room, headphones blocking the sound of his cries. Or maybe she was shooting up in the basement. Elisabeth’s urge to protect Gil was so primal that, by the time she entered the house and poked her head into the living room, she was already picturing her hands around Sam’s throat.
They were on a blanket on the floor. The baby on his back, staring up at Sam, cooing as she talked sweetly to him.
Sam noticed Elisabeth and said, “Hi there.”
“I left my laptop,” Elisabeth said. “I’m so out of it.”
She went up to her room, closed the door, and slept for the next three hours.
Since that day, she had rarely gotten any meaningful work done. She left the house after Sam arrived and went downtown. Sometimes she ran errands. Sometimes she read in a coffee shop. Sometimes she walked to her office space and jotted down ideas, and sometimes she went intending to do so, but ended up falling asleep on the floor.
But after that