Before I have to dodge her question, Janis’s cell rings. She checks the number and groans. “If that boy forgot his homework or lunch or head again, I will scream.” She slides the phone open and murmurs to her nine-year-old son, “Hey, punkin, what’s up?”
I wave the cookie in the general direction of the hospital’s Mother/Baby Unit upstairs, signaling that I’m heading to work. Janis nods, covers the phone, orders me, “Details. Tomorrow. You have to tell me everything.”
I nod, pretending that I will, and leave Janis asking her son, “Okay, so if you’re ‘three thousand percent’ certain that put your book report in your backpack, is there a chance you left it on the bus?”
The morning after Aubrey’s grand opening five months ago, I woke up refreshed from the first really good night’s sleep I’d gotten since she met Tyler. I walked into the great room and wondered why I had stopped allowing myself to appreciate the glorious light streaming in. I brewed a cup of Earl Grey tea, returned to the room that I now found, indeed, great, sat on the sofa, and watched a Milky Way of dust motes float through the radiance. Each particle was so precise and perfect, it was as if I’d had the prescription in my glasses strengthened.
The celestial stream whirled past and I thought about how I’d stopped drinking coffee. Bobbi Mac had gotten me hooked when I was ten. Just a few tablespoons in the morning with lots of milk and sugar, “to get the heart started.” In Europe, Martin and I had bonded over coffee, me proving to him how inherently sophisticated I was by learning to drink it the way he did, without the three spoons of sugar and half a pitcher of cream that I liked. In Sycamore Heights, coffee became a fetish—arabica, robusta, Jamaican Blue Mountain. I could not have imagined life without coffee any more than I could have imagined life without Martin.
And then, from the instant his sperm seduced my egg, coffee sickened me. One morning I craved it; the very next the smell nauseated me. Coffee became one more thing that Martin and I no longer had in common. In my fifth month, I tried to reclaim that bond and drank a cup of Kona Peaberry. I threw up longer and harder than I had during the morning-sickness months and never repeated the experiment.
Sipping Earl Grey in the great room that morning last August, I thought about Martin, about the life he had denied me, and I waited to be kneecapped by the rage and the sense of betrayal that usually skulked along with the topic. As with coffee, though, my craving for such a dark brew had vanished overnight.
Late that afternoon, Martin took a cab from the Candlewood Suites where he’d taken a long-term rental, stood on my porch, and very solemnly asked me out to dinner.
“How about a walk?” I suggested. “Maybe we can work up to dinner.”
Martin had let out the smallest exhalation. Just enough that I could see that he was sufficiently nervous to be relieved. “A walk would be good.”
We ambled around the Parkhaven reservoir and Martin asked, “Remember coming here? Pushing Aubrey in her stroller? How she used to say ‘dug’ for ‘duck’?”
The answer I would have given him on any day of the past sixteen years would have been a dark, rich house blend of rage, grievance, and sarcasm. No, there are just so many happy family memories to draw on that I lose track. Or, wounded and accusing, I would have demanded, What about all the times I was out here alone and she held her arms out to every male over ten and under seventy and said, “Daddy”? And the walk would have been ruined.
But that day, on what turned out to be the first of many walks, I just said yes, I did remember, and was happy to have someone by my side who also remembered that our daughter used to say “dugs” for “ducks.”
I step out of the elevator on the fifth floor, the Mother/Baby Unit. Beneath the odors of cleansers and sanitizers, machines and humans, I always catch a whiff of caramel. Though no one else I’ve ever pointed it out to can discern the sweet fragrance, I smell the caramel scent I first noticed on Aubrey’s breath, exhaled on the milky breath of all the nursing infants on this floor.