Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,45

of what it had been like to give birth.

After she was done purging every ounce of fluid in her body, Laura lay in bed shivering, feverish, drifting between thoughts and dreams. She wondered repeatedly whether she should get up and take Advil to attempt to break her fever and risk vomiting it up, deciding each time that staying supine and shivering was the best and, for now, only viable course of action. She wished someone would bring her Advil and maybe a handful of freshly fallen snow to wash it down with. She thought about her own mother, when she’d been sick as a child, getting up in the night to bring her medicine and staying with her, rubbing her back until she found sleep again. It was hard to reconcile this memory with the current version of her mother, who never seemed attuned to or curious about the specifics of her continued existence. They talked on the phone once a month or so, and Laura was never exactly honest about anything; her mother still didn’t understand why she was living in New York or how, exactly, she’d ended up with a baby, and this had created a gulf between them that made real communication impossible, so instead they said nonsense things about the minutiae of their days, TV shows that were terrible, her brothers’ kids doing well or badly in school.

Despite all that, Laura still wished for her mother to come and rub her back. When she was little, at least, her mother must have loved her—maybe even loved her as much as Laura now loved Marie. How else could it be possible to take care of someone who needed so much, all the time? The scariest thing was the idea that a similar gulf could someday exist between Laura and Marie. She wanted to cry just thinking about this possibility, but she was too exhausted and dehydrated to even summon tears. It was impossible, anyway. Laura and Marie were always going to be a dyad, united against the oppressive world, as close as they were now, even in an impossible-to-imagine future when Marie did not sleep five feet from Laura and get much of her nourishment from Laura’s body.

As Laura thought this, Marie woke and rustled, as if to determine whether she was unhappy enough to cry. Ultimately she must have decided that yes, she was. With an enormous effort Laura pulled herself out of bed and went to the crib, lifted Marie back into bed with her, and pulled up her shirt to give her a boob. Marie closed her eyes again and kicked both feet against Laura’s leg happily as she soothed herself back into slumber, one hand draped languidly across Laura’s chest and the other gently tugging on a tuft of her own hair.

7

In the spring of 2005, Callie texted Laura and asked her if she could get a drink later in the week, and because it had been probably a month since she’d had any recreational social contact Laura texted back “YES!!” without even checking first to see whether she could get either of Marie’s two favorite sitters.

Luckily, Caroline was free. Marie was obsessed with Caroline. She had actually told Laura that she preferred Caroline’s company to Laura’s, which did sting a bit. “If I got paid sixteen dollars an hour to hang out with you, I’d be much more fun to be around,” Laura felt like telling her, but it wasn’t really the kind of thing you should say to an almost-three-year-old.

In the week leading up to their date, whenever her brain was in an idle mode—doing dishes, picking toys up off the floor, teaching rich ten-year-olds how to play folk songs their grandparents liked—Laura found herself wondering why Callie had gotten back in touch. Their lives and schedules were so different these days that they often went a month or two without seeing each other. The primary way Laura kept tabs on her friends who did things in the world was now via the internet. Callie’s iteration of the Clips had made two albums, played midsize venues all over the country and the world, and had even opened for the Shins on a few dates where they’d played arenas.

They had arranged to meet on the early side, in deference to Laura’s schedule, at a bar in her new neighborhood. As usual, Callie was running almost half an hour late, but Laura didn’t really mind; half an hour to herself, just to be