Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,52
looked at her fellow passengers and tried to guess whether they had children. Something about their faces, she imagined, would always give it away, regardless of age or race. Some harrowed, ennobled thing. But she found that she often couldn’t guess, and she wondered what anyone would guess about her: a woman in her midtwenties, a girl, really, with smeared remnants of last night’s eyeliner and hair that smelled like cigarettes and the tar of a roof where she’d slept.
Last night’s drunken feeling of having severed the invisible cord that tethered her to Marie was now completely gone. She would have run alongside the subway if doing so could have gotten her home any faster. And even so, simultaneously, a contrary part of her still wanted to linger in this moment of being separate and plausibly childless, young again and free.
Matt answered the door in a shirt stained with some kind of pink juice, looking as tired as Laura felt but also genuinely happy to see her. “You look like you had fun last night. How was the show?”
Laura grimaced. “Way too much fun, but it was worth it. Where are the girls?”
“Hiding in Kayla’s room. They’ve been up since five thirty playing some game they invented that involves yelling really loud.”
Again Laura felt the impulse to give Matt a hug. They were like soldiers meeting in a wartime hospital and comparing notes about the battles they’d been injured in. She wondered whether raising a child with someone else felt like that all the time.
She opened the door to Kayla’s room tentatively. The girls were both sitting on Kayla’s bed in a nest of blankets and pillows and stuffed animals and various bits of plastic-toy flotsam and jetsam, and both of them looked perfectly calm and happy. But as soon as Marie saw her mother she ran to her legs and began to cry hysterically.
Laura bent down and embraced Marie, who clung to her with almost bruising force as she continued to cry.
“Mommy, Mommy, why did you leave me?”
“Baby, it was just one night, we talked about this. I had to go play music in another city, but I came right back for you. And you got to have a slumber party with Kayla! Didn’t you have fun?” Hot tears soaked through Laura’s T-shirt. A towering wave of exhaustion washed over her, almost immobilizing her. Marie’s warm little body was so heavy in her arms.
Marie was crying so hard that it was hard to understand what she was saying. “I didn’t know if you would come back,” it sounded like. “I missed you. I was scared.” She said the word so that it sounded like “scowed.”
“Did you tell Matt you were scared?”
“Mommy, don’t do that again. I promise, I won’t be bad.”
“Honey, you weren’t bad. I had to leave you, but it wasn’t because I didn’t want to be with you. I always want to be with you.”
“Then why?” screamed Marie. Kayla dropped a nude doll over the edge of the bed as she watched them with impassive curiosity.
“Baby, sometimes I need to leave, because …”
Marie cried harder and Laura decided to abandon this line of conversation. Anyway, what could she say? That she needed to go to work and make money to support Marie? It was true, but that wasn’t why she’d gone. Was she supposed to explain how it had felt to sing onstage, that it was like one of her limbs had been severed and then reattached and now blood was flowing through it again? Marie would never understand why her mother would choose anything over being with her. “Something else is more important to me than you are” would be what she would hear, no matter what Laura said.
Between her racking sobs, Marie was saying the same thing over and over again, and again it took Laura a second to decipher it; her enunciation was still toddlery and garbled. But when she realized what it was, she felt like her heart and lungs were being scooped out with a dull trowel.
“Mommy, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”
* * *
Three days later, Laura dropped Marie off at day care and then went to meet Callie at Oslo to talk about the rest of the tour. She got there early so that she could order a coffee and sit by herself at a table and try to clear her mind and make a decision, but her mind remained stubbornly clouded over. She got up to get a refill