The Identicals(99)

Tabitha drives past. The road becomes a dead end, but there is enough privacy for Tabitha to feel like she can pull over and rest a second.

She swigs from the bottle of wine. And that, as it turns out, is the swallow that unlocks the vault in her mind.



It’s mid-August of 2003. Julian is not yet three months old. Tabitha looks like a woman who has been lost in the wilderness and given up for dead. She hasn’t eaten a full meal or slept more than a few hours at a time since Julian was born. She and Julian are at home with Wyatt and Ainsley now; they have been permitted to leave the hospital, which makes things both better and worse. Better, because who wants to live in a hospital? Worse, because in the hospital, Julian was monitored all day every day.

Now that they’re home, Wyatt has gone back to work, and Tabitha has been left with both Ainsley and Julian. Tabitha is frazzled, but that word is too cute to describe how on edge she is. At the end of their first full week at home, she snaps at Ainsley. When Ainsley cries, Tabitha shakes her, hard. Not hard enough to hurt her, but hard enough to scare herself. Tabitha calls Wyatt at work, sobbing. She can’t do it, she says. She can’t do it alone. He needs to come home and help her.

And then we’ll do what for money? he asks. He flat-out refuses to accept financial help from Eleanor. It’s almost like he’s daring Tabitha to suggest it so he can leave her.

Never mind, Tabitha says.



The next day, Harper walks in the door.

“I’m here,” she announces triumphantly, as though she is the answer to all Tabitha’s problems. “I took four days off work. I don’t have to go back until Sunday.” From her bag, she produces a bottle of Billecart-Salmon brut rosé champagne, which, she says, is ambrosial; she lifted this bottle from the restaurant where she waitresses, Dahlia’s.

“But you paid for it, right?” Tabitha says.

“Right,” Harper says with a wink. “With my hard work and exemplary attitude.”

Tabitha can’t bring herself to care that Harper stole a bottle of champagne from her workplace. What does it matter?

“We won’t get a chance to drink it anyway,” Tabitha says. “I’m nursing.”

“So pump and dump,” Harper says. “I’m sure you have enough breast milk stored in the freezer to feed the Gosselin kids. This bottle has our names on it.”

“Whatever, Harper,” Tabitha says. She feels teary again for no reason; maybe because she desperately wants to drink champagne, but she just can’t. Julian starts to cry, and Harper says, “There’s my baby.” She points at Tabitha. “You sit. Or, better still, go take a nap. I’ll handle the kids, then get started on dinner. You look like Flat Stanley.”

Tabitha wants to protest. She wants to remind Harper that she has no idea how to take care of a toddler or a sick infant; it’s not something she can bluff her way through. But Tabitha is too tired to state her objections. The idea of a nap, an uninterrupted nap, followed by a home-cooked meal is too seductive to turn down.



As it turns out, Harper is a competent nursemaid and an excellent cook. She makes a bouillabaisse filled with scallops, mussels, and chunks of lobster. Tabitha eats three bowls with salad and crusty bread to sop up the juices, and then, amazingly, she feels like a human again.

Harper’s arrival on Nantucket is, in fact, an answer of sorts. Ainsley is two years old and newly verbal; she asks questions nonstop, the most frequent of which is Why? To which Harper chooses among three answers:

Because there is pie in the sky.

Because there’s a sty in my eye.

Because the guy makes me sigh.

Ainsley accepts all three responses with a solemn nod, as though she is being handed valuable pieces of wisdom.

Harper is also terrific with Julian. She doesn’t mention how pallid he looks; she doesn’t compare his feeble crying to the sound of a windup toy that is running out of windup. She treats him as though he were a normal baby. She calls him stud and stallion. And when he’s inconsolable and won’t settle or nurse, Harper dances him around the room, singing “If I Had $1000000,” by the Barenaked Ladies, which puts him instantly to sleep.

Wyatt is impressed. “She’s good with him.”

Tabitha nods. Half of her is resentful that Harper has proved so skillful with the children, but half of her is relieved. She has slept more since Harper has been here than she has in the three months prior.

On her last full day, Harper gets up early and rides Tabitha’s bike into town. She comes home with a bouquet of wildflowers that she bought from one of the farm trucks on Main Street.

“Something to remember me by,” she says, putting the flowers in water and leaving them on the kitchen counter. “And by the way, we’re going out tonight.”

“No, we’re not,” Tabitha says.

“Yes, we are,” Harper says. “Wyatt okayed it. He’ll stay home with the kids. He thinks it’s a good idea.”

“He does not think it’s a good idea,” Tabitha says. Wyatt is terrified of being left alone with the children, which is one reason for Tabitha’s exhaustion.

“Well, I talked him into it,” Harper says. “We are going to drink the champagne I brought, we are going out to dinner, and we are going to dance at the Chicken Box.”

At this, Tabitha laughs. There is no way they’re dancing at the Chicken Box. Tabitha hasn’t been to the Chicken Box since her first summer on Nantucket. “I don’t think you get it,” she says, “because you live a life free of responsibility. But I have two children, Harper. I’m a mother. I can’t just go out on a wild bender.”