The Mother's Promise(47)
Sonja wanted to tell her that George hadn’t threatened her. That the truth was, she didn’t want to get away. She liked having a warm body beside her while she slept. She enjoyed the money—or at least, not having to worry about it. And his intelligence! When he delivered a keynote, people hung off his every word, and afterward people stood around, just trying to get close to him. That was the kind of presence he had. She liked being married to someone like that.
“If you’re not ready to leave, there are still things you can do,” Dagmar continued. “Reach out to friends and family so you know you’re supported. Most victims of abuse wind up isolated—through their own or their partner’s efforts. It’s important that you remain connected to loved ones so you have options if you do decide to leave.”
It was preposterous. Sonja wasn’t going to leave George. Still, she thought about her family. When was the last time she called her sister, Agnes? More than a year ago, at least.
“And when things start to get ugly—make sure you speak up. Tell him you don’t like what he’s doing and if he continues, you will leave. Even if you won’t leave him, you can leave the room or the house, if appropriate.”
“I appreciate your concern, Dagmar. But George is not abusive. Honestly, you’ve got your wires crossed.”
Dagmar’s expression didn’t so much as flicker. “At least document it, then. The wrist. The hip. Take photographs and e-mail them to someone you trust. Or to yourself. With dates and an outline of what happened. Then you’ll have it. In case you ever need it.”
Sonja opened her mouth to tell Dagmar, again, that she was wrong about what she was suggesting. But when they locked eyes something passed between them and then she didn’t feel the need to say anything at all.
33
Kate was feeling resentful even before David walked in that evening. She couldn’t help it. As she stirred the dinner she tried to talk herself out of it. It’s Jake’s birthday, she told herself. Let’s just have a nice evening. She pictured her anger sitting in her belly, a bitter seed, and then imagined removing it with her hands and flinging it out to sea, like she’d been taught to do in a meditation class once. But even after flinging it, it continued to burn just as hot in the pit of her stomach.
The irony was, this was how new mothers seemed to feel. When her cousin Stella had her baby, Kate recalled her saying that she couldn’t even look at her husband without wanting to punch him—something about his presence in the room just set her off. It was natural, Stella had explained, for new mothers to feel like this. It was the body’s way of preventing another birth before it was ready. Kate suspected it had more to do with hormones and the sleep deprivation, but oh how Kate yearned for those hormones and that sleep deprivation. Being angry with her husband for giving her a child was far preferable to being angry with him for not giving her one.
“Hey,” David said when he got home. He was home early from work, a quarter past six. “Is it just us?”
“For now,” she said. She was wiping down the bench, not meeting his eye. They were speaking civilly, like they always did, but there was an undercurrent. “Hilary, Jake, and Scarlett are on their way. Hilary is bringing a cake and I’ve made spaghetti Bolognese.”
She was trying hard to be pleasant and it was uncomfortable and awful. Yet letting it out simply didn’t feel like an option.
“That’s really what he wants for his birthday dinner?”
“He’s a man of simple tastes,” Kate said. Like his father, she wanted to add, but it sounded too friendly, too conciliatory. And she was not feeling conciliatory.
She wasn’t sure why she was so riled up. It hadn’t been an unpleasant day. She’d spent the morning at the hospital and none of her patients had taken particularly bad turns. Even Alice seemed to be recovering well from the operation and should be discharged tomorrow. She’d spent the afternoon grocery shopping for Jake’s birthday dinner. Usually Kate loved the suburban humdrum of grocery shopping. She even enjoyed family dinners. Jake and Scarlett were good kids (how could they not be, with parents like Hilary and David?), and when they all got together she always felt a strange sort of pride at how harmoniously their blended family worked. In the early days, when she, David, Hilary and Danny and the kids gathered around the dining room table, Kate had always imagined the high chair that would one day be pushed up against the table. The chubby face that would be covered in red sauce. The big brother and sister who would lovingly talk about how annoying their li’l bro or sis was. The “annoying” kid who would be the apple of the family’s eye.
Kate had had such a clear picture of it all. And now that the image had been denied her, Kate felt cheated. It was, she realized, her own fault—marriage wasn’t meant to be conditional. But hadn’t she, during the last two years while she’d been playing the role of doting stepmother and new wife, been doing it on a silent promise of something to come? Hadn’t she signed up for a life that she’d only be happy with if certain conditions were met? She must have, because now that she understood David’s conviction that they should not have a child, she couldn’t seem to summon that old affection for Hilary, Jake, and Scarlett. Instead, she found herself entertaining different thoughts. Who are these strangers in my living room? These children who aren’t my own, this motherly figure who was once married to my husband? What happened to the things I’d assumed would once be mine—the big belly, the Lamaze breathing, the fluffy toys? The child who at certain angles looked like me and at other angles looked like David’s aunt Maude? What happened to that?