The Break(32)
Twist again.
Revelation: the truth surfaces.
Resolution.
Every character wants something on every page. When you figure out what that is, and how all the characters’ motivations and scheming fit together, you have a story. Tweak it lighter or darker until you know what you’ve got: drama or comedy. For some writers the line blurs, but for me it’s always a drama.
There’s only one doorbell, which makes me think Sylvie owns the whole townhouse and uses a room inside for her psychology practice. It’s freezing out and so very gray, but we only had to walk a few blocks from our apartment with Lila, and she seems content in Gabe’s arms. Gabe rings the doorbell, and someone buzzes us in right away. Gold-framed pictures line the charming foyer. A wooden staircase arcs up the right side of it, and Sylvie comes out a curved oak door behind the staircase. “Come in,” she says, a wry smile on her lips. “You must be freezing.”
Gabe’s holding a sleeping, snowsuited Lila against his chest. It’s sort of amazing how much she sleeps during the day. I know I’m supposed to do something to turn that around so that she sleeps better at night, but I just don’t see how it’s possible to wake a sleeping newborn. All the books make it sound like you just snap your fingers and they’ll wake up, but Lila sleeps so deeply that none of the advice I’ve read seems to work. I’ve tried taking off her clothes or putting a little cold water against her feet, but it’s a total joke to think that would wake her unless she’s already on the tail end of a nap. And it’s the same thing for her feeds; all the baby books tell you to try to keep them awake while they nurse, but have you ever tried to keep a sleepy baby awake on your boob? Good luck.
Every time I mess things up with Lila I miss my mother so acutely it hurts in a spot right behind my breastbone and doesn’t go away until I fall asleep or cry. I need to bring Lila to the care facility to meet her, but I don’t know how I’m ever going to convince Gabe that it’s a good idea. Gabe’s mom keeps stalling on bringing my mother to see me, telling me she hasn’t been well enough. And it’s true—when I’ve called her, she seems way more out of it than usual. So I’m going to have to go there myself, but Gabe was so nervous when we talked about it with the pediatrician, that she would catch something in that place among all those people crowded together during the winter. I feel a stab of guilt when I think about meeting June in the café: What if Lila caught a virus? Last night after Art called, Gabe told me we had to be more careful, and I thought he meant with Lila, because of the germs she could pick up in a public place. But he corrected me, saying, We have to be more careful with June, Rowan. How much further do you want to push her?
It made me feel so awful when he said that, like I was a predator. I tried to explain that June didn’t seem mad at me or even like I was bothering her; I tried to explain that it was just an apology and that she was the one who texted me to meet. And then Lila woke up and we started the whole nursing and pumping routine that the lactation consultant taught us. Gabe barely looked at me while we counted ounces and sanitized pump parts and tried to get Lila to take the milk from a special infant bottle without throwing it all back up. And then it was midnight and we passed out. At three a.m. we did it all over again, and at that point I didn’t bother looking him in the eye, either.
“Follow me,” Sylvie says. We climb the curving staircase and trail after Sylvie into a second-floor kitchen. I’m getting the idea that this whole place is hers. It’s breathtakingly beautiful, all moldings and doorways and prewar charm. “I’ve got to ask a favor,” she says, and I wake up a little because it’s not what I expect her to say. “One of my clients is in crisis and I need to make sure she’s been admitted to Bellevue. Would you mind waiting here while I make a call for a few minutes?”
Sylvie is booked through next year, or at least that’s the message we got when we tried to make an appointment on our own; she’s definitely not taking new patients. She’s what you’d call a trauma therapist, and she’s supposed to be the best, and we got in with her only because of Harrison’s colleague Louisa Smith at WTA, who went to college with Sylvie and called in a favor for us when I snapped and freaked out on June. All this is to say that, yes, we are very willing to wait in her townhouse’s well-appointed kitchen while she makes a call.
“Of course, no problem at all,” Gabe says, and my heart breaks a little, because his usually confident smile falters. He looks more desperate than I’ve seen him in a long time. He needs this thing with Sylvie to work. So do I.
Sylvie disappears through yet another door behind the kitchen. Townhouses in New York are like this, so many secret rooms and entranceways and unexpected twists, attics with stained glass windows as decadent as the ones in old churches, libraries tucked behind bedrooms, second staircases, panic rooms.
I love secret things.
We sit on pale wooden stools at a thick marble island. A crystal bowl of limes and lemons sits next to a chic black coffee-table book about Tom Ford and a vase filled with blue hydrangeas. Copper pots and pans hang overhead. My head is tipped back staring at them when my phone buzzes. “It’s Dave,” I say softly to Gabe, who puts his hand on mine and squeezes. It feels like an apology for last night, for how mad he got at me, the things he said. Maybe I shouldn’t look into it that much, but isn’t that kind of what marriage is? Increasingly subtle apologies for larger transgressions?