The Perfect Child(41)

I shook my head even though he couldn’t see it in the dark. “She did it on purpose. You were talking to me and ignoring her. She hates when you ignore her, so she ran across the street so you’d pay attention to her.”

“You give her way too much credit,” he said. He rolled over, his back to me. “Good night. I love you.”

“I love you too,” I said. We were always so cordially polite with each other when we were mad—sickeningly polite, really. Maybe things would be better if we got into one of the feet-stamping, book-throwing kinds of fights other couples had, because this way we just ignored anything emotionally uncomfortable without having to ever deal with it.

We still hadn’t talked about the fact that Janie was speaking to me again. We pretended like the weeks of silence had never happened, and I might have been able to go on pretending if things had gone back to normal, but they hadn’t. It had created a shift in my relationship with Janie, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t know how to fix it either.

I’d tried to talk to Christopher about it, but he didn’t understand my feelings because his relationship with Janie hadn’t been affected by the weeks of silence and the stitches incident. Christopher hadn’t wanted to go back to Dr. Chandler afterward, but I’d insisted. She’d said what we were going through was one of the most common problems couples experienced when they became parents—figuring out how to do it together. Even though I knew what was going on, it didn’t make it any easier.

I was hoping it’d be better when Janie went to school. We had all agreed it was time for her to start. She needed to be around other kids, and I needed to get back to my job. But we had run into a problem when we had started shopping for schools because Janie wasn’t potty trained. We had jumped into a crash course of potty training, and we’d been fighting over it all weekend. We had gotten her one of those cute potty chairs with the music and lights, thinking that it might help, but she still wasn’t having any of it. She crossed her arms and shook her head whenever we asked her to sit on it.

“Why don’t you go together?” Christopher had suggested after we’d spent another three hours trying to get her to go.

“What do you mean?” I had asked.

He’d pointed toward the regular toilet. “Go together. You sit there, and she sits there. Maybe it’ll help.”

I was an intensely private person about everything in the bathroom. We had been married for six years, and Christopher had never seen me pee. I didn’t even like to shower with him. He was the total opposite. He couldn’t care less. I was always yelling at him to shut the bathroom door.

“Are you serious?” I’d asked.

He’d shrugged. “Why not? What’s more effective than watching someone do it?”

“Whatever. Why don’t we try reading her Once upon a Potty again? Where’d you put it?” I had flipped through the other books on the floor.

“You’re not going to do it? You don’t even want to try and see if it will work?” He hadn’t moved from his spot in front of the bathroom door.

“Of course I’m not going to do it. You know me. How could you even ask?”

“I would do anything for her.”

It wasn’t what he’d said. It was how he’d said it, like he’d do anything for her, but I wouldn’t.

“We’re trying to potty train her, Christopher, not give her a kidney.” Normally, he would’ve laughed. Instead he’d said nothing, just turned and walked out of the room.

I reached toward my nightstand and grabbed my phone, quickly tapping out a text to Allison.

We need to talk tomorrow. When are you free?

She’d had lots of problems with Greg after their boys had been born. They’d almost split up. He’d moved out for a while but had eventually moved back in after they’d sorted it out. Allison liked to say that your chances of getting divorced decreased greatly after your kids turned five. Did that mean we had five more years of this, or did we get to take the accelerated course since Janie was so much older than a newborn?





TWENTY-FOUR

CHRISTOPHER BAUER

Exploring Times Preschool buzzed with activity. Kids of different ages moved around the room, gathering materials, washing dishes, counting beads, and checking out what their friends were doing. They were the first school on our list, and so far they’d exceeded all our expectations. Exploring Times was a true Montessori school—everything child size. Janie had a lot of catching up to do, and we didn’t want her to feel like she was behind the other kids, which was why the Montessori approach was perfect for her. It would allow her to work at her own pace and in her own learning style.

I pointed to a group of kids lying underneath a table, covered in smocks and painting the table above them. “What are they doing?”

The lead teacher, Mrs. Allulo, laughed. “We’ve been studying Michelangelo’s artwork, and they were all fascinated by the Sistine Chapel, so I wanted to give them an opportunity to see how hard it must’ve been for him to paint the ceiling.”

Hannah squeezed my hand excitedly. It’d taken a while, but we’d finally potty trained Janie and had started touring preschools. We’d used a sticker-chart system for the potty training that we’d created during one of our family sessions with Rhonda. We still met with Rhonda once a month for Janie’s follow-up care. At one point, I’d almost given up because Janie hadn’t had any interest in using the toilet and didn’t care when she soiled herself. Then one day, a few weeks ago, something clicked, and she’d been accident-free ever since, even at night.