The Light Through the Leaves(2)

Thinking about Jonah made her physically ill. She sat on the ground next to the baby.

She had to divorce him. Obviously.

He’d probably been with Irene since early in Ellis’s pregnancy. That was when he’d started the lessons. All those months, he’d been sleeping with his hard-bodied tennis instructor while his wife got softer growing his baby. She suspected he’d been lying to her about that tough case at his law firm. Lying to his boys. On Saturday, he wouldn’t even take them to the park. He’d probably been with Irene.

Ellis kept seeing it, Jonah getting into her sporty white car near his work. The passionate kiss. At eleven thirty in the morning. Tennis wasn’t the only reason he’d gotten in shape lately. Apparently, he was doing intense workouts over his long lunch hours.

The boys had been in the van when Ellis saw the kiss. If she hadn’t quickly said something to distract them, they might have seen. Any of her friends might have. Probably some of their mutual friends had seen them together or knew about the affair. Ellis felt betrayed by them, too.

“I found a whole bunch!” River said. “Mom! Come see!”

She glanced at Viola asleep in her carrier. She’d nodded off during the jostling walk through the woods. Ellis left her at the pier to look at the tadpoles.

“Do you see them?” River said. “Mom? Mom?”

“I see.”

“You’re stepping on them,” Jasper said. “River, stop it!”

“I’m not! They swam away.”

“Mom, he’s killing them.”

“Guys, let’s just calm down, okay? Put some pond water in your jars and try to catch a few.”

“How many?” Jasper asked.

“You can each catch about ten. Twenty’s a good number for the big fishbowl, don’t you think?”

“I want to keep mine in a different place from Jasper’s,” River said.

“No, they all go in the bowl. And once they turn into frogs, we’ll bring them back here.”

“Why?”

“This is their home. They’re adapted to this environment.”

How would the boys adapt to the new life ahead of them? Now they’d be living between two parents and two homes. Would she keep the house or would Jonah? Would she have to get a job? What kind of job would an undergraduate degree in plant biology get her—especially when she had zero experience in anything but babies?

She returned to her daughter and tucked the blanket beneath her cherubic face. Even through Viola’s baby fat, Ellis could see she was going to look like her. She had the brown eyes and tan olive complexion, and she already had a lot of curl to her dark hair. Her daughter would be the first relative she knew who looked like her. The boys took after Jonah and her mother, both with fairer skin, blue eyes, and straight hair. Ellis assumed she and Viola must look like her father, but she knew nothing about him other than a name on her birth certificate. But she even questioned that because her mother said, “I don’t know who your father was,” the one time she’d responded to Ellis’s questions about him.

She dabbed a dribble of breast milk on the side of the baby’s lips with her finger. Viola reacted to her touch, turning her mouth instinctively toward it, but stayed asleep.

Even now, more than two months postpartum, Ellis sometimes couldn’t believe Viola was there, another being she’d created, another little person who depended on her. Just when she’d finally gotten used to her routine with Jonah and the boys, when she’d almost come to terms with the strange future the unplanned twins had thrust upon her and Jonah. Thrown from campus life into suburbia. Botany texts traded for parenting books. Singles’ parties replaced by playgroups. Graduate school applications buried beneath research into preschools.

Ellis suspected the sudden reality of another baby had been as much of a shock to Jonah. Maybe that was why he’d escaped into the affair with Irene. Yet, he’d been the one who pushed for another baby. As the boys approached four, when they looked more “little boy” than toddler, Jonah had said he wanted a baby in the house again. He missed the infant stage, hoped for a girl.

And here was his little girl, left mostly to Ellis—an exhausted, milk-dripping matron, also juggling two active boys, while Jonah got to act his twenty-nine years, talking to adults at work, going out for drinks, feeling attractive with a beautiful young woman.

“Stop it!” River said. “Mom!”

Tadpole catching was not going well. None of it was. Ellis had come to the woods to calm herself, but she felt worse than when she’d arrived and still been in shock. Now she was angry.

And she felt guilty, she realized, because that inkling she’d had from the start, that she and Jonah weren’t meant to be, must have been real. Even months after they’d been together, she’d sensed an absence of passion in him, though he frequently proclaimed his love for her. She’d mistrusted her doubts, assuming the deficiency—if there was one—had to do with her. She had plenty of proof that she was to blame. Her mother hadn’t wanted her. Zane had left her, hadn’t even said goodbye. Ellis wasn’t like regular people. She was unsociable and peculiar, not the kind of person anyone wanted to stick with.

She had to get out of the forest. For the first time in her life, her favorite environment felt all wrong, as if it had also betrayed her. The trees and rocks, the dark water, whispered about her, telling the story of the needy little girl who’d written notes to no one.