The Queen of Hearts(30)
After sinking into the water, I closed my eyes and exhaled into a luxurious cloud of rosemary steam. Total bliss. On the ledge, my phone began to buzz like an angry wasp, but it was an out-of-state number so I ignored it.
I felt my body unwind, muscles unclenching and relaxing into my curves, as I submerged myself up to my ears. My body was not exactly perfect, especially given that I was in my late thirties and had had three pregnancies, one of them twins. I’d even considered a breast augmentation, which my friends referred to as a “refill.” That a refill was aesthetically desirable was incontestable: after the pregnancies and a total of four-plus years of breastfeeding, my breasts looked like they belonged on a four-hundred-year-old Yoda. But in the end I decided my babe status was still intact, despite having all those babies. And Drew wasn’t complaining either, not that he’d had much contact with me lately.
The thought of Drew and his absentee status from our home life was a touchy one. When we’d first met—on one random evening at Selwyn Pub—I had been in the beginning of my residency in Charlotte. My nonmedical girlfriends gape when they first learn the breakdown of my education: four years of college, four years of medical school, three years of pediatrics residency, and—because that clearly wasn’t enough—another three years of fellowship in pediatric cardiology, with a year of research worked in. Every now and then during that first year of peds residency, I’d escape the hospital, desperate to interact with humans who didn’t wear blue pajamas and white coats all the time.
Charlotte was chock-full of men like Drew, since the local economy was fueled by the financial industry. Uptown crawled with them: handsome, jet-lagged guys in button-downs. But Drew stood out in the horde of i-bankers and private equity guys.
I’d been sitting at the bar the night I met him, trying to simultaneously project aloof unavailability to the guy to my left (an opinionated tool) and cautious interest to the guy to my right (cute, good hair), when a beer came sliding down the length of the bar and planted itself in my cupped hand. I stared at it in delight and turned with the entire rest of the bar to see where it had come from. A guy at the end of the bar lifted his hand in a wave and mouthed, Hi.
I waved back. The guy smiled—he had a nice face, open and affable—and motioned to the stool next to him with a hopeful look. I hopped up, ignoring the crude leer from Mr. Tool, and joined Drew at the end of the bar.
The first thing he said: “I can’t believe I did that.”
He looked so shocked at his success I had to laugh. “It’ll make a good story to tell our kids,” I said cheerfully, and then clamped my hands over my mouth in horror. Oh God, no. Unrecoverable.
But he didn’t run out screaming: he laughed. And we talked until the bar closed. Everything happened in a whirlwind after that: our marriage, the kids, the blistering insanity of trying to parent very young children while one of us was working hundred-hour weeks, mostly at the hospital, and the other was working hundred-hour weeks, mostly on last-minute flights to Abu Dhabi or Hong Kong. Somehow we survived it.
Thinking of how we met reminded me I’d barely seen Drew this week. Maybe this weekend, we could—
The bathroom door flew open. Delaney staggered in, blinking against the sudden light. “Oh, hi, Mom!” she chirped.
“Lainie,” I began, resigned, standing and reaching for a towel to wrap around my wet hair. “Why, why, WHY are you up?”
“I missted you, beloved dear!”
“Well, you need to get back in your bed. Right now. It’s very late.”
Alarm crossed Delaney’s features, replaced quickly by cunning. “So, darling,” she began, clearly casting around for a conversational topic to distract me. Her huge owlish eyes lit on my wrapped head. “Is that . . . is that the same towel you wore in your wedding?”
It was an effort to keep my stern look in place. “Mommy wore a veil in the wedding, darling girl. No stalling. You are going back to bed.”
An epic battle ensued, which I won by virtue of superior strength and the fact that Drew had doctored up the children’s doors so that the locking mechanism was now on the outside. Padding back down the hall, I felt naked. I was more or less naked, but I realized the sensation of something missing was coming from my absent iPhone, which had gained the status of an extracorporeal appendage since I was never without it. Suppose Emma was texting me right now! Everyone agreed that these smartphones had rewired all the neural circuitry in the brain, setting up a feedback loop where you required more and more and more screen time, or else you suffered from a depletion of neurotransmitters and became all twitchy. This was problematic enough at my age, but just imagine what it was doing to the plastic little minds of preschoolers. Well, best not to think about that, or I’d be guilt-stricken at my failure to parent like my own parents. Of course, they had not even had cable TV to contend with, let alone fiendish mobile computers.
Ah! I spied the phone still resting on the bathtub ledge. Just as I reached for it, the bathroom door opened again. I whirled around, flailing for a towel, mentally cursing the children and their insistence on hopping out of bed seven thousand times a night, and nearly screamed as I collided with someone much larger.
“Oh my God, Drew,” I breathed. “How about a warning knock? I almost peed on the floor!”
Drew, who had been enthusiastically reaching toward me, pulled back. “That’s not a good visual,” he mumbled.