I put my bags in the foyer. It’s hot in New York—it’s July, after all—but inside the apartment it’s the perfect breezy temperature. The windows are open—no screens—and briefly I wonder if we have to worry about mosquitoes the way we do in West Hollywood, but Leo pulls me out of it.
“Come here,” he says. He pulls me down into an armchair with him.
I put my arms around his neck. He leans down and kisses me.
“Hi,” he says.
I look up at him. “Hi,” I say. I take a deep breath. “Listen, I’ve been thinking.”
“Uh-oh,” Leo says. “Already?”
“You were right.”
“About what?”
“The fertility stuff.”
Immediately, I feel him stiffen. The word is unwanted.
“I know you wanted to give up.”
He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t fight me on it.
“It’s just—there’s been this horrible unspoken thing between us for months now, maybe longer, and I want it to be over. I want to give up, too.”
Leo’s face doesn’t change. I press my fingers into his tight trap muscles, kneading them there.
“I’m done,” I say.
His brow furrows, he shakes his head. “I thought—”
“Listen, Leo. This life we have, I’ve been missing it.” My voice breaks because I realize how true it is, how everything I’m saying is the absolute, definitive truth I’ve just been too spun out to see it. “I want it back.”
I remember, in all my single years, being afraid of what marriage might demand of me—the time I’d have to give another person, what a huge commitment it would be, if I ever even got there. And then I met Leo. I remember a night, almost six months into dating, when we were talking about our future. Even in those early days, when we were trying to fit our worlds together, there was so little conflict. It wasn’t so much that I thought he wasthe onebut that I couldn’t see a natural end. With everyone else, there had been an obvious future off-ramp. With Leo, there was nothing but open road. And I knew, even then, that we were going to make it stick.
I remember asking him what he wanted to do for his birthday the following month—a big one, forty—and becoming seized by the age. Not because we felt real or adult, although we were and are all those things—but because I all at once realized all the time that had passed in his life without me, all the years where he blew out candles and I wasn’t by his side.
I believed, in a strange way, when I was single, that when I metmy person the clock would reset. That I, too, would be twenty-seven again, like all my friends had been. That I’d get it all back. That decade of singlehood, of searching. That our young marriage would be just that: young. But that’s not what happened, of course, and now, being here with Leo, I realize how long I spent wishing for everything we have. And how much I don’t want to waste what comes next—what’s already here.
“This life we have,” I tell him again. “It’s the only one I want. And I don’t want us to miss it because we’re so busy trying to get to a different one.”
Leo’s eyes fill. In another moment, a tear falls down his cheek. I wipe it away.
“You’re right,” I say. “And I’m sorry for us. I know how much you want to be a dad. I want it, too—But it’s enough.”
Leo shakes his head. His hands find my waist. He holds me firmly. “Do you really mean that?”
I feel my chest exhale. Everything I’ve been holding, released. “Yes, I mean it. I love you. Let’s give up.”
Leo laughs. He touches his nose down to meet mine. “Let’s give up.”
He kisses me then—deep and rooted. I fold my body into his. I think about the idea of home, of what it is. It was the beach for so long and then it was the idea of our family, this imagined future, our baby. But right now I think that maybe home could be us. It could be this apartment in Brooklyn. It could be now. Home could be this very moment, if we make it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The days and weeks after the accident are euphoric—Marcella has done it, she has successfully taken it back—but once the shock wears off she is left with a low-simmer depression that turns, in a matter of hours, into a boil. One morning she is clipping roses looking at her husband reading, and by the afternoon she is crouched in the corner of her bathroom clutching her stomach in the midst of what can only be described as a panic attack.
Because she understands, now. The flip side. The thing, perhaps, her mother was trying to protect her from. Life offered the worst to her, and she could undo it. What will happen now that she cannot?
