But then she was distracted by Bella, who wandered out alongside her brother. Indoors, Bella had been delighting Lucinda with cartoons on her tablet, Nick explained, and now Lucinda was partial to her, raising her arms for Bella to pluck her up. So Bella did, setting her down on her little feet and holding her hands to help her walk. Miles took her other hand and Lucinda beamed.
“Look, Mom,” Bella called, looking as proud as Lucinda. Here were all their children, like something she and Clara might have imagined on those nights when they sat out among the rooftops planning happily-ever-afters, the sunfiltering through the sprawling apple tree, the air still redolent with blossoms though they’d scattered weeks ago.
—
Nahlah said, “I bet it feels like you’ve only just got her back, and now you’re losing her all over again.” She scraped the last morsels of rice from her bowl. Nahlah knew. She’d been there for Jess when Miles was a baby, during all those years after Clara disappeared. Without Nahlah (in addition to therapy and pharmaceuticals), Jess wasn’t sure she would have still been standing when Clara decided to find her again.
“I have to let her go,” Jess replied. “It’s the only way. And it turned out to be a good little party after all. There was cake and everybody sang, and the baby smeared icing all over her face, so they got that part right.”
Miranda said, “She’s going to need you.”
“She’s pretty insistent that she doesn’t need anybody this time.”
“A fast blow to the head is what she’s going to need,” said Miranda, who was quite certain, and possibly not wrong, that anyone who embarked upon parenthood was playing recklessly with life itself—or at least with lifestyle. She’d spent her career as a children’s librarian, thus satisfying whatever maternal yearnings she had. She saw no real difference between what Jess, Nahlah, and Clara were all going through. They were all women indulging in inappropriate levels of self-sacrifice, and she was having none of it. “Put her out of her misery.”
“Harsh,” said Nahlah.
Jess said, “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
—
If Jess were in charge—this is what she told Adam, Miranda, Nahlah, and everybody else—she would have locked Clara in a tall tower for safekeeping, because Jess had so much else toworry about. She just didn’t have the capacity for one more impossible thing because her entire life was already an impossible puzzle, something that no one else seemed to properly appreciate. There was a calendar on the wall before her now, a wipe-board whose patterns would flummox even the most brilliant mathematician. A schedule, as though to suggest there could be a scaffold to hold all this: hockey, choir, and gymnastics during the week, plus computer-coding classes on Saturday mornings, which started conflicting with math club, so they had to quit.
There were not enough hours, not enough days. What was one supposed to do with the doctor’s appointments, trips to the dentist, allergy shots, speech therapy, and then more speech therapy? Jess had counted herself lucky that the Institute was generous and flexible with her hours, but she wasn’t sure how much longer that would last. None of it was remotely possible either without Althea, their long-time nanny, who was as capable as Jess at coordinating the madness, the juggling. Maybe in a few years Clara too would have a calendar as maddening as this one, a calendar where Jess had just noticed out of the corner of her eye a conspicuous blank space for the forthcoming Saturday. A blip, or an error? But no, Bella had karate. Jess had forgotten to write it down. She got up from the couch, where she had been sitting with Adam, so she could add it with the dry-erase marker. This oversight made her nervous—what else was she missing? So much could go wrong. It was a whirlwind, this life. Terrible and dizzy-making, though exhilarating at the best of times. All too much—but this meant Jess had a better idea of what Clara was going through than Clara knew. Jess imagined herself as a cautionary tale about the dangers of saying YES to everything, but all she had ever wanted was toopen up her children’s horizons. And with Miles’s struggles, it seemed even more important to push his limits. To leap them. Hurdle after hurdle, she hoped.
“But this isn’t about Miles,” Adam replied. “Miles’s problems aren’t Clara’s. Clara’s problems aren’t even yours.”
“But they are,” said Jess, slinking back down beside him. Everything was connected, one thing leading to another. So why would anybody tempt fate? Clara never thought things through. For example, she was planning to name her babies Paulina and Shadow. “Who does that?” Jess exclaimed. “Who names a set of twins ‘Something and Shadow’? Who gets to be the shadow? It’s cruel and inhumane, that’s what it is.”
“And you told her that,” said Adam.
“I did,” said Jess. “And she laughed, like I’d said something foolish. As though the implications of a name like Shadow were something to be scoffed at. Can you imagine that? Growing up as a twin and being called Shadow?”
“What about Paulina?” asked Adam. “Where did that come from?”
“Nick’s grandmother—the one who wasn’t called Lucinda. And now that they’ve run out of grandmothers, Clara finally gets to name one of her children, and she comes up with Shadow. I never thought I’d be wishing that Nick had more grandmothers.”
“So you don’t like it that Nick named the kids,” said Adam. He picked up her hand and started kissing her fingers. “And you don’t like it when Clara does either. Could the root of the problem be that you don’t get to name the kids? They aren’t your kids. You know that, right?”
What she also knew was that Nick and Clara would soon have a house full of girls, and they didn’t even have plans to buy a house or move to a bigger apartment. Clarajust kept shrugging and saying that babies were small. She had been even more strange and evasive than usual at the party on Saturday. There was something she wasn’t telling her, Jess was sure.
Adam was nuzzling her neck now. The children were solidly asleep, and it had been forty-five minutes since they’d heard a peep. Jess understood that he was seizing the moment, and even admired his initiative, but her mind was elsewhere. She pulled away from him. “What?” he said.
“I don’t understand how you do it. Just flick on the switch and start thinking of sex.”
Adam said, “I don’t have to flick. It’s always on.”
“But what about all the other things?” she asked him. “Here I am thinking about scheduling karate, and how I can get back from Miles’s appointment in time for my meeting tomorrow. If we had sex right now, I’d just be visualizing the calendar the whole way through.”
“The calendar?”
“The whiteboard. I close my eyes and see it on the back of my eyelids. Seared on my brain.”
“That’s what turns you on?”
She hit him with a throw pillow. “No,” she said.
He knocked the pillow to the floor and came at her again, kissing her behind her left ear. “You’ve got to relax,” he said, which was normally the kind of instruction that would annoy her, but Adam was right. She’d spent the whole evening wound up like a top, and if she tried to fall asleep with her mind like this, her dreams would be awful and her sleep would be wrecked.
