“Who, Aubrey, who?” Ilena blinks as her eyes finally begin to adjust to the brightness of the room—a brightness whose intensity she begins to understand as she takes in the gleaming white walls and shiny metal sconces and reflective glass dresser all where her Coventry Gray walls and blue porcelain lamps and driftwood chest should be. Either Jonah completely redecorated overnight or she spent the night somewhere else.
“Kai, didn’t I say that? My new employee? My maybe-college-aged new employee. Oh god, please tell me he’s eighteen. Employees have to at least be eighteen, right?”
“Are you sure?”
“That’s what I’m asking you!”
“I meant are you sure you slept with him.”
“I think so? I don’t remember.” Aubrey scoffs. “I’m a thirty-two-year-old cliché. Blackout drunk at a summer outing. I had those mules, two of them, and I guess I haven’t really been drinking much since Ethan, but I don’t even remember getting home last night.”
“Neither do I,” Ilena realizes, starting to wonder if someone slipped something into their drinks just as she’s seized by a desperate urge to pee—that bit of wetness a warning. She presses her hand against her bladder. It’s hard and full, so full, so... huge, actually. She looks down and can no longer hear Aubrey, just a buzzing in her ears, and her head swims and dark spots float before her eyes, and the phone falls from her hand.
She gently swings one leg, then the other off the mattress, her feet landing on an ebony hardwood floor instead of a crisp, white rug. She lifts her tent of a nightshirt. Sets a hand on her bare skin, a too-tight, diamond-crusted emerald the size of a kidney bean on her ring finger where her opal should be and the swollen belly of a pregnant woman in place of her Pilates-toned stomach.
Circled dates on calendars and endless data input into apps and contradicting trackers and choreographed sex and a diet of bee pollen and no caffeine and piles of peed-on sticks blaring one line, never two, and hope and sorrow and heartache and fights and fights and fights and this can’t be... can’t be...
Be what?
She skims her palm along her stretched skin, barely touching, as if the weight of her hand will make what’s underneath disappear.
She lowers a pinkie.Hard.Her ring finger.Like a soccer ball.Her middle and index fingers.Warm, so warm.Then her thumb and the flat of her palm, and this thing that can’t be real insists on proving the opposite becauseit moves. A flutter of bubbles grazing her skin. She stills. She wants it to happen again, she needs it to, because this isn’t real. She’s dreaming a dream that she can only make reality in the confines of her mind. Her mind is cruel.
She calls out, “Aubrey, you’re dreaming. Go back to sleep. I’ll see you at work.”
Ilena finds her phone and presses the red button to end the call. She sets the phone on the nightstand and curls herself back under the sheets she’d never have purchased that actually feel glorious against her skin. Jonah would relish stealing these, rolling them to his side of the bed like always while simultaneously knocking one of his sci-fi novels onto the floor, waking her, but not himself. She’s settling in to savor whatever is left of this dream when she hears the tapping of footsteps. If she weren’t dreaming, this would be yet another passive-aggressive act by Jonah. He knows he’s supposed to take his shoes off at the door. The exorbitantly expensive free-trade, sustainable, bamboo baskets were purchased for that very purpose, with the bonus of helping the women of the community that weaves them get free bicycles for safer journeys to retrieve fresh water.
Even in her dreams, she can’t escape fighting with Jonah.
“Where are those confetti cannons when you need them?” Felix Singh strolls into the bedroom, a banana in one hand and an enormous smile pushing back the light brown skin of his cheeks. “You finally listened to me and let yourself sleep in, a full night of baby rest. Bravo!”
“Baby rest?” Ilena’s brow furrows.
“What do you think?” He peels back the skin of the banana. “Decided I’d invent a new saying since you, my treasure, are by no means in need of beauty rest.” He waves the banana in front of her face, and nausea clenches her stomach. “Still no?” He swiftly moves it away. “Figured it was worth a shot. I’ll get you something else. Egg? Yogurt?”
“What? Why?”Why are you here in my dream, in my house, in my bedroom... calling me “treasure”?
“I walked into that one, didn’t I?” He gives a warm smile. “However, I am fairly confident that a man is allowed to make his pregnant wife breakfast and have it not be a condemnation of her ability to get it herself. But if you’d prefer, we can invest in a drone.”
“We?”
“Got me again. Yes, I’m the one who wants the drone. Sorry for being such a man.”
This is bizarre, too bizarre. Ilena’s ready to wake up. Justwake up. She pushes herself to her feet and turns to face Felix, but his back is to her. Beside him, the sun streams in through floor-to-ceiling windows that offer a breathtaking view of Boston Harbor. Boats and cargo ships and the Seaport Harbor Walk instead of the oak trees and white hydrangeas enclosing her small yard in Newton.
“Did I sleep here?” she finds herself asking, as if that would explain away the rest of it.
Felix spins around in front of the glass-topped dresser, confusion tilting his head. “Oh, you mean, well? Did you sleepwell?” He closes the dresser drawer, a Stanford baseball hat in his hand even though she’s positive that Felix went to Yale.
Felix walks toward her in his white polo and white shorts. “You slept like our baby.”
She gasps, and he chuckles knowingly. “I’m already doing dad jokes. Pathetic, I know.” He leans in and his lips graze her cheek. “Maybe I can work it out with a few strong backhands. I’ll see you in a bit? You know how James gets when anyone’s late.”
“Your husband,” Ilena blurts out, though as she says it, she sees the photograph on the dresser of Felix in a black suit, white shirt, black tie, and herself in a high-waisted cream gown with beaded embroidery trailing down the full skirt. Her wedding photo with Jonah shows her in an off-blue strapless shift and Jonah in a beige suit, both of which her mother had declared as “tacky” despite the ceremony taking place on the beach.
Felix laughs again, giving a bit of an embarrassed shrug. “Bit silly to have a work husband, I know, I know.”
But James doesn’t work at AIM. James is a first grade teacher who loves teaching six-year-olds decoupage and subtraction tables.
