When Elizabeth said things like that, Maribeth felt, not for the first time, that she didn’t know her at all anymore. Elizabeth had once been as broke and hungry as Maribeth, but now she seemed to regard jobs as something one did not for necessity but for fulfillment, like a hobby. Though maybe that wasn’t fair. Elizabeth probably took her hobby more seriously than Maribeth took her job.
“Next week,” Maribeth repeated. “I have some ideas about who to farm the work out to. And I think I can probably do big-picture edits now even.”
“It’s taken care of.” Elizabeth’s tone was not sharp, exactly, but definitely authoritative, bosslike, and Maribeth felt put into place.
Elizabeth grimaced. “I only mean the important thing is for you to get better,” she added in a softer tone.
“I appreciate that but I still have to pay my bills, Elizabeth.”
She hated herself for saying that. It made her sound petty and jealous of Elizabeth’s life, of her money, of the job. When if she was jealous of anyone, it was of her old self, the one who could rightfully call Elizabeth her best friend. The one who still had ambition and focus and wasn’t so harried all the time. The one who had a heart that worked properly.
Elizabeth looked so mortified that for a second Maribeth feared she might do something hideous, like try to loan her money. But she only whispered, “Please don’t worry.”
Liv reappeared, changed back into her clothes, carrying a set of paper dolls. “Want to play?” she asked Elizabeth.
In the early days, Elizabeth had been, if not a constant presence in the twins’ life, a regular one. In the past few years, however, as Oscar and Liv slowly animated into actual humans, Elizabeth had receded. So Maribeth wasn’t entirely surprised when she stood up and told Liv that she’d love to but she had to get back to work.
After she was gone, Maribeth offered to play paper dolls. Liv looked at her as if she were the consolation prize, which was basically how Maribeth felt about every friend she’d made since Elizabeth. But Liv said okay.
7
A week after she got home, Maribeth had her follow-up with Dr. Sterling. Her mother offered to take her, but the thought of the tag-team assault of Mom and Dr. Grandpa was more than she could bear. Still, she knew she shouldn’t go alone. Couldn’t go alone, really. What if she couldn’t get a cab home? What if the elevators stopped working? Things that had never occurred to her before now kept her up at night.
“Do you think you could maybe take me?” she asked Jason the night before the appointment. He had been working from home, but long, frantic hours—he was still monitoring the migration of thousands of audio files in advance of that planned database upgrade. She heard her tone, like a supplicant’s. It made her angry, though she wasn’t sure at whom. “You can bring your laptop with you.”
“Sure,” Jason said.
She felt it then: the gratitude, the resentment, seemingly competing emotions that these days twined together like strands of DNA.
She was glad she’d suggested he bring his laptop because they waited nearly two hours for her appointment with Dr. Sterling. All the while Maribeth seethed. And worried about what the seething was doing to her heart, which made her seethe more. Shouldn’t a cardiologist know better?
She had disliked Dr. Sterling from the moment she’d met him in the ER. His bedside manner had not improved during her week in the hospital, when he treated her with an obsequious condescension, always talking about getting “Mommy” back home to her babies. Jason said he was scared she was going to sue, but Dr. Sterling hadn’t performed the angiogram, and he’d faulted Maribeth’s own arteries for the rupture—they were tortuous, he said—and anyhow, everything else had turned out fine and she wasn’t going to sue. But she did need to find herself a new doctor, one she would choose and not simply get assigned to.
When the nurse finally called her in, she looked at Jason, who was tapping away on his laptop. “Do you want me to come with?” he asked.
He’d always come in for their ob-gyn appointments. Sometimes, after the sonograms, he’d trace the letters of whatever the favored names of the day were in the goo before he toweled it off her.
“That’s okay,” she said. “You just keep working.”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER they were in a cab heading home. Dr. Sterling had pronounced her “healing beautifully” and sent her on her way with a sheaf of brochures. Though she had brought a list of questions, in the end she had not asked any, because she could feel him rushing (who was in the hurry now?) and also because in the hospital, every time she’d tried to bring up how she was truly feeling—untethered, as if in some ways her heart was not a part of her body anymore—he warned her against “ruminating.”
Jason’s phone rang. She could tell it was important because he picked up right away and spent several minutes speaking to one of his colleagues in the indecipherable jargon of his job. After he hung up, he turned to her. “So the doctor said everything is going all right?”
She had already given him a rundown of the checkup in the elevator. “Yep. All good.”
Jason paused. “So you think it’s okay if I go back to the office tomorrow? They’re really in crunch mode now.”
“I’m sorry my heart attack came at such an inconvenient time.”
“No one said that.” The cab lurched to a stop as a jaywalker, eyes glued to his phone, stepped into traffic. The pressure of the seatbelt sent a cascade of pain through Maribeth.
“I’m sorry. You’re right,” she said.
“So it’s okay if I go back to the office?”
No. It wasn’t okay. She hurt all over. She wasn’t ready to be left alone with her mother, with the kids. She was scared.
“Of course it is,” she said.
“Good.” When he smiled, his eyes crinkled and he looked genuinely happy, and somehow this made everything worse. “But I think we should probably get your mom to stay another week, until you’re completely better.”
She deflated even more. “Another week?”
“She’s helpful. In her way. Another pair of hands. And she’s, you know, free.”
She looked out the window. They were going home. She was doing fine. The doctor had just said so. Why, then, did she feel like weeping? Why did she want to burrow into Jason’s neck, to beg him not to go?
Jason kissed her on the temple. “I told you everything would work out. Another week or two and we’ll be back to normal.”
8
Her mother was thrilled to stay on. “I’m having such fun with you all.”
Maribeth forced a smile. Said thank you.
“And if I can keep you from spending any of your hard-earned money on babysitters, all the better. Even with insurance, I remember how the bills piled up with your father. And with you not working . . .”
“I’m still working, Mom,” she said. “I’m on leave.” The truth was, she wasn’t sure what she was on. Leave? Disability? She should probably call someone in HR.
“Not really full-time,” her mother said. “And Jason’s salary . . .”
Jason worked as the head archivist for a music library. It was his dream job—he’d relocated from San Francisco for it—but the pay was awful, at least by Manhattan standards. One time Maribeth had complained to her mother how she didn’t understand why a company would go through all the trouble to relocate someone only to pay him a barely livable salary. Ever since, her mother had acted as if she and Jason were a step away from welfare.
“You know,” her mother barreled on, “that was why I made sure your father left some of his money to you in his will. Three months before the stroke, almost like I knew.”
Maribeth kept smiling. It felt like her face was encased in plaster.
“I’d hoped you’d use that money to buy a nice house,” her mother finished. “Maybe in the suburbs, like Ellen Berman’s daughter.”
“The one with breast cancer?”
“You can’t blame that on the suburbs.”
“We don??
?t want to live in the suburbs, Mom.”
“Maybe you can work less, somehow. I’m sure Elizabeth would find a way. She’s always been so generous to you.”
“Thanks for making me sound like a charity case.”
“Oh, I don’t mean it like that. I just want you to slow down.” She paused, frowning. “I suppose I hoped you’d use all this as a wakeup call.”
“A wakeup call?”
“Herb Zucker had a heart attack, lost thirty pounds, and started meditating.”
“I should lose thirty pounds and start meditating?”
“No, you’ve always been too thin. But you should take a look at your life. Your priorities.”
Maribeth understood her mother was singing a version of her own sad song: the hamster wheel that was her life. But hearing the lament from her mother didn’t make her feel supported, only accused.
“My priorities are just fine,” she said.
“I just wouldn’t want you to go through this again,” her mother added.
“Me neither.”
Her mother leaned in close, as if to divulge a juicy secret. “Jason told me that it might be genetic.” She looked at Maribeth meaningfully. “So you can’t blame me.”
What a thing to say. It reminded Maribeth of when she and Jason had started the fertility treatments and her mother had been, oddly, almost gleeful. “It’s like I passed something to you after all,” she’d said. That this sentiment was both unwelcome and off base—the doctors never thought Maribeth had any medical issues related to her infertility aside from her “advanced maternal age”—never seemed to occur to her mother.
“Why would I blame you?” Maribeth asked.
Her mother looked away. Then she clapped her hands together, as if officially ending the discussion. “What would you like for dinner? I thought we might get that brisket from the Jewish deli.”
“Brisket is kind of fatty,” Maribeth said.
Her mother put her hands on her hips. “At my age, I’m done counting calories.”
“I meant me. I’m supposed to eat lean meats.”
“Oh, we can get you a nice barley soup. Or a turkey sandwich. Do you have a menu?”
“No. We order online.”
“I don’t do computers.”
“Why don’t you tell me exactly what you want and I’ll take care of it.”
“Perfect.”
JASON WAS WORKING late so Maribeth put both kids to bed that night. Oscar had already fallen asleep and Maribeth was finishing Liv’s last book when out of nowhere her daughter asked, “If you die, will Grandma be our mommy?”
Maribeth was shaken. She had thought they’d successfully masked the gravity of what was going on. Mommy was sick but the doctors were making her better, that kind of thing. It was the first time the d-word had come up.
“I’m not going to die for a very long time, sweetie,” she said.
“If you die, can Robbie be our mommy?”
“It doesn’t work like that. And I’m not going to die.”
Oscar roused. “I don’t want you to die,” he pleaded sleepily.
“I’m not going to die,” she said. Yet, she thought. Please don’t let me die yet. “Go night-night, sweetie.”
A minute later, she heard Oscar’s snores. Liv was wide awake, blinking those huge eyes of hers, twirling a seam on her night gown. “If you die, tell Daddy to marry someone nice. I don’t want a mean stepmommy, like Cinderella.”
A tight feeling seized her chest, though Maribeth knew from previous conversations with Liv it wasn’t her heart, just her daughter’s uncanny ability to hit the tender spots. Because she had been thinking about this every day since she’d woken up from her bypass. What would happen to the twins if something happened to her?
She snapped off the light. “Go to sleep,” she said.
9
Now that Jason was back in the office, he was working longer hours than ever. He blamed the database upgrade, but Maribeth suspected he was looking for reasons to stay out of the loft. If she could do the same, she would.
The place was a disaster. Her mother was not much of a housekeeper, and cleaning had never been Robbie’s thing, so the mountains of laundry grew by the day, which was unpleasant, but it was the dirty dishes in the sink with the potential to draw out every cockroach within a five-block vicinity that worried Maribeth.
So, she started doing dishes. And laundry. And because she could not face another meal of takeout, she began to cook simple meals. These small tasks robbed her of whatever energy she was regaining. When he got home from work, Jason scolded her for doing too much, and yet he continued working late.
One morning during her second week home, Maribeth went to the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee and found some of last night’s dinner dishes, along with all of the morning’s breakfast mess. As if waiting for her.
Screw this, she thought. Going to the office would be easier than this. Remembering the promise she’d made to Elizabeth the week before—a promise she had half forgotten about as Elizabeth had urged her to—she fired up her laptop. As she waited for her work e-mail to download, dread knotted her stomach.
She recognized this as re-entry anxiety. Two summers ago, right after Maribeth had gone back to work at Frap, Elizabeth had invited her and the family up to Tom’s place in the Berkshires (well, now it was her and Tom’s place) for a long weekend. At the last minute Elizabeth had said she and Tom couldn’t come, but she’d implored Maribeth to go with Jason and the kids. They’d expected something rustic but instead had found an enormous colonial house with a private pond. The only thing rustic about it was that it was remote, and intentionally dewired. No cable TV. No Internet. Just a landline. You had to drive into Lenox to get cell reception. But it had been nice. Maribeth had turned off her phone, spending carefree hours hunting four-leaf clovers and observing tadpoles with the twins. But on the drive home, her phone had started chiming with e-mails and texts, making her feel like she’d missed something essential and was about to pay a price for it. Which was exactly how she felt now.
But no, there was nothing essential. In fact, there was hardly any mail at all. Which was odd. In any given day, between the staff-wide production notices and meeting announcements, and back and forth between her and various editors and writers, she usually had at least a hundred new messages. She looked through the inbox and saw that it cut off, abruptly, a few weeks ago, right around the time of her surgery. And several messages that had come in before the e-mail had been cut off had been read. But not by her.
She switched over to the webmail version in case it was a computer malfunction but it was the same thing. She checked her personal account to see if her e-mail was behaving wonky but it was fine. Weird. She called Elizabeth’s assistant, Finoula.
“Finoula, hi, it’s Maribeth Klein.”
“Maribeth, hi! How are you feeling?”
“I’m great. Well, not great, but better. All things considered.”
“Good, good. Tricky business, the heart,” Finoula said. “My granny had bypass surgery. She’s back hauling wheelbarrows through her garden now.”
“Oh. That’s reassuring. Along those lines, I’m trying to wade back into things, get caught up on my e-mail, but there’s nothing there.”
“Right.”
“Right?”
“Elizabeth’s orders.”
“Elizabeth?”
“She had IT take you off the system.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, okay. But someone went through my e-mails.”
“Probably Andrea Davis. We brought her in.”
“When?”
“I’m not sure exactly, when you were in hospital,” Finoula said. “I can look it up if you want.”
“That’s okay.”
“She’s great, Andrea is. Hit the ground running.”
“Yeah, she’s a real pro,” Maribeth said.
There was silence on the line.
“We’re ab
out to jump into a planning meeting. Do you want me to see if I can catch Elizabeth?”
“Oh, no thanks.”
“Take care, Maribeth.”
“You, too, Finoula.”
Maribeth hung up the phone and closed her laptop. For the first time in years, there was no assignment hanging over her head, no looming deadline. She should feel relief, but what she felt was betrayal.
Don’t think about it. That’s what Elizabeth had said. And meanwhile, she had hired Andrea. Had already hired her when she’d come to visit. Had barely waited for Maribeth’s chair to grow cool.
Don’t worry about it.
This was what happened when she didn’t worry about it.
She kicked her laptop to the edge of the bed and it fell to the floor with a thunk. She wasn’t fired. She knew Elizabeth would never do that. And it probably wasn’t even legal. But as for replacing her, the truth was, Elizabeth had already been doing it for years. This only completed the job.
JASON DIDN’T GET home that night until nine o’clock. The twins were still awake because Maribeth lacked the energy to put them to bed and her mother had fallen asleep early.
“How come the kids are up?” Jason asked.
“I guess the magical bedtime elf gave our place a miss tonight.”
He put his bag down. “Everything okay?”
She couldn’t even answer.
He checked the time again, glanced toward the twins’ room.
“Don’t you dare criticize me.”
“I wasn’t,” he said, defensively. “The database—”
“Yeah, the database upgrade,” she interrupted. “I know. All of Tribeca knows how busy you are with your database upgrade.”
“What is the matter with you?”
“What’s the matter? I’m here alone all day with my mother and the kids and I still feel like shit.” She paused, waiting for Jason to respond but he didn’t say anything. “You’re never here. I can’t tell if you’re trying to avoid home, or if you think that a week in the hospital, a week of recovery, was enough luxury for old Maribeth.”