I stood in the doorway, folding up my umbrella. He was sitting across the café, staring outside at the rain strafing the parking lot, a manila folder on the table with his phone, his leg jiggling nervously. Everything about him felt familiar. And then he glanced up and saw me, emotions flipping like cards across his eyes: relief; joy.
He stood as I approached the table. I suddenly felt clumsy and tongue-tied, and when I pulled out a chair, I managed to bump the table hard enough that his coffee sloshed over the rim. He steadied both his cup and the one I assumed was for me. “I like that,” he said.
“You like my almost dumping coffee on you?”
“I like that I can still make you flustered.”
“Who, me?” I was. Completely. But when our eyes locked, I forced myself to look away. Even after I’d told him about Lucy, we had bantered and teased, made each other laugh, and I had clung to that, believing it meant we’d be okay. I didn’t want to be fooled again. “Is this mine?” I nodded at the second coffee.
“Nonfat latte, no foam.”
“You remembered.”
“It hasn’t been that long.”
“A lot’s happened, Erik.” I held his stare.
“I know.” He hesitated, then said, “The kids were excited to see you last night.”
“I loved seeing them too.” I wanted to say more, comment on how much Spencer had grown and how the twins didn’t look like toddlers anymore, but I couldn’t. It had hurt to see the kids. The girls especially. They were now the age Lucy had been when I last saw her. I held my cardboard coffee cup in both hands, needing the warmth, though the room was hot. I wondered if Erik understood what a big deal it had been for me to let myself love his children. I doubted it. I’m not sure I had fully allowed myself to know it either.
Laughter erupted from a table of teenagers, textbooks open in front of them, one girl lying on her arm, highlighting pages with a yellow marker. “Did Annabelle tell you she came to my show?”
“Are you kidding? I know what you wore and what kind of wine they served.” He smiled sadly. “I went the next day.”
“You did?”
“I did. I was so proud of you.”
“I was so proud of me too.” I held his eyes. “I wished you’d come on opening night.”
“Me too.”
He lifted his coffee cup and turned it, lifted it again and turned it. He wasn’t looking at me, and it made my heart seize. What was I doing here?
Across the café was a gas fireplace, and in an armchair in front of it, a skinny woman in jeans sat with her laptop on her knees, an infant asleep in the stroller parked beside her. I’d been noticing these young mothers with their babies, watching them, studying them almost, as if trying to see what I might have looked like when I’d been a young mother. Had I kissed the top of my girl’s head as I buckled her into her car seat? Had I stood in a checkout line, swaying side to side with her against my shoulder? I’d watched Annabelle similarly, I realized now, studying her easy way with her children, how she touched them constantly, hand alighting on a shoulder or back in passing, fingers straightening a collar, combing the girls’ hair from their eyes. It was an ease I’d never found my way back to with Lucy, and I wished so much that I’d just touched her more in those months when I was trying to be her mom again.
“Are you thinking about Lucy?” Erik nodded toward the woman with the stroller.
I looked at him, startled. Although we’d talked around and around what had happened, he’d rarely spoken her name, as if it were taboo, which, of course, it had been. Now it sat between us like a small wrapped box. “I’ve been thinking of her a lot the past few months.” My voice sounded reedy.
“Me too. That’s what I wanted to tell you, or one of the things. Here—” He nudged the manila folder toward me. “It’s the stuff I should have read last November.”
“What stuff?” I sat back. I still had the articles I’d wanted him to read. I didn’t know what this was. I didn’t want it.
“It’s okay. Just look.” He opened the file so I could see the paper on top: “Postpartum Psychosis: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment.” Parts of it were underlined. Tentatively, I lifted the page, my hand shaking. Another article: “The Difference Between Postpartum Depression and Postpartum Psychosis.” And then the next: “It Can Happen to Anyone.” There had to be fifteen articles, underlined, highlighted.
I lifted my eyes to his. “You read all this?” I couldn’t move. “Why?”
“Why? It’s not obvious? I love you.” He drew in a breath, then let it out. “I want you back, Claire. I want us back.”
I pushed my tongue against my teeth to keep my jaw from trembling. Love. We’d danced around that word so many times. I love being with you, I love talking to you. But never I love you. “I know you wanted to love me,” I said carefully. My mouth felt dry. “It’s just, five months ago, love wasn’t enough.” I glanced again at the open file folder, underlined phrases lifting themselves up: In the United States, research into postpartum psychosis virtually stopped around 1926…. Hippocrates first described postpartum depression in the fifth century BC…. “I’m grateful you read all this….”
“But?”
“But you didn’t like me, Erik.”
“No—”
“Yes. You felt disdain.”
“No,” he said again.
“I’m not saying you wanted to feel that way; you just did. And I’m not…Can these articles really change that?”
“They already have.” He looked at me, his beautiful blue eyes dark with regret.
I held his gaze. Rain drummed against the windows. “What if we hadn’t run into each other last night?”
He frowned. “I’m not following you.”
“Would we be here?”
“Ahhh. Why didn’t I phone a week ago? Is that what you’re asking?”
I nodded.
“I wanted to be sure, and I was, the second I saw you. I don’t just want to date you and see what happens.” He put air quotes around the phrase. “I don’t just want to sleep with you. I want us to be a family, Claire.”
I was shaking. My entire body.
He laid his hand atop mine. “You’re like ice,” he said. And then, “Say something.”
“What if you change your mind again?”
He smiled. “Ain’t gonna happen.”
“Don’t. I can’t joke about this, Erik.”
“I promise you, I am not joking. I want a life with you, Claire. I want you in my life; I want you in my kids’ lives. And I’m not saying we have to decide anything right now or next month or even next year.” He exhaled a long breath. “But I’m in this for the long haul.”
I wasn’t home more than ten minutes when he phoned. “I had all these things I wanted to tell you,” he said, and we talked for another two hours. He told me the kids had started staying with him on weekends.
“Annabelle’s relinquishing control?” I asked.
“Annabelle’s in love and wants weekends with her boyfriend.” He laughed.
He told me he’d replaced the girls’ cribs with “big-girl beds,” and it just about killed him. “They’ll be dating soon. My hair will be white.” He talked about Ten Chimneys, and he sounded happy, and I thought how just that morning I’d imagined exactly this, all the things we would tell each other.
He asked why I’d changed my mind about having a show, and I explained that telling him about Lucy had loosened something in me. I told him about starting Leavings the night we broke up, how I wanted to call it Red Is the Color of Goodbye, but I hadn’t felt right using Spencer’s words.
He said he’d looked for my car every time he left the Y.
“You’re such a liar,” I teased, and told him about the night I’d seen him walking out with the people from spin class and how much it hurt to realize he wasn’t looking for me.
“Oh, how wrong you are,” he protested. “I know exactly what night you’re talking about. Mid-January. You were waiting for someone to pull out of a space to the far right of the entrance. Trust me, I saw you.”
“You never even looked up!”
“I didn’t dare,” he said. And then, “My alarm’s still set for four thirty.”
“It is not.” I laughed. “Why?”
“I guess I liked thinking of you getting up and starting the day.”
“You could have thought that at six.”
“I’m not saying it makes sense.”
I told him about meeting Margaret’s pilot, about seeing “our farmers” at the craft store.
“Kopp’s opens first weekend in May,” Erik said. “What do you think?”
“Are you asking me on a date?”
“I’m asking for a lot more than that, but sure, we can start there.”
It was nearly ten when we finally hung up. “I’ve got to sleep,” I told him.
“Why aren’t you here?”
“You think we’d be getting more sleep if I was?”
He phoned in the morning to say good morning. And on his way home after a fundraising dinner the next night. We spoke about work and the kids; Spencer was obsessed with glaciers. The twins were starting ballet. I told him about making cinnamon rolls on Lucy’s birthday, about the photo I had of her in my bedroom.
“Describe it to me. How old is she?”
“She’s six months.” I lifted the frame from my nightstand and held it in front of me. She was wearing a fluffy angora beret, smiling that wide toothless smile, her chin shiny with drool. You couldn’t tell from the photo, but she’d been in her bouncy walker and had just learned to move around, careening into walls and crashing into furniture and emitting this little shriek of joy that sounded like a teakettle whistle.