Lu came into the house on nervous little cat feet. The boys were watching TV, and Jeremy was still in the bedroom. He had moved from the straight-backed chair to the bed. He was lying on his back, the back of his head resting in his hands, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He was staring at the ceiling.
“Do you remember when I was working at the firm?” Lu asked. “Before kids.”
“Of course.” His voice was gentler than it had been, more conciliatory.
“You were just starting your residency, remember?”
“I do.”
“Working crazy hours.”
“Crazy.”
“And our schedules almost never matched up.”
“I know. You were alone a lot.”
“I didn’t mind.” She had never minded being alone when Jeremy was at the hospital. She had a new job. She had friends, and plans, and she could go for drinks or dinner any night of the week if she chose to. Sometimes she didn’t choose to. Sometimes she poured a glass of wine and put on her pajamas at eight-thirty. She was always tired after a day at work—they worked the young attorneys to the bone—but it was such a good kind of tired, a satisfying emotional and intellectual fatigue.
“But every now and then, we’d match up perfectly, on a Saturday! We’d both have it off. Remember that? Remember those Saturdays?”
Jeremy had a faraway look in his eyes. “I remember,” he said.
“Jeremy?” Lu sat cautiously on the edge of the bed.
“Yes?”
“I liked me better then.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, considering. “I liked you then too.”
“Better?” she asked. She was scared of his answer.
“No . . .” he said slowly. “Not better. But you were happy. I liked you happy.” He hesitated. “Do you know what I thought when I read your blog?”
Lu leaned back a little bit, so that her upper back was against Jeremy’s legs. “What?”
“I thought that you don’t love us anymore. The way you wrote about this other family—like you wanted us to be them, not us to be us. Like you like them better.”
Lu could see how it came across that way. She could see how that hurt Jeremy. “Of course I love you. I love you just the way you are, I don’t want you to be Jacqui and Charlie and Sammy. But I can’t love just you.”
Jeremy sat up and pushed his back against the headboard. “Lu—”
“No. You have to listen to me. Nobody has ever asked that of you, Jeremy, to love just your family, and not your work, and not all of the things you can do that have nothing to do with this household. You don’t know what that’s like. You can try to imagine it, but you can’t really know it, not the way I do.” She watched him, wondering what he was thinking, and she kept talking. “It’s not enough, Jeremy. I can’t do this . . . forever, just this. But I also can’t do the other thing if you’re thwarting me at every step. If you . . .”
“If I what?”
“If you’re not proud of me.” No, that wasn’t even it. “If you don’t take it seriously. To do it the right way takes hours every day.”
“Okay,” he said. “I get that.”
“You do?”
“I do. I’m trying to. So maybe you have someone, Maggie or someone like her, two mornings a week. You can do a little bit more every day while the kids are napping. We can afford a little bit of babysitting, if it’s what you really want.”
Tears of frustration sprang to Lu’s eyes. It was a concession, but it was all wrong. He didn’t really get it. “Chase hasn’t napped for two and a half years, Jeremy, and Sebastian is in the process of giving his nap up. If you ever had charge of the boys on your own you would know that.” Her voice came out sharper than she’d realized it would. “To do this thing the right way takes hours every day. The people who are successful with this are doing it as a full-time job. I can’t do it if I don’t take it seriously. If you don’t.”
She thought again of Virginia Woolf. Money dignifies. And she told him about the money, all of it: what she had in her secret account, and what she was making from affiliate links, and how many potential advertisers she’d found just this summer, and what her agent thought she could make in a book deal. She watched something change behind his eyes as she spoke—as fleeting as a flame, as undefinable. Was it hope? Desire? Disbelief?
Then she knew. It was respect. The money was changing it for him.
You go, Virginia, Lu thought. Nearly nine decades ago you wrote those words, and you hit the nail on the goddamn head.
“I didn’t realize,” he said.
“Of course you didn’t. I never told you. It’s another secret I was keeping from you. But with this kind of money, we can do a lot. We can pay your parents back. We can hire a nanny. We can get that awful wallpaper out of the basement bathroom.”
Jeremy smiled at that. “That wallpaper is horrendous.” She waited. The wallpaper was the least of it, obviously. “The money is a big deal, Lu. I get that. That’s huge. But even so, a nanny isn’t going to replace you giving them your full attention. Despite everything you’re saying, I still think one of us should. They’re still so little. That’s what we believe in. That’s what we always agreed on. Don’t you see?”
Again, the sensation of the high dive, the closing of the eyes, the jumping. “That’s not what I believe anymore. I’m sorry, Jeremy, no. I don’t agree.” She shrugged, and there was an apology in her shrug, but at the same time there was no apology at all. “I just don’t agree.”
“What do you mean?”
She stood and walked over to the window, which faced Anthony’s cottage. “If you think one of us needs to be home full-time with Chase and Sebastian, then you need to quit your job and be home with them.”
“Quit my job? I can’t quit my job. You can’t really mean that, Lu. People don’t quit jobs like mine.”
She whirled around. “Of course I don’t want you to stop being a doctor. Of course not. I’m trying to point out how ridiculous that would be, for me to ask you to do that. Priorities change, Jeremy, and needs change, and our priorities about this aren’t the same anymore. They just aren’t.” Jeremy’s mother had been home with him, and he’d loved it; Lu’s mother hadn’t, and she wished she could have been more. But she was finally able to articulate the exact thought that had been eluding her all summer: her need to be more than a mother now outweighed her belief that a parent needed to be the primary caretaker. “What you want me to need and what I need aren’t the same.”
There, she’d said it. Everything but the big one.
Jeremy got off the bed and came to stand beside her.
“But that won’t work, Lu. A full-time job for you? I just don’t see how we could possibly swing that right now, not without creating chaos. When we have another baby—” His voice was pleading with her, and his eyes were too.
Now it was time for the big one. She had climbed the ladder for a third time; she jumped again. “I don’t want to have another baby, Jeremy.” There.
“Lu! No, please don’t say that.”
“I have to say it. It’s true. I don’t want to. I’m not going to.”
“Lulu.” Jeremy’s voice cracked. “I want three kids so badly. I’ve always wanted three kids. I was always clear about that. So were you! You used to want three kids.”
It was true, long ago she’d said that. “That was before.”
“Before what?”
“Before the whole burden of child care fell on my shoulders. I’m only willing to give up so much anymore, Jeremy.”
His eyes were pleading; his whole body was pleading. “If I could have the baby for us, I would.”
“And I would say, be my guest.” Lu believed that Jeremy thought he meant that, but she also believed that if it came right down to the uncomfortable reality of it he probably didn’t want to perform surgery pregnant, with swollen ankles and distended veins, and then stay home from the hospital for twelve weeks while he milked—sorry, nursed—the new arrival.
He took her hands in his. His long-fingered, sexy surgeon hands, hands that knew how to bring people back to life. “I just want us to want the same thing, that’s all.”
She shook her head. “No, you don’t. You don’t want us to want the same thing; you want me to want what you want. That’s different.” He let her hands drop. She could feel the moment growing beyond its own size—pushing out of its casing, ripping the seams. “Does that mean we can’t be married anymore?”
“I don’t think it means that,” Jeremy said. Jeremy, who never looked scared, looked scared. “Does it?”
What if it did? The flood of hot tears came on so quickly then, and she put her hands to her face.
“Shhhh,” said Jeremy. His arms found her; he wrapped her up the way he used to. Lu couldn’t stop crying. “Shhh,” said Jeremy again. Lu closed her eyes and for just a minute allowed herself to believe they were themselves more than a decade ago. She was sitting on Main Street in Hyannis with a bleeding knee. Their futures were bright. It was all far enough ahead of them that they couldn’t yet get to it. But it was there. They were trying, pulling, reaching for it, arms out, wanting everything.