I had driven halfway there when my cell phone rang.
"Where are you?" Warren demanded.
"Going to prayer group," I said.
"Where"s the baby?"
"She"s with me."
Warren exploded. "Why didn"t you leave her home? I panicked when I couldn"t find her."
"I thought you were asleep. I was trying to be nice."
"No you weren"t," he said angrily. "You were trying to make the point that you have to do everything. Or maybe you just don"t trust me alone with Kasey."
I pulled over in the car, not wanting to argue while driving. Warren sounded sufficiently upset that after we hung up, I turned around to go home. I couldn"t understand how my doing something positive-going to prayer group-had taken this negative turn.
"I"ll do you a favor and leave," Warren said when I came back into the house.
"If that"s what you want," I said coldly.
"I think that"s what you want. You"d like me to finally leave for good."
For once, I took a deep breath and thought about what I wanted to say. "No, Warren. I"ve been through the wringer. I don"t think I can do this on my own. Tonight was a stupid misunderstanding. We can get through these. We have to."
Warren sighed. "Thank you for that, Jackie."
We both felt the tension in the room-and in our bodies-melt away. Kasey had fallen asleep in my arms, and now I handed her to Warren.
"Of course I trust you with the baby," I said, my voice starting to quaver. "You"re her father. She needs you."
Warren held Kasey in one strong arm and put his other arm around me. "We all need each other," he said simply.
Now that the idea of "leaving" had been said in the open, we both viscerally understood how much we wanted to stay together.
The next day I told Isabelle what had been going on.
"You two will never split," she said, as she often did. "You have all this drama and bickering, and then you"re fine again. And as soon as the smallest thing happens, your first reaction is "I"ve gotta call Warren and tell him." "
True enough. Warren and I called each other at least five times during the day-sometimes to say hi or check in, sometimes with a funny story or question. Often he had barely left the house before he thought of something to tell me. Once we were talking on our cell phones and I realized we were still close enough to see each other. I had giggled and waved at him-but we still kept talking.
"Don"t all couples do that?" I asked Isabelle.
From the funny look she gave me, I guessed not.
The next week, Dr. O"Brien cancelled our usual session because he was sick.
"I have a whole list I want to go over," I moaned to Warren when I called him at work-for the fourth time that day-to say he didn"t need to rush home. Dr. O"Brien had urged me to start keeping a list all week of issues that bothered me so we could handle them calmly during a session, rather than my erupting over each one during the week.
"Okay, we"ll go over the list ourselves tonight," he said.
He got home from work late and I said, "Are we still going to talk?"
"I thought we already talked," he joked.
"Very funny."
"Come on, sit down. Let"s go over your list."
I pulled out the sheet of paper on which I"d written the little concerns that had cropped up all week, bugging me. I worried that without Dr. O"Brien, we wouldn"t get anywhere, but we started at the top and talked about each one rationally. An hour later, we"d gotten through the list and Warren smiled.
"We just saved one hundred twenty dollars," he said.
"We can actually do this," I said, proudly tossing the finished list into the wastebasket. "We can talk to each other."
"Yup, we can do this," Warren said. He leaned over and kissed me. "We"ve done a lot of things these last couple of years we never thought we could. This one"s easier than most."
Thirty
One day in late March, Bernadette drove me home after a morning run, and as she dropped me off, another car came whizzing by.
"Watch out!" she called as I stepped out of the car, unaware of the danger.
The car swerved around me and I turned back to Bernadette and grinned. "You don"t have to worry about me," I said. "Apparently, I"ll never die."
Bernadette threw her head back and gave a long, long laugh.
I make no serious claims for my own immortality, but I spent two years hoping to die and never did. Now I felt great relief in enjoying life again. The worst had already happened. It did not kill me. I learned that we are all stronger than we would have imagined.
When my dad died, at age fifty-six, he seemed so young, and I mourned his too-brief stay on this earth. Now, in comparison, it seems like he had a full life. Maybe in the face of death, time always seems fleeting and transient. Religions all try to help us come to terms with the uncertainty of death and to give us the hope that the sweetness-and pain-of this life will somehow pay off in an eternity yet to come. I don"t know if that is true or not, but by the time Easter came, I was at peace with religion again and willing to take the comfort it offered.
Melissa and Brad had invited us to Easter dinner again, and we liked our new tradition with them. Throughout the winter, I hadn"t bought anything new for Kasey. Friends had been generous and she already had more pretty clothes than one baby could wear. Odd as it was for me to admit, I didn"t get a thrill anymore out of buying a cute new dress or sweet stuffed animal. Things no longer mattered very much. The years I had spent trying to convince Warren that we needed a bigger house seemed long, long ago. I liked where we lived. I could no longer remember why I had been so desperate for a new couch; as I sat relaxing on it with Kasey, I realized the one we had seemed just fine. I had a table in my living room covered with photographs of the girls, and that gave me a pleasure that no upholstery, house, or cute-as-a-b.u.t.ton onesie could match.
On the other hand, I"d always taken pleasure in shopping, and letting myself feel that lift for my new baby was part of accepting her. When Kasey was five months old, I saw a monkey-in-a-box in a toy store-and bought my first gift for her. I felt the guilt I always did about being disloyal to her sisters.
How can you buy something for her and not for Emma, Alyson, and Katie?
But I had a new message for that shrill, guilt-inducing voice in my head.
Leave me alone!
Wanting to buy something for Kasey was an auspicious sign, not cause for contrition.