Page 58 of The New Couple in 5B

“You’re indispensable to me.”

“Same.”

“Meet me for a drink later, okay? We’ll figure this out.”

We make plans to connect at a place in my neighborhood later. After we hang up, I leave a message for Amy, then head back to my apartment, feeling bereft for Max, worried for my project,wobblyin every way as Dr. Black likes to put it.

At home I use the side door to the Windermere and take the service elevator up to my floor to avoid Abi. Of course, there’s the camera in the service lobby, the elevator and in the dim, small space outside our back door. I sense, or maybe imagine, that he still knows my coming and going. That he’s watching me, judging my choice to avoid him.

I collapse on the couch, exhausted—by the horror of yesterday, my fight with Chad, who still has not called, my emotionally grueling session with Dr. Black, the bad news from Max.

There it is. The not unfamiliar urge to call my mother, my grandmother, my sister—but I quash it down hard. We’re always drawn back to our family of origin, aren’t we? No matter how much pain they’ve caused, no matter how far we’ve run from them. If only the answers to all life’s trials lay in a deck of cards, in visions and dreams. How much easier would everything be?

It all swirls as I lie there in our beautiful new home. I pull the throw blanket over myself and fall asleep hard.

seventeen

Willa

1963

“I saw you.”

The small voice distracts me from my novel. I have disappeared insideThe Glass Blowersby Daphne Du Maurier. Paul doesn’t think very much of her, but I love to disappear into the worlds she creates—so full of glamour and darkness. Though it was written before I was born,Rebeccais still my favorite. But Paul says that there are rumors that her new book, a huge bestseller, was plagiarized from the work of a Brazilian novelist. I don’t believe it. Male jealously, probably.

“I saw you.”

I barely hear the little voice over theswish, swish, swishof the coin laundry machine, the scent of detergent soapy on the air. This basement, dark and dank, is not my favorite place, and yet I often find myself sitting down here, waiting between the wash and drying cycles. There’s another young girl in the building, an artist, and we often do our laundry together, sometimes play cards while we wait. But she’s out of town, very glamorously off to Paris for an opening where one of her sculptures will be shown. I envy her—her success, her confidence.

The child inside me is growing. And my career is on hiatus, which is code for being over—because I don’t know of a single dancer who has come back to work after having children. Your body changes; suddenly, it belongs to someone else. Still, I’m surprised to find that I’m happier than I have ever been.

“Isawyou,” he says again when I ignore him.

That wicked little boy from next door. He stands over by the cages where everyone stores the things that don’t fit in the apartment.

“What did you see?” I ask. He’s horrid, always having tantrums in the foyer. Sometimes I hear him through the door, screaming at his mother. Once I saw him pinch his sister in the elevator, then lie about it when she started to cry.

“I saw you kissing,” he says. “Not your husband.”

My heart flutters and I feel the heat rise to my cheeks. “You saw no such thing.”

“I did. Right down here.”

He still wears his school uniform, pressed white shirt. His white-blond hair is tousled, eyes glittering with unkind mischief.

“You’re a silly little boy.”

“I’m not. I saw you. You were wearing a flowered dress, and he had his hand up your skirt.”

“Nonsense.” The little brat. I’d like to throttle him.

The service elevator doors open and Ella breezes in, as flawless as ever in a long white skirt and oversize top. She can’t be much older than I am but she seems to live on another planet of wealth and accomplishment. She and her husband, Charles, are world travelers, often gone for months, leaving the children with a nanny. Maybe that’s why her child is such a little monster.

“Are you bothering Willa?” asks Ella.

“Not at all,” I say. My heart is still hammering.

She sweeps by me with a simple woven straw basket and tosses in a pile of white clothes that hardly seem soiled at all. Even her laundry is perfect.

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