The Other Life

Table of Contents

 

 

 

PUTNAM

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Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright © 2011 by Ellen Meister All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Meister, Ellen.
The other life / Ellen Meister.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-48615-3

1. Married women—Fiction. 2. Pregnant women—Fiction. 3. Marriage—Fiction. 4. Motherhood—Fiction. 5. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 6. Domestic fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. 8. Love stories. I. Title.

PS3613.E4355O75

2011

2010028958

813’.6—dc22

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

 

 

Nan closed her eyes to shut out distractions and it appeared to her as a glint of silver. And there it was, her
X
-
Acto
knife. She could picture it—the chrome cylinder with a disposable triangular blade. It was in a can in the back room with her paintbrushes. She went to it.

Nan closed her eyes and the baby turned again. It was a bigger movement than she’d ever felt.
“
Please
. . . don’t fight this,” she said, or maybe she just thought it. She couldn’t tell anymore if she was speaking or not. She started to drift and felt a great pressure as the baby pushed downward. I’m giving birth, she thought
,
right here, right now.

 

 

 

QUINN BRAVERMAN HAD TWO SECRETS SHE KEPT FROM HER husband. One was that the real reason she chose him over Eugene, her neurotic, self-loathing, semi-famous ex-boyfriend, was to prove her mother wrong. She
could
have a relationship with a normal, stable man.

The other was that Quinn knew another life existed in which she had made the other choice. The two lives ran in parallel lines, like highways on opposite sides of a mountain. There, on the other side, the Quinn who had stayed with Eugene was speeding through her high-drama, emotionally exhausting, childless urban life. Here, the Quinn who had married Lewis lived in the suburbs of Long Island, drove a Volvo, and was pregnant with her second child.

But the important part of the secret—the part that terrified and thrilled her—was that she knew it was possible to cross from one life to the other. There were portals.

Sometimes she discovered them by accident. Like last month at the supermarket, when she had her hand deep in a bin of string beans, groping for the fresh ones on the bottom. She saw Isaac, her six-year-old, eyeing the Lucky Charms in someone else’s cart, and could tell from his expression that he was considering making a grab for the box. He glanced at her—his conscience—and she simply shook her head.

“Why?” he whined.

“Because we don’t take things that don’t belong to us.”

It was an important lesson and she meant to be stern about it, but when he folded his arms and pouted, Quinn laughed. Something about his naked petulance was so guileless that it melted her heart. When adults behaved like that, it was just plain obnoxious, though she had always excused it in Eugene, her ex. His neediness brought out her tender side. He was anxious, prickly, and so often miserable that comforting him was practically a full-time job. But of course that was Quinn’s nature—she was a caregiver. All those years of handling her mother’s moods had taken root in her psyche, and Quinn grew toward the troubled like a plant seeking sunlight.

She thought about that as she picked through the string beans. The first cousin of that need to be needed was guilt, Quinn’s constant companion. Her conscience gnawed at her continuously. Was she doing enough for Isaac? For Lewis? Had she done enough for Eugene, or had she ruined his life by leaving him when she did? As she turned that thought over in her mind, the solid mass of raw vegetables beneath her fingertips seemed to push away on their own, like a magnet repelled by its opposite. She knew then that she was touching the edge of the other side, and that if she moved the string beans she would find a fissure in the bottom of the bin, a rupture in her universe that presented itself during these moments, when the choices she made to alter her own destiny intersected with the choices she hadn’t. Quinn wiggled her fingers, thinking about the life she hadn’t chosen. If she wanted to, she could leave Isaac in the middle of the produce section of Waldbaum’s and slip through to emerge somewhere else, with a whole different life.

She also knew there was a portal in the basement of her house, behind the ancient built-in ironing board. She never opened it, didn’t even like to look at it. But from the time she first walked in and saw it folded up against the foundation wall, she knew.