Wishful Thinking (8 page)

Out of options, Jennifer looked at Vinita, who had waited patiently through her search, even as her intercom was buzzing with constant requests for her attention.

“I don’t understand,” Jennifer managed, as a sickening fear took hold of her. Images and sensations flooded through her: the sound of Julien’s guitar, the feel of Owen’s hand on her shoulder, Jack’s chocolaty kisses. “It was real.”

“I’m sure it seemed very real,” Vinita said carefully. “But extreme stress can bring on all kinds of mental symptoms—”

“No!” Jennifer cut her off.
“No.”
Reaching over to her right
hand, she ripped off the Band-Aid she’d applied before the staff meeting with a yank and pointed at the messy scrape. “I cut my hand,” she said. “Scraped some skin off when I was reaching for my phone in the broom closet. Look!”

Vinita did not look as long as Jennifer thought she should have. “Or you scraped it when you passed out in the bathroom,” she said.

“On what?” Jennifer demanded. “The toilet bowl?”

The intercom cut in again, disrupting their standoff. “Dr. Kapoor, please pick up. Emergency on line one.”

“I’ll be right back,” Vinita said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

Left alone, Jennifer searched her phone again and wondered, was Vinita right? Had it all been a dream? Had she passed out in the bathroom, her desire for the app so great it had knocked her out like some kind of mommy roofie?

A few minutes later, Vinita walked back into the room and closed the door behind her. “Sorry,” she said. “Julie’s off, and all these walk-ins, and naturally the computers are down.” She stepped toward Jennifer and took her hand. This was an unusual thing for Vinita to do. As a rule she was not the touchy-feely type. Perhaps for that reason, Jennifer did not find it reassuring at all. “I think I know what might have happened today,” she began.

“I don’t,” Jennifer said quickly.

Vinita ignored her. “I think what happened today was what’s called a dissociative episode,” she said, “brought on by extreme stress. I’d have to run some tests—an EEG, an MRI— and refer you to a psychiatrist, of course. But that’s what I think.”

Jennifer was silent.

“A dissociative episode is a kind of … break,” Vinita went on. “A mental break, where you can experience powerful hallucinations, like a waking dream.”

Jennifer pulled her hand away from her friend’s.

“Think about it,” said Vinita gently but firmly. “All the things you’ve been dealing with.” Jennifer winced. “Jack’s speech issues. You get no support from Norman. You’re under tremendous pressure at work. And your mom.” This last she delivered with special care, trying to go easy. “Losing your mom.”

My mom,
Jennifer thought,
would have believed me.

But would she have? Either Jennifer had come into possession of a time-travel app nobody on the planet had ever heard of, installed on her phone by a woman she’d never met, or she had had a dissociative episode. It wasn’t hard to see which was the more likely explanation. It had occurred to her to call Julien, to ask him if she’d been at his recital or not. But suddenly the idea just seemed nuts. She looked at the clock.

“It’s ten after six,” Jennifer said. “I gotta go.” Vinita’s office was so close to her apartment that if she hurried, there was still a chance she’d be only fifteen minutes late.

She slid off the table. Vinita pressed two prescriptions, one for the EEG and another for the MRI, into her hand. “You should get these tests done as soon as possible,” she said. Jennifer nodded. “I’m here for you, okay?” Vinita said. “Can we see each other in the next couple of days?”

Jennifer nodded again. “Love you,” she said, trying to sound normal.

“Love you too,” Vinita answered.

It was time to run again. It was time to go home.

J
ENNIFER GOT HOME AS
fast as she could. At 6:20 p.m., however, after walk-running down the hallway and unlocking her door, preparing to usher Melissa out with cash for a cab, she opened it to find a very unpleasant surprise: Norman, right there in her living room.

He was playing some kind of tickling-wrestling-punching game with the boys on her couch. The cat was sitting at a decidedly disapproving distance on the windowsill. What was Norman doing there? Aside from Saturdays, he was generally not seen or heard from except at the occasional school function, Julien’s winter soccer games (maybe Norman should find a way to get Jack a spot, she thought), and, lately, at Julien’s music recitals. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d laid eyes on him in her house on a weeknight. Couch cushions were everywhere. Plates of half-eaten spaghetti were on the table. She guessed Julien had not done his homework and Jack had not done his speech exercises. Not that Norman would have any clue about those.

Where in the world was Melissa?

“What are you doing here?” she asked as she attempted to hang her bag on one of the hooks by the door and was hit by an avalanche of jackets and backpacks.

“Hello to you too,” Norman said jocosely, continuing to wrestle with the boys, making a show of his hair-tousling, wet willy–dispensing manliness, performing, as usual, for her, for the boys, for himself. It irritated her to no end, not least because Norman acted more like a rascally uncle than like a father and would soon walk out the door and leave her with a hyperactive duo not remotely ready for bed. If she was honest, however, watching him filled her with jealousy, too, seeing Julien and Jack delight in a kind of roughhousing she could never get quite right. Eventually Norman told them to stop, though they didn’t listen. He was deflecting running charges from one and then the other when he answered her.

“Melissa texted to say you were running late and that she really needed to go to class, so I thought I’d come by.”

“Oh, damn! Night school. I forgot,” Jennifer said, lying again. Since when, she wondered, did Melissa look to Norman for help? “Maybe next time you or Melissa could ask me first?” she said. “I’d like to know when you are going to be in my apartment.” She looked around as she said it, as though there could be something incriminating there. But her life was so dull, the most embarrassing thing in the room was a stack of fifteen rice-pudding containers crusting over next to the TV.

“Boys, Daddy has to leave …,” Jennifer began.

“Daddy, don’t weave!” Jack cried, jumping onto the couch.

“
Leave
,” she and Norman both corrected.

“Jinx!” Julien called.

“Baths and pajamas!” she said, glaring at them both.

“You can’t talk, Mommy; you’re jinxed!” Julien shot back.

In response, Jennifer took him by the arm, swiveled him
around, and gave him a little shove down the hall. Jack reluctantly followed.

“Wait,” Jennifer said. “Say bye to Daddy before he goes.” The boys whirled around and rushed Norman, wrapping their arms around his legs. He gave them each a kiss on the top of the head.

“See you Saturday, you little monsters,” Norman added with a playful growl. Growling too, the boys retreated down the hallway.

“I’m glad Melissa got off okay,” Jennifer said to Norman. It had been good of him; she could at least acknowledge that. “Thank you.” She slipped off her shoes. “See you Saturday?”

“Actually,” Norman said, “there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“What’s up?” she said, walking over to the fridge and taking out a bottle of wine. She gestured to it. Norman shook his head.

“I got bunk beds,” Norman said.

“Really?” she said. The second surprise from Norman that day.

“And I got a teaching job,” he added. At this, Jennifer sat down. “Really?” she asked. The third surprise, and by far the biggest of them all. “What happened to ‘teaching would mean the end of my acting career’?”

Norman sat down too.

“Well,” he said, fiddling with a napkin ring on the table. “Things change. A spot opened up. Poetry and Poetics. Fourth grade.”

“At St. John’s?”

“Yep,” he said. Only St. John’s, one of the most artsy, elite, progressive schools in the city, would teach a class called Poetry and Poetics to fourth graders. St. John’s also happened to be Norman’s alma mater. Naturally, they couldn’t afford to
send their own children there. And naturally, when they’d needed it most, Norman had refused to apply to St. John’s for a job. But it was better late than never.

Then Norman smiled.
Could it be?
she thought, hardly daring to hope.
Child support?

“I’ll be able to increase my child support payments now,” he said. “I’m really happy about that.” If Norman was happy, Jennifer was ecstatic. This would be the first steady job that Norman had had—and the first steady stream of support he could offer her—in years. Just as she was about to smile back at him, however, she saw it. A look. An evasive, uncomfortable look she knew all too well. He was screwing up the courage to ask her something—something she was not going to like.

“But I also want more time with the kids.”

That was easy. “No,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, sitting up in his chair a bit. “Jennifer. You know and I know that the custody schedule we have now is completely unfair.”

Jennifer tried to control herself, to fight back the bile that had instantly leaped up in her throat. “You know and I know?” she repeated. “Completely unfair?” Norman nodded. She looked right into his eyes. “No,” she said firmly. “It isn’t.”

“I want fifty percent,” Norman said.

“What?” she cried. “Are you out of your mind? You have them one night a week, Norman! And half the time you aren’t even around for that!”

“You need to update your information,” he said coolly, working hard, she knew, to fight his instinct to shut down in the face of conflict. “If you were paying attention, you’d have noticed that that hasn’t been true for a long time.”

Jennifer dug her nails into her palm. Was this what he had been up to? Showing up for Julien’s recitals, covering for Melissa, and, yes, now that she thought of it, not missing a
Saturday in a long time?
How long?
she thought, struggling to remember.

“I haven’t missed a Saturday in eight months,” he said.
Eight months?
Could that be?

“So what?” she shot back. “You think you can disappear for
two years
and then, after a year of Saturday nights, demand equal time with me? Now that the hard part is over, with the bottles and the Cheerios and the strollers and the baby-proofing and the diapers? Do you remember where you were when Julien had hives for an entire summer and none of the specialists could figure out what was wrong with him?” Norman was clenching the napkin ring with such furious concentration now that Jennifer was sure he’d crack it. “Summer-stock theater! Do you remember where you were when Jack had a hundred and four fever and was throwing up so much I had to bottle-feed him Gatorade?” At this, he visibly flinched. “I don’t! But it wasn’t here!”

“We were divorced,” Norman said. “It wouldn’t have been here.”

“This is a total nonstarter, Norman. You hear me?
Total.
”

“Jennifer,” Norman said. “The boys. Keep your voice down.”

Jennifer could hear Julien running the bath and Jack singing loudly along with a Beatles song in their room. It was not for their sake that Norman wanted her to shut up.

“
You
left
me
,” he said. “Do you have any idea how devastating that was? What it did to my self-confidence? I’m sorry I checked out for a while. But I needed time, and now—”

“Yes, I left you,” she cut him off. “But
you
left
them
.”

Norman could not conceal, or did not want to conceal, the hurt on his face.

“I’m their
father
,” he said, with a choked, gulping, melodramatic
How could you say that to me?
delivery that hardened her heart completely.

“And you are welcome to see them,” she said. “Anytime. Here. Where they live.
At home.
”

For a minute they sat there in silence. Jennifer was shaking. It took her a minute to notice that Norman’s hands were trembling too. Taking a moment to steady them, he then reached into his back pocket and took out a folded-up piece of paper.

“I didn’t want to do this,” he said.

“What?” she asked, her voice rising. What was he pulling out? An order from a judge? It couldn’t be. They had never used lawyers, just a mediator. There had been so little to fight over.

But it was not a legal document. Instead it was several pieces of lined notebook paper, and on each of them was a long list of dates, followed by notes in Norman’s cramped, grade-school handwriting. “I thought you might react that way,” he said. “Because you have such a strong picture in your head of what I’m like as a father, and what you’re like as a mother, that you don’t really see what’s happening.” She leaned over the table, fighting the impulse to grab the paper out of his hand.

“It’s a log,” he said, “of how often, when the boys are staying at your place, they are with you, and how often they are with Melissa.”

“Melissa?” she said. “What does this have to do with Melissa?”

“I don’t have to share custody with a babysitter, Jennifer,” Norman said angrily. “And I’ve noted something else here. Do you know how many school events you’ve missed in the last few months? How many of Jack’s speech appointments you’ve rescheduled? The therapist’s office called me. He’s weeks behind.”

Jennifer’s heart sank. Suddenly she felt completely sad, and ashamed. The last few months she had had to cancel several of
Jack’s speech appointments, it was true. It had been impossible to get out of work. But she had always rescheduled … only to cancel again. She knew she had been falling far short of perfect lately in the mom department. But she had worked so hard for so many years to do it all. She hadn’t just given birth to her boys. She had earned them. And Norman hadn’t.

“So you’ve been spying on me?” she said. “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me, Norman.”

“You used to be so good at swearing,” he said with an awkward chuckle, as though this would somehow clear the air.