She thinks of Doug for a second. Whatever became of Doug? Melinda said he had a job in Florida, but also that they were just too different to make it work. “He needed to go—for both our sakes,” Melinda said, and Iris never asked more questions. She just remembers the way he kissed her cheek before he left, his shy wave as he walked away that day, his head down as if he didn’t want to go. His clothes like casualties in the closet. Doug loved Iris—she always knew he did. She wonders if Doug felt the way she does now—if he, too, was lost like this. If loving and losing a child hit Doug the same: the ache, the constant reminders, the part of you broken you know you’ll never get back. She feels like she can only limp, like she can’t hear anything clearly. She feels pulled down by the ocean’s undertow. At some point, she thinks now, in the quiet living room, she will track Doug down. She always promised herself she would. Alex was so good that he made her mostly forget Doug, but she knows this is important. She will say thank you for those years. For the hugs he gave her, for the way he held her hand and they ran outside when they heard the music of the ice cream truck, for the pieces of him he left behind in the closet that comforted her in some way. She stands up and pours her tea over the chamomile tea bag in the thick ceramic mug.
She sips it slowly and whispers Phoebe the way she always does when she’s alone. Once in a while she absently touches her belly.
Now her phone dings, and she holds the thin throw blanket around her shoulders as she walks to check it. A text from Alex. Can’t sleep. Just thinking of you. Whenever you get this, know I am.
I got this, she replies. She puts a heart emoji beside her words.
It’ll be okay, he writes.
She nods as if he can see her. Thanks. There is a long pause. Then a thumbs-up emoji from him.
She smiles. She loves him. She is grateful he came into her life when he did. She sips her tea again, and feels a swelling loss. She can’t get Phoebe out of her head. Or Doug either. Why does she miss Doug so much tonight? She feels something unexplainable: a pull toward the man who loved her and had to leave. He knew she wasn’t his. He had no rights once Melinda was done with him, and this breaks her heart.
Was he ever up at night thinking of her like this? Did he ever wish he could text her the way Alex just did? She thinks about the difficulty of love, how love isn’t enough. Not enough to have kept Doug in her life. Not enough to keep Phoebe’s tiny heart beating.
She stares at Alex’s words and sits alone in the dark, thinking about how random and alarming the world is. One day her dad left, one day she got a new one. One day she was pregnant, one day she wasn’t. She wishes Dave would wake up the way he sometimes does, and they would sit together and say nothing. She wishes she could turn on the radio and hear a sad song. She sees headlights in the distance of a lonely car out on the road.
She feels, some days, she hasn’t learned anything yet. She is still that girl looking at abandoned clothes in a cramped closet. She is still, no matter what, that curious girl, rolling a small white wand, looking, always looking, for life.
18. Life Is Like This
Suzette Savio is pumping gas at Henny Penny on Route 23 on a hot July afternoon when the girls approach her.
It is almost 5 p.m., and Suzette’s sleeveless navy blue linen shirt is uncomfortable and stuck to her back, and her feet hurt in these shoes, and her skirt feels tight for some reason, and she just wants to get back to the house and turn the central air as low as it will go and put her hair up and change into a loose T-shirt and pajama pants and ask Damon if pizza in bed with an ice-cold beer sounds okay.
Just one of those days where things didn’t fall into place easily, where she had to watch a social worker take a screaming three-year-old named Owen from his mother, who keeps leaving him alone to go score, and all Suzette wanted to do was hold Owen with his messy black hair and red cheeks. He bawled when his mother bawled; even their dog was walking in circles upset. And then Nicole, a client Suzette’s been working with for months, met her at Dunkin’ Donuts wearing a cotton scarf, trying to hide a new bruise around her neck. “Jesus,” Suzette said to her. “What’s it gonna take?” And then she felt bad for saying that because she knows about the cycle of abuse, and who is she to judge poor Nicole, whose life has been unfair in so many ways? And to make matters worse, Andy, a nine-year-old for whom she has been advocating, hugged a fourth-grade classmate in the coat closet too tightly, so tight that the girl couldn’t get away, and now they want to suspend him and possibly send him to the juvenile detention center, and the poor kid is so sensitive, so beaten down, that she doesn’t want to think of what would happen to him there.