“So we’ll drive to an airport,” said her mother. “Or we’ll just drive. Whatever you need. Just let me take care of you. Let me help.”
Annette
Annette Morgan—once, briefly, Annette Danhauser—knew what the world thought of her. She had flouted a primal directive; broken a central rule. She had walked away from her child. Not to mention a man who loved her; a man who’d loved them both.
Annette had always understood the consequences of her choices. She’d known, when she left, that she would spend the rest of her life paying the price, and the price would be punishingly high. Do you have any children? New friends and lovers, well-meaning coworkers, strangers who’d struck up a conversation with her; all of them would ask, in a dozen different languages. Do you have kids? Annette had tried, at first, to simply say No. She’d birthed a child, of course, but she’d never had one, and while that distinction might have been lost on most of the world, it was meaningful to Annette. Ruby had never truly felt like she belonged to Annette. Ruby belonged to her father, Eli; and to Eli’s parents. Eventually, Ruby had belonged to Eli’s new wife, and to Sarah and Eli’s sons; to Sarah’s parents, who served as honorary step-grandparents. Ruby belonged to the family that Eli and Sarah had built together. Ruby had a place in the world, and it was a good place. Things had worked out for the best.
But you couldn’t always say all of that, Annette had found. Not to well-meaning strangers or curious colleagues or the person on the mat beside yours in a yoga class. At least, a woman couldn’t. The world made space for men who left; who walked away from wives and children, sometimes more than once. Maybe the world had to make room for those men because there were so many of them; men who put themselves, or their careers or their dreams or their desire to sleep with other people, ahead of their spouses and children. The world forgave them. It gave them second and third chances. Women were not offered any such grace. A divorced man who’d moved out of the family home, to a different town or a different state or even a different country, could still be regarded, in some circles, as a catch. A woman who did it was a monster. Annette thought sometimes that even women who hurt their children got more sympathy than ones who decided to leave them. People would murmur sympathetically about postpartum psychosis; friends and neighbors would give interviews about how much that poor mother had loved her kids. She must have snapped, a neighbor would say. She just cracked, a friend would announce. A weeping husband would say, This wasn’t her; she would never, ever do a thing like this in her right mind.
Annette wondered about that; about all those mothers, snapping and cracking, bending and breaking. Sometimes, she’d think that there had to be more women like her; that she couldn’t be the only one. She looked for them, the women who, like her, had held their babies in their arms and looked down at those dear, tiny faces, the womb-crumpled ears and off-kilter noses, and felt… nothing. No, worse than nothing: bone-deep terror, a certainty that they would make nothing but mistakes and cause nothing but pain, and an overwhelming desire to run. Other women who would sit at home with that new baby in their arms and watch the clock counting the hours until a boyfriend or husband or babysitter came to rescue them, because they could feel their very souls shriveling and dying as the minutes dragged by. Women who gagged at the smell of a dirty diaper; women who longed for sleep the way they’d desire the most sumptuous meal, the very best sex. Women who always felt like imposters; women who never automatically looked up when a childish voice called, “Mom.” Surely, Annette would tell herself, there were more women like her out there. No matter how alone and isolated she felt, she couldn’t possibly be the only one.
Annette had always known that she could never be a mother. She had never lied. She told Eli, all along, that she never wanted to get married or become a mother or settle down in a suburb, and Eli, the duplicitous, self-centered creep, had sworn to her that he felt the same way. Eli had grown up in a suburb of Long Island, with a dad who commuted to the city and a mom who stayed home and tended her children. Annette had grown up in a suburb of New Jersey, with a dad who commuted to the city and a mom with a part-time job at a boutique. Neither Annette nor Eli wanted that life for themselves. Together, they’d watched their classmates, marching in lockstep from the altar to the delivery suite and then to the better suburbs of the tristate area, in that order. Not for us, Annette would say. Not for us, Eli would agree. Eventually, it emerged that when Eli said Not for us, he’d really meant Not right now; that when he’d said Never, he’d meant I won’t want any of that until I turn thirty, at which point I will want all of it; everything that you and I say we despise.