Chapter 4
Dreams
Kate
In Montreal, Kate was dreaming. A few hours before, she thought she’d have a sleepless night, a “white night,” she used to call them, back in her old life, when it still seemed as if a night without sleep could be benign. But sometime soon after two, she’d gone under, and her brain, like her daughter’s, was torturing her.
In the dream, she was in her old house. She’d forgotten to pull the shades on her bedroom windows tightly closed. They hadn’t wound the clocks back yet, so the light that pushed her awake wasn’t the sun but the street lamp on their front lawn that her children would decorate in a few weeks for Halloween. Kate knew without looking that her alarm would sound soon. That she’d have to pry herself away from the warmth embracing her and face another morning of getting the kids ready for school and herself ready for work.
She could feel her husband sleeping next to her. When she thought of him, Kate was always split in two. Sometimes even being married seemed weird, like a word you repeat so many times it loses its meaning. Other times Kate wondered how they’d ended up together. Had it simply been a case of musical chairs? That he was the one she was sitting next to when it was time for the music to stop? She knew she was being unfair to him, forgetting all the great things that were the reasons she was lying next to him in the first place. But instead, often, all she could focus on were things like the fact that he’d become a great father against his will.
When they’d discussed having children, it had never occurred to Kate to ask whether he wanted to be involved. Weren’t all fathers involved these days? They both worked equivalent jobs. Surely he wouldn’t expect her to give all that up and become the kids’ primary caregiver?
But he had. In those first months after they came home from the hospital, he’d refused to do diapers. He never offered to get up for a night feeding, or any feeding at all. Kate was at first amused, and then, slowly, furious. What was happening? She was too tired to understand. Too worn out to have the conversation she knew she should before this pattern became set in stone. They’d both come home from the hospital with the same amount of information. How had she become the expert and he the helpless?
And then things had shifted, she’d shifted, and he’d come to the rescue. He learned all the things they should’ve been learning together, and he’d done it so seamlessly, so easily, she often thought she’d made up the time before. Regardless, now he was in the trenches right along with her, maybe more than that, even. The cavalry, while she was the rear guard. A bad analogy. Of course, she was dreaming. She hadn’t thought all that, that morning a year ago. She’d just waited for the clock to click over. The music to start playing. The day to start up.
Time passed. Maybe she fell asleep again. Maybe it had been earlier than she thought. All she knew was that when she finally woke up, she was running.
Now, a year into her new life, Kate felt as if that was all she was doing—running. The direct result of her job as a nanny to a pair of three-year-old twins.
That was a laugh.
In fact, Kate did laugh when she accepted the job and realized what it would mean. She laughed again her first night in the basement apartment that came along with it. Lying in a brand-new bed (her employer, Andrea, had a horror of used mattresses and insisted on buying a new one for Kate, along with two pairs of Frette sheets and a set of the softest bath towels she’d ever used). Listening to the unaccustomed groans of the old building. Kate had stuffed a (organic) pillow into her mouth to keep the sound from flowing upstairs to the family she was now bound to.
“I can’t believe how lucky I am,” Andrea said the first time Kate met her, when she’d gone to an interview a week after she’d arrived in Montreal.
“Lucky?” Kate asked, but they both knew what Andrea meant. Of course Andrea was lucky. Look at where she lived—a sprawling brick house on a street in Westmount called Roslyn “on the flat,” as Kate would learn to call it, as if she were selling real estate. Everything on the property was neat as a pin. Even the leftover leaves from the big maple that dominated the front yard, yellowed and spotted with black nickel-size marks, had been bagged with more precision than anything she’d ever been able to accomplish.
“To find you,” Andrea said. Her hair was the ash-blonde color most of the women in the neighborhood wore. Andrea was personal-trainer, low-carb-diet skinny, and though it was October, her skin had a glow to it that was a shade too orange.
“My French is not very good, though.” Excellent French had been listed as a job requirement.
Andrea frowned. From the moment Kate had shown up in the chino slacks and argyle sweater she’d bought on sale the day before at the Gap, she’d been able to read the thought bubble over Andrea’s head. She was white. She was educated. She had the job.
But now there was a hesitation. Kate had revealed something about herself that was less than ideal. Were there other things to worry about?
“Oh, I don’t care about that,” Andrea said, her laugh tinkling. “They’ll be going to French school starting when they’re four. No.” Andrea leaned in. Kate could see the black hollows under her eyes that even a thick layer of foundation couldn’t hide. “I just need help getting them to four, if you know what I mean?”
Kate glanced over her shoulder at the photograph of Andrea’s boys that sat on the granite counter in the gleaming all-white kitchen. They looked harmless, with their milk teeth showing and their matching coveralls. But Kate knew that was likely deceptive. Two two-year-old boys. They’d be full of energy and questions. She wouldn’t have time for herself. It sounded . . . perfect.
“I do,” Kate said. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Kate’s dream shifted again. A tumble of images from the last year. The boys. The house. Her small moments alone. The picture she tried not to look at too often. The people she’d left behind. She felt herself sink deeper, even as it lightened outside. And perhaps that’s what this last year had been, a dream within a dream.
But it was time to wake up now.
So wake up, Kate. Wake up.