CHAPTER FOUR
OLIVIA
I DIDN’T HAVE A KEY. I was eleven. I couldn’t get into the apartment. I had no idea where my mother was.
I can’t remember where we were, what city it was. Indianapolis, maybe, or Milwaukee. It was a cold, glittery night. We’d been there for two days, having driven from Florida where my mother earned some cash selling woven bracelets on the beach. She’d used the money to put down a deposit on a first-floor, downtown apartment that smelled like mold.
She’d sent me out to get milk and bread from a store a few blocks away. When I got back, the apartment door was locked. I didn’t have a key. I rang the bell. No answer. Knocked. No answer. Tried to peek in the window. Dark inside.
Dark inside.
My heart thumped low and heavy against my ribs. I clutched the plastic bag. My hands were sweaty. I waited for a long time, huddled up against the door. Every now and then, I’d ring the bell or knock, as if she’d suddenly open the door and tell me she’d been in the shower all this time.
The night air grew colder. When my fingers started getting numb, I pushed to my feet and walked back to the grocery store. Even if I had no one to call, at least it would be warm there. Lights shone from the windows, neon beer signs flashing.
I walked with my shoulders hunched. I didn’t notice the group of men loitering outside the store until I straightened. They were big, maybe five of them, dressed in ratty jeans and jackets. Cigarette smoke, bottles of hard liquor, raspy laughter.
“Hey, honey, why you all alone?” one of them called.
I stopped. I’d been forced to deflect plenty of leering, wrong looks from men. I’d been looked at, touched, and spoken to in ways no young girl should be. My mother had never protected me, so I’d had to learn how to protect myself. Even if it was by being invisible.
A guy with a beard stood between me and the entrance to the store. He narrowed his gaze on me.
“You know how to answer a question, girl?” he asked.
My stomach knotted. Their stares burned into me. I’d have to pass them all, walk through the gauntlet they’d created, to get inside the store.
“You’re a pretty little thing,” another guy remarked, tilting his head back to drink out of a bottle. “You shouldn’t be out alone this time of night.”
“You got a boyfriend?” the bearded guy asked with a leer.
The others laughed, the sound cracking through the air like a whip.
I dropped the bag and ran. Better than trying to be invisible was not being there at all.
Their laughter followed me as I ran, my tennis shoes pounding on the cracked sidewalk. Instinctively, I ran back toward the apartment, but fear propelled me faster and faster. By the time I stopped, gasping for breath, I realized I didn’t know where I was.
I stopped on a street corner, looking around. An empty lot, car repair shop, boarded-up house. Yellowish pools of light cast by streetlamps. Panic flickered in my gut. I didn’t know what to do except keep walking. There was no one else around, not that I’d have trusted anyone enough to ask for help.
I walked through the maze of streets until my feet ached, passing closed stores and noisy dive bars I was too scared to enter. Everything scared me—passing cars, shadowed alleys, underpasses thick with weeds. I didn’t even dare try and find a police officer for fear they’d involve Child Protective Services after taking me in.
When I was too exhausted to keep walking, I found a sheltered stoop where I could hide in the shadows. I nodded off into an uneasy sleep, waking when the sky began to lighten.
I pushed to my feet, hugging my arms around myself as I started walking again. A grocer was just unlocking the door of his shop as I approached. Desperate and longing to be back at “home,” I hurried up to him.
“Sir, can you help me?” My voice was hoarse, cracking. “I’m lost.”
He eyed me warily, trying to figure out if I was a runaway kid, beggar, or both.
“P-please,” I begged. “I know the street where I live, but I can’t find it. Could you just l-look it up for me? Tell me how to get there. I’ll walk home.”
He finally relented and gestured for me to enter the store. He told me how to get to Sycamore Street, and it turned out I’d walked ten miles away from the apartment. Then he gave me an apple and told his wife to drive me back.
A light was on in the apartment. I knocked. I didn’t know whether to be enraged or relieved when my mother answered the door. She looked like an angel, the light glowing on her honey-blond hair, her features as fine as those of a princess. She looked at me with her thick-lashed blue eyes and blinked.
“Where were you?” she asked.
“You told me to go to the store for milk and bread last night,” I said, my throat tight with the urge to fling myself into her arms, to feel her embrace. “When I got back, you weren’t here. I didn’t have a key. I’ve been walking all night. I got lost.”
She blinked again, like she didn’t remember. At times like that, I almost wished I could blame drugs or alcohol for her lack of concern. Using the excuse “She was drunk” or “She was strung out” seemed far easier than admitting the truth, which was “She just doesn’t give a shit.”
My mother opened the door wider to let me in. A man’s jacket was flung over the sofa, his shoes next to the coffee-table. A heavy thickness hung in the air, one I’d learned to recognize as a male threat, menacing and lewd.
I glanced toward the bedroom. The door was closed.
“Well,” my mother said. “Where’s the milk and bread?”
“Paris?” Allie’s eyes widen behind her purple-framed glasses as she sets a roast-beef sandwich in front of Florence Wickham at the counter. “That is so awesome. I wanted to do a year abroad in Paris when I was in art school, but I ended up going to Madrid with a friend. We traveled all over Europe, though. Had a completely amazing time. I love Paris.”
“Moi aussi,” Florence says, pursing her lips around the straw of her cherry soda. “The city of lights and love. How can you not be happy there?”
“How many times have you been?” I ask.
“Oh, countless.” She waves her hand in the air. “But no matter how many times my husband and I visited Paris, we always found something new to see and do. And the food is incomparable.”
“Liv and Dean went to Paris on their honeymoon,” Allie tells Florence. “Isn’t that romantic? They were married at a villa in the south of France.”
“Oh, how lovely,” Florence says warmly. “Have you been back, Olivia?”
“Dean has. I haven’t.”
“Why not?”
I shrug, not wanting to admit I haven’t had a reason to return to Paris. “Well, Dean has gone for work reasons and I’ve just stayed here.”
“I’d never pass up the chance to go to Paris,” Allie remarks. “I’ll never forget this chocolate profiterole I had at a café on Boulevard Montparnasse.”
“My niece and her husband went on a food tour of France a couple of years ago,” Florence says. “They took cooking classes, went wine tasting, even shopped at the market with a chef so they could pick fresh produce. They had such a fantastic time they’re planning to do it again next year, either in Paris again or Rome.”
“You could totally do that, Liv,” Allie says, her voice tinged with excited envy. “Take French cooking classes or pastry classes in Paris. And you could write about all your experiences on your blog. Liv in a Parisian Wonderland.”
I frown, not having expected such an enthusiastic response from her. “Well, we might visit Paris again, but we’re certainly not going to move there. Dean hasn’t even been offered the job. It’s just an opening.”
“Well, I imagine Dean is rather exceptional at fitting into openings,” Florence remarks, dipping a French fry into a pool of ketchup.
Though of course that’s true, I shoot her a mildly disapproving look.
“Not this opening,” I say. “Besides, even if he were offered the job, there’s no way we could move overseas with a child. And it’s not just Paris either. We’d have to move to different countries for weeks or months at a time. Wherever the World Heritage people send us.”
“Well, that sounds incredible,” Florence remarks. “What an opportunity.”
“We can’t go globe-trotting with a two-year-old,” I say.
“People move all over the world with children all the time,” Allie remarks. “Don’t you ever watch House Hunters International?”
“We’re not on House Hunters International,” I remind her.
“Oh, you should totally apply.”
“Allie, I’m not moving overseas! I can’t believe you’d want me to leave the café.”
She blinks. “I don’t want you to leave the café. But I wouldn’t want you to think the café is the only reason you’d have to stay. I always believe you’re more likely to regret the chances you didn’t take than the ones you did.”
Florence nods in sage agreement. I scrub down the counter with unnecessary force. I’d secretly hoped that by mentioning the possible job to Allie, she would laugh and agree it would be ridiculous for Dean to ever consider such a move, thereby validating my own response. I hadn’t expected her to wax rhapsodic about pastries, cooking classes, and House Hunters International.
Over the next few days, I wonder if I’m the only woman in the world who can’t imagine moving to Paris. Admittedly, in some tiny part of my brain—fueled by travelogues set in Provence, Isabelle Adjani movies, and buttery croissants from the French bakery where I used to work—I can see the romanticism of the opportunity. I can imagine Dean reaching the apex of his career, he and I raising our son to be a citizen of the world, me learning French, visiting museums, making new friends for myself and Nicholas.
But I know the difference between an idealized image of something or someone (Hi, Mom) and reality. And I know that a move to Europe, even Paris, would not be like a soft-edged romantic movie where I wander down the Rue de Rivoli in a chic scarf, buying fresh flowers and macarons for my dinner party comprised of international diplomats.
Global mobility means Dean could be sent anywhere. I looked at the list of World Heritage sites, which includes monuments in China, India, Chile, Malaysia, Peru, Turkey…
There’s no telling where he would have to go first and for how long. It’s painfully reminiscent of my constant moving with my mother, except on a far bigger and more frightening scale.
Even if I could get past my deep-seated hatred of moving to unknown places, the price of the WHC position is not one I would want to pay—leaving Mirror Lake, selling my half of the café, selling the Butterfly House, saying goodbye to the friends who have become my family, trying to adjust to raising our son in foreign countries. Through hard work and struggle, my dreams of life in Mirror Lake have all come true, and I could never leave them behind for dreams I don’t even have.
But I’m distinctly aware I’m not the only one with dreams. And I don’t know what my husband’s dreams are anymore. I know he wants to protect his family, to do whatever he can to ensure we’re safe and happy, to forge new paths in academic research, expand the Medieval Studies department, and guide his students to achieve their best. But all those dreams focus outward or on other people.
Does Dean have any dreams for himself?
I try not to let the disquiet of that question affect me too much. I don’t want to even consider the idea that Dean might ever give up any dreams for my sake. But the question of the interview fades after Hans Klasen leaves town, and Dean and I settle back into our steadfastly familiar routine.
Though Dean isn’t teaching this semester, he goes to campus to work and meet with grad students. One Thursday afternoon, Nicholas and I head to Wizard’s Park to join a weekly playgroup of other children and their mothers.
The park is a grassy expanse of land dotted with sculptures and topiaries of wild animals—a tiger, elephant, a flock of penguins, a giraffe. A large playground sits in the middle of the park, and the landscape slopes down toward the lake.
The moms—or The Moms, as I’ve come to think of them, like an army guarding their children—are wandering around with takeout cups of coffee, talking and keeping an eye on the kids, who swing on monkey bars, cross the rickety bridges, and go down the slides.
Today Nicholas and I are in charge of bringing snacks, and I set up containers of grapes, apple slices, cookies, and milk on a picnic table before going to supervise Nicholas on the jungle gym.
When he starts shoveling sand into a plastic bucket expressly made for the purpose of filling and dumping, I sit on a nearby bench and take out my phone to text Dean.
LIV: Tell me a fantasy.
DEAN: I have office hours.
LIV: Ooo! A sexy office fantasy. Am I a naïve little secretary, and are you the big, domineering boss?
DEAN: I’m on campus and I have student office hours right now.
LIV: Is there a student in your office?
DEAN: No. Where are you?
LIV: With other moms and kids at the park.
DEAN: And you’re texting me about sex fantasies during a playgroup?
LIV: I know, it’s so wrong. So… naughty.
DEAN: Yes, it is.
LIV: Am I a bad girl in your fantasies? A slutty French maid?
DEAN: No, but now I want to buy you a French maid costume.
LIV: I would wear it for you, you know.
DEAN: Yeah, you would.
LIV: Do you really fantasize about that?
DEAN: No, but I will now.
LIV: Come on, give it up, then. What do you fantasize about?
DEAN: It’s in the vault, baby.
LIV: I’m not a nurse, am I? A cheerleader?
DEAN: No.
LIV: A stripper? Catwoman?
DEAN: Uh, no, but that sounds promising.
LIV: Dean, there can’t be that many fantasies left.
DEAN: You’d be surprised.
LIV: Tell me!
DEAN: Gotta go. Student just walked in.
LIV: I will break you, Professor West.
DEAN: You already do every time you smile at me, beauty.
Well, crap.
A smile tugs at my mouth as I tuck my phone back into my pocket and reemerge into the world. Even though Dean and I don’t have nearly as much time alone together as we used to, these little stolen moments still have the power to sweep me off into the space that belongs to us alone.
“Snack!” Nicholas calls, dumping the bucket of sand out.
“Come on.” I hold out my hand, feeling that warm glow when he closes his chubby fingers around mine.
We return to the picnic table, and I hand him an individual container of milk, a cookie, and a few grapes.
“Do you have soy milk?” Susan, a young mother of twins whom I met at the last playdate, pauses beside the table. “Bailey is lactose intolerant.”
“No, sorry.” Because I have become well-versed on the hot topics of The Moms these days, I add, “But the grapes are organic, and the double-chocolate cookies are gluten-free and nut-free.”
She appears somewhat mollified as she takes a juice box out of her bag and hands it to the pigtailed blond girl at her side.
“So I heard you’ve taken over the planning for the bicentennial,” Susan says. “Between that and the café, you must be swamped. Is Nicholas in daycare?”
“A few times a week,” I say, hating the stab of guilt and the sense that I’m being judged—even though the question was innocent enough.
“And how is the festival planning going?” Susan asks. “I don’t know how you do it all.”
I don’t, I think ruefully. At least, I’m not doing my husband.
“It’s going well,” I tell Susan brightly. “Just looking for a main sponsor.”
“I heard you were going to have a children’s stage.” Joan, a mother of two teenagers and an unexpected three-year-old, reaches for a cookie. “What kind of entertainment do you have planned?”
“Hopefully a magician and an acrobatic group,” I say. “But if I can bring in a high-level sponsor, Slice of Pie will be the headliner.”
“Slice of Pie?” Susan and Joan exchanged impressed looks at my mention of the red-hot children’s band, which is fronted by a charismatic and curly-headed young guitarist and singer known as the Pieman. “Wow.”
“I hope they don’t play ‘Rumble in My Tumble.’” Another mother, Wendy, approaches, pushing her sunglasses on top of her head. “If I have to hear that song one more time, I’m drowning myself in chardonnay.”
“Oh, please.” Joan rolls her eyes. “As if you need an excuse to drown yourself in chardonnay.”
We all laugh, and Wendy acknowledges the truth of the remark with a good-natured grin.
“So will we need tickets, Liv?” Joan asks.
“There will be a few VIP seats, but since the stage will be in the park, it’s all part of the festivities.”
“What about backstage passes?” Susan asks. “Can we meet the Pieman? He’s so adorable.”
“Noah wants to be the Pieman when he grows up,” Wendy says. “He’d lose his mind if he got to meet him in person.”
“Well, nothing is confirmed yet,” I reply. “I’m waiting to see if Edison will sponsor the festival so we can afford more entertainment.”
I glance at Wendy, wanting to change the subject. “So didn’t Noah start pre-K this year? How is that going?”
“Oh, it’s wonderful. I really should have had him tested for early enrollment.”
“Liv, Louise said you have Nicholas on the waitlist for Preschool of the Arts,” Susan says. “Have you heard from them yet?”
“No, but he won’t be three until next January. They won’t take him before then.”
“Oh, they will if your child is advanced,” Susan assures me, patting Bailey’s head. “I’ve had Bailey on the list since she was one. I expect she’ll be enrolled this fall.”
“Dylan just started at P of A.” Carol, the mother of a three-year-old son and newborn daughter, approaches the table. “It’s been incredible. They emphasize arts and music as well as academics, so the children go into kindergarten really well prepared. Some of them are even reading at advanced levels by the time they start.”
My heart sinks a little. I dropped a ball I didn’t even realize I was holding. I make a mental note to call the preschool as soon as I get home, once again feeling like I’m falling behind in some sort of race, even though I don’t even know where the finish line is.
“…the Bahamas,” Susan is saying, the conversation apparently having shifted to another topic. “We usually stay on Paradise Island, but this year we’re going to Nassau. We’ve never been there before.”
“Are you taking the kids?” Wendy asks.
“No, they’re staying with my mother.” Susan gives a sigh of relief. “I can’t wait. I’ve already booked two spa days and a snorkeling trip.”
“Bob and I are going to Colorado in August,” Joan says. “At least it’s a getaway. The kids are going to visit his sister for about a week.”
The other women chime in with their upcoming summer vacation plans. I stay silent. I can’t remember the last time Dean and I went on a trip alone together. We’ve taken Nicholas to California to visit Dean’s father, and to Chicago a couple of times, but other than occasional talk about going to Italy someday, we haven’t gone anywhere else.
I’m beginning to think with our focus on Nicholas and our work, Dean and I have lost sight of each other in ways that have nothing to do with sex. I can’t even remember the last time we managed to go on a date—mostly because by the time evening rolls around, I’m too exhausted to want to do anything but sit on the sofa and watch TV, though even then I’m usually falling asleep before a program is half over.
“Hey, there’s my main man.” A deep voice booms over the park chatter as Archer strides toward us from the parking lot.
“Unca Archer!” Nicholas launches himself at Archer like a little rocket and hugs his legs.
Archer rubs Nicholas’s head and extends a fist. Nicholas obliges with a return fist bump, and then they simultaneously flare their fingers out into “fireworks.”
“How’s it going, man?” Archer grabs Nicholas’s legs and swings him upside-down to carry him back to the playground. Nicholas shrieks with laughter.
There’s a palpable shift in the air as the other mothers watch Archer approach—big and muscular with black hair and the hard edges of a biker, Archer West draws a great deal of feminine interest and fascination.
“Hey, Liv.” Archer hauls Nicholas upright and upside-down again, causing him to burst into a fit of giggles. “You get my text?”
“Yes, thanks. Can you drop us off at home after we pick up the chairs?”
“Sure.” Archer flips Nicholas around a few times before setting him back down.
“Swing,” Nicholas shouts, tugging on Archer’s hand.
Archer obligingly follows Nicholas to the swings.
“He is so hot,” Carol mutters to me under her breath. “What’s he doing here?”
“I asked him to help me transport some used chairs from a furniture warehouse,” I say. “They’re for the festival auction.”
“You’re auctioning old chairs?” Carol asks.
“I’m collecting old chairs,” I correct. “The auction is going to be called the Chair Fair. We’re going to give a chair to anyone who wants one, and they can paint it with whatever design they want and return it to me. Then we’re going to auction the chairs along with the travel and dinner packages that local businesses have donated.”
There’s a murmur of impressed appreciation among The Moms, which makes me feel good. With the exception of Susan, who claims she can’t “draw a straight line,” all the other women agree to participate in the auction by painting a chair.
“I’m going to keep all the chairs in the shed at the Butterfly House, so you can come by any time to pick one up,” I tell them. “I’m going to do a garden-themed chair, and I’m hoping I can get Archer to paint a comic-book chair to go along with a gift certificate from a game store.”
“He could be a comic book hero,” Carol remarks, eyeing Archer as he catches Nicholas coming down a slide. “Is he married?”
“You are,” Susan reminds her.
“Yeah, but Frank doesn’t look like that,” Carol replies. “Archer could put the rumble back in my tumble, if you know what I mean.”
Susan chuckles. “Every mother of young children knows what you mean. That’s why we need these vacations alone.”
Good heavens. Is that true? Do we all have this dearth in our libidos and sex lives? Are The Moms so caught up in running households and raising children that sex has fallen by the wayside?
“Honestly, I’d rather have a spa day than a romantic night with Frank these days,” Carol says. “The idea of being alone and pampered is way more exciting than having to do any actual work. Maybe if I were more relaxed, I’d feel sexy again.”
“Yeah, well, Paula had a full-time nanny and plenty of time to pamper herself… you know what a babe she is… and her husband still ended up having an affair,” Wendy points out. “Less than a year after their son was born!”
The other ladies shake their heads and cluck their tongues. I eat a cookie and sigh inwardly.
I really do need to do something—not because I think Dean would start eyeing other women, but because I know how lucky I am to have him. In the chaos of the past two years, he’s always been right there, steady as an oak tree—walking with a colicky Nicholas at night so I could sleep, going to work every day after making breakfast and coffee, asking one of his grad students to babysit so he can take me out, always ensuring Nicholas and I have everything we need and want.
He and I have struggled with dry spells before, but not for longer than a few months. This one seems to have been going on for two years.
And my husband does look like Archer. Heck, my husband is a zillion times hotter and sexier. And still, even when he’s thrusting inside me and murmuring dirty things in my ear… I start thinking of daycare payments.
Really, Liv?
I need to do something more than just get my groove back.
I turn to pack up the snack containers. Archer runs around with Nicholas and a few of the other kids, much to both their and their mothers’ pleasure.
If these other women can manage to take vacations alone with their husbands, why can’t I? Schedules are certainly adjustable. But though I love the idea of Dean and I going on a trip alone together, I can’t prevent a nagging worry. If we’re alone in a hotel room, there’s some serious pressure to get uninhibited and raw.
Which would obviously be the point and, under the right circumstances, I’d be all in. But now I can just picture myself gorging on an expensive, room-service meal that I didn’t have to cook and then falling facedown on a huge, feather-soft bed to sleep for eight hours straight.
Leaving my husband to his own devices. Again.
But what if I don’t tell him about it at all? That would give me even more motivation—I could plan a hot, romantic trip just for the two of us and surprise him with it. How incredible would that be?
Ideas start sparking in my mind. I’ll buy new lingerie, get a mani/pedi, maybe a new haircut. I’ll study the 31 Days of Hot Sex website for new ideas, read some smutty novels. Heck, I might even check out a couple of dirty movies.
If I follow the Dean West belief that a plan is the bedrock of every action, then I should be raring to go by the time we close the hotel room door.
That’s it! That’s the answer. It has to be.
As Archer returns with a giggling Nicholas slung over his shoulder, I think I should have found—or at least looked for—the answer sooner.
Maybe if I had, Dean wouldn’t have turned his attention to work so much over the past few years. And maybe he wouldn’t be facing the lure of a fancy, international job that feels like it might suddenly be my new competition.