“Hi, baby,” she says. She opens her arms and Henry, aware that she can’t leap up to embrace him, wiggles over toward her. His body is hot, and soft. He smells wonderful. “How was your nap?”
“Good.” He yawns. An automatic response; good manners. “Mommy, can I swing?”
How she lives for it, this Mommy. Soon, too soon, it will be Mom, then, impatient, angry even. Mom! Doors slamming. Hard to imagine, though maybe it won’t be that way. She wasn’t that way, was she, as a teenager? Sarah can barely remember. It seems unimportant, now, what she was like; the only thing that matters, anymore, is what he will be like, him and his brother. The baby startles, kicks. She has a theory he does that at the sound of his big brother’s voice.
“It’s so hot,” she says. “We should get you a cup of water.” He looks up at her, his eyes dark, bottomless, under those eyelashes. He’s beautiful in the way she never has been. And it’s his birthday. Let him swing.
“Let’s swing,” she says. She heaves herself up, bracing palms against the iron table, a hand-me-down from Lulu, the one that sat poolside in Connecticut throughout her youth. She wonders if Lauren recognizes it. The table scrapes against the concrete. “Lauren, you coming?”
“Right behind you,” she says. She refills the glass, and they follow Henry, racing, awake now, down toward the swing set.
He leaps onto the seat, face pure joy. “Push me,” he says. “Push, push.”
And she does. The grass beneath her bare feet, swollen and fat, she pushes, back and forth, back and forth, stepping aside slightly, to keep the swing from banging into her belly. Henry laughs, such a sweet sound, and she keeps pushing, back and forth, up and down.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Julie Barer and her colleagues at the Book Group, and to Megan Lynch and Kate Cassaday and their colleagues at Ecco and Harper Canada. Thanks to Dan Chaon, Alexander Chee, Mira Jacob, Edan Lepucki, and Emma Straub. Thank you to Vern Yip and Craig Koch, for their generous hospitality. Thank you to Dr. Bhoomi Brahmbhatt, for her expert insight. Thank you to Jennifer Romolini (for “groupthink”), Kristina Dechter (my first reader), Emily Hsieh (for the think tank), Samantha Turner (for the mascara), Lauren Whitehouse (for the ice), and Amanda Guttman and David Tamarkin (for everything else). Thank you to the weirdos on Twitter who kept me company while I worked.
I wrote this book mostly between the hours of 8:00 P.M. and 3:00 A.M.; this would have been unthinkable but for David Land, who shouldered the responsibilities (financial, parental, you name it) that I shirked for many months. All people should have a partner so generous; all children should have a parent so devoted. How I got so lucky, I will never know.