“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re almost there.”
The school had a drop-off zone, and one or two equally late SUVs were swerving slowly into the zone and disgorging a child or two before carefully inching away. We were the last car in line.
“I’ll come pick you up after school?” I glanced at Sophia in the rearview mirror, hoping this was right.
She shot me a disappointed look. “No, Mommy. Olivia’s mommy brings me home on Thursdays, remember? You’re forgetting everything today.”
“Of course! Olivia’s mommy.” I nodded in complete agreement, twisting in my seat and unbuckling her seat belt. “Great, well, have a good day... sweetie.” I handed her the backpack, which seemed ridiculously large and heavy for a child her size.
Sophia gave me an uncertain glance, then slid the backpack on and let herself out the back door. She slammed it and headed for the school, looking back once. I waved cheerily and she waved halfheartedly, then turned around and walked away. I wondered if she was onto me somehow. She seemed like she might suspect something was amiss.
I heaved a sigh of relief. One down. One to go. “You.” I looked at Freya in the rearview mirror. She gazed back with round, innocent eyes. Her mouth was ringed by something brown and smudgy.
“What are you eating?” I twisted to get a better look, and she held up an empty orange wrapper. “How did you get ahold of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup?”
She just blinked at me.
“Right.” I sighed and turned around. “Okay, ballet.”
At the ballet class I managed to squeeze Freya’s little body into a pale pink leotard (thankfully already inside the bag marked “Freya Ballet” in the back of the car). The other moms smiled at me politely but were focused on their own children in the dressing room. Good, I didn’t have to pretend I knew anyone. I led Freya into the brightly lit space with golden wood floors and a wall of mirrors. A graceful goldfinch of a woman with a tight bun greeted her and had her line up with the other children along the bar.
“We will see you in an hour, Mrs.Shaw,” she told me. I nodded and left, rolling the moniker around on my tongue, marveling at the sweet feel of it.Mrs.Shaw.
Free for an hour while Freya had ballet, I debated what to do. My GPS showed a small park nearby and so I wandered over, enjoying the sunshine. I was a Seattle girl, born and raised with drizzle and cool salt breezes in my veins, but in early March the Florida warmth did feel delicious.
It was a pocket park, just a little square of tough grass with a gurgling fountain and a few benches nestled below blooming trees. Noone else was around, so I found a spot near the fountain and settled down on a bench, swiping to my home screen and navigating to photos. I glanced around guiltily. Just like when I looked at the photos on my phone at Toast, it felt a little illicit, voyeuristic, but I couldn’t resist this time either. I wanted to see all of it, experience it vicariously, this life I could have lived.
And there it was, my alternate life recorded in thousands of images. I cycled backward from the most recent photos. The girls’ ballet recital, them in matching standard-issue pale pink tutus, hair scraped back in buns, grinning proudly as Rory handed them both little bouquets of roses. Christmas with Rory’s parents, all of us gathered around the table as Nancy served her famous sweet potato casserole with candied bacon and pecans. A beach day, Rory squinting in the sun, laughing, half buried as the girls industriously poured shovelfuls of sand over him. There was an older boy with them in the photo, almost a teenager, helping the girls dig sand. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He had a cute, kind face and curly coppery hair, the exact shade Rory’s had been at that age. A cousin of Rory’s, perhaps?
Next were a couple of dark selfies of Freya’s blurry face, taken at night by our bedside. In the background I am a snoozing lump, unaware of my youngest child’s nocturnal antics. Then a cluster of photos in what looked like an industrial kitchen, all gleaming metal surfaces and several people I didn’t recognize in hair nets, facing the camera with me, all holding up jewel-colored popsicles and grinning. I paused, puzzled, wondering what that was all about, but moved on.
I scrolled ravenously, faster and faster, devouring the history of my life with Rory and the girls. Birthday parties. Family picnics. Start-of-school photos. A handful of photos with people I didn’t recognize, including a few more with that boy from the beach. A photo of me with Daphne, who was gorgeous and tanned and laughing. A hundred more funny, imperfect moments captured on film—goofy faces and jammyfingers, a five-second video clip of a shirtless Rory standing at the stove using a pancake turner as a microphone, belting out “I Got You Babe” in an off-key baritone. Then Freya’s birth, me in a hospital gown, big as a whale, red-faced and sweating. And her, equally red-faced, scrunched and mad, held in Rory’s capable hands. The look on his face stopped me cold. Awe and adoration, vulnerability and joy. I felt like I was standing on holy ground, glimpsing these intimate moments of our life. I hesitated. Was it good for me to do this? Was it helpful? Maybe I should stop looking, concentrate on this day, this moment, and let it be enough. But I couldn’t seem to stop my finger from swiping backward, ravenous for each photo, the documentation of a life I would never have.
A series of pregnancy belly shots, week by week in reverse, with me in yoga pants, turned sideways, with an ever-decreasing tummy. Wobbly videos of a younger Sophia learning to ride a trike, learning to walk. Us in front of our current house, pointing to theSOLDsign, wearing huge matching grins. Then I found a dozen or more photos of what looked like a wedding. There were round tables with gorgeous cream floral decorations, a couple dozen nattily dressed guests dancing to a live jazz band. I flipped backward a few more shots. Rory and me and baby Sophia in a tiny frilly dress, all solemn eyes and dimpled elbows. She looked like she was maybe a year old in the photos. Whose wedding was this? I kept scrolling then stopped. It was a photo of Dad in a white short-sleeved shirt with a lei around his neck, standing under a bower of flowers on a beach. And in front of him, holding his hands in hers, was the red-haired woman, Ramona. She was wearing a pale cream dress and matching crown of flowers over her long curls. I stared at the photo. She was smaller than I’d pictured, petite even next to Dad, who was not a tall man. Now I understood. This was their wedding.
The postcard on the fridge was not an invitation for an upcomingevent. It must have already happened. Dad was not about to marry this woman. They’d already been married, for several years by the looks of it. Sophia had been a baby in the photos, which meant it was at least five years ago now. I stared at the photo hard, seeing the adoration in his eyes, how he leaned toward her as though pulled by a magnet. Her face tipped up in what looked like the moment before a kiss.
I stared at the photo for a long time, trying to grapple with the reality of what I was seeing. Dad was married to this woman. He had a new life here. I studied his face and hers, how they radiated joy. Then I clicked off the phone, leaning my head back. I couldn’t take seeing any more. I had to stop. I knew there were probably thousands more photos, Sophia’s birth, our own wedding, med school graduation for Rory, so many moments in our shared history. But my heart was breaking. I wasn’t ready to see my dad marry another woman, but my feeling of grief was due to far more than that.
This could never be mine. All of it—the sticky pancake fingers and rumpled sheets on our bed, the pink ballet tutu and lunch box, the scratchy warmth of Rory’s neck—all of this was ephemeral, for only a day. I would never live this life. In real life I would never hear Freya call me Mommy or Rory press a kiss on the top of my head. All of this was so beautiful and so fleeting. I had only a few more hours left.Maybe it will be awful, Eva had said hopefully. And it was. But not in a way that freed me. This was a glimpse of a life I deeply longed for, with the person I still loved. I had a feeling this life might just haunt me to the end of my days. It was horrible because it felt so deeply right.
Heart aching, I stood and put my phone away. I would not look at any of the rest of the pictures, I promised myself firmly. It would do me no good. I could not ever experience all of the moments they showed me. But what I could do, what I was determined to do, was enjoy the moments and hours I had left. Right then and there I vowed to make the most of every second of this day. I might have only one day, but atleast I had something. Why waste even an instant lamenting what couldn’t be changed? I would press into it, allow myself to live it fully. Tomorrow I would have only the memory of it, and it was going to hurt like hell, but at least I would have gotten the chance to taste this messy, wonderful, perfectly imperfect life. For now I had to let that be enough.
30
“I did big,bigjumps,” Freya told me grandly as I ushered her out the door after her ballet class. “As high as the sky.” She demonstrated her grand jeté. In the dressing room I helped her out of her tutu, marveling at her round tummy, the impossible proportions of her little three-year-old body.
“Did you have fun in class?” I asked her.
She nodded, but her mouth turned down in a frown. “But I missedyou, Mommy. I always miss you when you’re gone.”
I looked at her earnest little face, and my heart melted. “I missed you too, sweetie,” I told her, brushing a piece of hair back into her pigtails. To my surprise, I realized it was true. I felt myself falling for this little person more and more.
I managed to get us back to the house, thankfully finding our home address stored under favorites in my GPS, and the remainder of the morning passed leisurely. After cleaning up the kitchen from breakfast, I fed Freya an early lunch of boxed mac and cheese I found in the pantry, taking several big bites for myself as I stirred in the powder, her chattering all the while. Afterward we walked to a playground I’d spiedon the way home. There she played in the sandbox, and I pushed her on the swing until she started to droop, her eyelids growing heavy. Then I carried her home, the weight of her slowly going soft in my arms as she fell asleep. I maneuvered her through the garage and up the stairs while she lolled, boneless and limp as a jellyfish, against my shoulder. She was surprisingly sturdy for such a little person. I was huffing by the time I got to the top of the stairs. I tucked her into bed with her bedraggled stuffed bunny, then wandered around the house restlessly, exploring.
The last door upstairs was the home office I’d glimpsed earlier. I opened the door and poked my head in. AGrand Openingbanner in candy-bright colors caught my eye. I went in and glanced around. There was a tall stack of pamphlets on the corner of a very messy desk. I picked one up. “Lolly’s Pops,” the pamphlet announced in the same bright letters as the banner. “New location opening soon!” I flipped it open in surprise. There I was in a little thumbnail photo, smiling brightly and holding a rainbow of popsicles up for the camera. Underneath, it said, “Lolly Blanchard Shaw, owner.” Well, this was interesting. I had my own company?
I skimmed the pamphlet. Lolly’s Pops was an organic popsicle company that specialized in handmade popsicles created with locally sourced fruits and edible flowers. It had two locations in Tampa and a mobile Lolly’s Pops popsicle truck in Seattle. How unexpected to find I was the owner, that this cute small popsicle business was my own brainchild! It wasn’t Toast, but it looked fun, and I’d always loved edible flowers and local produce. I studied the pamphlet for a moment longer, then set it down with a twinge of envy. How amazing that in this life I was both a mom and running my own small business, that I was accomplishing so much of what I’d always dreamed of. I lingered for a moment longer, enjoying the novel sensation of being a businesswoman.
