Hugo & Rose (5 page)

Perhaps it was this repetition that made it so that Rose could not get this other “better self” out of her mind. Like an actress whose poor performance was slowing down the movie, she just needed to be recast to make the whole thing work.

Recast with someone who wouldn't prefer sleep to sex with her husband. Someone who didn't yell to get her kids to listen. Someone as chipper as those women in the magazines, so orgasmically happy to be mothers, milling their own organic baby food and running catering businesses on the side.

She hated those women.

Rose even felt bad about feeling bad.

If she was depressed, she didn't have any right to her depression. This was just life, how it is. Over time these repetitions would amount to larger changes; eventually the children would get the knack of the current “issue” and then struggle beneath a new challenge. Eventually when she heard that low sound in Josh's throat, she wouldn't cringe at the thought of him touching her disappointing flesh.

Though she worried that instead the day would arrive when he stopped making that sound altogether.

That would be so much worse.

*   *   *

Rose had started seeing a therapist about two months after Penny had been born.

Josh had been able to take a week off work, her mother had visited to help with the boys, but in the end it was left to her to find a way to fit a newborn into the rhythm of her life.

Penny was a good baby. The pink-and-cream girl Rose had craved. She smiled early, nursed well, slept often.

Adam and Isaac transitioned well to her presence, whispering during naps, kissing her head while she ate in Rose's lap.

But Rose, having fought so hard to convince Josh of the need for this third baby, this hard-won girl, plummeted into the blue. She was living her life but felt as if she were watching it from a distance—its colors faded, its flavors stale.

Sleep was her escape. Sleep and Hugo.

The island was vivid as ever. Even more so compared with the washed-out world her reality had become.

She would drop the boys off at day care and rush home to sleep in her queen-sized bed, Penny snoozing by her side.

She resented every time the baby pulled her out of the dream. Every dirty diaper, every little wail for attention.

One night Josh discovered Rose sobbing uncontrollably during a feeding.

“I can't do this,” she cried. “It's too much.” Josh looked at the little person sucking hungrily at Rose. There was something frightening and hollow about his wife's eyes in that moment. The edge of a void.

He took Penny from Rose's arms and sent her to bed. That night he made a few phone calls, got a few recommendations.

The next day Rose met Naomi.

It was Josh who asked Rose to call Naomi by her name. It bothered him when Rose referred to her as her therapist. “Shrink” bothered him even more.

And as for referring to Naomi as her “doctor” … well, everybody knows psychiatrists aren't
real
doctors.

At least, not the way
he
was a real doctor.

But Naomi had been selected specifically for her “doctorness.” Josh had picked a psychiatrist so that she could quickly and
chemically
fix his broken wife. No waiting for a referral. A prescription to get Rose going, talk therapy to keep her moving.

But Rose had resisted the offered drugs.

She was nursing, she said. She worried about what might pass to the baby. How it could affect her still-wrinkling brain.

But she was glad to go to the appointments. The appointments meant she could justify a babysitter. The appointments meant she could buy two hours of freedom from her never-ending obligation to her family.

And so, Rose talked herself better.

Marginally better, but better. Better enough to activate a dormant love for her newborn daughter. Better enough to be able to smile when the occasion called for it. Better enough to get by. Better enough for Josh.

Still, as she listened to herself talk, it drove her mad how cliché her life was. The things that she struggled with were nothing compared with the
real
problems other people had.

“What are ‘real' problems?” Naomi would ask.

“You know what I mean.”

“But what comes to mind? I'm sure you're thinking of something when you say that.”

Images flew through Rose's mind. Foreclosure signs. A man with a sign by the highway. The hungry African children in those late-night commercials. She shook her head. Even her ideas of real problems were cliché.

“There's a woman at the boys' school. Another mom. She just got implants.”

Naomi laughed. “Okay…”

“I mean, her boobs are huge. So fake. And there're always just
out
there. Like she wants you to look.”

“That's possible.”

“It's just she got them to save her marriage. But then she made a joke about the fact that if her husband left her, at least her new boobs were one thing he couldn't get fifty percent of.”

“She said that?”

“That's the thing—I don't even know this woman. I've just seen her in the parking lot. It was another mother who told me she said that stuff.… People are talking about her, making jokes about her marriage. Thinking about her sex life. It's possible none of this is true, I wouldn't know.”

“So this woman, she's who you think of when you think of someone with real problems?”

Rose shrugged. “They seem more real than my problems.”

Rose also told Naomi about Hugo and the island.

Naomi was intrigued. She encouraged Rose to talk more about them. Her adventures with Hugo, the same tales that enraptured the boys, seemed stale and immature in Naomi's clean, dark office.

And she sensed that Naomi didn't believe her. Naomi would call the dreams “fantasies” and ask Rose what she thought they meant.

“I don't think they mean anything. They're just dreams.”

Which is what Rose said but was in truth not what she believed. Her time with Hugo
meant
a great deal, but it didn't
represent
anything. It just … was.

Besides, she was happy with her dreams.

It was her life she didn't like.

 

five

Rose hated soccer.

The boys had been dutifully enrolled in a mini-league when Isaac turned four. Rose, as always, had done her research, questioning other mothers about which association was best—as if “best” could be used to describe anything that involved a passel of preschoolers clumping around a ball and aiming kicks at one another's shins.

But of course the other mothers had a great deal to say about which league was best. Some leagues were noncompete, all games ending in a tie—while others sidelined the less athletically talented children, refusing to guarantee time on the field. One association's head coach was said to hit on the players' mothers, while another's was suspected to be gay, not that there was anything wrong with that, but,
you know …

Rose didn't know. But she also didn't find out.

She ended up picking the most popular league, which ranged somewhere near the middle on the competitive scale, and at which, so far, she had witnessed no sex occur, heterosexual or otherwise.

Rose began shuttling the boys to practice in the afternoons and to games on the weekends. As they grew older, entire weekends would revolve around their game schedule since it often happened that if Isaac's game was on Saturday, then Adam's would be on Sunday, and vice versa.

During games, Rose would watch the boys from the sidelines, trying to look interested. Clapping when Isaac made an assist, shouting when Adam blocked a kick.

But, dear Lord, was it boring.

So fucking boring!

And the other parents didn't seem to think so at all. She felt it was all she could do to smile, and they were screaming at their kids. High-fiving when they scored. So invested in the game, as if there were something actually at stake other than cultivating the competitive spirit in a bunch of five-year-olds.

What was wrong with them?

Or better yet, what was wrong with her that she wasn't feeling “it”?

Instead she
hated
the parents who bounced and clapped from the sidelines. And once she connected a child player on the field to his or her screaming, wailing counterpart on the sidelines, she found things to hate about the child as well.

Sydney, whose mother questioned every decision the referee made, ate her boogers while waiting for the game to resume.

Cooper, the goalie, had a ratty face. He looked like a smaller version of his father, who clearly viewed his son's position on the team as equivalent to an NFL draft pick.

Jaden-with-an-E tripped smaller kids.

Jaydon-with-an-O didn't share the ball.

Emma wasn't going to be very pretty when she got older. She didn't look as if she were going to be very bright either.

Rose would cycle through these judgments, finally turning her eye on her own children.

She would see them the way she imagined others saw them.

Isaac's pretty mouth would sneer when another player stole the ball from him. She could tell when his wheels were turning. His eyes would get that nasty narrow look and Rose knew by the direction in which he stared during the breaks which player he was going to target with an “accidental” blow to the shin. More than once, it was a member of his own team.

Adam was careless, daydreaming. Other players often had to shout at him to get him to pay attention to the game. More than once he had lost the team goals because he wasn't attending to the action on the field.

She could tell by the way the other parents would glance over at her when this happened—Adam was a loser.

Rose hated herself so much.

Hated herself for thinking horrible things about children. Hated herself for seeing anything ugly in her own. Hated herself for not being able to truly care whether it was the “Bobcats” or the “Pirates” that won the game, because all she wanted to do was get away from the noise and damp grass and screaming parents, go home, and take a nap.

*   *   *

Hemsford Fields was over an hour's drive away.

Though there had been no indication of that on the schedule, which had simply listed it as “Quarter Finals Tournament, Hemsford Fields.”

Under which someone had typed, “Snack Captain—Isaac A.”

Rose had been fortunate that she had overheard some players' mothers complaining about the distance, how much it was going to cost them to get there. “The price of gas nowadays, minivans aren't cheap.” Singsong voice: “But what're you gonna do?”

Rose did the sad calculus of the soccer mom.

Adam's first game was at eight thirty, but Isaac's started at eight. Check-in was at seven thirty for all players. An hour's drive with an extra fifteen minutes for buffer. And she had to make the snack. Load the kids in the car. Josh was working, so he couldn't help.…

Josh was always working.…

Maybe the boys could sleep in their uniforms.

Maybe she could shower before she went to bed.

Maybe tomorrow wouldn't be miserable.

*   *   *

The boys loved the idea of sleeping in their uniforms, though Rose had drawn the line at shin guards. Too sweaty.

Isaac watched her face as she was tucking the covers in around his body.

“Mom, I want a bike for my birthday.”

It wasn't a request. It wasn't really a demand either. It was a simple statement of fact, the kind made by children whose parents make sure Santa Claus brings them
everything
on their list. His tone was the tone of a boy who simply expected to say what he wanted … and get it.

“I'll talk to Dad about it,” Rose said, though she already knew the content of the conversation she would be having with Josh.

There was no way Isaac was getting a bike.

*   *   *

Do kids even bicycle anymore
? thought Rose as she swept up for the night. The dishwasher hummed quietly, belching a chemic-lemon fragrance.
I mean, aren't they all stuck inside on the Internet? Playing video games so child molesters can't snatch them from their backyards? Isn't that why they keep saying every other kid has type two diabetes?

No. Isaac couldn't have a bike.

He couldn't have a bike because to Rose bicycles were so caught up in her mind with “near death” and “brain injury” that the idea of gifting her son one was akin to giving him a death trap.

The bicycle her parents had given her was gone the day she had returned from the hospital. Rose's parents, grateful that she had been returned to them, had gotten rid of it. A totem of their misfortune.

So Rose had quietly passed out of childhood without ever learning how to ride one, a deficit that seemed to matter less and less the older she got.

Isaac couldn't have a bike because his mother didn't know how to ride one. He couldn't have a bike because she was convinced a bike would take him away from her, carrying his body away from consciousness.

Rose knew this was irrational.

Maybe a few more years.…
He still seemed so small.

She hated to disappoint him, but there was nothing for it. Isaac was going to
have
to want something else. They had time. His birthday wasn't for weeks. This happened a lot: Isaac and Adam would decide that they needed something desperately, begging for it for days, until some
new
thing caught their attention and they began to insist they couldn't live without
that
.

Oh, God,
Adam
. She hadn't even thought of him.

If Isaac got a bike, Adam would want one. He would
insist
on one, and sibling parity was not something either of them let drop. If Adam got a lolly, Isaac squawked until he had one, too. It was just how they were.