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Nicole

It is Wednesday. I still haven’t peed on the stick. I’ve come to enjoy this little fantasy of a baby in my belly and don’t want it to end. It’s helping me propel myself toward the conversation I know I need to have with Kyle.

I stare at him across the dinner table as he shovels forkfuls of my Mexican casserole into his mouth. Tonight, I’ll do it. I’ll tell him I want a divorce. I chickened out Monday and again yesterday. Tonight is the night.

The girls give me a particularly hard time before bed, as if they know my mind is elsewhere and they are intent on bringing my attention back to them.

It’s possible they sense my anxiety and that fills them with their own anxiety, and the only way they know how to process that is by acting out, refusing to cooperate with the bedtime routine that we’ve done hundreds of times.

“Come on, girls, I need you to help me out,” I say, my voice almost as whiny as theirs.

“What if there’s a monster in the closet?” Grace says. She forces her lower lip to quiver.

“Grace, there is no monster in the closet. Do you want to look again?”

Both girls hide behind my legs as I open the closet door. I flip on the light to reveal no monster.

“But what if a monster comes later?” Grace asks.

“Monsta?” Liv says, brows furrowed.

“There are no monsters in this house, remember? This house is full of—”

“Love!” Grace shouts.

That’s what I tell them: there are no monsters because this house is full of love. This house is also full of a fair bit of resentment, and they seem to have forgotten that their own mother is the Monster.

“Mommy, where’s Ella?” Grace asks.

Ella is one of her dolls. Actually, several of her dolls have gone by Ella at various times. I don’t know who the current Ella is.

“I don’t know, sweetie. Where did you leave her?”

“I thought she was in here,” she says, turning in a circle, scanning the room.

This happens a lot at bedtime—toys and dolls cannot be located. There is an escalation of panic. This is another of Grace’s procrastination techniques.

“Grace, we’ll find her in the morning, okay? I’m not going up and down the stairs twelve times looking for things.”

Grace falls to the floor, as if my attempt to set a firm boundary has delivered a blow to her kneecaps.

“But I need her!”

“Why don’t you go look in the usual places? You need to keep better track of your things, remember?”

When I look over at Liv, her eyelids are at half mast. Liv has recently become unable to physically function past a certain time. It is a blessing. Grace’s ability to summon energy long past the time she should be sleeping is a source of ongoing torture.

“I’m too afraid to go look by myself.”

She likes to pull the fear card when she is really just lazy and wants me to find the damn doll.

“I’ll go with you, then. I’m not going to do it for you.”

She stands, assumes a confident posture that does not align at all with her emotional display of a few moments ago.

I carry Liv, her sweet little face resting on my shoulder, because if I try to leave her alone in their room, I risk a meltdown that will send enough cortisol through her veins to keep her awake for another three hours.

Grace walks ahead of us, and I follow her through the living room, then the kitchen, where she finds Ella sitting in the toy baby stroller.

She cradles the doll in her arms, says, “Hello, my darling. Ready for bed?” in this adoring voice.

Perhaps I’m not doing so badly at mothering if she believes this is how moms interact with their babies.

Then again, she may just be imitating a YouTube video.

With Ella safely secured, I wrestle them into their pajamas and brush their teeth, then start book-reading time. A few pages into the first book about a giraffe who learns to dance, Grace protests:

“I don’t like this story.”

Books have become much like snacks—often rejected for no good reason.

I give her other options, and she selects a Berenstain Bears book in which the cubs have a bad case of the “gimmies” and their dolt of a father makes it worse by giving them whatever they want.

Halfway through the book, Grace protests again:

“I don’t like this one either.”

“Grace, I think you’re just procrastinating,” I say in my calm voice, though I can feel my blood pressure rising and my body getting hot.

“I am not!” She hates when I tell her she’s procrastinating, though I’m not even sure she knows what it means.

Liv starts crying upon hearing her sister upset—dramatic sobbing that is characteristic of her being overtired.

“Liv, shut up!” Grace says.

“Grace!” I yell.

Liv is now hysterical. I pull her from bed, bounce her in my arms.

“Liv is a baby! Liv is a baby!” Grace says.

“Grace, stop,” I tell her, giving her my don’t-fuck-with-me eyes. The expected sweat has now come out of every pore in my body, and I feel like I could fry an egg on my forehead.

“I hate you,” Grace says.

She’s recently into the word hate . She wields it like a weapon.

Liv starts to settle, and I place her back in her bed. Grace, however, is a demon.

“I’m not going to bed,” she says, sitting up, arms folded across her chest.

I hate you, I think. I want to be allowed to be as childish as her, to wield my own verbal weapons. Instead, I take my rage and impulsively crouch down and pound my fist into the floor, forgetting that just beneath the carpet is a cement foundation.

“Fuck,” I say, too startled by my pain to control my language.

That—the fuck and my obvious pain—transforms Grace back into an empathic future health-care professional.

“Are you okay, Mommy?” she asks in her sweetest voice.

Liv is now wide eyed and full-on sucking her thumb, which is not something she has done in months. I have traumatized her.

I clutch my hand against my chest, slowly moving the fingers. Nothing is broken. There will likely be a bruise along the pinky side of my fist, a weeklong reminder of when I momentarily lost my mind.

“I’m okay,” I say, my teeth chattering from stress or shock or the rapid cooling of the sweat coating my body. “Now can we please go to bed?”

There is zero protest. I cover them each with their blankets and wish them sweet dreams. They do not call for me after I close their door.

There is not a single peep. Perhaps I need to nearly break my hand every night.

I have scared them into submission, much like I did with the primal-screaming incident.

I should write a book about my parenting techniques.

Kyle is sitting in bed, legs outstretched, one ankle crossed over the other.

“Rough one, huh?” he says, eyes on the TV. He loves watching Dateline , which makes me wonder sometimes if he’s planning on killing me. I mean, if things got really bad.

“Rough one.” I shake out my hand, grimacing at the return of sensation. Kyle does not comment on this.

I inhale as deeply as I can, feeling my heart rate escalate as I catapult myself into this next life-changing moment.

“Why don’t you ever help?” I ask.

“Huh?” he says, taking his eyes off the TV.

“You can hear us in there, right? Why don’t you ever help?”

“Babe, I know you’ve got it handled.”

I am supposed to take this as a compliment. I am supposed to be charmed.

“I don’t have it handled,” I say. “Like, ever.”

He sighs. “Babe—”

I interrupt, not wanting to hear how I’m being dramatic. “We need to talk.”

He lifts the remotes, turns off the TV.

“Okay?”

His tone is resigned, like he’s just waiting for me to lay into him with my grievances.

As I’m about to say the words— I want a divorce —my phone starts blaring, the ringer on at full blast because I forgot to turn down the volume after the girls watched YouTube over dinner (the iPad was out of battery because Kyle neglected to plug it in).

I’m so startled that I drop it while attempting to take it out of my pocket.

It slides across the wood floor, face up so I can see that the caller is Merry.

She doesn’t usually call, especially at night like this, so I have to answer.

“Is everything okay?”

There is a pause and then the sound of sniffling. She is crying.

“Mer, what’s wrong?”

My dad is dead, I think. His heart gave out. His spirit gave up. He is gone.

“He’s okay,” she says.

I sit on the bed, dizzy from attempts to keep up with my fluctuating emotional states.

“I mean, not okay . But he’s stable,” she says. “It’s just ...”

“What? What is it?”

More sniffling.

“The hospice nurse came today. She said he’s moving close to a comatose state.”

Her voice cracks on the word comatose . It is as if I can hear her very being collapsing.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

A terrible word for the situation— okay . Nothing is okay.

“I asked her how long he has. I mean, you were just here this weekend. I don’t want you coming up if he has time. I just don’t know. She doesn’t know. It could be days. A week. Two weeks.”

“I’ll come up.”

There is no thought in the matter. I must be there. I could not live with myself if I wasn’t there.

My eyes flick to Kyle. He looks frightened, and I’m overcome with a dormant love for him. His fear makes him look like a little boy.

“I’ll get a flight first thing in the morning,” I say. “I can bring the girls or ...”

Kyle shakes his head, mouths, “I’ll watch them.”

“I’ll be there,” I tell Merry. I am about to say “Tell Dad to wait for me,” but I stop myself. I don’t want to burden him with my desires. If he needs to go, he should go. But I like to think he will wait for me.

I book a flight from Orange County to San Francisco for the next morning at seven o’clock.

Kyle is in crisis mode. He thrives in this mode, this mode that allows for the practical action and problem-solving that I despise in most of our marital conversations.

Don’t fix it, just listen to me —the wife’s lament.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” I say.

“It’s okay. The girls will be fine with me. I can take a little time off work. Or just let them watch a lot of YouTube.”