Page 11

Palm Springs

January 3, 2023

2:00 P.M.

The second time Grant left, I decided that if I needed to, I could be a single mother.

March took longer to rebound from her early entry in the world than Dort, which is why I’ve always gone out of my way to protect her. She was born notably weaker, with a low Apgar test. In those early days in the NICU, she’d get this look in her eyes as if she weren’t there, and she’d turn gray. It was no big deal for the nurses, who would joke that she was taking another trip to “the Great Beyond.” She’d stop breathing, and they taught us how to flip her onto her stomach and smack the bottoms of her feet to bring her back to life once we got home.

March had always seemed mysterious and powerful because of these spells. She grew out of them, but when they were happening, I couldn’t rest because I was so fearful that she could drift off forever while I slept. I checked her breathing a hundred times a night. That first year, the twins were terrible sleepers anyway, and they’d wake each other up with their crying.

Grant wasn’t around much. He had a busy teaching load, and fall was the time when academics look for jobs, a process that consumed much of his time. He was flown out to a few colleges for interviews that didn’t pan out. UW didn’t have anything to offer him but a lecturer position. I thought he should take it and try again the next year, but he argued that it had always been his dream to be a tenured professor.

When he came home, he saw me at my worst, too tired even to close the flaps of my nursing bra. My hair was greasy because I didn’t have time to shower. My shirt was covered in spittle and baby food, and everything smelled of diapers and wipes. Our apartment was a mess because my arms were always full; I couldn’t bend down to pick up baby blankets or toys, and there was no way I could cook. I didn’t have any friends in this new city. All day long I’d do the best I could, afraid to ask Grant for too much help because he was busy, and I was afraid to tell him how much I was suffering. We were still so new, and so fragile. I kept thinking back to how he’d run away from Sasha, and how he ran away from me when I told him I was pregnant. I couldn’t deal with his running away now and leaving me alone.

I dragged myself through the days as if on a military crawl through a dark cave, blurry from attending to my two little birds with their beaks open, hungry always at the same time. Dort would pound my breast when I couldn’t make enough milk. More, more, more. March had problems latching. She’d squirm and cry in frustration, and I worried constantly about her weight.

One awful late afternoon when Dort and March were at their worst, I walked to the front stoop of our rented duplex, the girls screaming in my arms. They were so cranky no matter what I did, and I was so burnt-out that I was truly afraid of what I might do if I snapped. I needed to be where people would see me to keep me from harming the twins. I’d been horrified by stories of mothers who’d shaken their babies; I thought those women were monsters. Now I had sympathy for them, pushed over the edge by colic, hormones, and sleep deprivation. Babies were fountains of need.

That was the moment when I knew I couldn’t get through another minute alone. Instead of begging Grant to take a day off, I broke down and called Polly. I hated asking my mother for help. She’d been so confident in my abilities, so certain raising children was something any woman could do alone, no big deal.

I felt I’d failed. Big-time.

The next day she showed up with her suitcase like a grim Mary Poppins, took one look at me, and said, “You look like shit, Kim. Go take a shower. Then go to bed.”

“But what if they’re hungry? And March, you have to watch her—”

“I’m a nurse—well, a retired nurse now, but I was damn good.” She pointed her finger in the direction of our bedroom. “Go.”

Within hours, order had returned to our world—or at least something close to order. The girls somehow knew better than to mess with my mother, which made me feel like an even bigger failure, as though they’d been keying off my anxiety. They grew mercifully quiet, and after a few frustrating days they started taking the bottle. The laundry was done, and the refrigerator filled with groceries. We went on walks and explored our University Heights neighborhood and I started to fall in love with my new city. For the first time in months, I felt human again.

Polly said, “You need a job.”

“I know, but the—”

“They’ll be fine. That’s what day care is for.”

“Grant would help but he’s so busy, and his postdoc is just one year. He wants to make a good impression. It means everything to him.”

“Stop making excuses for him.” Polly’s lips were pressed together. “Although in his defense, you never ask for his help. I’ll stay and give you a hand, but only until you get a job.”

Grant appreciated Polly, but not in the same way I did. He didn’t know her well and found her harsh and too direct. He felt our space was cramped, and he was outnumbered by all the women in the house. When he came home, she’d make him do laundry and dishes and send him to the store to buy diapers. If he was tired, she’d put a baby in his arms and say, “We’re all tired.”

It was nice to have her do and say to him what I wished I could.

One morning, Grant put on a suit and spent extra time with his appearance. He didn’t say where he was going, only that he’d return late.

When he did, Polly was at the store, and everything had gone to hell without her. Dort had just thrown up and March was hollering from her bassinet, and the oven timer was dinging relentlessly. I was at my wit’s end.

“Guess what?” He picked up March and held her like a football. He was grinning from ear to ear.

“Can you grab a wipe? I need to get this roast out of the oven.”

He cleaned up Dort and I took the roast out, burning my hand.

“Don’t you want to hear my good news?”

“Sure.” What I really wanted was to hear nothing. I craved silence and sleep.

“Well, I had an interview today, and I got it. It’s tenure-track, a three-three load. The dean asked me why I wanted to teach at a small liberal arts college. I didn’t know what to say, but you know what? I think I’d like actually knowing the names of my students. Not just their names, but really getting to know them, get to know their thinking. The campus was so quaint, filled with history. I think it’ll be a great fit, a place to have a career.”

“That’s wonderful. Where is this mythical place?”

He hesitated. I could tell his excitement came with a big but.

“It’s just an hour away.”

“Where, Grant?”

March started to shriek, a sound that went straight to my spine. And, of course, Dort had to join the chorus.

“College of the Mounds,” he said.

I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach. “That’s where Sasha just got a job.”

“I know. And she helped pull some strings for me when they had an opening.”

“You are not working with your ex-wife. She still has your name! No, Grant. There are other colleges and other jobs. You can lecture for a year and try again. No way.”

I saw him take in the scene: the messy house, the crying babies, the cranky, out-of-shape wife saying no to his dreams.

“I told you, we’re just friends. She’s dating a guy there, they’re serious. I met him. It’s a really good job. The way colleges are starting to rely on adjuncts, I might never be able to find a tenured position. This is all I’ve ever wanted to do, and it’s mine for the taking.”

“I honestly can’t believe you’d even consider it. You knew it would be a problem for me because you didn’t tell me you were interviewing.”

“I can’t say anything, it’s always chaos here.”

“Oh, I’m sorry you have to deal with my reality for a few hours each day.”

“Kim, you’re being unreasonable.”

“ I’m being unreasonable? I was up all night. Look around!”

And he did. Even with Polly’s help, our apartment looked like footage of a small town after a tornado with chunks of roof and siding everywhere and cars on their side.

Polly walked in the door at that very moment, let out an exasperated sigh, and lifted March out of Grant’s arms. “What’s going on?”

Grant got that look in his eyes. I’d seen it before, the moment I told him I was pregnant. He couldn’t process, couldn’t deal. “Nothing,” he said. He hadn’t even taken off his coat. He turned around and walked out the door.

After he left, my mother showed little patience for my tears—not that night, and especially the next morning when Grant still hadn’t come home.

“Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to get a job, and you’re going to find a day care. And you’re going to buy a house with that money you saved. You can love that man all you want, but you need to protect yourself.”

And that’s when the walls I’d built around my heart grew even higher, only to come crashing down all these years later as I braced myself for an update from Brady. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and checked for news. Instead, I saw that the twins had been texting nonstop.

Please tell me they found Dad, March wrote.

Dort added, I’m headed to the Berlin airport.

I rebuffed their efforts. No need, he’ll be found before you arrive. I still wanted to protect them, even as I wanted to beg them to come. I missed them as much as I missed Grant.

I had thought about keeping news of this situation from them, to spare them my anguish. Melody said they’d never forgive me if they found out about Grant’s disappearance later. “Believe me,” she’d said, “I know what it’s like to have a child who won’t forgive you.”

March said, Why can’t they find him??? Isn’t this their core competency?

Dort shot back, Why do you always sound like you’re updating a LinkedIn profile?

Dort was tough—maybe too tough—but March was still fragile, or at least that was how I always thought of her.

I wrote, Dad is going all out researching his next Christmas lecture topic: adventure survival.

Each year before opening gifts, Grant made everyone in the family give a very short TED Talk–style lecture on something interesting he or she knew about. This started when the girls were seven years old. They would teach us how to mummify a carrot or argue that video games improve literacy, in hopes that we would break down and let them spend their time the way other kids did. As the girls grew older, their subjects grew more mature, from the environmental impact of “cruel cashmere” to chain particle theory.

This year, our family spent our first holiday apart; March was invited to the house of the parents of her fianc é, Simeon, in Houston, and Dort’s band had some shows in Slovakia. Even though they had other places to be, they both seemed uncomfortable with the idea of their parents in Palm Springs instead of our Madison home. We were supposed to be planted in one place, like the backyard oak tree they’d swung on as kids.

Our Zoom connection was iffy, which made the annual lectures seem more distant. Dort told us about the counterculture in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, and March, who worked as an “integrated producer” for a digital-marketing company, shared her “best practices for process,” which left us even more baffled about what she actually did for work.

I usually shared moving stories from my job, but this year I spoke about Sunnylands, the modernist mid-century estate of Lee and Walter Annenberg in Rancho Mirage, which Basil’s mother had referred to as “the Camp David of the West.” The Annenbergs, wealthy art collectors and philanthropists, were as close to royalty as we had in the United States. One day, Melody took me on a private tour of the home. She explained that she and her parents had been there several times as guests. Her mother had sunbathed with Nancy Reagan, her father had golfed with Richard Nixon, and Melody herself had eaten off the fancy Herend china when she dined with the queen of England.

For my Christmas lecture, I talked about Walter Annenberg’s obsession with bird-watching, and how it had shaped the house. I explained that he’d even installed a microphone in his bird feeder and had the sound of chirping birds piped into his bathroom so he could listen to them when he showered. “Now there’s an app for that,” Dort said, unimpressed by anything she considered bourgeois.

Grant gave a lecture on the dangers of altruism and got into another of the heated philosophical arguments he and Dort loved, which ended when she accused him of becoming a fascist. He barked at her, “You, my sweet, have a low bar for fascism.”

March texted, I’m never complaining about Christmas lectures ever again.

Dort said, I wouldn’t go that far.

Don’t worry until you need to worry, I had replied.

But now? I had a feeling it was time to worry.