I'm Fine and Neither Are You

At any rate, Jenny was not on the bed, or anywhere else in the room. I braced myself as I opened the door to their master bath, but she was not in their claw-foot tub, or in the spacious shower stall.

The woman on the phone was still speaking, but I was no longer listening. Her office, I thought at once.

I found Jenny sitting—sprawled, really—in the cream-colored armchair in the corner of the room. With her arms gracefully outstretched, legs straight and bare feet resting just so, she looked like a dancer. The chair was beside a window, and the last of the day’s sun cast a strange light over her face, which was—

The phone slipped from my hand and hit the rug with a thud.

Her face was all wrong. Though they were closed, her eyes appeared to be looking in opposite directions. But her mouth, which was not the usual bright pink but so pale it nearly blended into the rest of her skin, was gaping open—too wide, I thought, much too wide. There was a dribble of something—food, or maybe vomit—on her bottom lip. For all her fretting about sun damage, she had already tanned to a golden brown in mid-June, but now her limbs looked like pale putty.

Worse, her chest wasn’t moving. And when I put my hand over her mouth, I couldn’t detect even the thinnest stream of air.

But she didn’t look dead, I thought ridiculously—I’d never actually seen a dead person outside of a funeral home. If she was dead, her eyes would be wide open . . . wouldn’t they? She had to be napping. Passed out, maybe.

“Jenny,” I said softly, like I was trying to gently wake her. “Jenny!” I said, this time loudly. By the time I took her by the shoulders to shake her leaden body, I had realized that Matt was right. She was not alive.

Which meant she was right in front of me . . . but not there. Not there at all.

A terrible, strangled sound escaped me, and I touched Jenny again—poked her, really—in the stomach. I don’t know why I did it, and thank God no one was there to see me prodding her. Maybe I just needed to be sure that I had not been mistaken. My fingers were met with the thinnest layer of soft flesh over a plane of muscle. Had she really grown so slim? I need to take her out for a burger, I thought. Then I reached for her hand, which was no longer a hand at all but rather a cold and lifeless thing, and realized there would be no burgers in her future.

But how stupid was I? What if Jenny had only been dead a few seconds? Or had suffered a heart attack or stroke and was still just the tiniest bit alive? (Was there such a thing as a little alive? Obviously seven years of working for the medical school had given me no real insight into matters of life and death.) I needed to try to resuscitate her. Immediately.

I had gone through CPR training right before I had Stevie, but like so many other things stored in my mind, motherhood had overwritten that file. Did I pinch her nose and put my mouth to hers? Press her chest . . . yes, but at the same time I was breathing into her mouth?

“Ma’am?”

I jumped straight up in the air. A police officer was behind me, and a man and two women were wheeling in a stretcher through the door. It took me a second to realize that they were emergency medical technicians or paramedics.

“We’re going to need you to leave the room,” the officer said.

“Going,” I mumbled, slinking to the door, like I was somehow responsible for Jenny’s condition.

In the hallway, Matt was walking toward me. His face was etched with a distant sort of pain; it looked almost as though he were watching this unfold from somewhere far away. I immediately recognized the feeling, even as I told myself to stay present—if not for Matt, then for Cecily.

“Don’t go in,” I told him.

His eyes welled with tears. “Then I’m right.”

“I don’t know, but don’t go in there.”

“She’s dead,” he whispered.

I stared at him. Yes, I was pretty sure she was dead. But . . . maybe the emergency responders had an antidote to bring her back to life. Maybe we would all wake up any minute now and realize this was a terrible dream. Or—well, I didn’t know what, but something other than this.

Then I saw another set of policemen marching up the stairs, each with a hand on his holster, and reality came rushing back at me.

Matt must have felt that way, too, because he suddenly said, “I might throw up. Can you find Cecily and keep her away from this?” He didn’t wait for my response as he ran toward the bathroom.

I could keep an eye on Cecily.

But who would be there for me?

As I descended the stairs, I found myself thinking back to how Jenny and I became friends—a story that began even before we met. The night before Sanjay and I left Brooklyn, our closest friends threw us a farewell dinner at our favorite restaurant. Stevie was six months old and at that point a wonderful child, the kind that tricked you into thinking that you had this parenting thing figured out. I bounced her on my knee as small plates were passed and wineglasses were refreshed again and again. At one point my friend Alex smiled at me with bright-red lips and said in her odd Wisconsin-by-way-of-West-New-Guinea accent, “Don’t worry, darling. You’ll be back.”

“Of course we will,” I said, though I knew nothing of the sort. “If all goes as planned, maybe even as soon as four years from now for Sanjay’s residency.”

We three Ruiz-Kars were headed West—not even halfway across the country, though at the time even New Jersey seemed like Timbuktu. But our course was already set. After years of preparation, Sanjay had been accepted into the ninth-highest-ranked medical school in the country, where he planned to become a neurologist or nephrologist or maybe even a psychiatrist like his father.

To say I had reservations about this plan, however glittering, was a vast understatement. Sanjay and I had known each other for almost a decade and had been together for seven of those years. All that time he had been a seed—ripe with potential but drifting unsown on the wind. How could a man who spent hours watching documentaries about Jimi Hendrix and reading Charlie Parker and Chet Baker biographies believe that yet more schooling would magically transform him into a person who was passionate about physiology? Why couldn’t he accept who he was and find something useful and well paying to do with his real interests, which were music and the arts and—well, not medicine? Didn’t he see that there was a reason he had gone to work at a cultural magazine instead of attending med school after graduating from college?

And yet. Being a doctor was what his parents wanted for him. Expected of him. Moreover, his fulfilling this plan would provide a good, stable life for the family he and I had just started. While I harbored no fantasies about being a doctor’s wife, I did not loathe the idea of being able to go to the grocery store and buy what I wanted without thinking about how much it would cost, nor the possibility of taking vacations with Sanjay and Stevie without running up credit card debt that would take years to pay off, if we ever did at all. Maybe later down the line, I thought, I could even take a whole year off just to write children’s books.

Even so, my short-term worries far outweighed any hopes or fears about how the rest of our lives would unfold. As I looked around the table at Alex, Harue, Jon, and Malcolm—people we had known for almost a decade, four of the six of us having met at Hudson —I felt an aching, preemptive loss.

Alex and Malcolm had been with me in the Hudson break room on 9/11, glued to the television with horror as we learned our city was under attack. Despite her vocal distaste for children, Alex had held my hand as I caterwauled my way through Stevie’s birth. And when Sanjay and I broke up, Harue had been the first to tell me I was a fool to leave him—a tragedy of sorts that she had retold as a comedy when toasting us at our wedding.

“You’ll be back,” said Harue. She drained her wine, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, having had so much to drink that manners were a distant memory. She added, “You’ll be back, because you’ll miss us too much, and you’ll run out of things to do there.”

Harue was right, I thought miserably as I drove past the forests and fields of Pennsylvania, through the flat expanse of Ohio, and north to the Michigan college town that was to be our home. We were making a terrible mistake.

That first year I quickly discovered she was wrong on one count: a dearth of things to do would never again be a problem. My husband disappeared into his coursework, I started a new job, and Stevie became mobile, revealing that the first year of parenting was not the hardest, after all. Then one December morning I threw up into my wastebasket at work and realized—with a horror that still fills me with shame—that I had gotten pregnant during the sole occasion Sanjay and I had slept together that fall.

I was lonely, though. Cripplingly so, and the email chain I kept up with Alex and Harue did little to ease the feeling that I had been marooned on a landlocked Midwestern island. I had taken a midlevel fundraising position in the university’s medical development department, and to my surprise I liked the work well enough—if only because I was good at it. But most of my coworkers were younger than me and childless, and those who were the same age or older were bachelors or men who behaved as though their children were hobbies. Even before I was pregnant with Miles, no one seemed to understand why I really—no, really —couldn’t grab a cocktail after work or join the development association’s golf league. As I would quickly come to realize, having a child—and then another—was a professional liability for a person like me, which is to say a woman.

I tried going to moms’ groups on the weekends, but I always felt awkward and out of place. When a brute of a toddler in the music-with-mommy class repeatedly played the role of Little Bunny Foo Foo to Stevie’s field mouse while his mother cheered his innate leadership skills, I decided I would have to get comfortable with going it alone.

Then I met Jenny.

It was a Saturday, or maybe a Sunday. I had recently had Miles and was still oozing from too many places, but I had used up my maternity leave, which meant Sanjay had already dropped out of medical school and I was adjusting to life as a working mother of two. (This consisted of overparenting at night and on the weekends, and thinking self-defeating thoughts while huddled over a breast pump in a bathroom stall scrolling through photos of my children’s life without me several times a day during the workweek.) I was pushing Miles, who was screaming his head off, in his stroller through a nearby park. I had just wheeled past a play structure when I came upon a woman with a baby in a sling, bouncing from one foot to the other with the kind of energy I had not had since before Stevie was born.