When You Were Mine

“Where did this even come from?” he asked. “Because this is the first I’ve ever heard about it. You’re talking as if this is the tenth time we’ve had this discussion. What’s going on, Ally?”

I ducked my head, a bit abashed, because it was out of the blue. Last week, I’d been talking about renting a house in Provence for the summer, after seeing a magazine spread of fields of lavender and sunflowers, the sea an azure sparkle in the distance.

I’m a bit like that—I get seized by an idea and then I can’t help but run away with it, at least in my mind. Nick tethers me to earth, grounds me in reality. Sometimes it feels like a wet blanket, and other times it’s a relief.

Yet right then, watching him sip his wine and glance at the baseball game on TV, just as he did every other night, thinking how easy our lives had become, it didn’t feel like either. It felt like a disappointment. I wanted him to want it. I wanted his eyes to light up as he leaned forward, the Red Sox forgotten for a second, and say, You know what, Al? That sounds like a wonderful idea. In fact, I’ve been thinking along the same lines…

“I know we haven’t discussed this before,” I said. “But can’t we think about it now? I want to do something more with my life. Something that matters.” I heard the throb of feeling in my voice and it surprised me a little, because I hadn’t realized just how much I felt that way. This might have started as an idea to run away with, but now it felt real.

“What?” The single word was gently scoffing. “You’re, like, PTA queen. You volunteer for everything…”

“That’s different.” I had done my time on a variety of PTAs, from elementary school class parties and gift-wrap fundraisers, where you’re fending off all the overeager parents, to the barren tundra of the middle and high school PTA, where no parent is interested in joining, and you have to do everything yourself. “I want to do something more,” I told Nick. “Something that isn’t just ameliorating our lives.”

“Ameliorating?” He raised his eyebrows, giving me that lopsided, rakish grin I loved. “Now you’re using fancy words.”

I folded my arms and tried to give him a stern look, but I ended up laughing, as I always did, and Nick held up his hands in surrender.

“Fine, fine. I’ll look into it. What should I watch? The Facebook ad that got you going?”

“Nick.” I shook my head, but I was still laughing. He knew me so well. “Look up some statistics on foster care in the US, or even just in Connecticut.” After seeing the clip, I’d done that much, at least. I’d gone on several websites that had given faces and voices to those soulless stats—photos of children, interviews with them.

It had been both heart-breaking and horrible, to scroll through photos of these kids with their

bite-sized captions—There is nothing Jenny wants more than a family. Juan would do better in a home without any other children. Drew needs a patient family who can help guide his choices.

It reminded me of when we’d been looking for a dog on the SPCA website—we never got one—only this was so much worse. These were people, children, and they wanted families. Safe homes where people loved them and tucked them in at night. Where they didn’t need to cringe or cower or feel afraid.

My heart ached for every single one of those kids, and I was sure if Nick went on that page, or any page like it, he’d feel the same.

“I know it’s out of the blue,” I said, “but give it a chance. Give a child a chance.”

“I’ll put that on a T-shirt, or maybe a mug.” I knew Nick was making light of it on purpose, because it was his default setting when it came to talking about anything emotionally serious. It occurred to me for the first time then, although it should have earlier, that this might have been all a bit too close to home for Nick.

I didn’t actually know that much about his upbringing, because he didn’t like to talk about it, except in broad strokes, and even then with great reluctance. What I knew was that he’d grown up poor in upstate New York, and that his father had disappeared when he was still a child and his mother had, more or less, been a semi-functioning drunk.

I met her once, when we got engaged at the end of our last year at Cornell, two optimistic math majors who felt we had the whole world shimmering before us. We’d been dating for two years but I’d never met his family; he’d always shrugged them off, said I wouldn’t want to meet them, and I hadn’t minded much because we’d spent time with my family—my mom and dad and sister in New Jersey. I’d been quietly proud to return to my hometown as the new and improved version of myself—the math geek of Moorestown High coming back with a new haircut, a new style, and best of all, a new boyfriend.

When Nick had proposed to me in New York City, spring of our senior year, he decided it was time for me to meet his mom. That one visit had been deeply uncomfortable for both of us—a snapshot into Nick’s childhood that made me pity him, and of course he hated that.

Nick’s mother Arlene had been living in a squalid little apartment in Albany that reeked of cigarette smoke and despair. She’d had a smoker’s voice, low and throaty, and the hacking cough to go along with it. She’d wished us well, but we might have been acquaintances whose names she’d forgotten for all the interest and care she’d shown. She’d kept the TV on the entire time we were there, on an ear-splitting episode of Cops.

Afterwards, we drove back to Ithaca in near-silence, Nick’s hands clenched on the wheel, his expression grim. I hadn’t known what to say, so I said nothing, and after an hour or two, he simply stated, “I had to do that. We won’t see her again.”

“Ever?” I couldn’t help but be startled, despite how difficult the visit had been. “Nick, she’s your mother—”

“No,” he said flatly. “She isn’t. Hasn’t been for a long time.” I knew he’d been living with his best friend Steve and his family since he was sixteen; Steve was the best man at our wedding. But I didn’t know what had precipitated that move, and I never asked. And we never saw Arlene again. She called around the time of our wedding, tearful and tipsy, and I sent her a Christmas card every year out of duty, without telling Nick. She died of lung cancer when Emma was six months old, and in the years since then Nick has never talked about her willingly.

There, standing in our lovely kitchen, watching Nick making light of something so serious, I wondered if he was doing it because the whole concept of foster care reminded him of his own troubled childhood.

I knew I wouldn’t ask, at least not right then. Every marriage has a few no-go areas, and Nick’s upbringing was definitely one of ours. We talked about it so rarely, and it felt so impossibly distant, that I often forgot about it all and just thought of him as the man he was now, confident, genial, successful.

“Please do look it up,” I said, and he dropped the light tone to give me a warm, serious look.

“I will.”

And he did. The next afternoon, he came down from his office over the garage—as a financial analyst for one of the large insurance companies in Hartford, he was able to work from home once or twice a week—while I was just finishing my own work as part-time bookkeeper for a couple of local independent boutiques. His expression was so serious and troubled, I thought something terrible must have happened.

“What—”