Today's Reading
Cam reluctantly gets Polly ready in the sling to walk to the nursery down the road, trying to accept that Luke, wherever he is, isn't going to see Polly before they leave. The house sits quietly around them as she prepares to go, a loaded kind of silence that she tries to ignore: It's the day. The return to work.
Cam has had barely any time to process this change, spent the settling-in sessions stress-walking the streets outside, maternal guilt morphing the inside of the nursery into some awful Dickensian orphanage staffed by ogres. She sometimes thinks she might've read too many novels.
But now it's here, the day mother and daughter splinter into different existences. She said this to Luke only last night, who joked, "Oh, bloody hell, are you not picking her up after?" She'd laughed at that. In every couple, Cam thinks, there is a calm one and an anxious wreck, and Cam is most definitely the latter to Luke's former.
Where is he?
She goes to grab her cardigan, and that's when she spots it. On the table in the hallway is a piece of paper with her husband's handwriting on it. As she looks at it, a half-memory of a coffee-scented goodbye kiss from him drifts across her mind, another of him in the shower, the sound of the water running in the distance, both in the veil just beyond deep sleep. So vague she isn't sure that they happened today at all.
Luke once said he would always kiss her goodbye. "I'm never going to be one of those people who just forgets," he once said. "Or, worse, a dry peck on the cheek!"
But did he?
She picks up the note.
If anything is written on one side. Huh? If anything? And crossed out? Cam holds the piece of paper up to the light. She turns it over. It's been so lovely with you both. Lx.
Maybe the If anything is old. The main note is this one, surely? An end-of-maternity-leave note. It's been so lovely. A kind of "good luck"?
There's nothing else on it.
How weird. Luke—a writer, after all—is usually clear.
She finds their text thread. She's asked once where he is, called twice, but she'll text again.
As she stands there, overthinking, Polly strapped to her chest, she finds she doesn't know where to start. Everything's so loaded these days. Before the baby, time alone was just that. But now it's a currency. One person's me-time is the other's solo parenting. They're not used to it. They've argued about it...
All ok? Sorry to ask again. PS. It's about to happen! The big drop off!! I am to be a working woman once again.
She reads it over, used to proofreading for tone.
She touches the note, just once, sends the text, then leaves.
It is June 21, the longest day of the year, and the hottest so far, too, even at eight o'clock in the morning. The sun is as sharp and yellow as a lemon drop. Cam turns her face to it, apricating in it. Huge flowers have bloomed in the street, big and open happy faces nodding as Cam walks by. She points them out to show Polly (should Polly be understanding gestures yet?), thinking how much she takes the weather for granted lately. It's been balmy for six straight weeks. No breeze, no rain. The same high, blue skies every day, pale at the edges, a deep cyan way up above, as if they're living inside sea glass.
Cam and Luke's lawn has turned yellow and beachy-looking. Each night, once Polly is in bed, Cam takes a novel out there, sits in a deck chair, and just plunges deep into its pages, like diving into a pool containing other worlds. Luke deals with Polly if she wakes. And he knows better than to try to strike up a conversation with Cam, too, during what she calls her introvert hour.
They reach the nursery quickly. A three-story Victorian building sandwiched between a bank and a launderette—very London. Cam feels a dart of dread as it looms into view, that distinctly parental mix of guilt and approaching liberty. The thing about motherhood, it seems to Cam, is that most forms of freedom come with a price. But today, she's just going to pay it, and try to relish it: The return to herself. To the job where she gets to read novels for a living.
...
