In Our Other Lives by Theodore Wheeler

Author:Theodore Wheeler [Wheeler, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542016513
Published: 2020-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Wasn’t she desperate to find where Nick was? Didn’t she panic?

That would only be natural, but it wasn’t how it happened.

Elisabeth was angry, she was confused, felt gullible and put over on and naive. But not so surprised, after all. Nick was a loser, wasn’t he? Men like him, other losers, they walk out on their families. And she was too scared to file a missing persons, because what if the police called her in to look at some John Does they had in the cooler. She couldn’t handle that.

Anyway, she thought Nick was still in Chicago, working at the warehouse, or out on a bender, that he needed a few days away or was ashamed of what was happening there in the apartment—the mother and child, the bonding, the tummy-time and smiling practice. Nick was like that. Elisabeth had seen it before. He felt shame if he received the blessings all people wanted. He felt profound guilt, for some reason, if the good in life didn’t pass him by.

A week later, when Nick clearly wasn’t sleeping on a friend’s couch and wouldn’t soon reappear, Elisabeth said fuck him. If he couldn’t hack it, fuck him. She took pride in how she could get along alone. Maybe Nick had been weighing her down. She was so busy with the baby and making plans to go back to work in a few weeks, and she didn’t have much time or energy or love to waste worrying about what Nick Holland was up to and whether maybe, possibly, he might come home. Fuck him. She was in the romance of first motherhood those days. She didn’t want Nick’s leaving to ruin that. She wanted to love her baby. That was all.

She sat in the chair all night, slept there, baby cradled on her lap in the horseshoe pillow so baby wouldn’t fall to the floor. The lamplight reflecting in the window, the gurgling noise of the humidifier. She hadn’t told a soul about Nick’s leaving, just barricaded herself in that apartment and did her best to take care of her baby and herself. She had food and water and didn’t need much from outside. Chinese could be delivered, and pizza. She’d stocked up on things like soap and toilet paper long before Caleb was born, packed the freezer with plastic-wrapped meals she’d premade: cheese-stuffed shells, beef stroganoff, chili, chicken and noodles, what froze well and could be nuked in a microwave. It was a little silly, a little sad, how much Elisabeth had prepared for the eventuality that she’d be alone with her newborn.

When her mom called to check on her, Elisabeth didn’t let on that anything was wrong. Her mom shouldn’t come visit. Not now. The weather was horrible. The whole city socked in with snow (an exaggeration) and the temperature at five below most nights. The wind chills, Mom. It’s bad. Every few days Elisabeth uploaded photos of Caleb to Blogspot so her mom could see that Caleb was okay. Elisabeth liked doing things on her own, it was true.

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