of birds in dreams and decided the bird was nothing more than a symbol of her struggle—to put herself through school, to get her first job, to pay back her loans, to survive the stress of trying to fit into the society she had worked so hard to join. She struggled to erase her past, to project the ease and confidence that her colleagues and friends seemed to come by naturally, to be the mother she hadn’t had, the wife her own mother hadn’t had a chance to be.
But none of that had been a problem for years. So why was the dream returning now?
Jen was tired and irritable as she got Teddy fed and ready for preschool. Livvy refused to eat breakfast and dashed out the door so she didn’t miss the bus. Ted took his car to the dealership to have the oil changed and a dent fixed. He’d been complaining about the dent for weeks—someone had dinged him at the Target Center parking lot during a Timberwolves game.
After preschool, Cricket Stern brought the boys over for their standing playdate. “Listen, Jen, something happened today,” she said as Mark and Teddy shot past her into the house. “I thought you’d want to know.”
Instantly Jen was on alert. She had worked so hard to get the speech pathologist and Teddy’s teacher on the same page. A year ago, when he was three, Teddy stopped talking to strangers; when he stopped speaking to his babysitters and then to his friends and teachers, Jen and Ted became concerned enough to have him evaluated, and Teddy had been diagnosed with selective mutism.
For the past year, he hadn’t spoken to anyone outside his immediate family, but the speech pathologist said that Teddy was responding well to the self-modeling and desensitization exercises. She thought Teddy was very close to verbalizing one-on-one with a trusted adult.
“It’s nothing,” Cricket said hastily. “Just, the kids are starting to pick on him. Well, not all the kids. Mack and Jordan. Of course, right?”
“Oh. Shit.”
“I know.” Cricket grimaced. “Sometimes I just want to smack Tessa. It’s like she wants to raise a couple of delinquents, the way she lets them run wild.”
The twins had been a problem since the beginning of the year. Recently they pushed a kid out of the castle in the play yard and knocked out two of his teeth.
“What did they do?” Jen asked, steeling herself.
“They had him in the corner by the dress-up box, and they were trying to make him talk. Mack was making fun of him and calling him retarded. Or maybe it was Jordan—I can’t tell them apart.”
Jen’s anger was tempered with dismay. “What did Teddy do?”
“He managed to get past them. They’re big, but he’s fast, you know?”
“Well, it could have been worse. Did he look upset?”
“Not too bad. More like aggravated. I said something to Mrs. Bray, and she talked to the boys. I thought you could decide whether you want to have her talk to Tessa.”
“No, I feel like that’ll make it worse. You know, like he’s a tattletale. Damn it. He’s so close. He’s been talking to the speech therapist over Skype. She says any day now...” She felt her eyes tearing up.
“Oh, honey, it’s okay. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Cricket said, pulling a packet of tissues from her purse.
“No, it’s not even that,” Jen said, taking a tissue and dabbing at her eyes. “It’s...just, things are kind of a mess right now.”
“Is it Ted’s job search?” Cricket asked sympathetically.
Jen hesitated. She hadn’t told Cricket about Sid’s death, or about Sarah’s note. She didn’t like to make her problems public, even to her best friends. “Yes, I guess,” she said, settling for a partial truth.
Cricket nodded sympathetically. “When Brad was laid off a few years ago he was unbearable. I finally made him rent office space to get out of the house. We pretended he was ‘consulting.’” She smiled as she made air quotes. “Luckily it was only for a few months or we’d be divorced.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad.” Jen had heard rumors that Brad was seeing a woman he’d met on one of his accounts while he was supposed to be at that rented office. “Just a blip, that’s all.”
As Jen watched Cricket drive away, she had the strange sensation that she could be watching herself. Sometimes it felt like she and her friends were all the same, well-preserved Calumet housewives in expensive sunglasses and recent-model SUVs.
Jen closed the door and wondered how many other secrets they kept from each other.
* * *
Thursday afternoon, Jen decided to bundle Teddy into the car and pick Livvy up from school so she wouldn’t have to take the bus. Livvy had been hostile and distant all week, and the gesture was meant to be conciliatory, to let her daughter know she was trying.
As she inched forward in the car-pool line, she caught sight of Livvy with her cluster of friends. Standing a few feet away was a gangly boy with shaggy black hair and a threadbare backpack repaired with duct tape. Sean—Livvy’s first boyfriend, the one who had broken her heart over the Christmas holidays. He was talking to a girl in pink UGG boots and a pink knit cap, his hands jammed in his pockets, and Jen had a momentary urge to get out of the car and shake him, to demand to know who he thought he was to hurt her daughter’s feelings, an unspectacular boy with a dusting of acne on his forehead and gauge earrings he was surely going to regret in a few years.
Livvy got into the car without sparing Sean a glance. She said hi to Teddy and lapsed into sullen silence.
“How was your day?” Jen tried. “Anything interesting happen?”
“My day was like every other day of my life,” Livvy muttered. “So no, I would say that nothing interesting happened.”
“Well, mine was fascinating. After I worked at your school, I did your laundry and made you a dentist appointment and picked up your sweaters from the cleaners.”
“Good for you.”
Jen tightened her grip on the steering wheel and pressed her lips together. They rode the rest of the way in silence. When she turned onto Crabapple Court, she realized she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled with relief as the garage door glided up, and she saw Ted’s BMW parked in his side of the garage. So he’d come home from wherever he’d been all day.
Jen had barely turned off the car when Livvy opened her door and bolted into the house. Teddy started whimpering to get out of his car seat, shoving at the restraints, and Jen hurried out of the car to help him. But even as she worked at the tangled strap, his protestations turned to frustrated tears.
Even though Jen could swear she was doing everything right—even though she was trying just as hard as she knew how—the more she strove to connect with her family, the further she seemed to drive them away.
* * *
Jen set her purse on the hall table and headed for the kitchen. She could hear Livvy’s footsteps racing up the stairs, and she winced, waiting for the slam of her daughter’s bedroom door.
Jen filled a plastic cup with snack crackers and got Teddy settled in front of the TV, his tears forgotten. She felt guilty using Dinosaur Train as a babysitter, but she just needed a few minutes to change into yoga pants and put her hair in a ponytail before she started dinner.
Jen went upstairs to her bedroom, steeling herself for whatever Ted had done to the room now. There he was, on his knees by the wall under the windows. It wasn’t really all that bad. He had put a drop cloth on the bed and the nightstand, and the lengths of baseboard that he’d pried away from the wall were stacked neatly. But there were several gouges and scrapes in the plaster. And there was a long, thin scratch in the finish on the walnut-stained floor.
Jen pushed her hair behind her ears as she looked around the room. It’s fine, it’s fine.
Ted set