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The crazy thing about being a stay-at-home mother is that once someone knows that about you, they think there’s nothing else to know. Done! Jackie resents it in the abstract, but when it comes down to her and her life, she loves the feeling that she’s getting away with something. Hiding in plain sight.
As the too-curious, school-stupid fourth of six growing up, she couldn’t hide at all. There wasn’t any part of her that she could keep back from her family or the school or the church or her youth group. Someone always had eyes on her, and everyone had opinions. What was Jackie screwing up now? Why wasn’t Jackie living up to her potential? You’re smart, Jackie. What’s going on with your test scores? Jackie, we know you’re smart. Why are we not seeing that in your grades?
Back then, she didn’t know enough to say, You’re seeing it in my family, assholes: when Gretchen doesn’t get pregnant because I talked her into sneaking out to Planned Parenthood, when I make the carpool schedule for Amanda’s volleyball team, when I figure out how to get clothes for Sammy that Mom’s too holy to worry about and Dad thinks just magically appear out of thin air. She didn’t know—because nobody told her—that there are more ways to be smart than getting As in school.
Hayden isn’t school-smart, and he’s not keep-Gretchen-un-knocked-up smart, but he’s the first person to look at Jackie and see the person she thinks she is.
She knows a little bit about hockey before she meets Hayden, and then she learns a lot more because she hates him having information she doesn’t have. “If you had this kind of energy for your chemistry homework instead of trying to impress a boy,” says her chemistry teacher, “you’d be getting recruited by Harvard by now.” Jackie asks if he gets evaluated on how many students pass or fail his class, and he sends her to detention because it’s the umpteenth time she’s mouthed off this week and he’s tired of dealing with her. In detention, she tucks a book about a rogue hockey league inside of her chem textbook.
She likes the idea of being adjacent to hockey, in its world but not of it, always a part of her held back. Still, she waits to marry Hayden until he gets drafted, so she’ll know where they’re going to live before she decides for sure. When she tells him so, he laughs his understated little laugh and kisses her. “Will you marry me if I get drafted to Canada?”
“We’ll see,” she says.
Sam—little Sammy, who used to be so—who held her hand when he was learning to— Sam says she’s a Jezebel and a gold-digger, which is the kind of thing he says now; and quotes Matthew 19:24 to cap it off. She’s most of the way out the door by then, but she doesn’t quite have it in her to say what she thinks, which is, so hell for Hayden, but it could still go either way on heaven for me. Sam wouldn’t think it was funny.
Hayden does.
And okay, the money’s not not a factor, for the fourth of five girls who got all her clothes thirdhand at best and wasn’t allowed to wear lip gloss even for special occasions. They start planning a big church wedding, paid for with Hayden’s signing bonus, to satisfy their parents, but Jackie tells Hayden, “After this I’m finished doing what my parents want,” and he says, “You got it.” They mark the promise by having sex-sex for the first time—which kind of hurts—and Hayden gets upset—and Jackie tells him not to worry, she’ll find out what the problem is and they’ll reconvene later—and he smiles up at her and says, “I love you, Jackie-o.”
“You can’t call me that. Jackie O is an existing person,” she says, rolling off him.
“There’s another Hayden Pike in Oregon. He’s a pediatric oncologist. Guess you’ll have to start thinking of something else to call me, too.”
“You really should have thought of this before they had all those jerseys made.”
“Well, see. I’m bad at planning ahead. That’s where we complement each other. You’re the planner, I’m the one with Scrooge McDuck money.”
“I do expect our first home to have a swimming pool of gold coins,” says Jackie. “Hayden?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“I love you too.”
That’s their real wedding night, as far as Jackie’s concerned. Some things are just for them.
She finds the solution to the sex problem, and it is lube. Hayden says, “Sweet!” After she loses what remains of her virginity, he goes down on her for two orgasms in a row, then gives her a high five and says she’s the hottest, smartest person in the world.
Maybe she is, she thinks, smug. Nobody’s confronted her with compelling evidence otherwise.
Montreal is great, actually. She wasn’t expecting that part. For the first few months, she assigns herself the job of finding one new Montreal thing to try every weekday. Museums. A lingerie store. A spa day. The Biodome.
Once her energy for that wears out, and Hayden’s still gone most of the time, she gets a job at a coffee shop that pays badly and never gives her the same shifts two weeks in a row. But she likes seeing different kinds of people, and she likes stealing a few of the day-old pastries that are destined for the garbage. Her parents would be so disappointed in her if they knew.
As an experiment, she tells them.
“Jackie,” says her dad, all the way down at the bottom of his vocal range. “That’s not how I raised you.”
“You don’t need to be eating all that anyway,” says her mom. “And shouldn’t Hayden give you money if you need to buy something?”
“Man’s supposed to be a provider,” her dad agrees.
What she can’t quite believe is that they can’t stop her. She keeps waiting for them to show up at her work and slap the slightly-stale Danish out of her hand. But they never do, and they don’t bring it up again, and she keeps stealing pastries the whole rest of the time she has that job.
It’s kind of funny that Jackie’s the first one to have kids. Amanda got married a few years earlier, but she doesn’t get pregnant right away because Trip’s sperm turns out to be garbage. Chrissie gets pregnant a couple of weeks before Jackie, but then Emma and Ruby come early. It’s funny, to Jackie. The day they finally come home from the hospital, with the very first grandchildren on either side of the family, Hayden brings her a half-dozen cupcakes with an icing letter on top of each of them. They spell out W I N N I N.
“You forgot the G,” she points out.
As radiantly delighted as the day she showed him the positive pregnancy test, Hayden says, “You’re the G.”
Jackie tries really hard not to smile. She does not succeed. “Hey,” she says, “let’s get divorced.”
“Too late now, baby, you’re stuck with me.”
That year at Christmas, Jackie doesn’t go to church with the rest of the family. She doesn’t intend it as some big statement, although she knows that’s how they’ll take it. She’s just tired. She’s tired, and now she’s a mother of her own children, and it’s been long enough in Montreal that she really does know for sure that her family can’t make her.
They can’t make her, but Gretchen and Sam stop talking to her. Even though she expected it, or part of her expected it, Jackie’s surprised by how much it hurts. It’s not like they were talking every day before. The youngest three—Juliet, Jackie, Chrissie—are the ones with the thriving group chat, because Juliet “likes feeling connected” and expresses the connection by sending them news stories about vacations that went terribly wrong and lurid updates on her coworkers’ love lives. But Jackie is the reason Gretchen made it through high school. Jackie’s the person who helped Sam scrounge up shoe boxes to make his book report dioramas.
She gets closer with some of her girl cousins: Gracelynn, who cut her hair in what Jackie’s mom called a half-Mohawk and Jackie learns to call an undercut; Isabel, who went to college in the South, where people are racist, and unnerved everyone in the family by dating a Cuban American premed student for seven months; Thalia, whose dad moved to Seattle and married a Planned Parenthood clinic escort, and everyone teases them at holidays in ways that Jackie always thought were in good fun and Thalia says came close to putting her off Christmas for life.
When she stops to think about it—and mostly she doesn’t—Jackie’s furious about all the years she spent trying so hard to be good that she didn’t recognize good when it was standing right in front of her.
Being home with the babies all the time is astoundingly boring. For a while, Jackie reads Proverbs 31 every day and cries herself sick. Not a sustainable situation, for someone who doesn’t even believe in God anymore. (Maybe.) (She hasn’t decided.)
She gets a stepladder and hides the Bible at the back of the high cabinet where they keep the gargantuan serving bowls and platters for the parties they’re going to host for the Metros when Jackie can tolerate human beings again. That’s step one. Step two, she can feel her brain beginning to atrophy, and since probably next it’ll start just melting into her brain stem, she decides that the best thing to do is to always always have a project.
And, which she should have known from her entire childhood, if anyone at any time had ever told her there was more than one way to be smart, she’s fantastic at figuring out projects. She starts slow by teaching herself to regrout tubs, and she regrouts all three of theirs. She reads an article about internet privacy, attends a class at the library with the twins in tow, reads a bunch of forum posts, and then flashes their home router with open-source VPN firmware.
(“Why, though,” Hayden says plaintively.)
She cleans the condenser coils on their AC unit and fills in a couple of tiny cracks in the driveway with asphalt filler. She buys a copy of How to Cook Everything and makes two new recipes per week, usually while the girls are napping. She sends photos of everything to Juliet, and Juliet sends back strings of applause emojis and reaction gifs.
She installs a tiled backsplash in the kitchen, which looks terrible but Hayden loves it. She pries it up and does the whole thing again, better. Ruby says her first word, Mama. Emma’s still thinking things over. She misses Hayden more than she thought it was possible to miss another person.
When she says that last part in her cousins’ group chat, Thalia sends her a vibrator.
Sometimes Jackie feels split in half, the girl whose foot was always sliding, and the picture-perfect stay-at-home WAG mom. They are two sides of the same coin, but most of the people she knows want to keep just one side facing up.
The cool thing about being a mother is that Jackie gets to decide everything. The kind of mother she’s going to be, and how she’s going to be different from her mom, different from her grandmother, different from Chrissie. When she takes the girls for chilly walks tucked up in their double stroller, she likes to think about all the rules she’s not going to have for her daughters, and all the ones she is.
Emma says her first word, sitter, which means sister. Having two babies at once has been, in many ways, awful, but at least there’s no pressure to make Emma a sister. She already has one. Built in. She texts Hayden, let’s wait a few years to have another one, okay?
great idea babe, Hayden texts back, because he thinks all her ideas are great. He scores a hat trick in that afternoon’s game against the Panthers that night, all three on assists from their hotshot rookie center, Shane Hollander. Jackie is burping Emma when the game ends. “Daddy did so good!” she tells her. “That’s your daddy and his new teammate, huh?”
“Sitter,” says Emma, having gotten a good reaction the first time. Jackie claps, which makes Ruby and Emma clap, too.
The hotshot rookie center has a sweet little face, a gentle and hurtable face, and he reminds Jackie of Sam when Sam was little. She googles him. Canadian, parents Yuna and David, number-two overall draft pic, only child. Too bad for him. He looks like someone who needs siblings.
make friends with Hollander and his gf, she texts Hayden. if I feed him first then I win. After some thought, she adds, I’m tired of being the baby WAG, which she really freaking is.
It’s good sense, more than anything. Hollander is living up to his promise, and he’s going to be the focal point of the team at least until his contract runs out. Hayden got picked in the third round, and he’s been solid so far, good in a room, racking up plenty of points and assists, no problems. Even so: it doesn’t hurt to have good chemistry with the team’s star. In Jackie’s opinion.
“Sitter,” says Emma.
Jackie thinks she’s going to be a good mom—it’s too soon to tell right now, anyone can take care of babies—but the thing she already knows she’s best at in the world is being a sister. She loves her sisters and Hayden’s sisters, she loves her cousins, she even mostly loves her WAG group chat, when they’re not telling her how to raise her babies or sidebarring with her to confirm that she thinks so-and-so is a bitch, like Jackie would ever be dumb enough to say something in a text message that can be shared around.
And she likes hotshot rookie center Shane Hollander. He doesn’t drink, he takes his own dishes to the sink instead of waiting for her to do it, and the first thing he says after nice to meet you is, “Hayden said you did the tile on your kitchen backsplash? By yourself?”
“Yep,” she agrees. “I like that stuff.”
“Did you just do it from watching tutorials online,” Shane asks, “or did you have to go to a class for it?”
He’s different than Hayden’s hockey friends, like a zoo animal that was hand-raised by people instead of hockey bros, and now he’s missed the window for brain plasticity and he can’t ever learn how to be a regular hockey bro. When the conversation turns to hockey, he carefully checks in with Jackie that it’s okay to keep going. “Not because you’re a girl. Woman,” he says, like a doofus. “Um. Sometimes, my dad gets sick of hearing my mom and me talk about hockey. So if you do, we can stop.”
Jackie laughs and starts asking him all her nosy questions. He answers dutifully: Since before he can remember. The Metros. No, not just for the press, really the Metros, because his mom loved them so much. Yes, but they couldn’t have any more after Shane. Sure, probably, someday.
“When you meet the right girl?” Hayden suggests.
In Shane’s face, Jackie sees a flash of fear, and he glances down at the phone in his hand. Then he jerks his eyes back up to Hayden and says, unsteadily, “Sure, yeah.”
Oh, Jackie thinks. Oh, honey, because she knows what it looks like when you are trying with everything you have to keep back a dangerous part of yourself from the greedy, all-consuming world.
The next morning, while Jackie’s nursing Ruby and Hayden’s helping Emma come to terms with permanent maternal abandonment, Jackie says the best thing she can say without making any guesses about Shane that would be rude to guess. “Look out for Shane, Hayd. He’s too sweet for hockey.”
“Ha. You haven’t seen him on the ice.” Before Jackie even picks up her head to object: “That is a joke. I know you’ve seen him on the ice. I’m just saying, the guy’s a beast. He’s all discipline. Hockey might be too sweet for him.”
“Nice,” says Jackie. “Good line. You should save that for your memoir.”
“Fuck off,” Hayden says affectionately.
“Swear jar.”
Hayden shakes his arms to demonstrate that they are full of a still-discomfited baby, and Jackie sighs to demonstrate that it is very difficult to be married to someone who won’t even keep his financial commitments to the swear jar. “I think you’re a good enough player that people would buy your memoir,” Jackie says.
“Aw, thanks, babe.”
She leans her head on Hayden’s shoulder, and he obligingly switches Emma to the other side, away from the temptations of Mommy’s boobs. “When I retire,” he says, “can you train me how to be a plumber?”
“Mm,” says Jackie. “I see you more handling the demo and interior design side of things. Everything in between can be me. We’ll make an HGTV show. The next Chip and Joanna Gaines. You can do that ta-da part at the end. Swap kids with me?”
They switch out the babies. Hayden goes to get Ruby’s bottle so she can finish her breakfast, and Emma takes a little while to latch, as she always does. The girls are mostly weaned, but Jackie’s taking it slow. She hates the idea of stepping out of this stage in their lives, unsure of what comes next.
Emma’s the more confident walker, but Ruby’s speech is clearer. They’ll always have each other to measure themselves against. If the Metros don’t make the playoffs, then Jackie could be pregnant by August and have their third baby a month after the girls turn two. Chrissie thinks she should do it, just knock out all the pregnancies now and get it over with. Juliet agrees because the future’s never promised, which is the kind of woo-woo stuff Jackie thought she’d trained out of her little sister years ago. Facts are facts, she used to tell her. And nonsense is nonsense. And it’s your job to know the difference. Juliet would narrow her eyes and nod, committing it to memory.
Jackie texts pictures of the girls to Gretchen, and says, thinking about trying for a third one! but Gretchen never texts back.
They see a lot of Shane in the springtime. Jackie learns to keep ginger ale in the fridge for him. She learns that while he’s not necessarily crazy about babies, if she hands him one of the girls and a jar of baby food and tells him “insert this apricot puree into this child,” he will get the full jar of apricot puree fed to Ruby or Emma without anyone making a fuss about it.
The third or fourth time he comes over, he says, a little shamefacedly, “Okay, can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” she says.
Shane glances at Hayden, and Jackie wishes she hadn’t said yes. It wouldn’t be the first time one of Hayden’s teammates asked her something weird and inappropriate. That’s what she gets for thinking of Shane like a baby brother, instead of a grown man with a horrible brain, which is what baby brothers grow up to be.
“How, uh,” says Shane. “What’s the best way to keep track of their schedules?”
The smile that breaks across Jackie’s face feels like it’s engaging a muscle she’s never used before. She wants to put Shane in a glass jar in a museum so he can be studied.
Embarrassed, Shane stutters and babbles. “I know that’s a dumb question but just, I know Hayden said babies have to keep on really strict feeding schedules—not that they’re babies!—toddlers have to— Anyway, I was just wondering if you have it all up—” He taps his head. “—or if there’s a paper calendar you use, or— Because I have a lot of stuff too, and it’s hard to stay on top of it.”
Jackie deposits Ruby into her high chair, kisses Hayden on the top of his head, and takes Shane into her office to show him all her systems. He likes her Google calendar, where she keeps track of all the birthdays and Mommy-and-me events and playdates and projects she’s working on. He likes her dry-erase calendar, where she keeps track of Hayden’s games. He loves her color-coded, sticker-forward paper family calendar.
“Seriously,” he says. “Can I take a picture? You’re like— This is really cool.”
It is the opposite of cool. Hayden yells from the dining room for them to come back, and Shane’s too distracted by Jackie’s organizational skills to pay any attention. Jackie’s brother doesn’t talk to her anymore, and she wonders, mostly kidding around with herself, if Shane Hollander might like to be the godfather of her third child.
Ruby and Emma would be such good big sisters. Ruby to dazzle the new baby, Emma to keep her in line. Or whatever they want. Jackie tries to stop herself from having specific expectations for what the girls will be like. When you are one of a set, it’s easy to fall into a specific mold. Gretchen did sports, Amanda was the pretty one, Chrissie was shy, Juliet’s the baby. Sam was the boy. All these years after marrying Hayden, sometimes Jackie still feels like the screw-up sister, the one who sneaked out of the church lock-in to kiss a boy and then Autumn Hubbard saw them and told everyone, and Jackie was grounded for two months and didn’t get to go to Model UN.
The boy was Hayden, who came to the lock-in with one of his friends. In the end, she married him. Shouldn’t that count for something?
Sammy called her a Jezebel for having sex before marriage, which Jackie barely did, even. She tells people about it as a joke sometimes. In Montreal, everyone thinks it’s funny. Americans! What a relief that she’s come north to Canada and escaped that brother and that life.
When Sam was little, five or six, they used to play a game where he was the dragon-slayer, and Jackie and Juliet were the princesses he was defending. Thank you, Sam!, they would say, covering his little round face with kisses. You saved us!
Getting pregnant takes longer, this time around. Jackie’s not worried. Her idea is that if they get into November, and she’s still not pregnant, she’ll start tracking her cycle a little more closely. One of the second-liners on Hayden’s team has a wife, Kirsten, who had a hard time conceiving their second child, and Jackie spent six months as the project manager of Kirsten’s infertility. You’re our angel, Kirsten said when she finally got pregnant, although it really had nothing to do with Jackie. After all the tests and injections and calendars, they got pregnant the old-fashioned way.
She gets a positive test in October, while Hayden’s on the road. The girls know before he does that there’s a baby in Mommy’s tummy. Jackie tells them all about what she remembers from when Aunt Juliet was born, and the fun of being a big sister. She tells them how you can teach a younger sibling things, and she will think you are so wise, and she’ll always be your first, biggest fan. Emma and Ruby aren’t very interested, can’t make the connection between their aunt and an imaginary baby inside Mommy.
When Hayden gets home, and she tells him, he starts crying. “Oh my God,” he says, hugging her so tight she can’t breathe. “I love you so much. Oh my God. Our family is just—I love you. I love you. I’m so glad we’re married. Oh my God.”
They have sex—“bonus round!” says Hayden—and Jackie comes just from that, which is so rare for her that Hayden doesn’t quite believe her and insists on going down on her after, which—it’s not like she’s going to say no. She likes watching him do it. Her leg thrown over his shoulder. The distracted way he touches her breasts and her thighs, during. How slow he takes it, like he could stay between her legs forever. She’s the one who always has to tell him to pick up the pace, she’s close, she’s close.
As they’re falling asleep, curled up together like newlyweds, Hayden starts crying again. “This is weird, bro,” he says, laughing at himself.
The right question would be, are you not happy about it?, but Jackie can’t even look at that question, let alone ask it. He is, anyway. She knows he is. They always wanted at least three kids, probably four. People don’t just change on a dime like that. Mostly, they don’t. “Are you okay?”
Softly, Hayden kisses her hair and says, “I’m happy,” like he knew the real question all along.
Oh, she does love him. You take such a gamble when you get married; but Jackie—almost every part of her, almost all the time—is really, really glad she took it.
When they find out the baby’s a boy, Jackie says, “Okay, we’re having a fourth one. And like, soon.”
“What?” says Hayden, while Carmina, the ultrasound tech, tries not to laugh.
“Yeah, we have to, sorry. If you have two girls and then you have a boy, everyone thinks you were just waiting for the boy.”
“But we weren’t.”
“People do think that,” agrees Carmina. “Your wife’s right.”
“See.”
“Our two girls are twins,” Hayden says, to Carmina, not Jackie, like if he wins her over then he can still get the verdict to turn in his favor. “I want a fourth kid! This just isn’t why I want one. This would be an insane reason to have a fourth kid.”
“Great!” says Jackie. “So we all want a fourth kid. Win win win.”
Hayden’s eyes go soft, and he leans over to kiss her on the forehead.
The second pregnancy is easier than the first one, apart from how huge she gets. You’d think having had twins the first time, she’d have gotten as big as a person can get. Shane comes over for dinner—he brings dinner, lasagna for them and little containers of bird food for him—and says, “Whoa” when he sees her.
“I know. Don’t say whoa like that to a pregnant lady.” Jackie reaches up to hug him.
At dinner, she and Shane talk about animal husbandry, because it turns out Shane watches a lot of animal videos and nature documentaries, and Jackie briefly wanted to be a zoo veterinarian as a kid. Shane is so easy to make happy; it’s one of the things Jackie likes about him. Eventually, Hayden begs them to stop because they’re making it impossible for him to enjoy his dinner.
Shane leans down to Ruby and whispers, “Daddy doesn’t want to hear about rhinos pooping out babies,” and Ruby screams with laughter. For the rest of the pregnancy, all Jackie has to do to drive Hayden crazy is tell him that the girls are excited for her to poop out their baby brother in a few more months.
When Jackie was a kid, her big sin was pride. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth. Everyone said that to her. God would see what she did in secret, and reward her Himself. But Jackie didn’t want a reward, she argued, she just wanted someone to say good job.
“Hm,” said her fourth-grade Sunday school teacher. “And why do you think you want them to do that?”
“So I know I did a good job.”
“Because hearing someone praise you like that, it feels good, doesn’t it?”
Jackie recognized the trap, but she was already caught in it. “Yes.”
“So that’s a reward, then isn’t it?” Jackie must have made a face, because she remembers Mrs. Matthews trying not to laugh. “Okay, Jackie. It sounds like your work is to know inside your own heart when you’ve walked with Jesus and done the right thing, and trust in God that He’ll see your good deeds and reward you in His own time.”
Jackie tried. She did try. Once people knew you like that, though, they never gave you a compliment again. Like how nobody at church would ever tell Amanda she looked pretty, because Amanda did the sin of vanity. What was the point, Jackie thought, of organizing the entire Sunday school bake sale in seventh grade when she knew she’d be expected modestly to say that it was nothing, she was nothing, it was by the glory of God that they stand before you today with six dozen of everything and clear labels for desserts that have nuts. And why did God have to hear good job all the time, anyway? Didn’t God know inside His own heart when He did the right thing? Why was Jackie being held to a higher standard than literally God?
She still organized the bake sale, though. It went great.
Arthur is beautiful. A beautiful boy. Not great at latching, but Emma wasn’t either, and they got through that just fine. The girls love Arthur, and they love running back and forth to do little errands for him. Jackie has never been happier. She’s making a life that’s exactly how she wants it.
There, she thinks. Good job.
At the first-week checkup, Dr. Lopez recommends a lactation consultant. Jackie wants to kick her, and she wants to kick the lactation consultant, too. This and that about Arthur’s latch. This and that about nursing positions. Like Jackie doesn’t know.
“They’re trying to help,” Juliet reminds her, when they talk on the phone afterward.
“Who said I need help?” demands Jackie. “Nursing my own baby? You know that’s not me.”
Juliet agrees, she does know; but she sounds a little sad.
Nothing works. Nothing works.
Nothing works.
Nothing works.
Hayden makes her schedule the two-month check-up at a time he can come with her. He calls Juliet to come over and watch the two girls, during. Dr. Lopez says that Arthur’s not gaining like he’s supposed to, which makes Jackie want to scream. He’s been nursing fine. Mostly fine. He has! This isn’t her first rodeo, and she knows how to get her baby to latch. In the middle of estimating how often she nurses him, and how long he feeds each time, Jackie starts crying. She can’t stop crying. She cries for so long that Dr. Lopez leaves and comes back.
How has her sleep been? Fine.
Not fine, says Hayden.
And have there been changes to her diet? No.
Yes, says Hayden.
Jackie tries to explain that everything is actually fine. The one, the one and only caveat is that Arthur doesn’t always latch and then she has to pump and then he cries and she cries and that’s only after trying and trying and trying and trying and trying, when with the girls she could always— But that’s the only thing. That, and this sort of, she doesn’t know how to describe it, but please try, says Hayden, so she tries to explain the weird blurry feeling that she gets, like she’s inside a thick plastic dome where everything’s just a little muted, like the way your ears ring if someone fires a gun too close to your head or the way your eyes won’t focus properly when you’ve just woken up or you’ve been crying for a really long time. Like that.
So, nothing.
Hayden is on the phone to his dad, in tears. It’s the exact kind of thing Jackie would be good at managing, usually. Dr. Lopez diagnosed her with postpartum depression, and she would love, usually, to fall down a google rabbit hole about it. She’d text Shane her findings and he would say some wry little thing that would make her laugh and laugh.
“Baby,” Hayden says, his eyes wet. “Baby, have you been—thinking about, like. Hurting yourself.”
No, she hasn’t. She has not, and she said so before, to the doctor, didn’t she?
Hayden hugs her. “Okay. Okay. Good. Okay.”
But she has been thinking—can she say this?—not with an action item, but she has just been sometimes fantasizing, and this is different than wanting it, about what it would be like to be dead. She thinks very peaceful. She thinks—
“God, Jackie.”
—about it, sometimes, that’s all.
How can they have a fourth one? How can they have a fourth one like this? How can they have a fourth one when she can’t even manage the three they already have?
If she’s so incompetent that her younger sister has to come live with them and do the things she can’t do, then how can they have a fourth one?
“Okay, killer, let’s leave that question for a time when we’re not having a medical emergency, huh? We can revisit that one later.”
While Hayden’s over at Juliet and Mark’s place explaining the situation and getting everyone packed up, Shane comes over to Jackie and Hayden’s place, very unfussy, and puts on a documentary about life in the deepest parts of the ocean. Being baby-sat by her husband’s teammate is not exactly the high point of Jackie’s life, even if that teammate doesn’t know exactly-in-those-words what he’s there to prevent, and is her husband’s best friend and someone she thinks of as a little brother at this point. Little brother reminds her of Sam, who fully just sucks now and vagueposts on Facebook about the kinds of things that can happen when you choose to worship the things of this world instead of fixing your eyes on the world beyond.
She bursts into tears.
“Aw, Jacks,” says Shane, and he wraps one of his big stupid arms around her and lets her cry against his big stupid chest.
The monstrous truth is that there is no part of yourself that you can hold apart from the world. The world reaches back for you; it drags and drags.
She hasn’t hugged her big sister or her baby brother in almost two years. She can’t even want to hug them now, because wanting the hug means wanting finally, you got your boy! in jovial voices to Hayden, and questions about their home church, and terrible little comments about Gracelynn’s hair and Thalia’s friends.
“My mom says to tell you it’ll get better.” Shane’s using his best good-boy voice, blurry in Jackie’s ears because she’s still crying. “She says it doesn’t feel like this forever. It’s okay, it’ll be okay. Hey, quit it,” because Jackie’s trying to pull away. “You don’t have to always get up and do stuff. Just be hugged for a little bit. Geez.”
Jackie laughs wetly, which must have been what Shane was going for. He’s so grown-up now. It feels like twenty seconds ago that he was sitting on her couch trying not to cry because the Metros didn’t win the Cup that year, because Boston won it instead. You silly baby, she thought tenderly, then. Now she’s the silly baby. Circle of life.
And it’s a lie: She does want to hug her baby brother and her big sister. She does. She wants Gretchen to smooth her hair back from her face, and Sam to run eager little errands for her like when he and Juliet and Jackie used to play house as kids.
They don’t know her girls, and they won’t know Arthur. All she’d have to do to have them back is lie.
“Shane,” she says, really quietly, and if he doesn’t hear her, then she won’t ask. But he says, “Yeah?” so she’s stuck with continuing. “Do you think it’s worth it to lie to people you care about, if that’s what you have to do to keep them?”
For a frozen second, Shane is completely still. Then, maybe, he remembers what he’s there for. Keep the crazy lady from going even crazier. “I guess, um,” he says. His voice cracks. He’s so young, really. You keep marching through time, year after unlovable year, and Jackie can’t remember anymore how to want to. “I guess it depends how important the thing you’re lying about is.”
How important is it? God. The careful picture books she bought the girls about different kinds of families. The life she’s made. Gracelynn’s hair.
“And if,” Shane says, a little steadier, “it isn’t anything—you know? If it’s something you know just—isn’t going to be anything. Then maybe it’s not so much of a lie. Maybe after a while, it starts being the truth.”
After a while of waiting for Jackie to answer, and Jackie not answering, Shane wraps his other arm around her and lets her cry some more. What a good person he is. What a kind and good person. Everything he’s saying is true, and maybe that’s what scares her so much. If she stopped swimming against the current, thrashing her arms and legs, fighting it, how fast would she get swept right back out to sea? And she could have Gretchen back, and she could have Sam.
How important is it? What else is it but her pride?
When the girls were this age, two months and change, she remembers feeling so sure.
Juliet and Mark stay for two weeks.
They wean Arthur. He’s fantastic at taking the bottle, way better than Emma or Ruby.
Hayden and Shane take the kids for little outings when they don’t have practice.
Sertraline helps.
She and Juliet watch YouTube videos about knob-and-tube wiring, while Adam plays a game with the girls that mostly consists of turning them upside down and throwing them into piles of cushions. “You could rewire this whole house,” Juliet says, resting her head on Jackie’s shoulder, “if you wanted. Rip out everything inside, and do the whole thing over.”
“I could not,” Jackie says, laughing. “I’d probably fry the circuits for the whole city. Anyway, we don’t have knob-and-tube. Hayden liked all these terrible old houses when we were looking, and I said I have my standards and the standards are grounded circuits or nothing.”
“Oh good.” Juliet reaches down and clicks into the next video. WHOLE HOME UPGRADE, says the video in a dramatic font. This just doesn’t meet the code, says the electrician, sorrowfully. Whoever put this box in did it all wrong. Even for the time it was installed, that’s, that’s sloppy work there. Jackie finds his rough, Brooklyn-accented voice comforting.
Juliet pushes Jackie’s bangs off her forehead and kisses her there, like their mom used to do when they were little. “I think you could do it, Jacks. If you wanted to.”