Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 14

The day of my discharge, I sat in a wheelchair at the hospital entrance, my child squirming angrily in my arms, my mother’s hands resting firmly on my shoulders, while we waited for my husband to navigate the parking lot pay machine. I swallowed the urge to let the baby roll off my lap, to raise the swaddled blanket over my head and chuck her as far as I could manage.

“Beautiful day,” my mother said.

“It is,” I replied. A car alarm went off in the distance. While my mother hummed the melody to “Lamb of God,” I gazed up at the sky and prayed furiously for death.

At home, I got out of the car, left the baby in the car seat, and walked straight up the stairs and into my childhood bedroom. At some indeterminate point between the moment I told my mother I didn’t think the child was mine and the moment I was discharged, it had been decided that we would be staying at her house for the indefinite future.

I got into bed while my mother carried Clementine upstairs behind me and moved to the diaper table in the corner. “There, there,” she kept saying, over quick Velcro rips. “That’s a good girl.” To whom, I wasn’t sure. I pulled the covers over my head and waited for them to leave.

Time did not pass. I lay beneath the comforter, frozen beneath the frigid beam of His fury, staring up at a gauzy layer of purple fabric, which functioned like a roving eyelid, reducing the world to a series of lights and shadows. It felt like I was a baby, floating in amniotic space. It felt, also, like I was dead, waiting for the Lord to pull the spirit from my hardened body. My mother must have sensed the general direction of my hopelessness, because she kept saying an old Sunday school line to me every time she came upstairs to change a diaper or bring me a meal or help me with a feeding: “Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith, sweetheart.”

I didn’t reply.

Sleep, breastfeed.

Breastfeed, sleep.

Sleep, sleep, sleep.

Breastfeed. Cry.

Breastfeed. Sleep.

Kill yourself.

No—sorry.

Sleep.

At one point my sister came to visit me. Abigail was a mother of two now: she had given birth a few months after my wedding, then immediately gotten pregnant again, and now had a one-month-old in addition to her fourteen-month-old. Two boys: Brandon and Brady. (She thought the matching B names were cute. Privately, my mother had concerns about this strategy: If, God willing, Abigail had a family of five or six or seven, would she really have all the names start with B ? Wouldn’t we all grow tired of the sound?) As Abigail perched at the foot of my bed, I tensed myself, waiting for some version of my mother’s speech. Doubt your doubts, et cetera! When Abigail finally spoke, though, her voice was so quiet that it nearly blended into the whizzing drone of the rotating fan. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

I said nothing. Didn’t even let myself exhale, for how surely a yes would slip out with my breath.

“Not the babies. The babies are—perfect.” She let out a quick ragged gasp. “I’m just so tired. And Bryce —” Another pause. “He always wants to have sex. And I’m just—and the boys are so—”

I closed my eyes. Where were the boys, anyways? Downstairs, probably, with my mother, the only woman in this house who seemed actually interested in taking care of these children.

“I think I might be pregnant again. Can you imagine? Three babies in three years. I can’t believe it. I never thought it would— happen, this fast.”

There was a stirring in my heart, a deep agitation. My sister and I didn’t talk like this. We never had. Our relationship had always felt a bit like the relationship between a queen and a pawn on the chessboard: we danced around each other, sometimes as allies, sometimes as rivals, but never once, in any sense, as equals. The idea that we might finally have found ourselves on equal footing in this moment—as complete and utter failures of motherhood—was not a recognition I was equipped to handle.

“I’ve been thinking about it, you know,” she whispered. “Getting birth control. Bryce doesn’t believe in it, but I heard you can just go to the doctor and get it. Without them knowing, I mean.”

This was my breaking point. I sat up, startling her, and hissed, “Birth control? Lying to your husband? These are sins, Abigail.”

“But—”

“I’m sorry you’re having a hard time, but it’s not fair for you to project your issues onto my life.”

For a moment it looked inevitable that Abigail, crybaby of the family, would collapse into sobs, but she didn’t. Instead, her eyes, liquid soft, seemed to harden and dry. “Of course not. I just wanted you to know, if you’re having a hard time—”

“I’m not having a hard time. I’m just tired, and I like to sleep when the baby sleeps. Which is why I was trying to take a nap before she woke up.”

I lay back down in bed, pulling the covers high around my head. At that moment, there was a gurgling peal from downstairs. Undeniably Clementine.

“I’ll let you sleep, then,” my sister said. “Before she wakes up.”

But she sat there anyway for a long time, motionless at the foot of my bed, her hand on my feet, before finally she whispered something about getting home to make dinner, and then I was alone again.

The next time I saw Caleb, he said, “Your mom mentioned you might need a little pick-me-up.”

We’d been home from the hospital for ten days. I’d showered once. My young, jovial husband was sitting at the foot of my bed for the first time in days, a handful of presents in his lap. He handed me the first one, a small box. I opened it to find a small silver flip phone.

“That way I can call you wherever you are.”

I looked at him. “But I don’t go anywhere.”

“That brings me to gift number two.”

I opened the bigger box. Inside were a brand-new pair of turquoise running shoes, along with a handwritten note. As I read it, I could practically hear my mother as she instructed Caleb, word for word: A new pair of baby blues to run the other kind away.

“The lady at the store said this brand is everyone’s favorite,” Caleb said. He pointed at the foam heel. “Famous runners use this style.”

Before I could reply, he leaned over and picked up another bag, pulling out something black with mesh straps. “I also got this,” he said, lifting it up so the straps dangled in the air. It was a baby carrier. “So the baby can go with you when you run, and you can bring the phone in case you need to reach me. Neat, huh?”

This was the moment the crisis became clear to me. This was the moment I realized my husband was an actual, honest-to-God idiot: when he suggested with all the sincerity in the world that I might like to bring our two-week-old newborn with me on a jog. I imagined Clementine’s tiny brain bouncing around like a bruised fruit in her playdough skull while I stumbled through an asthma attack on some nearby sidewalk, phone to my ear, waiting for someone at home to pick up. On one of our early dates, Caleb had said he wasn’t “book smart,” but that wasn’t the full truth, was it? The full truth was that he wasn’t anything smart. He was a nice, dumb rich kid. And what did that make me? A fool. An embarrassment of a woman. At the most important moment in my life, I’d made a critical error of judgment: I’d mistaken a man’s wealth for his intellect. I’d assumed that Caleb’s presence at Harvard justified some sort of success of critical thinking skills—but I hadn’t considered until now that he’d gotten in on the worth of his last name alone. The realization filled my mouth with a bright, acidic flavor. Like I’d swallowed some sort of lemon-scented disinfectant. I blinked rapidly, my eyes stinging.

A girl like Reena never would’ve made a mistake like this.

My husband was an idiot. Worse, there was absolutely nothing to be done about it. In the world that I came from, divorce was a German word that translated loosely to a lifetime of destitution and misery followed by an eternity in Hell. You didn’t leave your husband if he slapped you in the face, or had an affair, or set you up on a weekly allowance so sparse that you snapped at your children when they spilled a glass of milk, and you certainly didn’t leave your husband if he was just some dumb rich guy.

The disappointment was so big that I had trouble seeing it with any clarity. I felt myself stepping back, and then back again, in an effort to see the picture more fully.

The coffee date. The fancy Italian dinner. The engagement party. The wedding. All our sunny afternoons sitting on patios in Paris, smiling mildly at nothing.

What did we talk about?

I couldn’t remember a single substantial conversation.

There it was, I couldn’t avoid it now: the dawning, prickly sense that I knew my husband as well as I knew the elderly cashier who bagged groceries in my hometown.

I was feeling a bit woozy now. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the realization that this man was nowhere near as handsome as I had been telling myself he was. Maybe it was the nausea. But no— no, his eyes were closer together than I thought they were. And the tip of his nose—had it always been so bulbous? And what about the acne on his chin? Did my husband have a pizza face on the day of our wedding?

Caleb registered the force of my attention. “Is everything okay, Nattie?”

At the sound of my own name, my self-awareness snapped back into place. I shook off the misery with the shivering force of a wet dog. “Tell me,” I said. “How do you know me so well?”

He grinned. He kissed me. He helped me out of bed so I could lace up the straps.

I was just over two weeks postpartum. I couldn’t run or even jog without ripping my stitches and unleashing a rush of clotted blood. But I could walk. Boy, could I walk. And so I began a daily ritual of walking for hours through my neighborhood in the late afternoon. In the beginning, I left the cell phone and the baby carrier and the baby at home, and before long it was my favorite part of the day. I liked watching the steady stream of cars rolling down the road, peeling off one by one into various driveways. I watched the husbands get out of pickup trucks and SUVs and small sleek sedans. I glanced into kitchen windows to see wives in purple and blue and pink aprons pulling roast chickens out of the oven, setting the trays down, and calling over their shoulders for their children to come down for dinner. The kitchens gleamed. The lawns were lush and vibrant. This was the world that the girls in college had found so revolting; these were the driveways they prayed their cars would never pull into. And yet it was unmistakable: these wives and husbands and children were visibly happier than anyone I’d gone to school with. The families were assembly-line functional. The marriages were superglue-tight.

The epiphany arrived slowly for me. With each house I passed—each husband hopping out of the car with a spring in his step; each wife joyfully pulling a tray out of the oven—the realization became clearer and clearer until I had completed the neighborhood loop and was standing back in front of my mother’s house, right where I started.

Inside, my mother was holding Clementine at the kitchen island. “I’ll take her,” I said.

She carefully transferred the swaddle of pink into my arms, blinking away tears as she stepped back and watched me become a mother.

My daughter looked up with cold, unimpressed eyes. Caleb was right. She did look just like me. I held her gaze, trying to communicate silently. We’ve gotten off to a rocky start, haven’t we? Let me reintroduce myself. I’m Natalie. I’m your mother. And I’m going to be in charge from here on out. You don’t have to pretend to like me, but I’m going to pretend to like you. I will fake the emotions until I genuinely feel them. That’s a promise, okay?

She blinked twice, then snuffled her grudging approval. I lifted her head to my lips, kissed her tissue-soft forehead. “I think I’ll take her on my walk tomorrow,” I said.

“I think that would be very nice,” my mother said gently.

Then I walked into the living room, where Caleb was watching football. “Caleb,” I said, positioning myself between my husband and his sight of the game. When his gaze moved slowly to me, I said brightly, “When are you going to get a job?”