Leave Me

But the real truth is that we got you two on Thanksgiving. It’s not when you were born but when you were conceived. (One day that will make sense.) So how could any present compete with that?

She laid down the pen. Because what she wanted to write was that she was sorry. Sorry for ruining this Thanksgiving. Sorry for ruining every Thanksgiving so far.

She had not lied to the twins. She really did consider them the ultimate Thanksgiving gift, the source of so much of her gratitude in life. Which was why it was so bewildering that every single Thanksgiving since they’d been born had been awful. One year worse than the next.

The first Thanksgiving they’d all trekked up to Jason’s sister’s—the orphan dinners discontinued without any discussion. Lauren’s kids had wanted to hold the twins and Maribeth hadn’t wanted to be that mom, the one who was obsessive with the hand sanitizer, and as a result, Oscar and Liv had come down with matching colds, and Maribeth had spent the holiday holding, walking, and nursing two cranky infants. “The days are long but the years are short,” one of Jason’s aunts had said. Which she’d found hard to believe given that the weekend alone felt like it might last a year.

The following Thanksgiving, her parents had come to visit and to “help” with the food prep and childcare, no small feat as Oscar and Liv were now fifteen months old, heat-seeking missiles of destruction. Maribeth had left others in charge for twenty minutes to take a shower, and when she’d come out, Oscar had managed to tip over the cooling turkey. It had taken a half hour to rescue the bird, an hour to calm Oscar. When they went around saying what they were grateful for, Maribeth, feeling spiteful, had said, “Pass.”

Which she regretted. Particularly because by the following year, her father was gone. Which was why she and Jason and the twins had flown to Florida to be with her mother. Upon their arrival, her mother had announced that after fifty years of preparing food for others, she had retired from kitchen duty. Maribeth, she said, was welcome to cook the meal. Maribeth had stayed up until two a.m. the night before finishing a freelance story so she wouldn’t have to work over the holiday and had spent eighteen hundred dollars they couldn’t really spare on the airfare. She knew her mother was in mourning, but that didn’t prevent her from wanting to kill her. They wound up eating the most depressing meal in history at a near-empty restaurant in downtown Boca.

Last year, they went upstate to see Jason’s father, and it hadn’t been bad. Now working at Frap, Maribeth had been forced to bring work with her, but Jason and Elliott had kept the kids entertained so she could focus on work and the cooking. On the drive home, she was trying to finish up an edit. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she’d caught a glimpse of Liv coloring and smiled for a moment, savoring the connection, mother and daughter, hard at work.

“Did you have fun?” she asked.

“No. You worked. You always work,” Liv said. Her tone was mild but that made the accusation punch even harder.

She put the article aside for the rest of the drive, and that night she stayed up late trying to finish it.

“Come to bed,” Jason said.

“In a minute,” she replied, tapping the page with her pen.

“I thought you did that in the car.” When she didn’t answer, he said. “Liv?”

There was something to his tone. Simultaneously scolding Maribeth for letting a three-year-old best her, and admiring the three-year-old for being that powerful. “She’s going to give us a run for our money, that one,” Jason added, smiling.

People often said this. Though usually it was directed to Maribeth: “She’s going to give you a run for your money.”

As if she didn’t already know.

32

Thanksgiving morning, Maribeth decided to show her gratitude by taking a bath. It had been nearly seven weeks since her surgery, and she remembered from the brochures Dr. Sterling had given her that six weeks post-op was like the twenty-first birthday for the cardiac patient, the date after which many previously forbidden activities—sex, bodily immersion in water, strenuous exercise—were permitted.

As she waited for the tub to fill, Maribeth inspected her naked figure in the mirror. Though she had gained some weight back, she was still thinner than she’d been in years—she could tell by the daylight blinking between her thighs—but it wasn’t an enviable skinny. And even if it had been, there were the scars. She had three of them now: the pucker on her leg, the angry welt up her chest, and the pale white smile of her C-section.

“Scars are just tattoos with better stories.” Again, she was reminded of what Jason had told her when she’d first showed him her crosshatch of stitches after the twins were born. She’d been worried he’d think she looked disfigured (she thought she did). And then he’d said that lovely thing.

Her scars now were worse. Or would be. They didn’t even look like scars yet, more like wounds. If they had stories to tell, they were still being written.

Maribeth eased into the tub, grabbing a couple of the magazines Todd had given her yesterday when she dropped off the Thanksgiving shopping list. She’d promised to help them dress and stuff the bird, but after that, they were on their own. She was skipping Thanksgiving this year.

She was skimming an important piece of reportage about the fashion evolution of Nori Kardashian West when she heard the pounding at her door.

“M.B., are you there?” It was Todd.

“Yeah, hang on.” She heaved herself out of the tub, toweled off, and threw on her dirty clothes.