The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [66]
The system’s biggest success story is about to break. Yes sirree, Bob. The kid’s gonna blow.
| CHAPTER SIXTEEN |
You know what people want more than anything else in the world? More than love, more than money, more than peace on earth? People want to feel normal. They want to feel like their emotions, their lives, their experiences, are just like everyone else’s.
It’s what drives us all. The Type-A workaholic corporate lawyer who hits the bars at eleven P.M. to bolt back Cosmos and pick up a nameless fuck, only to rise at six A.M., rinse all evidence of the night away, and garb herself in a sensible Brooks Brothers suit. The respected soccer mom, famous for her homemade brownies and Martha Stewart décor, who is secretly popping her son’s Ritalin just so she can keep up. Or, of course, the highly esteemed community leader, who is secretly banging his male secretary, but still appears in front of the eleven o’clock news to tell the rest of us how we need to take more responsibility for our lives.
We don’t want to feel freakish or different or isolated. We want to feel normal. We want to be just like everyone else, or at the very least, just like what some TV commercial for Viagra or Botox or debt consolidation tells us our lives should be. In our mission for normalcy, we will ignore what we must ignore. We will cover up what we must cover up. And we will disregard anything we need to disregard, just so we can hold on to our illusion of perfectly regulated bliss.
And maybe, in wanting so badly to be normal in our own way, normal Jason and I became.
So I took off for a night or two every six to nine months. Working moms need a break, right? How kind and considerate of my husband to allow me occasional “spa” breaks. So he stayed up late, hunched over the computer, typing furiously. Writers often have long and irregular hours, right? How kind and understanding of me to never complain of my husband’s demanding job.
We gave each other space. We disregarded what we needed to disregard. And in the process, we stood side by side and watched Ree careen down the sidewalk on her first tricycle. We cheered her first jump into a swimming pool. We laughed the first time she tiptoed into the freezing Atlantic Ocean and came screaming full speed back up the beach. We celebrated our daughter. We worshipped every giggle, laugh, burp, and chattering word that tumbled from her mouth. We adored her innocence, her free spirit, her spunk. And maybe in loving her, we learned also to love each other.
At least that’s how it felt to me.
One night, toward the end of summer, when Ree was due to start preschool in September and I would start my first gig as a student teacher, Jason and I stayed up late. He had a George Winston CD playing. Something soft and melodic. Ree and I were constantly torturing him with rock-n-roll, but he always gravitated toward classical music. He would close his eyes, and enter some Zen state where I was certain he was sound asleep, only to realize he was humming softly under his breath.
Tonight, we sat on the little love seat. His left arm was thrown across the back, his fingers touching the nape of my neck and rubbing gently. He did this more and more. Light, little touches, caressing me almost absently. In the beginning, I had startled at the contact. I had learned since to sit still, not say a word. The longer I relaxed, the longer he touched me, and I enjoyed my husband’s touch. Heaven help me, I liked the feel of his calloused fingertips grazing the back of my shoulders, sifting through my hair. Sometimes, he rubbed my scalp and I arched and shifted under his hand like a kitten.
Once I had tried to reciprocate, to scratch his back. The second my fingers went to lift his shirt, however, he got up and left the room. I never tried again.
A husband stroking his wife’s neck while they cuddled on the love seat, on the other hand … Welcome to our little slice of normalcy.
“Do you believe in heaven?” I asked him casually. We’d watched some Harrison Ford movie that night, where the vengeful ghost