Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

That was when I broke down. After a moment of hesitation, I felt Sean’s arms come around me. “Just leave me alone,” I cried, but my hands clenched his shirt even more tightly.

I hated him, and at the same time, he was the one I had turned to for comfort for the past eight years. Old habits, they died hard.

How long until I forgot the temperature of his hands on my skin? Until I didn’t remember the smell of his shampoo? How long until I could not hear the sound of his voice, even when he wasn’t speaking? I tried to store up every sensation, like grain for the winter.

The moment cooled, until I stood uncomfortably in the circle of his embrace, awkwardly aware that he didn’t want me there. Bravely, I took a step backward, putting inches between us. “So what do we do now?”

“I think,” Sean said, “we have to be adults. No fighting in front of the girls. And maybe-if you’re okay with it-I could move back in. Not into the bedroom,” he added quickly. “Just the couch. Neither of us can afford to take care of two places, and the girls. The lawyer told me most people who are in the middle of a divorce stay in the same house. We just, you know, figure out a way so that if you’re here, I’m not. And vice versa. But we both get to be with the kids.”

“Amelia knows. She read the letter from the court,” I said. “But not Willow.”

Sean rubbed his chin. “I’ll tell her we’re working some things out between us.”

“That’s a lie,” I said. “That suggests there’s still a chance.”

Sean was quiet. He didn’t say there was a chance. But he didn’t say there wasn’t, either.

“I’ll get you an extra blanket,” I said.

That night in bed I lay awake, trying to list what I really knew about divorce.

1. It took a long time.

2. Very few couples did it gracefully.

3. You were required to divide everything that belonged to both of you, which included cars and houses and DVDs and children and friends.

4. It was expensive to surgically excise someone you loved from your life. The losses were not just financial but emotional.

Naturally, I knew people who had been divorced. For some reason, it always seemed to happen when their kids were in fourth grade-all of a sudden, that year in the school phone directory, the parents would be listed individually instead of linked with ampersands. I wondered what it was about fourth grade that was so stressful on a marriage, or maybe it was just hitting that ten-to fifteen-year mark. If that was the case, Sean and I were precocious for our marital age.

I had been a single mother for five years before I met and married Sean. Although I truly considered Amelia the one good element of a disastrous relationship, and never would have married her father, I also knew what it was like to have other women scan your left hand for an absent ring, or never to have another adult in the house to talk to after the kids were asleep. Part of what I loved about being married to Sean was the ease of it-letting him see me when my hair was Medusa-wild in the mornings and kiss me when my teeth weren’t brushed yet, knowing which television show to click on when we sat down with a mutual sigh on the couch, instinctively recognizing which drawer housed his underwear or T-shirts or jeans. So much of marriage was implicit and nonverbal. Had I gotten so complacent I’d forgotten to communicate?

Divorced. I whispered the word out loud. It sounded like a snake’s hiss. Divorced mothers seemed to have evolved into their own breed. Some went to the gym incessantly, hell-bent on getting remarried as soon as possible. Others just looked exhausted all the time. I remembered Piper once having a dinner party and not knowing whether to invite a woman who had recently been divorced because she didn’t know whether it would be uncomfortable to be the only single in a room full of doubles. “Thank God that’s not us. Can you imagine having to date again?” Piper had shuddered. “It’s like being a teenager twice.”

I knew there were couples who mutually decided that relationships were past repair, but it was still always one partner who brought up the solution of divorce. And even if the other spouse went along with it, she’d secretly be stunned at how quickly someone who claimed to care about you could imagine a life that didn’t include you.

My God.

What Sean had done to me was exactly what I’d done to Piper.

I reached for the telephone receiver on my nightstand and, although it was 2:46 in the morning, dialed Piper’s number. The phone was next to her side of the bed, too, although she slept on the left and I slept on the right. “Hello?” Piper said, her voice thick and unfamiliar.

I covered the base of the receiver. “Sean wants a divorce,” I whispered.

“Hello?” Piper repeated. “Hello!” There was an angry, muffled sigh, and the sound of something being knocked over. “Whoever the hell this is, you shouldn’t be calling this late.”

Piper used to be accustomed to waking up in the middle of the night; as an OB, she was on call most of the time. Much in her life must have changed if this was her reaction, instead of the assumption that someone was in labor.

Much in everyone’s life had changed, and I had been the catalyst.

The canned voice of the operator filled my ear. If you want to make a call, please hang up and try again .

I pretended instead it was Piper. Oh, God, Charlotte, she would say. Are you all right? Tell me everything. Tell me every last little thing .

The next morning I woke up with the panic of someone who knows she’s overslept because the sun is too high and bright in the sky. “Willow?” I called, leaping out of bed and running to your room. Every morning, you’d sing out to me, so that I could help you transition from bed to the bathroom and then back into your room to dress. Had I slept through it? Or had you?

But your bedroom was empty, the sheets and comforters pulled tidy. Near Amelia’s bed were your unpacked suitcases, zipped up and ready to be carried to the attic.

As I went downstairs, I heard you laughing. Sean was standing at the stove with a dish towel wrapped around his head, flipping pancakes. “It’s supposed to be a penguin, ” you said. “Penguins don’t have ears.”

“Why couldn’t you have just asked for something normal, like your sister did?” Sean said. “She’s got a perfect bear over there.”

“Which would be cool,” Amelia said, “if I hadn’t asked for a lizard.” But she was smiling. When was the last time I’d seen Amelia smile before noon?

“One penguin-slash-donkey, coming right up,” Sean said, sliding a pancake onto your plate.

You both noticed me standing in the kitchen. “Mom, look who woke me up today!” you said.

“I think maybe you’ve got that backward, Wills,” Sean said. His smile did not quite reach his eyes as he met my gaze. “I figured you could probably use a few extra hours of sleep.”

I nodded and wrapped my robe tighter. Like origami, I thought. I could fold myself in half and then in half again, and so on, until I was someone else entirely . “Thank you.”

“Daddy!” you cried. “The pancake’s on fire!”

Not on fire, exactly, but charred and smoking. “Oh, shoot,” Sean said, whirling around to scrape it off the pan.

“And here I thought you’d gone and learned how to cook.”

Sean looked up over the open trash can. “It’s amazing what desperation-and a box of Bisquick-can do for a guy,” he admitted. “I thought, since I’ve got the day off, I’d hang out with the girls. Finish up the wheelchair ramp for Willow.”

What he was telling me, I realized, was that this was the first step in our informal shared custody-shared household-split marriage situation. “Oh,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I guess I’ll just run some errands then.”