Other mothers talked about feeling overwhelmed, about the difficulties of focusing on one thing, and they were always saying, “How do you do it all, Cecilia?”, and she didn’t know how to answer them. She didn’t actually understand what they found so difficult.
But now, for some reason, something to do with this silly letter, everything felt somehow at risk. It wasn’t logical.
Maybe it wasn’t anything to do with the letter. Maybe it was hormonal. She was “possibly perimenopausal,” according to Dr. McArthur. (“Oh, I am not!” Cecilia had said automatically, as if responding to a gentle, humorous insult.)
Perhaps this was a case of that vague anxiety she knew some women experienced. Other women. She’d always thought anxious people were cute. Dear little anxious people like Sarah Sacks. She wanted to pat their worry-filled heads.
Perhaps if she opened the letter and saw that it was nothing, she would get everything back in focus. She had things to do. Two baskets of laundry to fold. Three urgent phone calls to make. Gluten-free muffins to bake for the gluten-intolerant members of the School Website Project Group (i.e., Janine Davidson), which would be meeting tomorrow.
There were other things besides the letter that could be making her feel anxious.
The sex thing, for example. That was always at the back of her mind.
She frowned and ran her hands down the sides of her waist. Her oblique muscles, according to her Pilates teacher. Oh, look, the sex thing was nothing. It was not actually on her mind. She refused to let it be on her mind. It was of no consequence.
It was true, perhaps, that ever since that morning last year, she’d been aware of an underlying sense of fragility, a new understanding that a life of coriander and laundry could be stolen in an instant, that your ordinariness could vanish, and suddenly you’re a woman on your knees, your face lifted to the sky, and some women are running to help, but others are already averting their heads, with the words not articulated, but felt: Don’t let this touch me.
Cecilia saw it again for the thousandth time: little Spider-Man flying. She was one of the women who ran. Well, of course she was, throwing open her car door, even though she knew that nothing she did could make any difference. It wasn’t her school, her neighborhood, her parish. None of her children had ever played with the little Spider-Man. She’d never had coffee with the woman on her knees. She just happened to be stopped at the lights on the other side of the intersection when it happened. A little boy, probably about five, dressed in a red and blue full-body Spider-Man suit was waiting at the side of the road, holding his mother’s hand. It was Book Week. That’s why the little boy was dressed up. Cecilia was watching him, thinking, Mmmm, actually Spider-Man is not a character from a book, when for no reason that she could see, the little boy dropped his mother’s hand and stepped off the curb into the traffic. Cecilia screamed. She also, she remembered later, instinctively banged her fist on her horn.
If Cecilia had driven by just ten minutes later, or even five minutes later, she would have missed seeing it happen. The little boy’s death would have meant nothing more to her than another traffic detour. Now it was a memory that would probably cause her grandchildren to one day say, “Don’t hold my hand so tight, Grandma.”
Obviously there was no connection between little Spider-Man and this letter. He just came into her mind at strange times.
Cecilia flicked the letter across the table with her fingertip and picked up Esther’s library book: The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall.
So, the Berlin Wall. Wonderful.
The first she knew that the Berlin Wall was about to become a significant part of her life had been at breakfast this morning.
It had been just Cecilia and Esther sitting at the kitchen table. John-Paul was overseas, in Chicago until Saturday, and Isabel and Polly were still in bed.