If You Only Knew

“Why?”

“Because I have to eat, or I’ll die,” he says. “Never mind. It’s a bad idea. The offer’s been revoked. Bye, Jenny. See you around.”

He smiles as he closes the door, gently, in my face.

It’s only when I get back to my apartment that I realize he left the flowers on my coffee table.

Chapter 6: Rachel (#u16b9990d-5FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)

MY MOOD OVER the next few days is shiny and hard and relentless. Nothing can get me down—not Charlotte putting a meatball in her diaper, not Rose’s tantrum at the grocery store when I wouldn’t let her swim with the lobsters, not Grace stonily telling me she loves Aunt Jenny more. I’m so, so relieved about Adam, and filled with energy. The house has never been cleaner. The girls and I weeded the flower beds—well, they played with shovels while I weeded. I baked and froze eight loaves of banana bread.

It’s only at night that my stomach aches.

On Monday, I take the girls to nursery school for their four hours of doing exactly what we do at home—reading, singing, crafts, snacks—and then go over to Jenny’s to help her unpack and organize and clean. She asks how I am; I tell her I’m great, and we leave it at that. I invite Mom to have lunch on Tuesday, and the girls are sweet and affectionate with her. I listen to her stories about Dad—I even encourage them, nodding and smiling as if I’ve never heard them before. When she leaves and the girls are still asleep, I bake so much that when the girls wake up, I put them in the minivan and drop off cupcakes for Jenny, another batch for her nice building super—though why a two-family house needs a super is a mystery—and three dozen for the homeless shelter.

On Wednesday, we have Mommy and Me swimming, and when we’re in the pool, Clarice Vanderberger tells me I sure am in a good mood. I smile and say yes, what’s not to be happy about, gorgeous weather we’re having. Then I slosh over to Grace, who’s a little too good of a swimmer and seems to be in love with Melissa, the swimming instructor, and resentful of the fact that Melissa is helping Rose.

“Can you believe Jared Brewster is actually going ahead and marrying that woman?” Elle Birkman asks me as her son laps pool water. God knows what kind of chemicals and germs and bodily fluids are in the pool, but she doesn’t tell him to stop.

“Mama! Mama! Mama! Watch!” Rose orders as she dips her chin in the water as Melissa holds her. “Face in, Mama!”

“Honey, that’s so good!” I say. “Oh, Charlotte, honey, don’t drink the water. It’s only for swimming.”

“Hunter’s drinking it!” Charlotte says. Grace tugs my hand.

“Hunter, honey, it’s yucky.”

Elle doesn’t chime in. “I mean, men will be men, but he doesn’t have to marry her,” she says instead. “Has he talked to you about it? It’s hard to believe he’ll go through with it.”

Jared is my oldest friend. Jenny and I have always been so close that it was hard for me to find another person I liked as much, but Jared was special. The Brewsters lived up the hill from us, so technically, we were neighbors, though his house was really posh; they even had a live-in housekeeper. He was that rarest of boys—clean, for one, and nice, the type who’d ask you if you’d read a book or seen a TV show, then listen as you answered. Riding the school bus cemented our friendship; we sat together every day from kindergarten through eighth grade. He went to Phillips Exeter Academy for high school, but even then, we stayed in touch. Mom used to ask if we were dating—and pray that we were—but we weren’t. It wasn’t like that. But he’s kind and nice and funny and comfortable as flannel pajamas. In addition to being my oldest friend, he’s Adam’s coworker at Brewster, Buckley and Bowman, or Triple B, as they call it.

So I’m not about to gossip behind his back.

“You guys talking about Jared?” Claudia calls from the other side of the pool, unfettered by loyalty.

“Yes,” Elle says at the same time I say no. Grace yanks on my hand again, and Elle tows Hunter through the water to Claudia’s side of the pool for a better gossip partner.

In the changing room as I wrestle my damp daughters back into their little dresses, Elle strips off her suit to make sure everyone—including the kids—is treated to a view of her new breasts. Claudia rolls her eyes, and I smile back. Personally, I thought the “before” pair was more attractive, but Elle insisted that Hunter had ruined her body.

The body looks pretty great to me.

She has a bikini wax.

So did the woman in the picture.

In fact, Elle’s body is pretty damn perfect. No stretch marks… She had a C-section two weeks before her due date. The Hollywood, she called it. The scar is barely visible. Her ass is round and high, her stomach perfectly toned.

I’m suddenly cold.

Is it possible that Elle sent the picture?

“Mommy, wrong foot, wrong foot, wrong foot!” Rose yells cheerfully. She loves the echo in here. She’s right, though. I switch feet and have better luck getting her little sneaker on.

Adam doesn’t even like Elle. Says she’s a climber. But maybe he does like her. I don’t know why I’m thinking about it. That picture was sent by mistake.

My stomach doesn’t feel so good.

“Okay, girls, sit tight. Mommy’s going to get dressed, too.”

“I’ll keep an eye on them, Rachel,” says Kathleen Rhodes. She has two sets of twins, ages seven and four—another in-vitro mom—and she’s been really kind and helpful, loaning me books on getting your baby to sleep through the night, inviting us to playdates. Not many people want three kids in addition to their own. Kathleen doesn’t mind a bit.

“Thanks,” I say.

I pull the curtain behind me in the changing room and peel off my wet suit. It’s a retro-style one-piece, red with white polka dots and wide shoulder straps. I liked it when I bought it, but now it seems matronly.

Well. I am a matron, after all.

I look at my reflection in the mirror. Unlike the mirrors in Nordstrom or Bergdorf, it’s not a magical mirror, making me look taller and more slender than I really am.

For the most part, I love my body. I’m proud of what it did, percolating three babies at once, nursing them afterward. There’s a little pooch of skin that no amount of crunches has been able to vanquish, but I’m the same size as I was in college. My breasts fared pretty well, too. Granted, they’re not what they were when I was twenty, but they’re hardly embarrassments. In fact, Kathleen once said she envied how I bounced back from pregnancy. Told me it took her four years. She still carries some extra weight, but she carries it well.

Adam has always been complimentary…though now that I think of it, maybe not as much lately.

My body is a mother’s body. It’s hopefully a MILF’s body, but it’s a mother’s body, no doubt. My stretch marks, once a lurid red, have faded to tiny silvery marks, like a small school of fish. I can feel them more than I can really see them. On the rare occasions that I get to take a nice long bath, I find myself stroking them as I read.

I’m average. That’s the word for it. This is an average body. It’s not bad. For a nearly forty-year-old mother of triplets, it’s really good.

But it’s not Elle’s body.

“Elle works out with a personal trainer five days a week,” Kathleen tells me ten minutes later when I admit my insecurity. We’re hunched over, buckling the kids in their car seats. Our cars, both minivans, are side by side. “Do you want to stick your kids in day care so you can go to the gym? Or drink kale shakes for breakfast?”

“No,” I said. “I definitely don’t.”

“And you’re fucking gorgeous, Rachel,” she says. I’ve always been both shocked and impressed by her potty mouth. “Edward, if you bite me again, you won’t have any dessert until Christmas.” She turns back to me. “You okay, Rach?”

“Oh, sure,” I say, sliding the door shut. “I just… I don’t know. I guess I’m at the age where I’m getting…”

“Invisible?”

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but there it is. Very few men look at a woman wrangling three toddlers. And I don’t have time to look at them. “Yeah. Invisible.”

“I know how you feel. The other day, this guy at the deli—you know, Gold’s? The short guy with earrings?” I nod. “Well, he handed me my baloney and said, ‘Here you go, beautiful,’ and I was so fucking grateful! I mean, I used to get that all the time. All the time. And now, nothing. It takes longer and longer to pull off even not bad. Beautiful left on my thirty-fifth birthday. So I wanted to kiss this guy and buy him a car.” She hands Edward a juice box, gives one to Niall and closes the door. “Enjoy it while you still have it. You want to get coffee?”

“Maybe next week,” I tell her. “I think I’ll drop by Adam’s office for lunch.”

I call our babysitter from the car. “Hi, Donna, it’s Rachel Carver.”

“Donna! Donna!” Charlotte shouts happily, and the other girls pick up the chant.