And Brian, sweet, smart, determined Brian, was the steadiest person I’d ever encountered who wanted to put up with directionless me.

“I’m not giving up anything,” I said.

And in that moment, I thought it was true.


After the hike fails to calm my heart, I do the only thing left I can think of. I slip into Brian’s office and root through his medical bag. I gave it to him when he started his practice, soon after we moved here, making some joke about him being the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s stamped with the words Dr. Brian Underhill in faded gold letters. My fingers probe through its contents until I find the bottle of Ativan he keeps in it. I hold it in my hand, wondering briefly which act is worse: the stealing of the medication or the reason I need to.

I press my palm into the safety cap and twist until it releases. I shake out four pills, hoping Brian won’t notice their absence from the almost-full bottle. I hesitate for a moment, but I can’t go on feeling like this, so I swallow one down with a glass of water and tuck the remaining pills in my pocket, just in case. Then I lie on the couch and wait for the pill’s effects to start. After a while, I feel my heart start to slow and a sleepy calm comes over me. My eyes slide shut, my thoughts float away, and I know I’m asleep the moment before I am.

I’m still like that, my head to the side, a bit of drool running down my chin, when Brian and Zoey get home. I make a half attempt to get up, but Brian puts a practiced hand to my forehead and professes me slightly feverish. He raises me enough to slip an aspirin and some water into my mouth, then eases me back down and pulls a blanket over me, like he’s done with Zoey countless times.

Only tonight, I’m the one who’s helpless.


I wake early the next morning feeling groggy and disoriented till it hits me, the dread rushing back like water released from a dam.

Brian’s already up. I can hear him rattling around in the kitchen, making coffee, toast. I push my hand into the pocket of the jeans I slept in. The pills are still there. I feel relieved and ashamed, but that doesn’t stop me from breaking one in half and taking it in the bathroom after I brush my teeth.

Up in my bedroom, I dress haphazardly with the first things I come across. I twist the half pill into a Kleenex, shoving it into the pocket of my skirt, and hide the remaining two in my sock drawer.

When I go back downstairs, Zoey’s sitting at the breakfast table, the newspaper propped in front of her while she munches on a piece of toast slathered with butter and jam. She’s wearing her school uniform. Her long dark hair flows across her back in a messy tangle. I sit down next to her and apologize for not having been up to hearing about how the competition went the night before.

“ ’Skay,” she says between bites of toast. “Feeling better?”

“A bit.”

“You should eat something,” Brian says, plunking down a glass of juice and a plate of toast in front of me. “It’ll settle your stomach.”

I bite off a small corner of the toast, and wash the cardboard taste out of my mouth with a sip of orange juice.

“Was it fun, Zo? Were you happy with how it went?”

“I screwed up a line in ‘Trees.’ I said, ‘The way is gracious / when your leaves tumble down’ instead of ‘The gracious way your leaves tumble down.’ ”

“I kind of like the new version better.”

“But that’s not what we’re being graded on. You have to stick to your original poem exactly.”

“You’ll nail it next time, Zo,” Brian says.

“And it’s not like it kept you from winning,” I add.

“Mommmm, that’s so not the point.”


Zoey was born forty weeks and a day after we moved to the “other Springfield,” as it’s called at work. She’s the result of the second honeymoon feeling that consumed us the minute we went into escrow.

Zoey was a beautiful baby. With my black hair and her father’s blue eyes, she looked like I always imagined Sara Crewe did when she was still A Little Princess. But mostly, she was an incredibly observant child. Able to hold her head steady from an early age, she would follow us around the room with her eyes, as if she was trying to figure out how we did whatever it was we were doing.

Turns out, she was. Zoey’s first word wasn’t a word, it was a sentence.

“I want milk,” she said clearly at eleven months. I nearly dropped the plate I was holding, certain I was hearing things.

Then she said it again: “I. Want. Milk.” Then she paused and added, “Mama.”

Brian was extremely excited. He’d never admit it, but he had that fear a lot of smart people have that their children won’t exhibit the same kind of intelligence they possess. So her precociousness was a relief. She spoke in full sentences before she was one. She was obviously a genius!

I met this news with wonder and trepidation. I’d been a quasi child prodigy myself (at golf), and I knew that wasn’t always a good thing. It marked you out, kept you from hanging out with your friends, and came with expectations. At some point you grew up, and what you did, whatever it was, wasn’t remarkable anymore—unless you lived up to your full potential, which I hadn’t, not by a long shot. Another pun intended from my college golf coach. He had a bag full of them. Ha!

I read somewhere that many adults with advanced IQs are often less happy than those who test average. Like how there’s this optimal money/happiness equation. Once you pass a certain amount of household income, life isn’t any better.

Apparently, money can’t buy happiness, or it does, but it costs less than you imagined it would.

Anyway, Brian was excited, I was happy but cautious, and Zoey was, well, Zoey. She’d observe, listen, absorb, then issue these comments on what we’d been doing. First in short, declarative sentences (“Mama opened the fridge.”), then increasingly in an almost lyrical way (“These blocks are beautiful.” “The sky is floating.”).

Brian taught her to read and write when she was three, and she produced her first poem at age four years and seven months. It’s framed and hanging in the stairway in between shots of her at various ages. Written in orange crayon, it reads, The rain falling against my window / is scratchy / It makes the world / blurry / It’s hard to sleep / when the rain is falling / against my window.

Four-going-on-five Zoey wasn’t Shakespeare, but she delivered her poem with amazing force, standing in the party dress she’d insisted on wearing before reading it to us, her shiny Mary Janed feet a body-width apart, keeping her steady.

And what do you do in this day and age when your child performs some marvelous feat? You ask her to do it again, of course, and this time you make sure you have your video camera ready. If you’re me, you email that video to a few friends and family, or post it on Facebook with a proud caption. But if you’re Brian, and you’ve been tracking every sign of prodigiousness since her first demand for milk, you spend hours editing the video, buffing it here and splicing it there. You study how videos go viral, and you make sure this one does.

And you don’t tell your wife because, well, you say sheepishly when she learns what you’ve done by overhearing two people talking about it in the grocery store, you thought it would be a nice surprise, you weren’t sure it was going to work. Isn’t it amazing that it’s up to ten thousand views already?

And he looks so excited, so proud, this man you love, who loves your daughter more than anything, that you squash down the anger that’s been building since the produce aisle and you smile and say, of course it’s a great surprise, and wow, that’s amazing.

So that’s what I did. And I did it again when he showed me the spoken word competitions he’d found, a couple of them really close by. They weren’t beauty contests, he was quick to assure me. No tiaras. No spray tans. Only the spoken word, spoken by our daughter. He was excited, she was excited, I couldn’t say no.

We went. Zoey back in her party dress, her hair French-braided, our video camera at the ready.

She lost.

I was worried she’d be devastated, but instead of putting her off the whole thing, which I think I was secretly hoping for, it made her more determined. I’d find little scraps of paper scattered around the house full of misspelled words and half-rhymes written with thick colored markers, and it wasn’t long before she started winning those competitions, her room filling up with ribbons and trophies.

I’m not sure when I became less involved. Maybe it was always essentially her thing with Brian. I went to those early competitions, my stomach clenched as she spoke. I dried her tears and shared her joy. But it was Brian who planned for the next one, who knew the other competitors, who strategized her rise through the ranks.

The irony of it being Brian who was the one who encouraged her writing came up during our first interview with the local morning news show. Zoey was eight. She’d just won the National Spoken Word Competition in her age category. We were sitting on a three-seater couch, the arc lights above us casting a hot glow. The host, who looked handsome and young for his age on television, but grubby and older up close, leaned forward.

“I understand Zoey gets her talent from you, Mrs. Underhill?”

I blinked a few times, caught off guard. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“Aren’t you the poet in the family?”

“No, I—”

“You were the editor of your college poetry journal, right?”