30 Days, 30 Stories

Day Twenty-Nine: What Have I Done?

My aunt came prepared. She'd made sure there were two carseats--one for Liv and one for Freya. In my haste to make an escape, I'd not even thought about it. Once we strapped the girls in, we headed off towards my aunt's new home. 

I'd never pictured my aunt as a snowbird. For me, she was the quintessential New Yorker. But even when Eddy and I were teenagers, we used to wonder if Aunt Cecily was really meant to be someplace else. She was practicing yoga before celebrities made it trendy. She was a health food nut who gave us green smoothies with our breakfast every morning. Around ten years ago, she grew tired of New York's snow chaos after one blizzard too many. She sold the brownstone Eddy grew up in and where I'd lived once my mother was gone, and moved to Florida. At first she lived in Miami, but then she decided the people there were just as crazy as in New York and so she headed north along the Atlantic coastline until she found the perfect four-bedroom bungalow in Juno Beach. The crazy thing was that she looked so relaxed, so happy--even in the face of her wayward niece showing up with two toddlers--that it made me wonder what was her secret. Was it the Florida air? Was it the warmth 365 days a year? My sixty-nine-year old aunt looked younger and more harmonic than most people my age.

I was still thinking about how I wished I could be more like her when she asked me if I'd thought about what I was going to do now that I was here.

"No, not really," I admitted. We passed palm tree after palm tree. Sometimes I glimpsed the Atlantic Ocean and wondered when I would be able to take a dip and lose myself for a while. I glanced back at Liv and Freya. They'd fallen asleep again. I was pretty sure I would pay for this later but at least they were calm.

"It hasn't been easy--and I didn't expect it to be. I just didn't think he would leave me in the lurch."

"My darling, what is going on with you and that handsome husband of yours? When I was there in January, I never saw a more devoted man."

"I know... I don't know what happened. One day he was there all the time, helping, being the kind of father I always knew he would be...and then he just...stopped."

"Did you try to speak to him about it?"

I nodded. "He doesn't understand though. He thinks that I don't need his help. He thinks I manage to do everything on my own. And I don't."

"Well, I have to say, I've never seen you look so worn out, even when the two of you were having to go back and forth to the hospital for Liv."

"I'm fine..."

"If you were fine, you wouldn't have left your husband."

"I haven't left him."

"Well, you're here, he's there and he hasn't got a clue where you are. Sounds like you left him."