Preface

We almost hit a deer, the night we drove up. We had the high beams on, and they broke through the darkness of the long dirt road that led to Happiness House, but we mostly saw encroaching leaves stretching out toward the car, the rubbly path of little rocks, and a black void between the trees on either side. We should have been driving slower, but we were trying just to get there, finally. We’d spent hours inching through traffic without music, without conversation, just silence like a cocked gun, like a flame crawling toward a gas leak. We just wanted to arrive. We just wanted to see Happiness House and all the warm blond wood floors and high ceiling beams, the ripe gardens, everything we’d seen online. The families. Children stampeding up the stairs in giggles. Parents calling for washed hands, uncorking local wines, shucking corn into the compost box. We wanted to know we had made the right decision.

Then, less than a mile from Happiness House, a deer came sprinting out of the woods, right in front of the car. John slammed to a stop, and the deer gazed through the windshield with what looked to me like terror, her eyes round and infinitely deep. Then she leapt off into the dark. We sat still for a moment.

John let out all his breath and rested his forehead on his arms against the steering wheel. I opened the passenger door and threw up onto the road. I closed the door again and popped a mint from my bag.

“You okay?” John asked. His voice sounded hoarse, like he hadn’t spoken in days, instead of hours.

“Yeah. You?”

John nodded and reached for my hand. He squeezed it until my fingers hurt, crushing them together. Then he slowly accelerated, crunching over the rocks, jostling us again.

For a long time, living at Happiness House, I had dreams about that deer. Her black eyes bearing through the glass, as if she knew that we’d almost brought her death, as if she could still see it lurking in the shadows of the backseat. The way she made no noise when she appeared, when she vanished.

April 2022

1.

A hissing in the kitchen. The rice has boiled over. John is rushing to turn down the heat, suck his finger where he burned it, scrape the vegetables into a pan from the cutting board. I don’t feel like helping. I’m watching videos of felting, people molding little faces and woodland creatures from soft fibers. It feels unreasonably good to watch a sped-up needle plunge into the felt and form a fox’s ear, a pink nose. I’m into self-soothing these days, doing what it takes to fill that little well in me, thirsty for contentment. John is into plans. He has made a meal plan, a workout plan, a vacation plan. Vegetable stir-fry is our Tuesday night meal on the plan this week. Tomorrow, John has assigned himself an abs and core day.

There is a cleaning plan for the apartment, too, and technically, today is my day to dust surfaces. I can tell John is resentful. His movements are choppier, his tone a little flat when he talks to me. My new strategy is to ignore, play dumb. He’s grown too used to being asked what’s wrong.

Veggie stir-fry tonight. Tomorrow is salmon bake. Thursday is chicken and salad, and John’s day to clean the bathroom. The week laid out in little preplanned chunks, digestible. These mini-plans are part of John’s larger plan to “get life on track.” He wants to be a manager at work, and so he has become our home manager, our relationship manager. I’m finding that I’m often unmanageable. I don’t follow assignments. I take lengthy, unstructured breaks.

“Can you just try,” he said during our last fight. “Just try to take one thing I want seriously.”

“But you want to take over everything. It’s not fair to me.”

“Literally everything is about being fair to you. I want one thing—”

“No, you want everything. You want to sap every ounce of pleasure from our lives.”

“Then why are you with me?”

“Honestly, I don’t know.”

Then we both cried. Then I said we could try his plans.

The veggie stir-fry is decent, even though the rice is overcooked and mushes together. I clean up to make up for not dusting or helping with dinner. We watch the murder show we like, and I lie against John for a little while. He smells like oil and garlic from cooking, but also the familiar John smell that seeps into his T-shirts no matter what detergent we use. People smells are indescribable, but his smell makes me think of his old apartment and waking in his bed. His messy boy apartment, shades drawn, bad lighting, cheap sheets. I think about waking there and walking home to my own apartment through the soft morning and feeling like this was the life I wasn’t meant to lead. Like a TV life, bouncing between my apartment and my boyfriend’s, meeting up for drinks with him, planning what I’d wear. I had done the marriage thing, but the dating thing was new and tasted sweeter because I was older. A window back in time to the twenties I could have had.

John and I met on an app. I was separated and still untangling from my marriage, the divorce not yet stamped and finished, the ex not yet done texting me. John had had a couple of relationships, each significant and heartbreaking, but finally, cleanly ended. He did his crying for a couple of weeks, then opened up the apps again, and began the numbing swiping.

On our first date, over tacos and beers, he asked about kids.

“You didn’t want kids when you were married?”

“No, I did.”

“Okay, so….”

“It wasn’t ever the right time. We didn’t have the money, and then we didn’t have the stability. As a couple. The love, I guess. Or maybe, the like. We loved each other, but we’d stopped enjoying each other, and that doesn’t really lay the ground for a baby.”

John chewed his taco silently for a moment. He was trying to bite carefully, eat without spilling, which was endearing. I liked that he wanted to impress me. I liked that he’d worn a collared shirt over his T-shirt, that he’d brought me water from the bar without asking.

“I want kids one day. Or a kid,” he said.

“Me too.”

He smiled at me. I wasn’t used to men talking about real things, important things on dates. I knew he’d dated before, but it felt like he didn’t know the rules, and I liked that too. I liked the way he held my hand on the walk to my apartment, as if we were already together. I liked that he asked before taking off my shirt, my pants. I liked that afterward, he played a little drumbeat on my stomach. We were so united already, comfortable. He picked up my hand, bit my finger. We made a plan to meet again before we even said goodbye.

We lie in bed after stir-fry and TV. We are each on our phones.

“Lyd,” he says. I look up. “This was nice,” he says. “Tonight.”

“Yeah. It was.”

He pulls me into his chest. “We can do this,” he says into my hair. “I really think the plans help.”

I don’t agree, but I nod. I like his bare chest against my cheek. I can feel a little of our old spark crackling between us as he squeezes tighter, and I run my hand down to his stomach. Suddenly he’s on top of me, and we’re both just creatures of need, and the sound when he finishes is like a howl.

May 2022

2.

“You are so fucking selfish.” John is spitting the words at me.

“I’m selfish? When you’re trying to impose some sort of fascist dictatorship over our lives?”

“What are you even talking about? You don’t even know what you’re saying.”

“Fuck you. I guess from now on, I have to do whatever you’ve decided, or I’m in trouble, right? Or I’m the bad guy?”

“I can’t talk to you like this. You won’t even try one thing for me.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. We’ve been over this.”

“And we don’t get anywhere.”

I have nothing to say to that. I go to our room and slam the door. John’s mad because I ordered takeout before we could cook whatever was on his meal plan tonight. He’s mad because I ignore the cleaning. He’s mad because he works hard to bring us structure, because he commutes into an office, and because I make more money working at home, and I leave the couch messy and forget to do the laundry and get distracted by videos of cakes being decorated. I understand. But I also wanted pad thai and sometimes the luxury of fulfilling a want just when you want it is too good to pass up.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s crept on for a long time, this dizzy, heavy urge to go for slow walks in endless circles around the park, and nap after lunch, and ignore texts from my friends and my mother. Sometimes, I look at the clock on my phone, and it’s hours from when I last looked. Sometimes it’s just a minute. Time has been leaping and crawling. Most of the time, I don’t want John to touch me.

John comes into the room an hour later and lies down beside me. He wraps his arms around me, and I let him hold me. I even hold his arms, too, stroking down the long hairs.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I overreacted.”

“I’m sorry too.” I’m not sure if it’s true, but I know it will soothe him.

We watch our murder show. In the show, someone is stabbed in a bathtub. I have dreams about water and blood, an ocean full of red blooms, crimson trails. I wake up at 4 a.m. I look at my phone’s calendar, and I realize I was due for my period last week. I go to the bathroom and check my underwear, but it’s clean. I stuff a wad of toilet paper into myself and pull it out—white.

I wake up John.

“Do you think the pharmacy is open?”

He’s groggy, rubbing his face. I can hear the scritch of stubble under his hands.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I think I’m pregnant.”

“What?” He’s awake now. “How do you know?”

“I’m late.”

“And you only just noticed?”

“Yes.”

John groans into his pillow. “This is just like you.”

“What does that mean?”

“Meaning you don’t notice until it’s four in the morning and suddenly it’s an emergency.”

I start to cry. I can tell John doesn’t want to comfort me, but he rubs my back.

“Fuck you,” I say, but I lean into his chest and cry harder.

We don’t sleep the rest of the night. When the pharmacy opens at seven, we are at the doors. We buy a test and bring it home. I pee on the stick and end up peeing all over my hand. I wait with John in the bedroom, my face buried in the pillow.

“What do you want it to say?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “What do you want it to say?”

“I don’t know.”

Three minutes are excruciatingly long, a lifetime of thoughts. I imagine a baby with soft hair and tiny hands drifting toward my face. I imagine John making school lunches, singing. I imagine us screaming over whose turn it was to take them to soccer. I imagine nap schedules, grocery lists, a chores wheel. I imagine rocking a crying child. I imagine them sleeping beside me, their breath on my cheek.

The stick says that I’m pregnant. John and I stare at it without talking until I stand up and throw it away. He says, “Okay. We’ll talk about this later.” Then he kisses my cheek and leaves for work. When he’s gone, the apartment seems quieter than usual. I lie on the couch listening, hoping to hear his footsteps in the hall, the scrabble of the key in the lock, John coming back home.

3.

I’ve never been so tired. Days float on, and I feel hungover, living under a caul of nausea and fatigue. I feel queasy when I don’t eat. I feel queasy when I eat. The smell of cauliflower makes me vomit. I nap and dream of giant birds swooping in and out of view, of my mother feeding me burnt rice from a spoon, of staircases in houses where I used to live.

During my marriage, I went through a depression. I was in my mid-twenties. For two months, the world was dim and colorless. I went to work, smiled, and then came home, slid into bed and watched TV shows on my laptop with the blinds closed. Everything felt inescapably sad. It was hard to make myself see friends, go to the grocery store, have sex. I couldn’t pinpoint what had brought it on, this heaviness, so I didn’t want to discuss it with anyone. My depression felt unearned.

My ex was patient. He didn’t complain about not having sex or being the only one to cook and clean. He massaged my shoulders at night and brought me pastries from the local café and continued to live his own life normally. He weathered through until eventually, I’m not sure why, I began to feel better. I left the bed more, met friends for dinner, took walks. It was like I’d been trying to move while carrying a giant iron anchor, and someone had finally lifted the anchor away. When my ex and I started having sex again, it changed. It was rougher, more humiliating, a current of violence now fizzing beneath each act. I wondered if he was punishing me. I wasn’t sure if I minded.

There are ways in which this pregnancy feels the same. I feel removed from the world, only energized enough to eat and watch TV. John is less patient. He is nervous, flitting around me while I doze, annoyed when I forget to load the dishwasher.

“We have options,” John says.

“I know,” I say.

“Well, are you decided?”

“No.”

“For God’s sake, Lydia. You have to talk to me.”

“I am,” I say, pulling my hands through my hair. Maybe I’m imagining it, but it feels softer. It’s so hard to talk to John because this body that has always just been the vehicle for me to chug along through the world is now suddenly the whole world. My hair, my bowels, my breath, my skin. I read articles about how your nails become thicker and your feet swell, and your organs eventually shift and squeeze the air from your lungs. You are suddenly coursing with extra blood. I don’t know if I want all this change, all this foreign activity in my veins. And yet.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I think I want to keep it. But I don’t know. What do you want?”

John sighs. “We have time,” he says. “To figure it out.”

“Does that mean you want me to get an abortion?”

“I don’t know. You just said you don’t know too.”

We keep having the same conversation. I am thirty-six. It’s an age when a baby is still possible, maybe even easy, or easy-ish. You will not be an old mom at the playground. Doctors may forewarn risk, call it geriatric. But you are still a recognizable baby-having age.

But there is a great void beyond thirty-six. A leap into uncertainty and worn metaphors about closed windows, shut doors, empty ovens. I worry, looking into the future, if this is a chance I’ll have again.

A few weeks of fear and drowsiness and should I, shouldn’t I. My mother picks me up at the PATH stop in New Jersey, and we go to brunch.

The brunch restaurant is one of those cavernous, generic Italian restaurants, but with the trappings of class—white tablecloths, uneven breadsticks dotted with sea salt, fluted bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I order French toast because I crave sweet breakfasts these days.

My mother is looking thin and hugging her feels like holding an injured bird. She orders a mimosa and when I order just an orange juice, I sense her questions, although she says nothing, merely sips her water while gazing out the window into the parking lot.

I tell her before the food arrives, while she is crunching a breadstick. She pauses and places the breadstick on her plate. I can tell she is herding her feelings, sheepdog style, into a little pen. She will not release them until I’ve told her how I’m feeling about it, which I appreciate. But also, I wish she would throw down her napkin and cry out and hug me. I’m thirty-six, I’m employed, I live with my partner, this potential baby’s potential father. But no one, somehow, is celebrating this thing. Including me, I guess.

“Is this good news?” she asks. “For you?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“How does John feel?”

“He’s conflicted, I think.”

“Hmm.”

“What’s hmm?”

The server returns with the mimosa and orange juice. My mother takes a long drink.

“What’s hmm?” I repeat.

“It just seems like John is conflicted a lot.”

“I don’t agree.”

“And now is the time to make some decisions. Because it’s really, extraordinarily hard to have a child. So you’ve got to commit and want it one thousand percent.”

“So no one in the history of becoming parents has ever felt uncertain?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said it’s better to commit. And John doesn’t seem to commit to much.”

“I don’t care about getting married again, Mom.”

“You might once you have a child with him.”

“I don’t know that I’m actually going to have a child with him.”

“Well, then maybe we should hold off talking about it until you know what you want to do.”

“So we can’t celebrate?”

“What is there to celebrate if you’re not going to keep it?”

I draw out a breadstick and snap it in two. I think about a time when I was twelve, and we were at the mall. I was angry for some reason, some disagreement over clothing, things I wanted that she wouldn’t agree to buy. I wanted skinny denim skirts and tiny tank tops and hated my belly and thighs and the way clothes clung to all the rounded, softest parts of me. My mother would only buy clothes for me that she deemed flattering, and I was furiously peeling clothes off in the dressing room when I heard a salesperson talking to my mother.

“They’re all like that,” the salesperson said. She was a woman, probably around my mother’s age. “It’s impossible.”

“I’m doing it alone,” my mother said. “Even more impossible.”

“Widowed or divorced?” the salesperson asked. “I’ve got girlfriends in both camps.”

“Divorced,” my mother said. “Widowed—I wish.”

The two of them cackled. “I always say the same,” said the salesperson. “And I’m still married.” They laughed harder.

I hated my mother in that moment. I hated her for being alone, I hated her for acting like I was just like every other preteen brat in the shop, I hated her for laughing when I was choked with rage—at her, at my body, at my absent dad, at the chummy salesperson. I needed to believe in men, that they could redeem themselves. I had to think that some of them, somewhere, stay and speak softly and hold you if you’re feeling sad, stroking your hair.

When we leave the restaurant, my mother and I drive to her house, the house I grew up in from age nine. It’s a town house with faded yellow paint and a trim front yard. Growing up, the house was too small for much private space with friends, so while I had someone over here and there, I mostly spent time at other people’s houses, lounging in “family rooms,” which seemed just like living rooms, but with bigger TVs. My old room upstairs in the town house is now a guest room, stripped of my No Doubt and Almost Famous posters, my incense holders and drawings of sad-looking girls on the backside of social studies notes. The small clay sculpture of a pair of breasts that my friend Trina had made me as a joke in art class and that I kept hidden in a drawer, but fondled curiously from time to time, long ago cracked and was tossed out. Sometimes when I visit, I sit on the bed and try to recreate the old room in my mind. I summon all the lonely quiet of that place until I’m almost in tears.

My mother makes me tea and I fiddle with her laptop, trying to fix an issue with the Wi-Fi connection.

“Can I just ask you one thing?” she says, sitting down at the table next to me. I make a noncommittal noise. “When you think about having a baby, are you excited?”

I take a sip of tea. It hasn’t occurred to me to be excited. In moments, I can be content with the situation, fighting the tide of doubt and fear and disappointment in John for feeling doubt and fear too. But I haven’t allowed myself to be excited. I think about a baby, the gentle weight of it, of soft hair and tiny fingers. The gurgles, the shrill, unearthly cries. I used to make my dolls pretend to get injured so they would cry for me. There was something about being needed in that way. I’d drop them off my bed, again and again, and make my voice into their sobbing voices just so I could hold them and soothe them. I was the only one who could. If I’m honest, it’s being needed in that way that excites me.

I tell my mother yes, and she squeezes my shoulder.

“Let me just say then, it doesn’t happen alone. You need people. You don’t think you do, but you do. Having a baby is lonely and boring and terrifying. You need people.”

“Like you?”

“Sure, me. But anyone. People who help.”

I hear her words. But I’ve done everything alone. I built a dull and comfortable career alone. I walked myself down the aisle at my wedding. I signed the divorce papers alone in an office supply store. And here it’s my body alone feeling the heavy tiredness, the nausea, the sore breasts that I’ve been told will not stop being sore for over a year. I am not afraid of the aloneness. Not yet.

June 2022

4.

The not-deciding is becoming our decision. I know from the mommy app I downloaded that I should be scheduling my first medical checkup. I should be asking doctors to test my blood for rubella and HPV, should be having them culture my urine and weigh me and probe me to take a blurry photo of a peanut-shaped smudge and hear the swish of the heartbeat. I am half desperate to experience all these things. But I’m dreading bringing a sulking John to the appointment while everyone else is there with their partners who massage their shoulders and smile at the fuzzy black and gray of the sonogram.

“I know this is so much harder on you,” John says to me over his coffee. It’s the weekend, and we’re sitting in the backyard of our favorite coffee place, the one with the good scones.

“It’s your body, I get that,” John continues. “But I feel like I’m drowning.”

My drink has left a ring of water on the table, and I draw swirls with the water.

“I love you,” he says. “But nothing feels solid. We don’t feel solid. I don’t want to fight in front of a baby. Or a kid. I want to feel like we’re working together, and I just don’t.”

“What if we do it your way? The plans, the lists. We can do that for the baby.”

John sips his cold brew and shakes his head. “I just don’t know.”

“In the end,” I say, and I am choosing my words with care. “I know you have a voice in this, but in the end, it’s really only up to me.”

“Yes.” John seems equally cautious. Nothing can be unsaid after this. “I can only choose if I want to….” He breaks off a piece of scone, but doesn’t eat it. “If I want to participate.”

My stomach has contorted into a ball. I know it’s the eighteen years of raising a child alone that should worry me. But in that moment, the image that bothers me is being in labor with no one to help. No one holding my hand, no one rubbing my back or telling me to breathe.

“That’s true. You don’t have to participate.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“All I’m saying is that you get to choose to be a mother, and I get to choose to be a father.”

“No, you don’t. You get to choose to be a participating father. But you might be a father, even if it’s not your…preference.” I say the last word with as much scorn as possible.

John mutters into his drink, “I hate when you sound like that.”

A month ago, I would have told him to fuck off. I would have left the coffee shop, thanking the baristas on my way out to prove I am a decent and polite person and it is just John who turns me into this raging monster who burns and burns and burns. Today, I am too tired to storm away anywhere. I am too tired to defend myself against him and his guilt trips and his own anger that comes out all mushy and weepy and falsely injured. I take his hand.

“John.” I put his hand against my belly, even though there is nothing to feel, not even a slight swelling yet. “I think this is happening.” I take a deep breath. “I don’t want to stop this from happening.”

John looks at his hand on my middle as if a pregnant belly might balloon beneath it as he watches.

“I wish I could say the same thing.”

It’s that night I first learn about Happiness House. It’s a brief mention in an article on one of the mommy apps. The article is titled, “Building Your Village: How to Get the Parenting Help You Need.” Mostly it quotes women who moved in with family or enlisted neighbors and friends for babysitting. But there’s a section that sticks out to me: “Some families even choose to live together to share the responsibilities of parenting. One such extended family is called Happiness House, an application-only collective in Upstate New York that invites families to raise their children in one home with shared values and a close community of support.”

The article includes a link to Happiness House’s website. I click and find myself staring at a giant white house with black shutters on sprawling green grounds. The photo flashes to a vegetable garden. Then a giant farmhouse kitchen where people are laughing with their hands in some kind of dough. Then a huge staircase with children descending, holding hands. Then everyone at a giant table in a yard strung with lights, passing giant salad bowls and holding wine glasses skyward, children ably cutting their own meat. A woman in a blue shawl holding a baby to her chest, looking relaxed and smiling slightly, her face aglow in candlelight.

I click on the History page.

It was February, 2021. COVID was still surging and vaccination rollouts were only just beginning. Carleen Ortega and Michael Wells had spent the last year in their Tribeca apartment feeling isolated from their network of friends, juggling the management of their children’s virtual school days with their own full-time jobs. Like millions of other families in that time, they were lonely, frustrated, and overwhelmed. One day, Carleen was scrolling through a real estate app, fantasizing about escaping the city, when she stumbled across a large upstate house for sale on a beautiful piece of land. She had a vision of her family there, experiencing a slower pace of life with plenty of outdoor space for the garden she’d always imagined. Carleen knew her family could never afford the place alone, but she found herself looking at Happiness House again and again. She showed Michael, who fell in love with the property too. On a whim, they sent the pictures to some friends: Jenny and Heela, Tom and Marianne. The three couples birthed an idea, an idea that would combat isolation, that would promote sustainability, that would foster true community and love, and that would radically redefine “family.” They pooled their finances and purchased Happiness House, and, by doing so, founded a new way of life.

Below there’s a picture of a couple, presumably Carleen and Michael. I recognize them from a few of the other pictures. Carleen is striking rather than beautiful, with deep, dark eyes like spelunking caves. Michael is bearded, wearing the kind of expensive clothing that is designed to look hearty and inexpensive. They look genuinely happy, their smiles clearly reaching their eyes. I want to resent them for their obvious fortune and ease, but I don’t. They shine, and I stare.

I read that in addition to the original three families, Happiness House has a carriage house on the property, which can accommodate two more. They are currently accepting applications for the new openings.

HADLEY FRANKLIN has an MFA in fiction from NYU’s Creative Writing Program and was the 2023 winner of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in The London Magazine, Joyland, Cagibi, The Boiler, Narrative, and others. She lives in Brooklyn. Find her on Instagram @hadleyf.

Featured image by Steven Pahel, courtesy of Unsplash.