Free The Other Life by Ellen Meister

table, trying to wrap her mind around that. Could she really pick it up and dial her parents’ number in Long Island and talk to her mother? Her scalp prickled.
    Quinn rose and paced the room. I shouldn’t do this, she thought. I should go back into that bathroom and find a way back. I’m not this person. I’m not a single woman living in New York with her famous boyfriend. I’m not someone who can go to Fiji next month and stay in a luxury hotel with heated towel racks. I’m Quinn. I’m married to Lewis. I’m Isaac’s mom. I’m pregnant with a damaged baby.
    And my mother is dead.
    Quinn picked up the phone and put it down again, her hands trembling. She went into the kitchen and looked around. The place should have been strange to her, but from the moment she emerged from that bathwater it was all hers.
    She opened the cabinet and saw the mug imprinted with the cover of Eugene’s book. She turned it over and examined the underside. Most of the inscription had worn off, but the tops of the letters were still there. It was the very same cup she had in her cabinet at home—the one Eugene had given her the day they met.
    Quinn filled it with water and put it in the microwave. She’d have some herbal tea, get her wits about her, figure out what to do.
    She ran her hand along the smooth counter. Everything about the place was so familiar, so ordinary, and yet. Yet this wasn’t where she lived. This wasn’t where her life was.
    The microwave beeped and she took out the steaming cup. She opened the cabinet where she knew she kept the tea and then shut it, realizing that she could have a glass of wine, since she wasn’t pregnant. She pulled a bottle from the wine rack and stopped herself. No, she thought. I can’t do this. I have to get home. She went back to the bathroom, where she kneeled beside the tub and ran her fingers over the porcelain of the bottom, looking for the fissure.
    It has to be here, she thought. It has to.
    The phone rang and Quinn stopped what she was doing. Ignore it, she told herself. But on the second ring she rose and went into the bedroom, where there was an old phone on the nightstand next to the bed. It was a fifty-year-old collectible she and Eugene had bought in the Berkshires last fall. He had gotten a kick out of the fact that this heavy black relic—the kind of phone he remembered from his early childhood—was now an antique. And so they bought it, assured by the store owner that it worked. Of course, it had a heavy old dial and no caller ID, so they didn’t use it much. But Eugene enjoyed the nostalgia of it.
    It rang a third time and Quinn just stared. On the fourth ring she picked it up.
    “Hello?” She had expected her own voice to sound strange, but it didn’t. A bit nervous, maybe, but that was all. It was just her, Quinn, picking up the phone in her bedroom.
    “Hi, kiddo,” said the voice on the other end.
    Quinn pulled her robe tighter against the sudden chill that ran through her. She swallowed against a lump in her throat before she could speak.
    “Mom?”

8
    “ARE YOU OKAY? YOU SOUND UPSET.”
    Quinn realized tears were spilling down her face. She wiped them with the back of her hand. “I’m . . . I’m okay.”
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing. I’m just . . . catching a cold or something.” Quinn covered her mouth so that her mother wouldn’t hear her weeping. God, she was talking to her mother. Her mother !
    “Of course you are. You hardly get any sleep. If you don’t stop burning the candle at both ends . . .” Nan paused. “Are you crying?”
    “Mommy.” It was primal. Juvenile. She couldn’t help it.
    “You are crying. What is it?”
    Quinn paused to regroup. She glanced around the room, trying to think fast. “Just . . . something dumb on TV.” Quinn sniffed, attempting to recover.
    “TV? Oh, for heaven’s sake. Really, Quinn. If you want to cry, read a book or something.”
    “I know,” Quinn said, smiling now through her tears.