Book excerpt: ‘Between Here and April’

“How about your work?” said Dr. Rivers. “Dr. Leland told me you’re a journalist, right? A TV producer?”

“So to speak.”

“So to speak?”

I chastised myself for not answering at least that one succinctly and in the affirmative. I was a journalist, after all: 18 years and counting, the last six of which I’d focused, out of financial necessity, on television production. It’s the word I always scribbled in the blank following “mother’s occupation” on the emergency forms for the girls’ school. I should have just said yes and been done with it. But I knew, even when filling out those forms, that to call what I did “journalism” of late was generous. My most recent assignment, from Entertainment Now, had been to stake out the entrance of the W Hotel waiting for an actress whose ménage à trois with a Brazilian hooker was making the rounds of the blogosphere. The one before that, for a failed pilot called Real Women, Real Beauty, had me interviewing random women on Madison Avenue on the subject of their nails.

“Meaning, I guess sometimes I feel like I’m just treading water these days,” I said to Dr. Rivers. “The work feels empty.”

My career, prechildren, I explained, had been going along a fairly normal trajectory, with various internships and wire-service gigs which lead to postings in Newsworld magazine’s Rome bureau and then New York. But by the time Kosovo was imploding, so was I. It wasn’t burnout per se, although I was definitely burned out. “It was ...” I paused. Dr. Rivers remained silent, waiting for me to continue, but I let it drop. I could never even explain any of it to Mark. I was pregnant with Daisy at the time, and it was just easier to blame the months of crushing fatigue and confusion that followed on that.

I returned to work faithfully after each brief maternity leave, taking a more deskbound position as an editor after Tess arrived, but it didn’t take long for me to grasp the economic realities of American parenthood. An old colleague of mine, who lived in Paris, would gasp when we’d swap stories. Clem was given a year-long paid maternity leave and placed Sophie in a state-subsidized crèche the day she went back to her job which, by law, she could only perform thirty-five hours a week. A doctor checked Sophie’s ears, nose, and throat every Friday afternoon, doling out free antibiotics to her and her classmates whenever necessary. “But I don’t understand,” Clem would say when I’d complain about our crushing childcare expenses, the five-figure preschool bills, the uncovered well visits to the pediatrician which I had to sneak out of my office to attend. “How can you afford to live like this?”

“We can’t,” I’d say.

“What about daycare? Surely there is an affordable crèche nearby, non?”

Video   Balancing act Oct. 2: Author Deborah Copaken Kogan chats about her new mystery, "Between Here and April," which focuses on a mother balancing her career and family. Today show

I laughed. There was a daycare center on the outskirts of my neighborhood which, while not affordable, was at least more reasonable, at least for one child, than a full-time sitter, but to get in I would have to have applied Daisy while she was still in utero.

“Incroyable,” said Clem. “No wonder all those American girls are dropping their babies in dumpsters.”

Since uprooting the kids to France was not in the cards, Mark and I decided that I would switch from my full-time magazine job to freelance television producing for a few years, figuring we’d reassess the situation and our finances once the girls were in school. Then, just as Tess was getting ready for kindergarten, just as I was getting ready to “ramp back on,” as the social scientists were now calling it, the news divisions of all the major networks announced massive layoffs. A month later, my old editor at Newsworld took me out to lunch to inform me that not only was my former position there no longer available, it no longer even existed on the masthead. “We’re down to one foreign editor,” he said, mumbling something about falling ad revenues, the rise of online media, the lack of general interest in international news. The only magazines with any real budgets to burn, he said, were either lifestyle/consumer or celebrity ones, but if I wanted, he could definitely set me up an interview with the editor of a new venture called Scoop, which sounded promising, until I got to the interview and blew the job within the first five minutes of sitting down. “What do you mean you’ve never heard of Pratesi?” squawked the editor.

But I’d never heard of Pratesi. Or Frette or Crème de la Mer. And I couldn’t bring myself to care, either about the products or the celebrities who used them.

And so I fell deeper and deeper into journalistic purgatory, writing press releases about antifungal medications and a new brand of sneakers for a viral marketing firm, comparing the suction strength of various breast pumps for an online parenting site.

Dr. Rivers jotted down another note on her pad, crossed her left leg over her right. “What about your marriage? Everything okay on the home front?”

“It could be better,” I said.

“Meaning?”

“Well, my husband and I hardly ever see each other these days, for one.”

“And for another?”

“I don’t know. I just said, ‘for one’ as an expression. I don’t really have a ‘for two.’?”

“I see.” She glanced at her clock. “Look, Elizabeth, I think we should focus, before our time is up today, on the blackouts themselves.” She wondered aloud whether there might be anything to unite them: a thought process; a feeling; a circumstance; a trigger. “The first time you fainted, for example, where were you? What was going through your mind?”

“I was at the theater,” I said. “Watching the last act of Medea. Then I suddenly remembered this girl April. From elementary school.”

“She was a classmate?”

“A friend. My best friend, actually. In first grade.”

“And what happened to her after first grade?”

“She ... I don’t know. She left. Never came back to school.”

“She moved?”

“No, I think she .... actually, I really don’t know. I never found out. And I haven’t really thought about her since. Until that night, I mean.”

“I see.” She was now scribbling furiously on her pad. “And what about the other blackouts? Same questions: where were you, what were you thinking about?”

I lined all the other episodes up in my head, a row of dominos: the time at the grocery store, when the girls were playing ring around the rosie in the aisle; the one at the school yard, when I was able to catch myself on the fence; the Saturday when we rented a car to visit friends who’d moved out to the suburbs, and we’d stopped off at an Exxon station to fill up on the way back; the time I was riding on that crowded crosstown bus with Daisy, the two of us sandwiched in the aisle between two other women, one who was nuzzling her nose against the fragrant head of her infant, the other who was ignoring her crying toddler. “They were all totally random,” I said, listing each one, fall by fall. Picturing the dominos tumbling down. “And there’s no pattern to what I was thinking about beforehand. I mean ring around the rosie? A bus ride? A gas station? One has nothing to do with the other.”

Dr. Rivers glanced at her clock and sighed. “We’re out of time today,” she said. “But I’d like you to do something for me this week. A little writing assignment, if you will. I’d like you to jot down everything you can remember about that friend of yours. The one who disappeared. I’m not saying she has anything to do with your blackouts, but I have a hunch, if she preceded the first episode, that this disappearance may somehow be significant. At the very least, it’ll be a useful exercise. To focus on your memories. From the past. To try to figure out the significance of their sudden emergence into your present. Especially when it involves a close relationship that was severed.”

“I never said my relationship with April was painful.”

Dr. Rivers’s eyes widened. “Neither did I.” She scribbled another note. “Was it a painful relationship?”

“No,” I said, looking down at my hands, noting the prominence of the veins, the cracked crevices of their surface, like a dinosaur’s. Whose hands were these? “We were children. Good friends. Nothing painful in that.”

Dr. Rivers stole another glance at her clock and gathered her papers, her demeanor calm but expedient. “I’ll see you next week,” she said, standing up. Then she showed me, cordially, to the door.

Excerpted from "Between Here and April", Copyright (c) 2008 by Deborah Copaken Kogan. Reprinted with permission from Algonquin Books.

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