The Last Good Night Read Free Page A

peanut,” David whispered.
    She opened her eyes and stared up at us.
    â€œCome here, precious,” David said as he reached his large hands into the bassinet and picked her up. “Mmmm.” He nuzzled her neck and then looked over her drowsy marshmallow body and smiled at me. “We did a good thing,” he said softly.
    â€œWe did.”
    â€œFamily hug,” he said, and he reached his free arm around me, the three of us clinging to each other in the center of the room.
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    T HESE ARE THINGS I never thought I’d have: a husband, a child. Family.
    Sometimes it feels like luck, pure luck. Someone else’s luck, a mistake to be corrected.
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    O UR NEW NANNY, Dora, arrived twenty minutes later, bundled in layers of wool, two scarves, and a baseball cap, her wire-framed glasses misted with condensation. She washed her hands and went in to look at Sophie, who was swaying contentedly in an electric swing and batting with athletic determination at the hanging plastic rings. “Hello, little girlie, hello, little baby,” Dora cooed in her nearly impenetrable St. Lucian accent. I often found myself nodding in polite agreement when I hadn’t the vaguest idea of what she had actually said.
    I went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. Then I lay on the bedroom floor, did seventy sit-ups, twenty lifts with each leg, and fifteen push-ups before showering. I’ve always been terrified there’s a fat woman lurking within, just waiting to escape. Staring in the mirror, I began to apply makeup to my long, narrow face with extra care. I paused for a moment and appraised myself. My thick shoulder-length hair is cut into a bob by the most expensive stylist in New York. Its once unruly curls are chemically straightened so that they fall in a smooth, perfectly natural-looking sheet by someone else, who uses a secret formula from Italy that frizzy-haired women fly across the country for. A third person painstakingly paints it with four different shades of blond, completely erasing any evidence of its black beginnings. My brows are professionally shaped and lightened to match. I even have a new nose, thinner, straighter, shorter than the original, acquired twelve yearsago because I was told it would look better on camera. Is it any wonder that celebrities sometimes slip and refer to themselves in the third person? I leaned closer and patted cream underneath my eyes to cover the circles. Other on-air women I know go to the studio bare-faced, letting the makeup artist start fresh, but I never do.
    â€œYou look good,” David said as I came out of the bathroom.
    â€œReally?”
    â€œYou always look good.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œThat was meant to be a compliment.”
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œDid they messenger over an outfit? Did they give you rules about jewelry?” he asked. “Did they remind you that an open neck means an open person?”
    I frowned.
    â€œCome on. You need me to keep you honest,” he teased.
    David maintains a certain ruefulness when it comes to the background of my work, as if the politics and image-making are somehow unseemly, or worse, amusing. His own brush with notoriety left him glazed, intrigued no doubt, but winded and suspicious. Within six months his book was off the bestseller list, the magazines were hungry for the next new face, and David was back where he said he preferred it, in the quieter and more manageable world of ideas, teaching his classes, working late in his study, giving occasional quotes to the more academic journals. Still, there was a passion and a pleasure in his eyes during that singular period of glare that I sometimes miss, even if he doesn’t. Or says he doesn’t.
    â€œAnd you need me to keep you from being too sanctimonious,” I replied.
    He laughed. “I’ll be rooting for you,” he said as he touched the small of my back, and I knew that he would be. It is one of the