Read Hugo & Rose for Free Online

defecation not five feet from her breakfast table. A stronger mother, she thought, would be able to make her two-and-a-half-year-old use the bathroom. A better woman wouldn’t have to drive her boys to school twice a week because they missed the bus so regularly. She wouldn’t have to cobble together lunch because they were out of bread (again), knowing the boys would come home (again) complaining about their almond-butter-and-jelly burritos .
    *   *   *
    But these were the scenes of her life. Playing over and over again. The same morning, the same night. The same conversations.
    â€œPuppies, kitties, ice cream.”
    â€œYou do need to poop.”
    â€œPlease, not tonight, dear.”
    The dialogue changing a little each time, slight variations in the timing, but so small as to be indistinguishable from the last time it played. If last night she put Josh off sex by saying that she hadn’t showered, next time it would be that she was tired. If today she had to push Adam to clear the table, tomorrow it would be Isaac.
    Perhaps it was this repetition that made it so that Rose could not get this other “better self” out of her mind. Like an actress whose poor performance was slowing down the movie, she just needed to be recast to make the whole thing work.
    Recast with someone who wouldn’t prefer sleep to sex with her husband. Someone who didn’t yell to get her kids to listen. Someone as chipper as those women in the magazines, so orgasmically happy to be mothers, milling their own organic baby food and running catering businesses on the side.
    She hated those women.
    Rose even felt bad about feeling bad.
    If she was depressed, she didn’t have any right to her depression. This was just life, how it is. Over time these repetitions would amount to larger changes; eventually the children would get the knack of the current “issue” and then struggle beneath a new challenge. Eventually when she heard that low sound in Josh’s throat, she wouldn’t cringe at the thought of him touching her disappointing flesh.
    Though she worried that instead the day would arrive when he stopped making that sound altogether.
    That would be so much worse.
    *   *   *
    Rose had started seeing a therapist about two months after Penny had been born.
    Josh had been able to take a week off work, her mother had visited to help with the boys, but in the end it was left to her to find a way to fit a newborn into the rhythm of her life.
    Penny was a good baby. The pink-and-cream girl Rose had craved. She smiled early, nursed well, slept often.
    Adam and Isaac transitioned well to her presence, whispering during naps, kissing her head while she ate in Rose’s lap.
    But Rose, having fought so hard to convince Josh of the need for this third baby, this hard-won girl, plummeted into the blue. She was living her life but felt as if she were watching it from a distance—its colors faded, its flavors stale.
    Sleep was her escape. Sleep and Hugo.
    The island was vivid as ever. Even more so compared with the washed-out world her reality had become.
    She would drop the boys off at day care and rush home to sleep in her queen-sized bed, Penny snoozing by her side.
    She resented every time the baby pulled her out of the dream. Every dirty diaper, every little wail for attention.
    One night Josh discovered Rose sobbing uncontrollably during a feeding.
    â€œI can’t do this,” she cried. “It’s too much.” Josh looked at the little person sucking hungrily at Rose. There was something frightening and hollow about his wife’s eyes in that moment. The edge of a void.
    He took Penny from Rose’s arms and sent her to bed. That night he made a few phone calls, got a few recommendations.
    The next day Rose met Naomi.
    It was Josh who asked Rose to call Naomi by her name. It bothered him when Rose referred to her as her therapist. “Shrink”