The Safe Place by Daria Lojko

The Safe Place by Daria Lojko

What is it gonna be today? Barb melted into her bed, muscles aching. A street view of a European city or maybe a balcony looking out on a tropical beach? Barb took a deep breath and closed her eyes. To her annoyance, Jeremy dimmed the light and scooted over to align his body with hers, his hand gliding up her thigh. “Not tonight. I’m too tired.” He sighed and bobbed back to his side of the bed, quaking the mattress and Barb with it in protest.

Naturally, there will be an all-white décor, a generous bed, and an enormous fluffy duvet. As Jeremy’s snoring rose and faded, the pillow grew perfectly comfortable, and Barb filled her lungs with humid, salty air. The light glided in from the right behind her closed eyelids. The beige walls of her bedroom blurred and morphed into a sparkling-white chamber elsewhere. First, a massage. A nice shoulder massage… and she felt the strong hands of a masseuse on her shoulders. She was no longer in her real-life bedroom. This was Portofino.

When the sun reached its zenith, the Italian Riviera sparkled and whispered beneath Barb’s balcony. The waves flirted with the shore. The seagulls called. “Can I have another couple of Concaves?” she said to the brunette in a white uniform as the latter refilled Barb’s crystal flute with Prosecco.

“Most certainly.” Another neat brunette hurried from inside the room, placing a serving of the freshest oysters onto the wrought iron table in front of Barb.

Savoring the flavor of the ocean, Barb didn’t slurp but chewed the oysters. A rush of sea breeze ruffled her silk negligee and the tulle curtains in the doorframe. The first brunette arranged fragrant branches of lilac inside the living room, while the second brunette also scurried around tidying up an already perfect suite.

“Will you be strolling the streets today, Sweetheart?” one of them asked. Barb never bothered to give them names.

“Sure,” she said, adding contemplatively, “I should be going back, you know. I wish I didn’t have to, but I do miss my babies…”  A mother’s guilt of enjoying herself too much nagged her, and she did miss her little monsters, their warm, wiggly bodies and fluffy blond curls.

“Would you like me to invite the stylists to get you titivated for today?” The brunette continued.

“Yes, please… I’d like the whole mani-pedi, getting my hair done, and such. I’ll hit that cute little boutique on Vico Nuovo, you know, and I’m thinking I’ll go out dancing…! And then plan to go home tonight…” Barb exhaled. “Hey, and I want lobster risotto for dinner. And lavender gelato for dessert,” she added.

“Totally. I trust you will have a terrific time.”

Sometimes, people here talked a little strangely. Must be a glitch in her imagination that created them. Who knows, and why should she care? They were here to make her Safe Place perfect. No point in spending extra energy coming up with precise details for her creations. She wanted to have a good time, not do heavy thinking.

After a few hours of dancing to her favorite 90s hits in the company of sun-tanned Italians and then savoring the lobster dinner, Barb readied herself for the transition. She lay on her cloud-soft, white-as-snow Safe Place bed with the view of Portofino Bay outside the window. On the side table, in a white porcelain vase, the lilacs’ leaves drooped. How could they wilt within a day?

She closed her eyes and recalled the beige walls and the bed with Jeremy in it. With the next inhale, she caught a whiff of the stale air, and when she opened her eyes, there was hernightstand and the lamp with the crooked shade. And there was Jeremy, sleeping. Snoring.  

& & &

“Hey, can we chat?” Barb approached Jeremy in his home office a few days later. Jeremy peeled his onyx eyes tinged with red away from the computer screen and planted them firmly on Barb’s face. Under that gaze, she grew conscious of the greasy knot that now nested on top of her head. The knot had permanently replaced the lush, buttery waves he used to love.

“Look,” she said, folding her arms, slumping. I worry…. that Logistics—I don’t know how much of my team—will be cut next. You know, with all these layoffs that’ve been happening.”

She’d resolved to state her case calmly and clearly to her husband. “I can’t be taking this much time off…I need you to work less and stay more with the kids. We’re supposed to be in this together.”

“Is one of them sick again?” Jeremy tilted back and forth in his office chair.

“Yup, Stevie got sniffles. And if one gets sick, the other one follows. Then I get it too. Every time.”

“Yeah… I can’t work less, Barb.” Jeremy let out a puff of air.  “We have the same thing going on. Sites are shutting down. I want to show right now that I can do more, so if they need to decide between Brian and me, they keep me.  We need my income, right?”

“And we need mine as well, don’t we? So how is it that your job is always more important than mine?” Barb’s resolve waned.

“I didn’t say that. What do you want me to do?” He always adopted that composed tone, as if he were the logical one, while Barb was the crazy, emotional one.

Help. I need you to help me. Barb wished she had said that, but instead, she bit, “Oh, I don’t know. How about you care for your children when they’re sick sometimes, too?”

In the end, Jeremy agreed to watch the kids on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Better than nothing. Barb took those mornings and Fridays off work. On Mondays, the kids roamed free, destroying the house together with the dogs—it’s a team sport!—while Barb tried to keep up with work despite it all. An old sack stuffed with potatoes and ripping at the seams, she plodded away each day, gulping coffee after coffee. She found it harder to find reasons to leave the Safe Space. It was Barb’s own special technique for managing stress.

& & &

On Tuesday, Barb waited in bed for Jeremy to stop working and join her. He was still her husband, and she had to keep trying to reach him. When Jeremy walked into the bedroom, she jumped into the cold river: “Hey…Have you noticed that you’ve been staying in your office longer and longer? Have you been avoiding me?”

“Of course not,” Jeremy answered, his hand on the bathroom door handle. “There is just a lot of work.”

“You’re in there late into the night sometimes,” she pressed on. “Even when you’re with me, you’re just on your phone, you know… Can we talk about it? Is there something going on?”

“There isn’t. Everything’s fine,” he answered mechanically, walked into the bathroom, and carefully locked the door behind him.

Barb’s gaze fell on her poor old Ficus in the corner. When had its leaves turned limp and rusty? She’d neglected to water it and to open the curtains to let sunlight in. If I restart tomorrow, could I still save it?  

When he re-emerged, Jeremy ditched his stretched-out sweats and climbed onto his side of the bed. He switched on his phone and stubbornly ignored Barb’s questioning gaze. He was done with the conversation. He doesn’t even engage, Barb thought. She almost missed the zeal with which he used to argue. At least that showed he cared.

When Jeremy went to sleep, Barb picked up his phone and locked herself in the bathroom. Compelled to hunt for cues, both wanting answers and fearing what she might find, Barb entered the pin code she knew Jeremy had used before. Shoot, he changed his pin. That was not a good sign. She tried their kids’ birthdays, his birthday, her birthday, and their anniversary date. Various combinations of the kids’ and dogs’ names and birthdays. No luck. Barb gave up, feeling both silly and relieved, and headed out of the bathroom to return Jeremy’s phone to his nightstand. A notification from Tinder popped up on the screen.

She froze and then tried to open the notification but still couldn’t unlock the phone. In any case, clearly, Jeremy, for whatever reason, was on Tinder.

Having stayed up most of the night, filled with dread and picturing the total fallout of their marriage, Barb could barely wait until a reasonable hour to wake up Jeremy. She figured six in the morning was good enough to do so.

“What the hell?” she demanded, shoving the phone into his sleepy face with the Tinder alert on the screen.

“What?” Jeremy sat up, took the phone out of Barb’s hand, and rubbed his left eye. He squinted at the screen. “I have no idea…yeah… it must be spam…”

He couldn’t come up with a more ridiculous explanation even if he tried, Barb thought. “Unlock your phone right now,” she demanded, trying to pin his shifting eyes with a deadpan stare.

“Honey… I swear. I am not on Tinder.”

“Why did you change the pin?”

“Why not? I have the right to privacy, don’t I?” His tone rose.

Could he be cheating on me? That would explain why he has been more distantlately. I wish he had at least enough respect for me to be honest. 

“Mommy, Daddy, why are you yelling?” Katherine stumbled in, dragging a teddy in one hand and a blankie in the other.

“We’re not yelling, sweetie. We’re just talking loudly.” Barb opened her arms and gestured to Kathrine to come to her. Some mother I am, letting my kids wake up to their parents fighting. Stevie followed Katherine and stood next to her, grasping his own blanket with red and blue truck pattern. He blinked, and his little face scrunched up, ready to break into tears. The argument had to stop, and between the daily hustle, kids, and work, Barb and Jeremyprobably wouldn’t get a chance to resume it.

& & &

That night, Barb chose Nice. With a nameless tall French stud with wild chestnut curls, they swam, and ate, and drank, and rollicked together in Cote d’Azur in the company of boisterous, nameless friends.

“J’taime,” the French stunner said on the beach. She winced as the stunner slid his palm around her waist, afraid that he would recoil at the extra rolls of fat she’d acquired over the past few years. Then she remembered that in her Wonderland, she was perfectly slim and shapely in all the right places.

“Stay with me forever,” he said. Barb didn’t respond. But she stayed. For a while. And then a while longer. There was no way to count how much time had passed in the Safe Place. She did think of Jeremy but rather fleetingly. The idea of returning to real life appeared as distant and melancholy as the sun setting over the French Riviera.

Unlike the rest of her real life, missing Katherine and Stevie did not subside. It intensified. At some point, Barb needed to return to her children.

“Duty calls,” Barb joked to the brunette on the night she decided to transition back.  

“You will be where you need to be, which is wherever your heart is. And where your heart is not, you will cease to be,” the brunette replied, fluffing a pillow.  

“Care to say more?”

The brunette folded her hands at her belly and stared at Barb with silent concern. Not a hair strayed out of place on her head. Her hairline seemed carved in with precision into her porcelain forehead. Not a wrinkle, not a spot on her skin, either.

“My advice is to try to treat your true self to the truth about your pursuit.”

She sure is persistent with this.

The brunette left, and Barb climbed into the bed. On the nightstand, lilac twigs sagged, scattering its flowers beneath. Mental note: gotta ensure fresh flowers next time, Barb thought and closed her eyes.

She envisioned the beige bedroom, beige duvet covers, the crooked lampshade. But her real-life bedroom wouldn’t appear. Barb focused a bit harder, painting the beige walls and the bed with Jeremy next to her in her mind as graphically as possible. She squeezed her eyes harder, forcing the smallest details of the real-life bedroom to take shape in her mind. I can feel Jeremy’s body heat and breathing…

It wouldn’t materialize.

What is happening? Why is it not working? I want my babies. They’re gonna wake up soon…!

This was irrational. In all her past trips, they never woke up, and time didn’t go on until she returned. But the brunette’s words and not being able to transition… For a moment, she forgot to breathe. As the panic flooded in, she sensed things change. Hers and Jeremy’s smell, the lumpy pillow, his reassuring snoring. She opened her eyes and reached out to touch her husband. Yes, he was there. Barb heaved a shaky breath.

& & &

By Saturday, all of this became nothing more than a simple nightmare, which lingered in the form of vague anxiety but couldn’t cause any real danger. Until Barb’s mom called in the afternoon, “Your dad is having chest pain. I’m taking him to the ER.”

The family met at the Mountainside Medical Center within an hour. Barb’s mother paced the lobby and wrung her hands.

“They took him and told me to wait out here. It’s been at least an hour!” Mom released a sob as she rushed toward Barb. Barb put one arm around her, holding Stevie in another. Katherine gripped her leg.  

Another forty minutes of waiting and chasing the kids around the lobby floor, chairs, and benches passed. Barb approached the reception. And froze.

“How can I help you?” A brunette with her hair slicked in a neat bun at the nape of her neck stared back at Barb. Her hairline neatly framed her smooth, porcelain forehead. Barb blinked. Her thoughts scattered. This woman looked identical to the brunettes from the Safe Place. Or was it just the type? The look that responsible, competent women adopted. Hair tied away in a no-nonsense bun, not a strand out of place. Hair, skin, clothes, emotions, life—in control.

Next to the brunette, in a cheap glass cylinder with moldy water, withered a bouquet of lilacs.

“The doctor will meet with you as soon as she can,” Barb heard the brunette say from behind the plexiglass window. Another brunette with a neat bun hastened out of the ER doors. Besides the doctor’s scrubs, the only difference between her and the brunette at the reception and the brunettes in the Safe Place was real-life bluish bags under her eyes—eyebags on the porcelain face with a precise hairline.

“Your husband did have a heart attack,” she skimmed past Barb and addressed Mom. “He’s on Nitroglycerin now, and we’re transferring him to the Intensive Care Unit. It’s right here on the second floor.”

“Come,” Jeremy approached Barb and attempted to pry Stevie off her hands. But Stevie clasped Barb’s neck like a baby koala. Jeremy gave up. “You’re alright?” he asked Barb and repeated, “Come,” this time pulling Kathrine, who held onto the bottom of Barb’s shirt. He coaxed the little girl towards the elevator. In a haze, Barb followed her family. Her feet seemed to move by themselves. Stevie felt remarkably heavy, and Barb worried she would drop him. She squeezed him tighter, arms shaking and sweat skidding down her spine.

& & &

After midnight, once Dad stabilized, Barb, Jeremy, and the kids returned home. Penny and Piper greeted them as one ecstatic, barking whirlwind of tails, ears, and tongues. Invariably tone-deaf to the family’s mood, the Labradoodles couldn’t be happier. They tracked around them the trails and pawprints from two giant, smelly puddles merging at the corner of the entryway rug. The wet paws stomped on Stevie’s blanket and hit Katherine’s coat. The tired, hungry kids amplified their whimpering.

“Oh God,” Barb slid down the wall, still holding Stevie. “I can’t deal with this right now.”

“Don’t.” Jeremy kicked off his sneakers into the hallway closet and hung his jacket. “Let’s just go to bed; we’ll clean it up tomorrow.”

“By ‘we,’ you mean me? And this is going to dry up and stink here until the morning?!”

“Here, I’ll wipe it right now if you want,” Jeremy stomped after a paper towel into the kitchen. “And we’ll deal with the rug when we get up.”

“Can you help me undress the kids? They need something to eat,” Barb said meekly.  

Jeremy pulled the coat and boots off of sleepy Katherine while Barb did the same for Stevie. He then disappeared into the kitchen and returned a couple of minutes later. “I poured them some milk and cereal,” he said and headed upstairs.

Half an hour later, after feeding and tucking away the kids, Barb found Jeremy in their bedroom. He had been in bed, looking at his phone. She was too tired to restart the ongoing argument about him not helping enough. She climbed into the bed and turned on her side, away from her husband. Jeremy put down his phone, killed the light, and turned on his side away from Barb as well. Barb needed the Safe Place like never before, but her Safe Place was tipping into not being enough while real life was becoming too much.  She thought, why not try to do what she’d had at the back of her mind for the longest time?

Barb opened her eyes under a blooming white magnolia tree. In its shade, on a gingham blanket, a white embroidered cotton skirt spread in a semicircle around her ankles. Also on the blanket stood a wicker basket filled with succulent grapes, blushing apples, and golden shortbread cookies. Three floral porcelain tea cups and saucers nestled in the center. A few feet away, Katherine held a palette and a painting brush and, with controlled strokes, reproduced a lagoon sleeping in front of her, lulled by cypress trees and Spanish moss. Stevie rolled two wooden trucks at her feet.

“Katherine, Stevie!” Barb called.

“Yes, Mommy.” Katherine suspended her brush filled with mint-color paint and half-turned in Barb’s direction. Stevie stopped rolling his trucks and riveted his eyes on Barb.

“Come here, babies!”

Katherine helped Stevie up and led him by the hand to the edge of the picnic blanket.

“Yes, Mommy,” she repeated. The kids stood there with polite smiles plastered on their faces. Both sported immaculate white collars and patent leather shoes so glossy they reflected the noon sun above their heads. The children’s hair coiled with rigidity, unresponsive to the gentle southern breeze. The faint scar from a bicycle accident last year was missing on Katherine’s forehead.

No, this is insane, Barb thought. Back to my bed, please!

& & &

By the time the weekend came, Dad moved from ICU to Inpatient, still on a ventilator, connected to numerous tubes and monitors, and awaiting surgery. Mom called what felt like every hour. She needed Barb to switch with her, bring her something from home, or she complained about the “heartless nurses” who kept waking Dad up at all hours of day and night to take their endless measurements. Stevie had to stay home from daycare due to a persistent, wet cough. Barb requested more time off work. Her shoulders didn’t ache anymore; they throbbed. Real life weighted her down with concrete blocks of pressure, and those blocks were piling up.

& & &

On Monday morning, Jeremy entered the kitchen. “Morning,” he mumbled, scratched the stubble on his face, and poured himself a cup of coffee from the fresh pot Barb had made minutes earlier.

Barb was working on her own coffee. One sip at a time. Wouldn’t it be nice if one time he got up first and started the pot? She leaned against the counter and rubbed her temples. “Hey,” she answered. Another stinging sip. “Stevie kept me up with the cough all night. Do you think you can take tomorrow off? I could really use help with the kids… and Mom, you know… I don’t know what’s worse: having her stay at the hospital and call me every five minutes or asking her to come to stay with us and ‘help with the kids,’” Barb signed air quotes. “I’m afraid she’ll drive me crazy.”

“Honey, I can’t…I actually meant to tell you that I have to travel tomorrow through Saturday.” He looked sheepish.

“You can’t be serious! Now?!”

“Yeah, I know…” Jeremy said, “It’s not the best time with your dad and all. I can’t have an excuse. It’s a client emergency; business-critical for us.”

Did she hear a note of excitement in his tone? Business-critical or Tinder-critical? He runs away when I need him the most. Typical.

To avoid exploding right that second, Barb closed her eyes and summoned a small dark-lit room with meditative music. A heated spa bed enveloped her body. The lavender fragrance filled her lungs, and a brunette rubbed her scalp, drawing firm, bliss-inducing circles around Barb’s crown with her thumbs. Once infused with tranquility, Barb was able to think again.

She slid off the spa bed, pulled on silk trousers and a cashmere sweater, walked out of the spa boutique, turned left, then right in a couple of blocks, pushed in a metal gate guarded by shriveled lilac shrubs on either side, and walked into a luscious courtyard.

“Bienvenue, Madame,” a brunette wearing a white scalloped apron lowered her chin.

“Hey,” said Barb. “Where are they?”

She found Jeremy, Katherine, Stevie, Penny, and Piper in the living room. The Labradoodles sat side-by-side next to her husband and smiled. The dogs didn’t move, didn’t blink. Instead, they bared toothy smiles ear to ear. Jeremy rose from the couch and approached her, “My Love! How was your spa?” He dipped her and slipped a dry, meaty tongue down her throat. Revolted, Barb pushed him away.

“My Love, why are you not happy? I’ve missed you! I washed the kids!” His eyes, bottomless black pits, seared hers.

Barb didn’t run but threw herself toward the kids. Stevie and Katherine kneeled on the opposite sides of a coffee table. They had a chessboard between them. Stevie moved a pawn. His gaze was fixed on the board. Katherine moved a bishop diagonally and took Stevie’s pawn. Neither of their facial expressions changed. Neither of them lifted their eyes from the board. Her eighteen-month-old and four-year-old were playing chess.

“Stevie, baby!” Barb picked him up. “Katherine!”

“Hi, Mommy. I love you,” Kathrine said in a flat voice. Stevie remained quiet, unblinking eyes fixed on the chessboard. “Daddy washed us really well,” Kathrine added.

Only then Barb saw that the skin on their cheeks, legs, and arms was raw. Stevie had puss oozing from his forearm. Kathrine had bleeding scratches on her shins. Barb tore her eyes away from the children and onto Jeremy. Someone who looked like her husband still stood in the middle of the living room. In a thick wool cardigan and pleated trousers. Clean-shaven. His hairline looked etched around his face. He wrinkled his forehead to express concern, or maybe confusion, but his black gaze was vacant.

Barb lowered mute Stevie onto the floor and backed away from them all. “No!” she screamed. “Out! All of you, out of here!”

“Honey? Honey?” Jeremy’s voice called.

Opening her eyes, she found herself on a couch with an ice pack on her forehead. Jeremy squatted at her feet, holding his cell phone. “I was about to call an ambulance; you went catatonic for a good 15 minutes. How are you feeling? What day is it today?”

“I’m fine. And it’s freaking Monday.” Barb pushed him away and, despite his protests, rose from the couch.

“Mommy!” Kathrine jumped up from the chair, where she huddled with her brother, being distracted by a video game. Barb saw that they both had been crying. Spilled coffee sprayed a wide net across the kitchen floor amid the shattered pieces of her favorite mug. Barb had jumped to the Safe Place in the middle of an argument, and she brought her family with her. And, unlike all the times before, real life stopped.

She crouched to pick up the shards of the mug. Her chest tightened again at the memory: Jeremy was leaving her at the worst time. How would she manage? Not by going to the Safe Place, clearly.

“Honey,” Jeremy called again. “Can you please get a check-up as soon as possible?”   

Sure, while you’re gone, I may as well quit my job, take the kids with me, the dogs, and why not Mom and Dad, too, and we’ll all go get a CT scan for me…went through her head, but she replied, detached,“You know, sometimes I vividly envision smashing a cast-iron skillet over your head.”

Jeremy chuckled and awkwardly put his arm around her shoulders.

“I know. Yeah, and I would probably deserve that. I’m sorry, Honey. I know the timing is not great. You’ll be ok. You’re a strong woman.”

I’m so angry, I could punch him right now… and he laughs. He laughs, and pats me on the shoulder, and dismisses me like it’s not a big deal. “Not great?!” She pushed him away. “I hate it when you call me a strong woman! I would love not to be strong, but do I have a choice!?” She heard herself screaming like she had done many times before, and she kept screaming, not able to contain herself any longer. About always being tired. About always feeling alone.

Her voice broke. She looked at Katherine and Stevie. They stopped playing and stared at her with alarm. Jeremy studied the floor. Then, without saying anything, he wandered off, ruffled Stevie’s hair on the way, and went upstairs. He just left. Well, I’m not staying either.

& & &

But Barb stayed. She waited for Jeremy to return from his trip before shifting to the Safe Place. It was more responsible to have him home when she transitioned. She may also have wanted to see Jeremy’s face, hoping to read what the trip was truly about. In any case, when he began to snore, she knew where she wanted to go—somewhere fault-proof, where she always felt adored and carefree, to the exquisite and glamorous—Avenue Montaigne.

Many days, or it could have been weeks (it was hard to tell in the Safe Place), later her tall French stunner, smelling of jasmine and musk, cooed across a red-clothed table in a dim-lit restaurant, “Cheri, you are charmaint! Irrésistible in this ensemble!”  She leaned in, feeling irresistible indeed in an ethereal black gown adorned with pearls and crystals, its organza skirt as delicate as smoke encircling her hips.

“What would you like to order, ma chéri?” He picked up her hand and planted a warm kiss.

The romantic dinner with copious hand smooching turned into a fabulous party. The stunner led Barb by the hand to the dance floor. She basked in his adoring gaze as she twirled in her magical dress. Libations flowed, and music thumped. Admiring faces of the group around her cheered her on, copying her dance moves, all smiles. In the center of the dance circle, Barb looked up at the painted stucco ceiling with an enormous chandelier ignited with a thousand lights and closed her eyes in sheer bliss. Her arms extended to the ceiling, and she swayed with the music. At last, she was free, and everything and everyone around existed just for her. This was utterly perfect.

At that very perfect moment, Barb noticed something strange. She felt as if she was losing the substance… of her body and her inner self… becoming discarnate. Sort of dream-like. Terror—as if something abysmal loomed—shook her and banished every trace of bliss that filled her an instant earlier. The dancers around her all blended into a flickering, mad mass. She pulled her arm from the stunner’s attempted grip, darted through the crowd, ran down the vast marbled staircase, pushed open the heavy carved wooden doors into Parisian dawn, inhaled the sobering raw air, and sprinted to her flat on lamp-lit Avenue Montaigne.

She burst into the foyer, out of breath, and plopped down on her bed in front of a brunette. “I just… I was dancing, on cloud nine, you know! And then… I don’t know! Like I was disappearing or something! What was THAT?!”

The brunette stopped shuffling lilacs in a vase on a dresser. The delicate, four-petal flowers, dry as dust, crumbled from the twigs onto the dresser, the carpet. The brunette took a long look at Barb. “Neither here nor there, you won’t find yourself anywhere.”

Barb stared at the brunette in despair. “I want to be where I am happy! Where someone cares about me! I am constantly, permanently tired! Do you understand that?”

“Related to reality, a rare run is reasonable. Not really living in reality, it will rid of you,” the brunette folded her arms and offered Barb a sympathetic look.

Rid of me?? Barb flung herself onto the bed. Her mind swam. Exhausted, she soon sank into a restless, disturbed sleep right in her gown and woke up to a sunny spring morning. Outside, birds chirped as the Eifel Tower and Haussmann rooftops glistened from the recent rain.

That day Barb didn’t meet with the stunner or her retinue. She roamed the streets, not stepping in or even eying the charming boulangeries. She lost herself in Jardin des Tuileries and her thoughts. If I have to choose, what do I choose? I could stay here forever. But what about Mom and Dad, Jeremy, the kids, Penny, and Piper? What will become of them?

Bringing them here is not an option. That turned into a nightmare.

And Jeremy, and Tinder… How different is that from me escaping to the Safe Place? How trapped has he felt in these last few years? Without noticing it, Barb and Jeremy had dropped to the bottom of each other’s priority lists. What had she done to ensure that her husband felt loved and seen? And now… would she ever get a chance to bring back what they had once had? That palpable connection they shared when they’d just met and a few years thereafter could never be recreated in the Safe Place.

She wandered through the garden and along the Seine until twilight crept through her cardigan.

Barb returned to her flat. That evening, she didn’t invite the stunner. She asked for a steak with Bordeaux and didn’t speak to the brunettes afterward. Likely sensing that the decision had been made, they did not speak to her either. Barb took the last sip of the wine, placed the glass on the table, took in the view of the rooftops and the lit Eifel Tower one more time, and squeezed her eyes shut.

A few times, Barb believed that she had started to shift. The beige walls seemed within reach, yet she’d slip back to the table by the window with the view of the Eiffel Tower. As if Paris was not letting her go. She tried again and again, squeezing her eyes harder. She chanted, “Jeremy, Katherine, Stevie, Jeremy, Katherine, Stevie…”

She sensed the sun rising in real life and Paris fading away. At the same time, Barb’s body, its weight and her perception of it, her being and her cognition also grew lighter and fuzzier, fluttering somewhere between the two worlds. Beige walls. Paris. Both blurring. Neither real enough.

She saw her children running into Jeremy’s and her bedroom and launching themselves on top of her husband. She heard the all-too-familiar high-pitched “Mommy! Where is Mommy?” But it sounded like a distant echo.

Jeremy rolled over and patted the empty space on Barb’s side of the bed. “Barb?” he called, “Barb?” Katherine and Stevie searched Jeremy’s face for an answer, their eyes darkening.

Barb could almost touch her kids, yearning to squeeze their little bodies, which always squeezed back with their whole strength. Those soft curls, Barb could not feel or smell them. She was too late. She was too slow to choose them. She chose to run away over and over, for longer and longer, instead of making it right with her family, and now she’d lost them. Now there was no Safe Place—let it be damned! And she would also be gone. Neither here nor there; there was no in-between.

“I’m sure Mom will be back soon,” Jeremy said as he embraced Katherine and Stevie, not sounding too confident. In the corner, only a leafless stem remained from her ficus. The last pang of heartache and nothingness took over Barb’s Safe Place and the bedroom with the beige walls.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Daria Lojko 2025