When she missed her period and began vomiting, Emma knew, but felt obliged to take a urine test anyway. As the day wore on, she started getting used to the idea, and patted her belly. That evening, though, her nausea magnified after she told her husband and he stared at her with an intensity that frightened her.
“What are you trying to do, ruin my life with a third one?”
The clinical distance of the phrasing clawed at her brain. It was nearly nine o’clock and she sat on the couch surrounded by Bluey, a wooden puzzle and a large plastic truck. The new Ikea sofa already smelled faintly of apple juice mixed with beer, which unsettled Emma’s stomach even more.
He paced the living room twice. Even pulled his hair dramatically before grabbing his keys in the kitchen and storming out.
Emma didn’t move as he slammed the apartment door. She remained frozen several minutes more, then stiffly picked up the toys and rinsed her teacup, assuming he’d be home in the morning.
The next day, when Clara and Tristan asked where Daddy was, Emma told them truthfully that she didn’t know. She stuck to their routine while constantly checking for messages until Tristan tried to take her phone away. After the playground, after dinner, after she tucked her two into bed that night, Emma sat back down on the couch with apple juice and beer smells and stared at her phone.
They had moved to Zurich only a few months ago; a planned two-year hiatus before kids’ schools would restrict their travel. She knew a few other mothers only superficially.
Her first call was to the only work colleague of her husband whose number she had.
“’Ssup?” His voice was too jovial to be hiding information.
Her next call was to a friend whose husband played golf with hers.
“So is there a golfing weekend coming up?”
In spite of her casual tone, her new friend figured out why Emma had rung.
“Oh God, these men. Don’t worry. He’ll get over himself.”
Emma dropped the idea of phoning around and sat instead in front of her piano, allowing her hands to find the betrayal and revulsion of Schoenberg that matched her anger. Jagged phrases, half-finished, exhausted her as she pounded the keys. A lock of hair fell into her eyes. She eventually softened into Mahler’s Adagietto. It was the love song she had performed at the conservatory just after she had met her future husband. Now it sounded like a requiem and she was mourning. She wiped her cheek dry as she pulled the strand behind her ear.
Emma tossed in bed, playing out what she would say when he came back. She placed a hand on her belly and tried to feel excited, but could muster only weariness. The other two kids already overwhelmed her. She was still too embarrassed to call a friend back home.
On the third evening, three-year old Clara had a meltdown because daddy wasn’t there to read her a story. Emma was too tired to fight her. She could only keep down crackers and weak tea. It reminded her to make an appointment with an ob/gyn, and she nearly went into a small panic thinking she had no idea how to find a doctor who spoke English. That, in turn, got her remembering about the last time she was pregnant, when he had come with her and they had marvelled at the tiny blob on the ultrasound and she wept. Clara thought it was because of the story and patted her back.
By day four, Clara chatted incessantly, including gabbing in English with the bewildered pensioner standing behind them in a grocery line. Emma briefly imagined the woman as an ersatz grandmother. That evening, Clara’s babbling just got irritating. She followed Emma from room to room; sat on the toilet seat when Emma showered. Spoke over Tristan when he needed something.
“Clara, my ears hurt. Can you give me a few minutes of silence?”
Clara watched the second hand jerk around the ancient kitchen clock.
“Is that a few minutes?”
After five days without a break from the kids, Emma snapped. She screamed at Clara. Threw a hairbrush into the bathroom corner, then felt guilty and out of control, so she hugged her children on the tiled floor and apologized while all three of them cried. She stopped insisting they start the night in their own rooms, welcomed their bodies on his side of the marital bed. Tristan lay with her, drinking his milk. Tristan was still easy and Emma was grateful for his warmth; she stroked his head, kissed his hair and worried. For a way to keep up her music, Emma had been teaching piano around Clara’s pre-K and the kids’ nap times. The lessons kept her sane, but now she fretted about health insurance and rent, worried what to do if she were stranded in Switzerland.
One of the most beautiful cities in the world, but Emma felt lost in its wilderness of cobblestones and meandering paths. On the tram, Clara pressed her nose to the window as the Frauenmünster slid into view, while Emma stood gripping the pole with one hand and Tristan’s stroller with the other, wondering what her friends in Chicago would say if they could see her now. The expat life had once felt charming. She had been set down in another mother’s life, one in which she did not possess a map.
On day six, Emma watched a student’s fingers move through a Philip Glass étude, barely hearing the notes over the echo of her husband’s voice playing in her head, repeating that she had ruined his life. Then she heard a key slide into the front door lock, caught a glimpse of his figure passing the door and heard his shoes – no one in Switzerland wears shoes indoors – clomp to the bedroom. She wanted to cry out with relief and anger, but kept a straight face, as if she were interested in this failed attempt on the piano. Her student, who took himself to be a serious musician, rushed through the repeated patterns, missing nuance entirely.
“Try slowing down the tempo.” Emma kept her eyes on the space outside the doorway. She sat out the rest of the lesson in silence, her pupil did not notice her shaking hands.
After her student left, Emma stood a moment at the doorway to compose herself. She had been playing out the moment of her husband’s return in her head, but Emma had not anticipated the adrenaline rush. She exhaled long calming breaths before she walked as slowly as she could down the corridor to the bedroom. She leaned against the doorframe with her arms folded against her stomach, waiting for an explanation. Blood rushed back into her limbs when she saw him packing clothes into a duffle bag.
“Where were you?”
He gave her a sharp look but didn’t answer. Instead, he opened a second bag on the unmade bed. The pithy barbs she had practiced stuck in her throat. Her mouth opened, but words did not flow. Each time he crammed a shirt or sweater into the bag, she felt it in her gut. Emma thought she was going to be sick again.
He picked up a framed photo of the kids feeding ducks at Lake Zurich; stared at it a moment before packing it. Left behind the picture next to it, the one of the whole family taken last December at the Adventsmarkt with a giant Christmas tree in the background.
In the other room, Clara was waking from her nap, chatting to the plush animals that surrounded her in bed. Emma wondered how he would feel if Clara came in; if he’d ignore his daughter, too, while he stuffed underwear into the corner of the suitcase. He dropped a sock but she didn’t bother to tell him.
Eventually Clara did walk down the hallway toward her parents’ bedroom. When she could see her father through the doorway, she squealed in surprise, and ran past Emma.
“Daddy!”
He stooped down on his haunches and wrapped his arms around their daughter.
“Hey, squirt.” He breathed her in.
Rooted in place, Emma waited for him to close the distance, to include her in the embrace with Clara.
“Where are you going?” Clara nodded at the suitcases.
“To Katja.” He tried to sound casual as he finger-combed Clara’s thin curls.
His words punched Emma in her belly where a third one grew. Katja was the work colleague who had recommended him for the international move.
“Can I go to Katja too?” Clara snuggled into his lap and stuck a finger in her mouth.
“Daddy’s going to stay at her house for a while.” He didn’t look at Emma.
“Exactly how long have you two been so close?” Emma’s voice, finally functioning, was so loud and shaky, even Clara startled at its harshness.
He wiped Clara from his lap, opened a new drawer, and did not answer. Clara handed him the sock on the floor. Emma remained stuck in the doorway. Tristan was still asleep.
The doorbell rang for Emma’s next lesson.
“Mommy’s business is doing well!” He attempted a casual tone but Emma had known him too long to be fooled. He couldn’t even look her in the eyes.
Instead of the ob/gyn, Emma wondered if Switzerland had some sort of Planned Parenthood. Who would stay with the kids when she went in for the appointment? At the front door, she choked back tears, then shut away her emotions.
“Come in.”
Emma waved in her next pupil, who was more expressive than the previous pianist and was now working on Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis II. When Emma taught this piece, she asked her students to envisage a plant’s life: how it stirs in darkness, breaks the soil, reaches for the sun, until, finally, in the fifth movement, it slowly returns to silence and death. Emma liked the second movement’s beauty and heaviness.
The student began with the looping motifs in the left hand, then subtly shifted its harmony with the right. The same notes and sequences repeated and evolved. It was meant to be a serene movement but Emma found herself fidgeting. She thought she detected a bag zip in the other room as the chipped nails of the student paced across the keyboard.
It was as if the music were inching forward two steps only to hesitate one step back. Tristan was now awake and she heard the three of them playing, possibly for the last time in that apartment, in that room. The second movement was haunting. Long notes built anticipation until the flurry of arpeggios announced the seed’s emergence amid sorrowful chords. Emma closed her eyes as quiet descended on the piece.
Little feet pattered down the hall as the kids migrated from room to room.
Emma waited for that final passage, introspective and restrained. She told pupils that Metamorphosis was perceived as a representation of botanical evolution, but now she realized the possibilities for interpretation were endless. What emerged didn’t have to be that seed. A transformation could be something breaking free from what constrained it in the first place.
A pause held the air as the last echoes of notes drifted off.
The student leaned back on the bench, hands slowly lowering from the keys.
Emma exhaled.
Alison Langley’s debut novel, Budapest Noir: Ilona Gets a Phone, was published by Dedalus Books (UK) in 2024. That book, which is now available in the US, won the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in The Pig’s Back, Frazzled Lit, and an anthology from Insurgent Press (UK); one story earned a shortlist nomination for the Bournemouth Writing Prize. She lives in Switzerland.