Three Wishes

by Liane Moriarty

My eyes popped as the nurses undid the mother’s bra and peeled off soggy green leaves! Your breasts sometimes become very hard and swollen when you start nursing, you see, and for some reason chilled cabbage leaves soothe them.

His name was significant in a vaguely comical sort of way. Something made her think, well, I’ll remember that name, ha ha. And there was also something that was just a tiny bit sad about it. Just a faint, delicate shadow of sadness. It was very odd. What could it be? What name could be funny and sad all at once? How fascinating! She couldn’t wait to remember it.

Gemma laid her head back against the rim of the bathtub and was suddenly intensely uncomfortable, too hot and headachy. Baths, she thought, were just like her relationships, all “ooh, ah” in the beginning and then suddenly, without warning, she had to get out, out, out!

Well, she wasn’t lucky. She was effective. Ever since then, she had begun each day with a strong cup of coffee and a brand-new “to do” list. She had a hardbound notebook especially for the task. At the front was her “principle-centered personal mission statement” and her long-term, medium-term, and short-term goals for each of the key areas of her life: work, family, and friends.

What if it was simply physically impossible to do everything? Sometimes it felt like all the people in her life were scavengers, pecking viciously away at her flesh, wanting more, more, more.

It was as if she were being picked up and put down again in each new stage of her life like a chess piece.

but he spoke about rivers and mountain ranges in a voice with an underlying sweetness. It was perfectly masculine but somehow gentler or softer than the average man’s voice. It made her feel safe.

Michael listened to Lyn with unhurried, flattering interest. It was a brand-new experience for her. It made her eloquent.

Opinions were for other people. It was fascinating how upset they got about them.

Normally Dan’s cards read, To: Catwoman. From: Batman.

It was like a stained-glass window shattered in her head and every fragment was a different memory or thought or feeling.

And that was it. I don’t like you, she thought, and it was like an icy cold breeze whistling around her bones.

There was only her and she reached only as far as the tips of her fingers and the tips of her toes and beyond that there was nothing.

Her favorite time was twilight, when people began switching on lights, with their curtains still undrawn. You could see straight into the bright little cubes of their lives. It fascinated her. The minutiae of their existences. The potted plants on their windowsills. Their furniture. Their pictures. You could hear the sounds of their music, television sets, radios. You could smell their dinners cooking. People called out to one another. “What’s this plastic bag in the fridge?” “What?” “This plastic bag!” “Oh, that.” Once she stood still for five minutes, listening to the soothing sound of someone’s shower running, imagining steam billowing, soap lathering.

Her future back then, thought Cat now, was like a long buffet table of exotic dishes awaiting her selection. This career or that career. This boy or that boy. Marriage and children? Maybe later—for dessert, perhaps. She didn’t realize they’d start clearing the plates away so soon.

Sometimes, she still felt the beginning of that icy breeze whistling around her bones, but now she had a cure. She simply thought back to the night when Sal was born and she was in the ambulance listening to Charlie’s voice on the mobile telling her how a lightbulb worked. “There’s a thin little piece of wire and it resists the flow of electricity. That’s why the filament glows…Everything has to flow back to earth, you see…Look, Gemma, you’re not planning on rewiring or something like that, are you?” It was like remembering the words to a beautiful poem. “…It resists the flow of electricity…That’s why it glows…”