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I had been given a gift. I had been given the greatest gift that could be bestowed on anyone. It was a gift better than diamonds or a closet full of clothes or an extravagant trip.

I had been given the gift of starting all over again with someone else.

And this time I was going to do it right.

A smile came over my face. All the baggage I had with Howard, I was now able to drop. I was going to start all over again. Maybe Zachary and I would move far away and I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone from my former life. I would miss Lucy, but I’d still speak to her from time to time. I could move on with things.
I wondered if I could even start another family. Men do it all the time. This time I would bring my children up right. I would teach them to think for themselves and to be independent, but at the same time insist when I thought something was right.

“I have something that I think is going to make you feel better,” Zachary said, getting out of bed and heading toward the kitchen.

“What is it?” I called to him.

“It’s a surprise,” he said.

I sat up in bed and propped the pillows and smoothed out the sheets as I waited for him.

This was what it felt like to be taken care of. Whatever he was bringing back, the smallest of things would be more appreciated than anything I could ever want.

He appeared in the doorway.

In his hand was a plate. On the plate was one cupcake with a candle in it.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

“When did you get that?” I said, laughing and clapping my hands.

“I actually got it this morning, when I met you,” he said, coming toward me as he shielded the candle from going out. “I meant to eat it today, but I never got the chance. It’s funny, because I only went in there for a muffin. I’ve never bought a cupcake in my life, but it just looked too good to pass up. Now I know why I bought it. It was meant for you.” He sat down beside me and placed the plate on my lap. “Make a wish,” he whispered.

So I did. I closed my eyes tight and said my wish in my head over and over.

I wished that I could start all over again.

I wished that I wouldn’t turn back to seventy-five.

I wished that I could be twenty-nine this year and thirty the next, and so on.

I wished that I could be with Zachary and relive my life with him.

And then I opened my eyes and blew out the candle.

I smiled. This could work. This had to work.

“Thank you so much for this,” I said as he unwrapped the foil from the cake.

“Take a bite,” he told me as I opened my mouth. So I did, and then he did the same.

“Did you make a good wish?” he asked when we were halfway through.

“Yes,” I said as we kissed, getting icing on each other’s faces.

We finished the cake, and Zachary got under the covers again.

“Blue Eyes?” I asked him as he got on top of me and started kissing me.

“What is it?” he asked. “Anything.”

“Let’s go away,” I said. “Let’s go far away and be together.”

“I was thinking the same thing.” He smiled. “I was thinking that I’d love to take you to my favorite bistro in Paris. I want to take you to Rome and sit at an outdoor café and drink espresso with you. I want to climb the steps to the Parthenon and walk on top of the Great Wall of China with you. How does that sound?” he asked me.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I told him.

“Do you have to go back to Chicago tomorrow?” he asked me.

“Do I what?” I asked, then I remembered. “No, there’s nothing that I have to go back to Chicago for. Nothing is keeping me from going anywhere!” I shouted with excitement. “How about you?”

“I’m free to go, too!” he shouted. Then he said, “You know, I never asked you what you do. What’s your job?” he asked.

I tried to think of something to tell him. I almost said “computers,” but I knew he’d never believe that in a million years. So I told him the truth.

“I’m qutting my job,” I told him. “I was there for a lot of years, but lying here with you I realize that I don’t need it anymore. I want to do a lot of other things with my life.”

“Good for you,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said to him, and I meant it. I was proud of myself. I was thrilled. I was over the moon. “And now I get to do what I really want,” I told him.

“And what’s that?” he asked me.

“I get to be with you.” I smiled.

We kissed passionately as he wrapped me in his arms.

And then we made love again.

But I don’t kiss and tell.

cinderella at midnight

My eyes shot open.

I had no idea what time it was. Zachary’s apartment was pitch-dark.

Memories of a life that hadn’t even occurred came pouring through my head.

It was the life Zachary and I would live together.

There would be pet names. He would come to know that I don’t like the sheets tucked in at the bottom of the bed. He would hate that I leave little gobs of toothpaste in the sink after I brush. He would like his newly washed socks to be placed starting on the left of the drawer, and he would joke, “This way none of the socks get jealous that I’m wearing one pair more than another.” He’d learn that I always like at least a half a tank of gas at all times in the car, because you never know. We would eat at seven-thirty, not eight. We would be in bed by midnight. Zachary would always put an extra blanket on my side of the bed in case I got cold. Sometimes in the middle of the night we would both wake up instinctively at the same time and hold each other until we both fell asleep again. Sometimes we would wake up,
and neither of us could get back to sleep, so we’d just talk about the day we had or what was on tap for the next day. Or we would make love.

I could see us making goo-goo eyes at an outdoor café in Paris, or skiing down slopes in Switzerland. All of the dreams we talked about in our one evening together would come to life. We would decorate our home with the treasures we picked up in these places. These trinkets would become stories from our life. We’d make new friends together. Some of the wives would become my closest friends. They would become the women I’d reach out to if I needed some estrogen time. They would call me to grab a cup of coffee, or to take a quick jaunt to a shop.

I would become an integral part of Zachary’s business, picking out the clothing for his Web site and becoming familiar with the latest designers all around the world. Zachary would begin to rely on my opinions. He would take them very seriously. I would have a knack for knowing exactly what to buy. I would begin to understand the Web site, and make it even easier for people to shop. The business would go from being his to being ours. It would become even more successful because of my input.

I would be introduced to his family in a way I had never known them before. His mother would be older than me, and I would respect her. I would ask her for advice even though I already knew the answers. We would spend holidays with his family. They would become my family. He would talk of his grandmother, and I would listen and tell him I wish I’d met her.

We would get older. We’d be forty, fifty, sixty . . . seventy-five. Would we have children? I don’t know. Maybe we would. We’d have a daughter, and she’d be like Lucy. I would insist she figure
out her own life instead of living mine. I’d make sure she had no insecurities about herself. She would be independent and freethinking. My advice would be just that, advice. My children could take it or leave it. There would be celebrations, and there would be times of grief. We would say good-bye to older relatives and welcome new ones.

Then Zachary and I would live out the twilight of our lives. We would look back with joy on a life together. Maybe we made some mistakes, but we did it together. We stuck it out for each other. We always put each other first, before anyone else. The love between us was undeniable. In our last days, we’d ask ourselves as we did so many times before:
How did we get so lucky?

My eyes widened as fear shot through my body.

I knew I had to go back.

It’s not that I wanted to; I didn’t want to. The warmth of Zachary’s arms around me was more than enough to keep me there forever. The comfort of his bed, the way his legs lightly touched mine, his relaxed breathing, in and out.

My mind was running a mile a minute. Would I get out of that bed? Everything depended on my staying or getting out of bed. If I stayed, my new life would begin. If I got out of bed, my old life would stay intact. I did not want to get out of bed. Everything in my body told me not to get out of bed. My mind, however, was telling me something very different.

Barbara.

Frida.

Lucy.

Howard.

They were my life. A life without them was no life. The other
life I was thinking of—that was someone else’s life. How did all this happen, anyway? It was just a birthday wish made by an old woman. A wish that doing it all over again would make things right. There was no way I could continue my life without the people I loved. I would learn from my mistakes. I would make the future right.

I had brought Barbara into this world. To abandon her, even at this late stage, would hurt too much. I love my Barbara. I love her more than she will ever know.

To leave Frida at this point in our lives, even if I did see her from time to time . . . it wouldn’t be the same. We wouldn’t understand each other anymore. Sometime in our lives a pact had been made, and I realized now that I couldn’t break it. We began our lives together. We experienced each decade of our lives as they changed and we changed. How could I not see it through to the end?

I took a deep breath.

I could not run away from the life I had built. It wasn’t right. This was not the second chance at life I was meant to have. I was not meant to have a second life. I just needed to know that the first life was worth it.

I looked over at the clock to see what time it was, hoping that I still had time to get out of there before . . . It was 11:59! And then the clock turned to midnight.

And right then I changed. Again.

It was odd. It wasn’t as if it happened slowly. I felt it in the blink of an eye. One second I was breathing easy; the next second I felt as if a hard shell had suddenly grown on top of my skin.

One day. Twenty-four hours. That was all I wished for on my birthday, and whether I liked it or not, that was what I got. All that thinking that I could stay twenty-nine had been pointless. It was the wish. The wish was being twenty-nine for a day—not a week, and not a lifetime.

One day. And it was all over.

I placed my hand on my neck.

It didn’t feel smooth and supple as it had that day.

Now it felt tough and fatigued.

Every single part of my body ached, but I had to get out of there as carefully as I could, without waking Zachary. I felt like I had run a marathon, but I couldn’t think about the pain at that point. Could you imagine the look on his face if he opened his eyes and saw a seventy-five-year-old woman lying next to him naked?

I slowly turned to sit up and put my feet on the ground. The hardwood floors started to creak as I put my weight on them. I grabbed my lower back to lessen the pain as Zachary rolled to the other side of the bed and began snoring loudly. Thank goodness for his snoring; he wouldn’t hear me. I knew that from my time with Howard. When Howard was in such a deep sleep, I could have banged pots and pans in his ears and he still wouldn’t have woken up. I knew I was safe as long as I heard that deep gruff sound coming from him.

I knelt down and felt around the bed until I located the fabric of my black dress. I crept toward the bathroom, feeling the walls and furniture around me like I was blind. I was blind. Everything was completely blurry around me. Why I didn’t just throw my glasses into my bag, I’ll never know. As I shut the door
to the bathroom, I turned on the light and squinted my eyes as I tried to bend down and put on the dress. Oh, my back, my legs, my bunions! I had gone from such an easy pain-free body to feeling like I’d just put on a wetsuit that was three sizes too big.

And then, as if I didn’t have enough trouble, I couldn’t zip the dress. My potbelly was in the way. There was no way I could zip up the dress and move my breasts into the correct position, no matter how many times I tried. I didn’t know whether to be agitated or scared at that point. All I kept thinking was
Please don’t let him wake up. Please, please, don’t wake up.

Needless to say, I wasn’t even going to attempt to find my heels.

I tried to look at myself in the mirror, but it was just too blurry for me to see anything. (By the way, that was fine with me. There was nothing to see. It was just the same old me. I was the last person I wanted to see when I looked in the mirror.)

I turned off the bathroom light and found my way toward Zachary’s closet. I grabbed any old pair of pants and a T-shirt off a shelf. Remember, I was doing all of this blind. I wouldn’t know what I grabbed until I got home, just that it had an elastic waist and I wouldn’t need a belt. I felt around the bottom of the closet and came across a pair of sneakers; at least I assumed they were sneakers because I felt laces. It was easy for me to just slip my feet into them, as Zachary’s feet were quite a few sizes bigger than mine.

Don’t even ask me how I found my way toward the door to his apartment and undid the locks. My senses were on their highest alert.

I thought about saying good-bye to Zachary. I wanted to
apologize and tell him I wouldn’t be going to Paris with him, or to Italy. He would find someone else to do those things with. I had already done them, anyway. He would find a young woman who respected him and loved him for who he was, that I was sure of. I wondered if he would be hurt when he woke up the next morning and I wasn’t there. Would he call Lucy looking for me? It would bother him for a little while, his heart would be a little broken, but he would get over it. After all, he was young. He had his whole life in front of him. I had already lived my life.

I slowly opened the door. The shoes were so big it took more energy to keep my feet in them than to walk toward the elevator. Thank goodness it was late. Could you imagine the look on anyone’s face if they saw this old woman leaving Zachary’s apartment dressed in his clothes? By the time I got into the elevator, though, I was relieved that I had gotten out of there without being noticed. Now all I wanted to do was get home.