The Salt House

by Lisa Duffy

   2

  Hope

  An hour passed before Kat’s face softened and her breathing changed to the familiar timbre of deep sleep. I lay next to her in bed and wondered whether Jack was sleeping in the truck. Or more likely, he had a spare key stashed somewhere, and he’d gone to the boat. Or maybe to the Salt House across town.

  I closed my eyes, but sleep was impossible. The argument with Jack had me twisting and turning in Kat’s bed, restless from a current running through my body. Difficult now, with all the words hurled at each other, to pinpoint what we’d fought about. But something Jack said turned over in my mind.

  When was the last time we were together and you didn’t do this vanishing act that you do?

  Men like Jack didn’t say such things. Not out loud, at least. It seemed the point of no return. For both of us.

  For Jack, it would have been saying it out loud—admitting I was letting him down in some way—that he had expectations. Needs.

  For me, hearing him say it, even now, made my body jolt. My hands clench.

  It was a year last week. The anniversary of her death. The beginning of the longest year of my life. Of our life. Our marriage.

  We need to not let this thing destroy us, Jack said last week. When he said this thing, he meant my grief. But he never used that word.

  In bed, when he wanted to make love and all I could muster was to kick off my pajama bottoms and press my lips against the side of his neck where I knew he liked, Jack had questions. Are we ever going to make love like we used to? Are we going to move on from being sad all the time?

  He didn’t use the word grief. Grief was too serious. Being sad was temporary, fixable. Grief was deeper, unchangeable, forever.

  He didn’t say this, but I knew.

  I didn’t tell him that my grief was as familiar to me as a worn sweater covered with loose threads and filled with the smells and sounds of a thousand cold nights and frosty mornings.

  Grief and me, we had a history.

  On most days something benign brought my grief calling. The smell of apple juice in the morning. A lost diaper in the bottom of a handbag found buried under shoes at the bottom of my closet. A forgotten pacifier I stumbled upon when I pulled the bed out to vacuum.

  This grief had separated into various faces, each with its own smell and feel.

  Holidays and birthdays were sure to bring one, if not all of them, piling in like crazed partygoers trampling over one another in their haste and excitement. On those days, I didn’t get a word in edgewise; they were overwhelming.

  Pity was my favorite. Pity had a calm, soothing voice. She made me rest in bed, and she never stopped talking about how unfair this all was. She patted my back and rubbed my arm, and she smelled like the kind of cinnamon toast my mother used to make for me when I was small and tired and out of sorts. The kind that’s crispy on the edge, soft and gooey in the middle with swirls of butter, sugar, and cinnamon seeped deep into the belly. Pity knew I didn’t deserve this fate. She repeated again and again how unfair it was that this happened to me, when mothers all over the world gave up their children willingly. Some neglected or abused them. Pity was compassionate; pity understood; pity knew I could not just get on with life.

  Anger was the opposite. He was needy and smelled like air the hour before a hurricane struck, and I was left cold and empty after his visits. He didn’t speak to me; he screamed in my ear that I was robbed. He was enormous with piercing eyes and a viselike grip that grabbed hold of my arms and shook me when I didn’t respond. He wasn’t happy with simple tears; he wanted action, repayment, retribution. Somebody was to blame for this, he said. Don’t give me that healing crap. Anger wasn’t satisfied until I was angry. He giggled when I lashed out at Jack, chortled when I threw my pocketbook with the diaper across the room and followed to stomp and tear at it.

  This grief had softened in the last month or so. A better word surely applied, yet this was how it felt. A dulling of the sharp edges. An imperceptible shift inside of me. Simple things—a morning two weeks ago when the clock struck noon before I thought of her—a night when Jack and the girls were at the table, and he made them laugh. He looked at me and winked. I smiled and left the table to wash the dishes. But my hands trembled as I washed the silverware. I saw the hollow space at the base of his throat. I imagined the skin against my lips.

  But later in the evening, Jack fell asleep in front of the television, and when I woke up, there was crying throughout the house.

  I’d been dreaming about Maddie, and now there was crying and maybe it was all a bad dream. The bedroom was dark. The sheets tangled around my legs. I kicked them off, stumbled to the door, and yanked it open.

  Then I was racing around the corner to the sound, to Maddie, and there was Jack, sitting up slowly on the couch, dazed, his eyes trying to focus through the haze of sleep.

  And there was Tom Selleck on the television screen, holding a howling baby.

  Jack said, “Babe?” and my open palm slammed down on the remote so hard, the battery cover popped off, and I yelled, “Goddammit, Jack!”

  And then there was silence. Jack was wide-eyed. When he came over and put his arms around me, I leaned into him and found the hollow space at the base of his throat and pressed my lips against it.

  But all I felt was the pounding of my own heart, and all I heard was a crying baby that did not belong to me.

  This was the thing not just threatening to destroy us—it was destroying us.

  I climbed out of bed, careful not to wake Kat, and tiptoed into Jessica’s room.

  She was normally a deep sleeper, and I was thankful when I found her snoring lightly. One less casualty of tonight’s war.

  I sat on her bed and stared into the darkness of the doorway across the room, empty of her things now: the changing table replaced with a file cabinet; the crib packed away in the basement; a desk with a calendar hanging above it in its place. As if to say, Look, see? Time goes on.

  I drove Kat to school the other day, and as I pulled out of the drop-off area, I saw a class of preschoolers gathered around a teacher. I circled around and parked in the visitor space and studied each one of the girls, wondering if Maddie’s hair would have been long like the girl with the polka-dot raincoat. What sneakers would she have liked? Would her eyes have stayed the same deep blue? Would the birthmark on her tummy have faded? I sat in the car, paralyzed. Not able to move. Sometime later, I drove away. This was my life now. Time unaccounted for. Days lost.

  I used to write. It was what I was doing when she died. We’d gone to the grocery store. By the time we got home, she was cranky and hungry. I settled her in the high chair and she pushed macaroni around on the tray, every third one making its way to her mouth, while I put the groceries away. Jack called at lunchtime, and I put the phone to her ear and watched a gummy smile spread across her face at the sound of Daddy’s voice.

  We cleaned up, and after I changed her diaper, I gave her a kiss and hugged her tight. I remember thinking I could just sleep with her in the rocking chair, but my column was due and her nap was my only writing time. I put her in the crib, under the small soft blankets. There were more than usual, but she started to fuss when I tried to take some of them out, so I let her be. Kat had climbed in the crib that morning and let Maddie cover her with stuffed animals and blankets. I didn’t see the harm in letting her nap among the extra baby blankets.

  I remember making a cup of tea and settling at the kitchen table. I’d joined Parent Talk magazine more than a decade ago as a staff writer after doing freelance work for years. Jess had just started full-day kindergarten, and the local office in Portsmouth was full of women, mostly my age, balancing work with raising children—just what I was looking for after the solitude of freelance work.

  But even after ten years, my bad habit of finishing my column at the deadline hadn’t changed.

  After fifteen or so minutes of writing, I went to her doorway and looked around the corner. She was busy pushing blan
kets around the crib, babbling to herself. She was making a racket when her chubby hands hit the crib bars, but she was content, so I moved out of her line of sight. If she saw me, the crying would start for certain.

  My memory blurred from there on. I don’t know how much time passed before I went to wake her. I wouldn’t have wanted her to sleep past two o’clock, so maybe another half hour, but I don’t recall the exact time.

  I also don’t know if it was the color of her face or the lack of movement when I picked her up that made me scream. I’ve gone over it in my head more times than I can count, and all I remember is the metallic taste in my mouth and the sound of a train thundering in my head. I don’t remember the ambulance ride or the room where we waited or the hospital chaplain who held my hand.

  They found a quarter-size heart locket lodged in her throat. Jack and I had given the necklace to Kat for her birthday two weeks before. She hadn’t taken it off since.

  They’d jumped and played in the crib that morning. Kat’s necklace fell off and slipped in the folds of the blankets. It was Maddie who found it. I imagined the delight on her face when she found it. I pictured her sitting on her small bottom, her plump legs crossed in front of her and the necklace draped over her chubby hands, her fingers settling on the locket, a shiny heart of sparkling silver. She knew it was Kat’s.

  Had she brought the locket to her nose to smell it and give it a taste and it slipped down her throat by accident or did she get right to it, slamming the necklace in her mouth with both fists? Was she scared? How long had she struggled before she lost consciousness? What went through her mind in her last moments? These were only some of the questions I would never be able to answer.

  The only thing I knew was that as I sat writing on a clear nondescript day, my daughter died twenty-two feet away from me without calling my name or making a noise. I knew that in the middle of the afternoon, without any warning and within an hour, it was possible to lose your life.

  Those first months after she died were a blur. My mother flew up from Florida the day after we lost her. She stayed for two weeks, and then went back to Florida, to her own life. It was a process she repeated nearly every month. And somehow, the year passed and here we were.

  It seemed we were through the worst of it—I could breathe again, at least. I could open my eyes in the morning and take a breath without feeling like a slab of granite rested on my chest. I lost track of the number of days this past year, I simply closed my eyes again, let that crushing weight sink my body deeper into the mattress.

  Jack was the opposite. He got up every single morning—sun or rain or snow—and went to the boat. As if his sanity depended on it. And maybe it did. Perhaps in his own mind, putting one foot in front of the other suggested forward motion. Perhaps his inability to talk about any of it, to cry even, was the very thing that allowed him to get up and get moving.

  Not that his grief wasn’t as far-reaching as my own—it was. I saw it in the weary lines tugging at the corners of his eyes, and in the pounds melting off his already lean frame. But movement seemed to heal Jack, or at the very least, keep his mind occupied.

  There was a part of me that knew I deserted him, left him to his own grief, his own way of dealing with it. He didn’t dwell on the moment like I did. He didn’t obsess over how things might have gone differently. How she’d still be here if I hadn’t been writing, if I hadn’t given Kat the necklace. Stop, he’d say to me, with his hand up, not wanting to listen. Not willing to live in a moment that was gone. Irretrievable. But I was still there, on that day, and we were moving farther and farther away from each other.

  I’d put life on hold for a year.

  I hadn’t been back to work since she died. My editor, Josie, kept the column filled with ads—she was giving me time, encouraging me to come back, insisting our readers missed the column. But when I sat down to write, I was back on that day. Had she called out for me, and I hadn’t heard her because I was occupied? Why hadn’t I checked her crib, knowing that Kat had played in there? There must have been some noise . . . some indication of her struggling. Why didn’t I have a video monitor?

  These weren’t just random thoughts. They were comments posted online after the local news ran a short article about her death. The article wasn’t specific—just the facts—her name, age, a short blurb about how choking was the cause of death. One sentence revealing she had been put down for a nap in her crib and was found unresponsive by her mother. At the end of the article was a Comments link. I’d clicked on it. I can’t say why. Perhaps only because the link was there. I’d stumbled across the article as it was, only online for the first time in weeks to send my coworkers at Parent Talk an email thanking them for the dinners that showed up on our doorstep every night.

  Jack had walked in the room and found me wide-eyed at the computer. He leaned over my shoulder, glanced at the screen. Internet scum, he growled, and yanked the power cord from the wall so hard, the pins on the plug bent at odd angles.

  I waited until the following day, when Jack was at work, to turn on the computer again and search for the article. I scrolled down to the Comments section.

  Most were condolences, well wishes, an occasional OMG! or Devastating!

  Then there were the others. Not many. Enough, though. Enough to confirm every fear, every voice in my head.

  Where was the mom? Ever hear of a monitor??? Video monitor maybe?! Morons!

  Sh*tty parents! NOTHING should EVER be in crib to choke on! WTF-they desrve everything they got! Poor baby!!!!!Wouldn’t happen in my house!

  Nice parenting-NOT. RIP sweet baby!!!!!!!

  I hadn’t written since that day.

  When I got on Jack for working so many hours, he’d look at me like I was living in some imaginary world where mortgages didn’t exist.

  We’d taken out a second mortgage last year to renovate the Salt House, a dilapidated farmhouse across town passed down to us from Jack’s grandfather. Nothing to look at except for the view. Water as far as the eye could see. The view at our house now wasn’t anything to shrug off, but the street was busy, full of triple-decker homes built almost on top of one another.

  We were supposed to be living in the Salt House now. The plan had been to rent out this house and move across town once renovations were complete.

  But I hadn’t been back since she died.

  There wasn’t an inch of the house that didn’t remind me of her. The screen porch where Jack and I had made love. The bathroom upstairs where I’d peed on a stick and watched the plus sign appear while Kat and Jess played on the lawn below. The sunflower garden in the backyard, where she’d crawled while I weeded and pruned.

  Jack had been patient, given me time. But our savings were gone. The money we’d taken out to renovate the Salt House was gone—we were close to finishing the renovation before she died—and we were paying two mortgages now. I’d mentioned putting the Salt House on the market months ago. Letting someone else finish the renovation. He’d looked at me, and the look on his face made my cheeks burn, my insides twist.

  But we were out of time, and money.

  Over the years, I’d built up a handful of women’s magazines I contributed to on a regular basis—articles for Ladies’ Home Journal, Family Circle, Glamour, and SELF. Tips on how to lose the baby weight, or the best places to vacation with toddlers in tow. But I hadn’t taken a freelance job since she died.

  And even though my work at Parent Talk clocked in at typically less than twenty-five hours a week, it was twenty-five hours’ worth of income that had disappeared from our weekly budget. For more than a year.

  Josie had called last week and asked, in a gentle tone, if I was thinking about ideas for the column. I told her I’d have something for the September issue, and apologized again. She’d shushed me, telling me the column wasn’t going anywhere. I’d felt my face flame anyway, feeling as though I’d been taking advantage of our relationship.

  Josie and I had grown close over the years we worked
together. She had four boys and often said, with her formidable stature—she’d been captain of the volleyball team in college—and penchant for chaos that a house full of boys suited her just fine. But after too much wine one night, she’d admitted she and Cal had tried for a fifth, and she’d miscarried. And now they were done trying. Four children, all healthy, was more luck than she could ask for, she’d said, with a wistfulness in her voice. When she’d excused herself to the bathroom, her eyes were wet as she left the table.

  I knew they’d been trying for a girl. I saw the way she ran her fingers absentmindedly through Kat’s hair when she stood near her. She brought the girls gifts when she visited the house: hairbrushes with their names written on them, tiny barrettes Kat would let Josie put in her hair (forget it if I tried). She’d taken pleasure in buying clothes for Maddie, and I knew when we lost her, Josie felt as if she’d lost one of her own. And I knew our friendship blurred the lines when it came to my job.

  I said this to her on the phone, admitted I felt guilty, and told her I would understand if she wanted to ask someone else to write the column. But she’d refused. Our readers don’t want someone else, she’d said. Our readers want you.

  I didn’t argue with her. I wanted to write the column. I hadn’t wanted to stop writing the column. But the words wouldn’t come. I’d sit at my desk, the screen blank and the cursor blinking at me. Sometimes, I’d sit for ten minutes before I gave up. Other days, hours. In the back of my mind all those voices rising up. Who are you to write a parenting column?

  What sort of mother doesn’t notice a necklace in her daughter’s crib? What kind of mother doesn’t know her child is choking twenty-two feet away from her?

  I’d written the first column years ago after Josie and I went to lunch and I told her how, the night before, Jess had lost her tooth. Kat had been up teething all night. I’d spent the night rocking her in the chair, and when I woke up, morning had come but the tooth fairy hadn’t. I had only stray change in my purse, and when I tiptoed into Jess’s room to leave the money under her pillow, the coins clanged as they slid from my hand to her mattress. Jess opened her eyes, and even though my hand was already out from the pillow, I saw she heard them fall from my hand. I saw she knew what it meant too.