The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel

by Thea Goodman

  Clara screamed directly into his ear. The sound of a baby crying was considered torture; tonight he understood why. Tisbury’s drugs were wearing away. His head was beginning to pound. He hugged Clara, saying, “Daddy’s here,” and feeling totally preposterous. To wish your child asleep, to yearn for her to sleep more than anything else in the world, was the plight of parenthood.

  The sleep-training book they’d consulted when Clara was four months old had called letting the baby cry it out extinction, with no irony at all, with no admission that crying it out was a little death. Veronica and John hadn’t been willing when Clara was four months old, but they were planning to try it soon. In that stucco room, in a guilty reversal, John held Clara and rocked her, all the while wishing for extinction. Time thickened and stretched. A spiderweb dulled the plastic leaves of a fake plant on the dresser. Clara’s body grew heavier as he paced. He paused to examine the bruise on his forehead in the dresser mirror. A swollen purple lump muddied his hairline where he’d been hit by the ball. Clara began to scream, so he resumed pacing, his biceps aching. The bedspread was white chenille, the pillow mustard foam beneath a thin pilled cover. Finally Clara’s eyes almost rolled back in her head with exhaustion and closed. They snapped open once more—no!—and then shut.

  He waited a full fifteen minutes and then carefully, in a ridiculous mime of slow motion, placed Clara on the center of the bed. When he was sure she was down, he picked up the hotel phone and dialed his home number. Two hours had passed since Derek had left him at the airport. He had a tic in one knee that was trembling. He had to reach Veronica; it was a relief to get the machine.

  “Hi, it’s me?” he said, his intonation like a question. “Um … I’m on my way home. I should be there by … tomorrow, Sunday, by one, maybe more like two. I—I’m sorry I missed you. I mean, I keep missing you. Okay, see you soon. I’d put Clara on, but she’s sleeping. Okay—bye.” Despite his relief, he wondered where she’d gone. They never went out two nights in a row.

  He worried that it was too late: Ines must have told Veronica about Barbados. Or, and maybe this was worse, she had gone to Irvington. He stood up, paced the darkening room, and then dialed Irvington. His old number, the one he’d memorized in middle school, made him nostalgic. Muriel and Evan announced themselves on the machine. Why had his mother not changed the message? It had been nearly a year. The recording stopped and he breathed into the space after it, unsure what to say. Exhaustion pivoted to confusion. He hung up.

  Last he called Veronica’s cell. His stomach lurched when he heard her voice mail; she was someone who answered phones—they’d always shared this quality—who, despite all the technical deferrals to connection available, wanted to hear real voices, who always kept phones fully charged and ready to connect.

  Failing to reach her, he forced himself to lie down—gingerly, so as not to wake Clara. Outside, machinery hummed on the humid ground. Through the window he could see a rickety dolly overloaded with suitcases being wheeled across the tarmac by a man who looked too old for the job. A red duffel bag tumbled off and was left there; for several minutes, no one noticed or came to pick it up. For some reason, this gnawed at John: the stranger’s loss of hair gel and bathing suits and the possibility that they might never be recovered.

  * * *

  There were at least eight people in the operating room. Later, there’d been an entire additional body, twenty-one inches from head to curled toes in his arms. The nurse who was restocking the cabinet didn’t understand natural selection. How could these people have been entrusted to bring life into the world, to save life, when they failed to understand the concept of evolution? Clara had looked like John, and he was her protector. He’d held her there when the alarm sounded and an orange light flashed on her tiny pink hat. The woman who was restocking the cabinet dropped a box and ran to the orange light, to the room where Veronica was hemorrhaging. There was something primal and also futuristic in the rhythmic noise, the sound of an emergency. He was now a father. The family he’d come from was gone. His sister was overseas; his father was dead; his mother remained, circling a poorly heated stone house alone. How innocent Veronica and he had been to presume they could make another family. It was not something you could plan or count on but merely a happy accident. The orange light continued its assault, burnishing the dry white space. Abruptly, the alarm stopped. Veronica had not yet held her daughter. Maybe she never would.

  * * *

  He told himself he should sleep and he did for a while, the foul dreamless sleep of passing out. He woke perspiring heavily. Clara was whimpering. He picked her up and she howled. His head throbbed. Her body was too hot and also clammy to the touch. Her eyes remained closed as he tried to soothe her, but she was in a nocturnal rage, kicking and thrashing as he tried to contain her.

  Giving her a bath did not work. Wrapping her in a towel made her incensed; extinguishing the air conditioner enraged her. With each of his attempts to calm her, she expressed her extreme frustration with him, as if his willful good spirit, the fake cheer of a parent trying to calm a child, was wearying to her. Finally, he understood: She was hungry. She was very hungry. It had been four hours since she’d eaten and she was usually asleep by this time, but her wails were unmistakable. He fed her some Bajan formula—the goat milk had gone sour—and she was sated for an hour. Then the whimpering began again, a mournful sound drained of energy. The air conditioner had been on for a while and the room was cool, but Clara was hot. She was burning up. He gave her the medicine from the dropper and she greedily licked the sugar, then cried when he took it away. The fever broke in half an hour, but he looked at the bottle of medicine doubtfully. He would barely have enough to keep her fever down if it continued through the night and the next day.

  The few hours after she was calm peeled away until morning. She rested, then clung to him, alternately sucking vainly on his hand and clenching down hard on his fingers. He’d had little sleep; no dreams. The thin smell of exhaust permeated the cell-like room, as the heat of the sun increased. Clara lay limp in his arms as he hurried out to catch his plane.

  PART THREE

  NEST

  14

  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

  Veronica

  The clean, easy commuter’s step off the train, that dangerously wide gap between the car and the platform, delighted her. Off she flew, buoyed by the egg sandwich and the teenage lovers. The town itself, its extreme cleanliness, the permanence of its Wing Cleaners and Stride Hardware, flooded her with nostalgia. The now-stronger skunk smell had been hovering there for a decade, since John had first introduced her to his family; she had become his family. Yet as Veronica walked down the steps to the lone taxi, she noticed her hair was still damp from Damon’s shower. She got in the taxi and leaned forward to tell the driver the address.

  The young couple in blue fleece stood on the platform under floodlights and kissed goodbye; the girl pulled away first, offering him a handshake, which made them both laugh. After this strange night, vision was returning to her again, as it hadn’t for months.

  The driver took Oak and then turned uphill onto Willow. They passed John’s Georgian brick elementary school, the soccer field and seesaws, and then the brown shingle house with its legend of a suicide. Beside her in the dark, another cab carried the man in the pin-striped suit from the train, who was squeezing the bridge of his nose.

  She would console John. She had changed but was not devoid of memory. The October before Clara was born, they’d had a tiff at the community garden on East 2nd Street when Veronica had wanted to go to eat with the vegan gardeners at somebody’s apartment and John had whispered, “It’s going to be terrible. Trust me. The whole thing reminds me of my parents’ awful potlucks in the seventies,” an analogy that had only intrigued Veronica.

  “But I’ve never been to a potluck,” she quietly persisted. “They’re farming on a roof in the East Village! How amazing is that?” She held a pamphlet about the collective’s f
all harvest and gazed up at the third-floor rooftop where she imagined the last of summer’s overripe yellow tomatoes dangled above Second Avenue.

  “You go alone if you want. I have work to do.”

  She kissed his palm. “But I want to be with you.”

  They were startled by a clap of thunder. It started to rain. Without discussing it further, they hopped into a cab and slammed the door. John gave their home address. Veronica glared at him. She simmered for a minute, then looked out onto the blur of the Bowery, letting it go. He wrung his hands, as he sometimes did, but then one hand sort of fell into her lap and idled there, lolling between the silk skin of her bare knees.

  They’d kissed silently throughout the ride. They’d had to say nothing, mute as they were with lust, as they pushed their way into the cramped Crosby doorway, into the small elevator and the apartment itself, finally lying down on the Tibetan rug.

  Rain gushed in through the open windows, soaking the freshly painted sills. Earlier the same day, she’d experienced an odd twist within her, an aching little pop on the right side of her belly, and knew, since she’d been waiting for such a thing, that she’d ovulated. The conception was that deliberate and that accidental.

  The storm, the broken late-fall heat, the difference of opinion, had created their daughter. Maybe if it hadn’t rained that night, forcing them into that backseat, if the weather had remained humid and stagnant and they’d walked instead or eaten with vegans, but they hadn’t.

  They’d held each other for a long time before separating, and they’d been happy and had drunk some white wine in little water glasses while they lay on the rug. A fluttering haze sifted through her whole body like a purr. She’d never felt anything so dynamic and fleeting as the very first moments of conception.

  “Can you really feel something like that?” John had asked. His eyes remained serious; his smile betrayed his skepticism.

  “I’d like to think you can,” she’d answered.

  He didn’t question it again.

  In the chilly cab in Irvington, she watched the tree air freshener spinning from the rearview mirror; she had done something that jeopardized everything.

  The taxi progressed uphill to the Reeds’. Nine months after that rainy, fateful night, when she had finally been pushing, Muriel’s face appeared in the doorway, a reminder that her own mother would not come in. Annalena had been embroidering somewhere, Veronica had been told, some tight concentration of threads that only she could see the beauty of. It would be a comfort to see Muriel now.

  The cab pulled into the Reeds’ driveway. Muriel’s pearly-white hybrid was parked nearby. Veronica paid the driver and closed the door, shivering in the crisp night.

  She crunched her way over the gravel drive, trying not to make too much noise, because it was late, already twelve-forty-five, and the house was sealed and darkened for the night. At the front door, she considered knocking but refrained. She didn’t want to wake them up. In the thin winter air, she inhaled with relief: Clara with her oat–almond sweetness was inside, asleep.

  She checked the back door, searching under the mat for a key, but there was none. Making her way to the side of the house, she decided she’d climb through the window. She crossed the backyard, where John had told his parents he was leaving his career as a journalist. She hadn’t been entirely sure of his decision—he was doing well as a writer—but she wanted him to be happy. Someone else’s happiness—his and then, later, Clara’s—had become as important as her own.

  She had betrayed them in the individual days, sometimes only in a minute here or there, in the months of her frequent absence. But tonight’s singular event was, if not entirely accidental, perhaps necessary. It was Damon who had revived her passion and her perspective. He had returned her to John.

  It was hard to open the living room window. Muriel had put the storm windows on and they’d frozen in place. Veronica pushed with all her effort, grunting a bit in the cold. She looked up to John’s window and imagined the outline of the portable crib aligned near his old twin bed. She threw a pebble up at the window, a gesture from the movies. Nothing.

  She pressed her knees together, then, desperate, undid her jeans and let urine steam into the snow. Finished, she moved around to the back of the house to what Muriel called the “sunroom.” She easily pushed in one of the screens on the porch surrounding it and then opened the door to the living room, which Muriel often went in and out of to get firewood.

  The comforting woody smell was in the house, and a small ember spit in the fire. Later she’d wonder why she hesitated. After two interminable days of waiting, she didn’t run up the stairs. Instead, she lingered there in the sunroom on a wicker sofa, reading about heirloom tomatoes in an ancient issue of The Learning Annex. Soon she would get up to take a peek at John and Clara, and then she’d sleep on the sofa with the wood smell. They could discuss everything tomorrow, why he had not called, what he was truly angry about. She flipped through to the end of the leaflet, and then it hit her.

  She catapulted herself to the stairs and mounted them quickly, then moved down the hallway past her own wedding portrait, in which she’d smiled so hugely her face looked like it might break, for she had known, finally, what people were talking about when they said they knew someone. Heart pounding, her hand on the knob, she entered John’s boyhood room.

  Gray shadows danced above the white Lucite built-ins on the far wall. The twin bed was smooth, royal blue, and unruffled. She scanned the room quickly for the crib, as if it might be tucked in a corner, the baby sleeping safely inside, but the room was empty. She took two steps back into the hallway, where the grandfather clock ticked loudly. Incredulous and tearful, she went back into the room and opened his closet, as if to find not him, not Clara, but some sign of who he was. Who was he? Nothing but a faded Betty Blue poster secured under a plastic basketball hoop peered at her from inside the door.

  * * *

  Sleepless, Veronica had risen from the couch at some unknown hour and rummaged through the powder room for some of Muriel’s melatonin. There was none. Instead, she opened her purse—the giant purse held everything—and found a sample from Lancelot Drugs, John’s new sleep aid that was still in trial. She swallowed one of the blue pills without water. Waiting for it to kick in, she paced the living room, pausing to pick at the wax in a dark-green candle. She decided she couldn’t wait, even if she was going to wake them up, and called the apartment—they must have crossed paths; she and John must have been on two trains heading in opposite directions at the same time—but she got the answering machine. There was one message from John saying he was on his way home and sounding faintly desperate and out of breath. The phone in her hand, Veronica lay down on the couch and drifted off to sleep.

  In the morning, she heard Muriel padding down the stairs. She rose from the sofa, fixing her tangled hair with her fingers and wiping her eyes. They met at the foot of the steps. Muriel screamed.

  “I’m so sorry, forgive me,” Veronica said, and reached to embrace her mother-in-law.

  “What are you doing here? I mean, I don’t mean it like that, but you scared me!” Muriel wore a hot-pink velour robe and drew a thin hand over her breast. Her shoulders trembled.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I got here when you were asleep.” There had to be an explanation. Muriel had to know where John was.

  “Oh gosh, no, I mean, I wasn’t expecting you. What are you doing here?” Muriel said. “When did you get here?”

  “John didn’t tell you…” Veronica began, but it was now clear he’d never been here.

  “Is everything okay?” Muriel asked.

  Veronica lowered herself to the foot of the stairs. Her head was thick and gauzy from the sleep aid, her speech slow and deliberate. “No. I don’t know. What time is it?’ The air seemed cosseted, lined in cotton. They were miniature figurines inside a dollhouse.

  “Noon already. Just past.”

  “Oh my God.” She hadn’t slept this late s
ince high school.

  “I’ve been awake doing the crossword,” Muriel said. She fluffed her gray hair, assuming the role of the strong one as Veronica wilted. She stood up and fell into her mother-in-law’s pink caftan, her lanky but totally secure arms. She looked up into Muriel’s face and saw John’s light-brown eyes, so similar that she even recognized the same black fleck in the left one. The uncanny miracle of heredity.

  “Tell me everything,” Muriel said.

  So Veronica told her about Friday, about the note, the nap, the terse affectionate messages, and then about Saturday, with its disquieting silence. Veronica looked up to Muriel, still somehow believing that this woman, a born nurturer, a teacher of small children, would have an answer for her.

  But Muriel’s sudden rush, her air of emergency, her total ignorance about their whereabouts, scared Veronica. Quickly, Muriel went to the kitchen, rummaging for the car key, while Veronica—still groggy from the effects of the sleeping pill—followed and stood at the butcher block, trying to decipher a Metro-North train schedule. “I think he went to Massachusetts, to Amherst. He must have. He’s had this weird idea for months of visiting his alma mater and taking the baby with him.”