The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel

by Thea Goodman

  “I checked the mail as I was leaving and the passports were there. I didn’t have tickets,” he said, “before.”

  Veronica lifted her face. John and the window behind him blurred through her tears. “Oh my God.” She covered her mouth with one hand and shook her head.

  “I don’t know. I just went.”

  “I’m her mother.”

  “I didn’t plan it.”

  “It doesn’t matter where I am; I know where she is—I know. I follow her whole day, her whole night, what she eats. When she wakes up from her nap. Everything! I do it! You don’t do it. It’s me.”

  “It’s not only you—I go in there every night and check on her. I promise you, I took care of her.”

  Veronica’s skull felt like it was simmering, lifting apart. “You go in there every night and wake her up when she’s sleeping. You think that’s checking on her?” She tore off her black sweater and threw it to the floor. The heat in the room, the heat within her, had become unbearable.

  “I go in to make sure she’s breathing! All right?”

  “So that makes it better? You think you’re like me? I go through the day and imagine her every minute, call Rosemary to ask about icing carrots for her gums and call back to tell her to make sure they’re organic, and then hang up and think about how they can’t be baby carrots, because she could choke on one and how they have to be full-sized carrots! Call again to ask what’s in her diaper, hear about a reddish tinge, wonder if she had somehow ingested beets and worry that it’s blood. You’re proposing that you go through your day doing this too? Wondering about her stool when you should be working? I’m her mother. You go away and forget. You have your needs. You are paramount. To you. I don’t have needs anymore. Do you even get that? I don’t know if I am hungry or tired. I have no idea. I don’t need a single goddamn thing!”

  She tore out of the room and down the hallway. Reaching the stroller where Clara slept, Veronica bent down and touched her forehead. It was burning up.

  “That’s total bullshit,” John said, rushing after her. “You don’t need a thing—you never think of yourself, is that what you’re saying?”

  She picked up the baby. “She’s on fire.”

  “You never think of yourself? Then what the hell were you doing when she was two months old? What would you call that? Excellent parenting?”

  “The Tylenol’s above the microwave, up in that cabinet.” Her tears started falling and she wiped them away. “You know I’m sorry. We’ve been through this,” she said quietly. “Hurry up.”

  “But, see, we haven’t been through it. Not really,” he said, as he cracked open the seal on the tiny pink bottle.

  “I fucked up. But I’m not a terrible mother.” Finally, accidentally, she had asserted it. She did not have to wait for his verdict. “Please. Don’t turn this into something else.”

  “It’s not something else. Can’t you see? It’s all one thing!”

  Veronica stood and swayed with Clara’s hot, limp body in her arms. She stared into the stroller for the beloved lamb. With her free hand, she rummaged nervously under the stroller pads, then looked for it in the basket beneath the stroller, but the lamb was gone.

  “You kidnapped her,” she said, almost laughing with incredulity. She caught a drip from her nose with the back of her sleeve.

  “I should have told you where I was.” Veronica cradled Clara and, with her pinky, opened the baby’s mouth. John administered the medicine.

  “Okay,” she said. She didn’t know what to do with the impossible new information. He had acted without thinking, just as she had.

  “Meanwhile, you’ve been fucking impossible,” he said, renewing their argument.

  “Art told me you think I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do. You think I’m a crazy bitch. And because of that—your own unfair characterization—that justifies … You said she was okay. How long has she had a fever?”

  “She had a low one last night and some diarrhea.”

  “Were you even going to tell me that?”

  “I was going to—I haven’t had a chance. I know it was strange, leaving, I know, but it was also kind of extraordinary.”

  “Extraordinary?” She noticed that his eyes danced and shimmered, until she started to move toward him. With her free hand, she grabbed a pillow off the sofa and swung it at him. She felt his unshaved face against her palm, his nose and his oily hair. He shielded himself with his arms. A great lash of fire whipped up and through her, propelling her toward him. She yanked at the neck of his T-shirt and held on.

  “Extraordinary! Wow. It was extraordinary to lie to your wife and take your baby to a foreign country without telling her?” He looked at her hand on his shirt. “And now she’s sick?” She hadn’t had this much energy since she was pushing, trying to get Clara out into the world; like a tidal wave her whole body was washed and lit.

  Yet before she could say any more, a feeling of sheer defeat gripped her; in that effort, despite that singular energy, she’d failed. She let go of his shirt, walked across the room to get the thermometer and take the baby’s temperature. The thermometer beeped and read 101. It wasn’t as high as she’d guessed.

  “You were sick and overtired and I thought you’d needed to rest for a long time. You needed a break. That’s all I wanted,” he said, as if their world were still cohesive. “I never wanted you to be hurt. I tried to protect you; even in the hospital I tried to do everything for you. I would do anything. Anything you want. I didn’t plan on going there.”

  She moved down the hall with Clara in her arms.

  He followed her to the door of the nursery and watched as she put the baby in the crib. Clara’s lack of protest was worrisome. “Listen. It’s me, Veronica.” He was standing, his nostrils flaring, his arms open, as if ready to capture her. “It’s me.”

  “Whatever that means. What does that mean?” She stood there, burning, fluttering as if a million birds beat their wings in her chest. She could have run in giant steps, scaling Manhattan, the earth. She could have flown. “Who are you?”

  * * *

  They were silent for what seemed like a long time. An old Snoopy digital clock John had salvaged once from Irvington made its loud click from one minute to the next. An impossible distance. Dust motes shivered around the air purifier near the window. An ambulance screamed. Two people walked by on the street and their conversation floated up: “Did he get the bacon?” one woman asked. The other assured her friend: “He did.” How Veronica wished they were talking about bacon.

  “I admit it must seem strange to you,” he finally said in a choked voice, a meager concession. But she wasn’t ready to comfort him.

  It was disconcerting how John wouldn’t look away, how he stared at her. Something hummed there between them like a moving painting, something that breathed when you didn’t expect it to. From the airing came a strange mutual relief.

  “I’m not crazy,” he said.

  “You left me,” she said, as if aware of it from a different angle.

  “That’s what Derek said.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “A friend.”

  When had he had a friend she didn’t know? “I suppose you went to Glittering Sands.”

  “I tried to, but they wouldn’t let me in.”

  Veronica shook her head.

  “Veronica,” he said, “listen.”

  “No, I will not listen to you!” She could not. She had to get away from him. But when she moved to go through the door, he blocked her path.

  17

  Sunday

  John

  He could not let her go. He had to tell her what had happened, how he’d finally understood, how valiantly he’d searched for goat milk. The dream of the white flower in her hair, the dialogue with his father: It was all fueled by love for her. “Where are you going?”

  “Away.”

  She tried to squeeze past him, under his arm, but he held her th
ere, prying her hand off the knob. He didn’t let go. Her wrist felt stiff in his grasp, like polished wood. She smelled clean, her hair freshly washed with some new shampoo.

  “Let me go, okay?” He heard a crack of fear in her voice.

  He held on to her. “I will not let you go,” he said. He needed to tell her everything. He felt her body grow tense beneath his hands. He looked at her white neck and wanted to nibble it; that used to happen so easily and was now so improbable. Lately she would never let him touch her. Now he could imagine it again; he could devour her.

  “Let me go, John, okay? Let go.” She spoke pleadingly, gently. He held on tighter, his fingers sinking into the flesh of her wrists. A softening had emerged in her voice; her words were peeled and alert. In this state, maybe he could reach her; maybe she could finally hear him.

  “No. I need you,” he said. He was too tired to think straight. For months she had been this way, withholding and unreachable. She was simply evasive because he was touching her, like she always was. His mind darted close to and then away from knowledge: She was leaving him. She would be gone, as he had feared the night of the birth, as he feared in the subsequent months of her coolness and removal. His mind was going to the darkest places. He took shelter in something simple: lust and the pleasant awareness of his size compared with hers. His relative power.

  “Please get off,” she said, almost formally this time, yet he thought he detected a break in her resolve. He pushed her securely against the frame of the door, pinning her with his hips. Her Botticelli face was raw, pale, and very awake.

  “Please, V,” he said. He kissed her chest near her collarbone, then her breast through the fabric of her tank top.

  “Don’t,” she said. He kissed her other breast, her clavicle. She had to let him. She stepped on his foot, which he felt was mildly encouraging—footsie—until she stepped again, hard, with the heel of her boot. The door frame held them there as his foot throbbed.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

  “You already did.”

  He pressed the top of his head into her neck, nuzzling and inhaling her.

  18

  Sunday

  Veronica

  What happened next was unexpected. A familiar scent rose up around her, warm and sweet. It was coconut oil, rich and intoxicating. She saw a smear of it on the neck of his T-shirt. She sniffed it. The triangular patch of light behind his head melted and broke open. She leaned closer to him as if into a darkening prism. Winter sunlight poured into the space of the doorway, warming the crown of her head, her hair. She stopped pushing him away. She breathed him in.

  Her body loosened in his arms. “Are you okay?” he asked. She couldn’t speak. Last night had been a mistake, an aberration. She nodded and pulled him closer to her. She was overcome quite suddenly by that fleeting, strange lover’s conceit that they were one and, having been unnaturally parted, they would—had to—connect. This was what was real.

  He pulled her back into the nursery with a proprietary hand on the nape of her neck and shut the door. “The baby!” she said, almost demurely, knowing that she wasn’t going to go to her, that instead she would have sex with her insane husband. His aggressive motions became tender. Down the hall, Clara cried out briefly. John opened Veronica’s jeans fast with one hand and traced a finger on the rim of her underwear, just above the scar. They were the lemon-yellow lacy ones, nicer than any underwear she’d worn for months, which she had put on Saturday morning a million eons ago. She felt him touch the edge of the panties, almost mournfully, before he yanked them down.

  She kissed him more deeply and he pressed his hands under her shirt, under her filmy bra onto her nipples, which hardened quickly beneath his fingertips. There was no time—the baby might wake up—but it was as if they were saying hello and goodbye at once, and it had to be at once, very fast and immediate.

  The sheepskin rug was soft beneath her. His white narrow hips were a delectable blade, a part of a machine, burrowing in, while his stubbly chin knocked at her jawbone and neck. Sorrow consumed her.

  “What is it?” He paused above her, sensing her distraction.

  “Nothing.” She swam in this warmth. His hair, the oil, his skin. Saturated yellow glowed beneath her eyelids. Yellow turned brighter and deeper into gold. The color seared through her like something electric, a flash of happiness.

  * * *

  The spell ended as quickly as it had begun. The golden hue was eclipsed by darkness. In the back of her throat she could still taste Damon’s licorice toothpaste. What had she done? She heard John say, “I’m sorry. What’s wrong?” Her cheek rested in his warm palm. She hesitated there. Despite all that had happened, the grave flight away from each other, the otherworldly delusions, he was holding her the way she had always wanted to be held.

  He caressed the brown curve of her hips. She saw him move back a bit, perhaps to gain perspective. She recognized the question in his face: Was this the last time, or had she forgiven him? He cupped her face in his hands. “You look so sad,” he said.

  “You have no idea—” she answered, as tears spilled from her closed lids.

  Clara woke up and cried in earnest. Neither one of them moved to get her.

  19

  Sunday

  John

  It wasn’t the baby but the telephone that roused them. “Don’t go away,” John told Veronica before rushing to answer the call, to stop the ringing and get rid of it—whoever it was—because he needed to return quickly to that sheepskin rug, while she was still there, while her great distress made her available. He picked up the kitchen phone.

  “Ines may be miscarrying again. She’s bleeding,” Art said, trumping them and their own domestic drama. Veronica, half dressed, rushed out of the nursery and over to the stroller, pushing it a few times until Clara settled down. You have no idea, she’d said. Now he’d lost his chance for discovery. “We’re at the hospital,” Art said, “and if you could come by—actually, if Veronica could come.”

  “Let me get her,” John said, and he motioned for Veronica to pick up the other phone. He recalled Art’s single-word response: WHAT? He was glad that he’d been temporarily forgotten.

  Veronica picked up in the bedroom. When she heard, she asked about the blood. “Was it bright red or brown?”

  “The second one, I guess,” Art said sheepishly. “She said it was like at the end of your period. I don’t know exactly.”

  “Good, that’s a good thing,” she said, though her voice wavered.

  The fear from the hospital—that long spell of uncertainty—returned to John. From the kitchen he watched Veronica through the open bedroom door as she quickly got dressed. She paused, hands on her hips, the phone in the crook of her neck, before she peeled off the yellow lacy underpants, replacing them with some white cotton ones.

  Art said, “They said it was too early for Braxton Hicks, whatever that is.” John didn’t know what it meant either. He didn’t know what any of it meant—how you could thoughtlessly have sex for decades with no repercussions, how the mysteries of biology could mean nothing to you and then, quite suddenly, dominate your life.

  “I’ll leave right now. Have you been seen yet?” Veronica asked.

  “Not yet. We’ll be here awhile. Ines said she wanted every test under the sun.” Art’s voice was stripped, sad, the way John had rarely heard it.

  * * *

  John hung up and found Veronica already fastening Clara onto her body. “Her fever’s down. Hopefully we’ll be back soon,” she said, rushing to the door.

  “Leave Clara here with me.” Ordinarily that’s what they’d do. It was close to her bath time and she’d been sick.

  “I just can’t,” she said, her face shrouded by her marvelous hair.

  “I’m coming with you, then.” He could not let her go. He followed her out the door. She adjusted the baby’s socks—made to look like Mary Jane shoes—as they rode down in the elevator. He’d been briefly optimistic, but Veron
ica was as distant, as she’d seemed on her first day back to work months ago, capable and clearheaded when faced with problems that weren’t her own.

  On the street, she let him hold her hand briefly as they walked to the corner, but then she removed it to fidget with the carrier. “It seems more serious than it is. They’re only going to the hospital because it’s a Sunday. On a weekday they’d just be sent to her doctor’s office,” she told him, thinking aloud.

  They jumped into a cab on Spring Street. As they rode uptown, they must have looked ordinary to anyone—a family of three heading out together on a Sunday afternoon. They had been that family, and all the while—through the unseasonably hot fall, through the darkness of winter, through the virtual weekend and the dream of escape—he had not fully known this.

  “Did Art know where you went?” she asked.

  “Art? He had no idea,” he said, unsure why he lied.

  “He must have,” she said, shaking her head.

  “He had nothing to do with it. If you’d let me, I’d tell you everything.”

  “Your mother definitely had no idea. She told me that story about you visiting the Sandlemans when you were little—she loves that story.”

  “She does,” he said, but Veronica had turned away from him to look out the window at the slush in Union Square. “I’m here,” he said, breathing into her shoulder, “in case you want to keep talking.” Briefly, she turned to him. “I missed you,” he said.

  “I missed you too.”

  The cab passed the dowdy restaurants on First Avenue where he’d eaten far too many meals, the mediocre pizza places and the bars patronized by hospital staff in dirty white lab coats; passed the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel and the endless rows of doctors’ offices with brass plaques until they were back at the hospital, back where Clara had been born.

  He liked feeling Veronica follow him out of the car and around the corner as they walked under the neon EMERGENCY sign and into the fluorescent waiting room.