The Moment Between

by Nicole Baart

  Hailey was born on March 14, 1986, while Halley’s Comet passed overhead, glazing the night sky with a tepid stroke of glittering light.

  It was the first clear night in nearly two weeks and the first decent chance that anyone who cared to observe the comet from the Bennetts’ little corner of the world could do so with relative success. For the rest of her life, Abigail would remember the night as if it had been forever preserved, full-color and high resolution, in a carefully maintained and easily accessible part of her mind.

  There was the almost-tangible excitement that hovered over the house all day—Melody was infatuated with the celestial sighting and, eight months pregnant or not, couldn’t wait to attend a midnight viewing of the starry spectacle. There was the scent of melting snow, the early spring runoff that had lulled Abby into believing that it was much warmer outside than the thermometer indicated; her resulting sniffly nose caused Lou to shoot her glances that were less than adoring. And then there was the special supper—chicken kiev and brown sugar glazed carrots, Lou’s favorite—that was immediately forgotten the moment Melody groaned.

  Abby was jarred from her plate by a quick and stabbing fear. Melody was white, as white as the dirty trail of the comet light that she longed to see, and trembling.

  “Mel?” Lou dropped his fork and reached for her.

  “I think it’s time,” Melody managed. Her lips were blanched and wilting on her startled face, but she managed to direct a shaky smile at Abby.

  Lou didn’t question his wife and he didn’t waste a single second. He threw himself back from the table and raced for the hospital bag that Melody had leisurely begun to pack. She was just under four weeks from her due date, and the urgency with which Lou pulled things together was filled with the intensity of the omitted three weeks of waiting, wondering, and worrying.

  From her vantage point at the kitchen table, Abby could see her father reflected in the bathroom mirror. Toothpaste and dental floss went into the duffel bag but no toothbrush. Lou grabbed the understated tube of petal pink lipstick that Melody only rarely wore but not the stout bottle of Oil of Olay that she smoothed on her cheeks every morning and night. Glasses but not Melody’s contact case or soaking solution. Perfume but not deodorant.

  Abby watched him unswervingly until little black dots appeared at the edge of her vision, and she realized that she had forgotten to blink or breathe. Then she gasped and remembered why Lou was frantically filling a bag. When Abby looked at her mother, Melody was sitting very still and upright, and her eyes were closed. Abby slid away from the table to rush to her mom and tuck herself under one of those warm and comforting arms.

  Skidding across the pockmarked, hardwood floor, Abby stopped when she saw the alarming glare of reflected light off the pool of dark water beneath Melody’s chair.

  The following minutes melted into a hot and simmering interlude in Abby’s otherwise-perfect memory. She felt a swell of emotion, a panicky tightening in her throat that made her swallow hard even decades later whenever the moment was unearthed. Even when she learned that nearly every childbirth was filled with the same sudden uncertainty and potential darkness, Abby remembered the look on her mother’s face and the water beneath the table and stifled a shiver.

  Abby was shuffled around while Lou and Melody sped to the hospital. Lou had deposited his daughter on their neighbors’ front porch and unceremoniously entrusted her well-being to their good graces; Melody was waiting, pale and vulnerable, in the backseat of the car—what else was he to do?

  “We have to go,” Lou spat out as if it was enough of an explanation.

  Mrs. Manning wrapped a kind arm around Abby in an inexact facsimile of the gesture Abby had wanted from her mom. The older woman waved Lou away and promised they’d be fine, but the first thing she said to her husband when the front door was firmly closed behind them was, “We have card club tonight. We’ll have to bring her somewhere else after supper.” Turning to Abby, she said, “Can we drop you off at a friend’s house, honey?”

  Together, Mrs. Manning and Abby collected her pajamas, toothpaste and toothbrush, and a change of clothes for the morning. Then the Mannings drove Abby to Heather’s house (no one was home), Cara’s house (Cara had the flu and her parents didn’t want to spread it around), and finally Tanya’s house, where Abby was

  somewhat warmly welcomed into the chaos that invariably ensued when five children under the age of ten lived under the same roof.

  “I’ll call the hospital and have them let your parents know where you are,” Mrs. Manning assured Abby as she handed her the plastic grocery bag that contained her overnight things. Then she even gave Abby a quick, awkward hug and a kiss on the forehead, as if Abby were a dear niece instead of the little girl she barely knew.

  Tanya was ecstatic about the arrangement. She dragged Abby to the room she shared with her younger sister, skipping all the way and making Abby’s arm bob as she clung to her friend’s hand. Newborn siblings were no longer enchanting as far as Tanya was concerned, and she glazed over the reason for Abby’s appearance on her doorstep as if it didn’t exist. Abby was left feeling jumbled and tired, and though curling up on Tanya’s bed was the most inviting scenario she could imagine, the night had already been planned without her consent.

  “Since it’s Saturday tomorrow, Daddy said we could stay up late and watch the comet!” Tanya informed Abby with a grin.

  While Abby should have been thrilled that she would be able to see Halley’s Comet and recount it in perfect detail for her mom, something in her balked. Seeing Halley felt wrong somehow. It felt like a betrayal of her mother. They were supposed to have enjoyed seeing the comet together—before the baby was born, before everything changed. Abby might have been young, but she felt the once-in-a-lifetime weight of what they had missed.

  Much later, when Abby’s stomach was sour from homesickness and Tanya’s enthusiasm had worn thin with exhaustion, Tanya’s father bundled his kids plus one into their new minivan and drove out of town. They turned off the highway onto a narrow gravel road and followed it until the light pollution of town was lost behind the gentle slope of a rolling hill. Here they got out, everyone except for the littlest, who had fallen asleep with her cheek pressed implausibly against the cold window.

  Abby curled into herself as much as possible and felt the brisk night air sweep over her winter coat and razor through her cotton pajamas. They were a two-piece set, with plaid bottoms and a long-sleeved shirt that sported a matching plaid ruffle along the bottom and at the cuffs of the sleeves. Across the chest were the words Daddy’s Girl. The gift tag had told Abby that the pajamas were a Christmas present from Lou, but she knew that Melody had done the shopping and wrapped the gift. It was Melody who tried hard to orchestrate a relationship that refused to resonate in tune.

  Nobody was much impressed by the comet, even though it was heralded and pivotal, something they would most likely never have the chance to see again. But to Abby, who couldn’t begin to articulate what she felt, Halley left her oddly unsettled. Her mother was in the hospital. Their family would never be the same. Abby was too young to understand what it meant, but the irony of what her pajamas boldly declared pinched uncomfortably around her slender five-year-old shoulders.

  Worst of all, branding the sky above her was Halley. The comet was maybe lesser than Abby had expected, but it was significant all the same. It was bold and mysterious, special yet strange, and it moved leisurely through the darkness, shedding a dim but perpetual light.

  The room was beginning to sway.

  It didn’t spin, not exactly. It didn’t roll and tilt like it sometimes did when I was sick and my body rebelled against the pull of gravity—falling upward, floating, trying to fly. But the walls shimmered and I found myself slightly off-balance.

  I knocked my hip on the counter and was surprised by the jolt of pain that stabbed through the taut ridge of bone. I stumbled on my way to the sink and, reaching for something to steady myself, pulled the hand towel from t
he brushed bronze ring beside the counter. It fell almost gracefully.

  I wanted to sit down for a minute, but I couldn’t bring myself to reclaim the toilet seat, where I had collapsed when I first found her. Nor could I prop myself on the edge of the tub again. In fact, now that I had done what I could with her, now that I had held her, loved her, and washed her beautiful face, I discovered that I could not physically go back to her.

  But neither could I leave.

  “It’s time,” I told myself, steeling my nerves to dial the three numbers on my cell phone that would conclude the solitary, final moments that we had spent together. Final moments that were far from the hoped-for eloquence of farewell and more a fumbling attempt to simply endure. Survive. Go on.

  Could life go on?

  I couldn’t go forward and I couldn’t go back, so I knelt to do the one thing I was able to: I picked up the fallen towel. It was laced with multicolored lint and it smelled faintly of sour milk. It seemed wrong to hang up a dirty towel—jarring and indecent, as insulting as dirty underwear on an accident victim—so I found a clean one in the cabinet and folded it carefully to hang just so.

  There were cleaning supplies beside the neat stack of towels, and because I had to, because there was no one else in the world who could do it, I hauled them out one by one and began to perfect the bathroom that had become her mausoleum.

  The cleaning was nonsensical, and somewhere in the back of my mind I was fully aware of this. But it was also compulsive. I couldn’t stop myself. And as I played my part in the purification of her tiled tomb, the room felt momentarily solid again.

  I buffed away the fingerprints, scoured the toilet, and polished the sink fixture that curved like the neck of an impossibly flawless silver swan. I replaced the toilet roll. I swept her hair from the corners of the room and threw the curling filaments into the garbage can. Then I filled a little bucket with water and Mr. Clean and went to my knees to mop the floor.

  There were corners that hadn’t been touched in weeks and a fine film of sticky hairspray over everything. The slender lid of a tube of eyeliner was collecting dust behind the toilet. And lying next to it, I found an empty container of musky-smelling men’s deodorant. I was so thrown by the incongruity of the heady fragrance and the impossibility of it in her apartment that I shoved it to the bottom of the garbage can and attacked the floor with new vigor.

  My thumb began to ache from working over the black smudges that I assumed were from the pair of heels I had seen uncharacteristically abandoned by the couch when I first came to her apartment. I had almost looped my first two fingers around the inside curve of the heels to set them neatly by the door. But I had known enough to understand that the apartment was thick with something invisible and threatening. I had turned and walked toward her instead.

  How long ago had that been? Only minutes? Hours maybe?

  I never imagined it would end like this, with me kneeling before her, prostrate in some futile act of servitude that she would never know. I never imagined I would back away from her, my eyes fixed on the floor as I tried to erase what she looked like the very last time I would ever see her.

  When I reached the doorjamb, I found that I could back right over it. I was shocked by how much I wanted to. My knees sank into the carpet, and I finished the last foot of tile with my bare toes curling in the plush flooring. Then I dropped the rag in the gray water clouding the bucket and raised my arm to pull the bathroom door shut.

  She was there, across from me. Perfectly silent and eternally still. I could feel her presence as if she were pressing herself against me, as if she were waiting

  for me to wrap my arms around her and I was being the obstinate one. As if I was the one resisting her.

  I didn’t look at her. I closed my eyes and I whispered, “Good-bye.”

  After the door clicked shut, I leaned my forehead against it and listened to the sound of my own breath wheeze and fail and gasp in the hushed catacomb of the airless apartment.

  IV

  Gia’s Bakery and European Deli was nothing like Abigail had pictured. Maybe it was because she had grown accustomed to the sparkling newness of nearly everything in Rosa Beach, but she had expected a glass-fronted shop in a modern strip mall. She imagined something neat and brightly lit and filled with the occasional North-Americanized nod to assumed European stereotypes: a handwritten sign announcing a sale on Black Forest ham and a basket display with a well-arranged collection of Kinder Eggs.

  But Gia’s was nothing of the sort.

  As Abigail neared the address that she had so carefully researched and printed out in various routes and forms, the neighborhoods of Surrey, British Columbia, slowly began to deteriorate. Sprawling buildings with interesting architecture and trendy coffee shops on every corner gave way to low-lying stores and run-down houses covered in a fleece of soft, green mold. The mossy rooftops seemed almost primeval, as if BC merely suggested the facade of civilization. Beneath the surface, an elemental rainforest only just tolerated the presence of so many cars, structures, and people. Abigail couldn’t shake the feeling that the earth could rise up at any time and reclaim its own.

  The effect was only heightened when Abigail started to descend into the heart of the old city. Streets began to sweep downward in sharp diagonals that rivaled the hills of San Francisco. Through the shrinking buildings and side-street vistas, Abigail could catch the occasional glimpse of muddy water in the distance. The Fraser River. And beyond, lining the North Shore and sprawling all the way up and up into Alaska, were the mountains. They hovered, indigo and jagged with snowy peaks that lingered still as a reminder of the brutality of winter at seven thousand feet.

  It was against this backdrop that Abigail finally found Gia’s nestled beneath the steel girders of a small bridge crossing a tributary. The building seemed to sag against the corroded beams, and ivy clung to the rotting exterior like barnacles on the hull of an old ship. It was two stories tall but narrow and angled, exactly how Abigail imagined a centuries-old store in some undiscovered German village might look.

  The deli was so out of place amidst the industrial feel of the area that Abigail was sure for a minute that her eyes had been tricked. She blinked twice only to find that though Gia’s Bakery and European Deli was drooping ever downward, it did indeed exist. A wooden post outside supported a dangling placard that confirmed it: Gia’s, it simply said in a scrawling, ornamental font.

  Abigail parallel parked behind a rusty van and stepped out into the shadow of the building. A cool breeze filtered off the water and she felt her skin prickle, though she couldn’t tell if it was a result of the air or the beginning twinge of anxiety that was clawing its way up her throat.

  He’s here, Abigail told herself. Tyler is here.

  The thought nearly leveled her, and she leaned against her car for support.

  As she was collecting herself, the front door of Gia’s opened and an elderly woman with close-cropped curls walked out. The woman caught sight of Abigail and smiled. “They have the best Gouda, ja?” Her thick accent betrayed her immigrant status as she raised her paper bag in salute.

  Abigail nodded and hoped her smile looked sincere. Then she watched the woman fumble in a lumpy purse for her keys and finally get into the van. When the woman pulled away, Abigail’s Kia was the only vehicle left on the street. She was alone. Maybe she was alone with Tyler. Abigail had to ball her hands into fists to stop them from trembling.

  Now that she was on the threshold of actually seeing him, Abigail realized that she didn’t have a plan. Not a well thought-out one, anyway. What was she going to do? What was she going to say? Would Tyler recognize her?

  Abigail fought the urge to retrace her steps and instead put one foot in front of the other to approach the heavy, wooden door. If she didn’t go now, she might never work up the courage to follow through. She had come this far; she had to at least see him. Besides, standing beneath the silhouette of Gia’s felt like entering a fairy tale; maybe everything el
se would unfold with equal magic. Abigail crossed her fingers.

  The interior of Gia’s was everything that the exterior had promised and more. It was dimly lit and almost cavelike with a wide planked floor that was worn smooth from decades of traffic. Dutch-lace curtains shrouded the windows on the inside, and ivy leaves unfurled in layers of lush green on the outside. Best of all, the scents of fresh meat and pungent cheese lent an appealing acridity to the air. There was also the faint but lingering hint of baking bread, though the ovens that must have been busy throughout the morning were cool and empty now.

  Abigail didn’t see anyone right away, and aware that she should at least appear like she had business in the store, she walked absently to the meat counter. Trailing her fingers along the cold glass as if to ground herself, Abigail studied the fat wheels of foreign cheese and curled links of spicy sausages. At the end of the case was an aquarium, and Abigail approached it with some trepidation: the slithering forms amidst the murky water were not lobsters.

  Eels? Abigail stifled a gasp and backed into a little round table filled with embroidered towels. The table tottered and she spun to steady it.

  “Can I help you with something?”

  The voice came from above her, and Abigail had to cast around for a moment before she found him. Along the far wall was a curving staircase leading to a small, open loft. At the top of the steps stood a portly man with a large, red nose and thinning hair. His hair was either very blond or completely white. Abigail couldn’t tell which in the muted light. And she couldn’t decide if she was happy or disappointed that the man was not Tyler.

  Whoever he was, he was looking at her expectantly and obviously waiting for her to tell him about whatever friend of a friend had directed her to his unlikely store in the middle of suburban Vancouver. Abigail glanced at the meat counter to stall and wondered what exactly the woman outside had gushed about. Gouda? That was a cheese, right?