The nurse brought the baby back to the side of the bed. “Are you ready to hold her?” she asked Alissa, who gave the slightest shake of her head. I bit my lip.
“How about you, auntie?” the nurse asked me. “Would you like to hold her?”
I looked up at the nurse. “Yes,” I said, draping the washcloth on the metal bar of the bed. I reached out my arms, and the nurse settled Hannah, light as feathers, into them. I looked down at the tiny perfect face and felt the strangest emotion come over me. It slipped into my body and locked my throat up tight. I’d rarely related Alissa’s pregnancy to my own. That denial had been easy, since I’d blocked so much of my own experience from my mind. The baby I’d had didn’t exist for me. But suddenly, holding this beautiful little angel in my arms, I thought, This is the part I missed. This was the part I’d never realized I was missing and that no one must ever know that I missed. And as I pressed my lips to the baby’s warm temple, I cried the first tears ever for the empty place in my heart.
4
Erin
Raleigh
Michael set one of the boxes on the granite counter of my new, small kitchen. Through the window over the sink, I could see the sun disappear behind dust-colored clouds. The sky would be opening up soon with a late-summer storm. I was glad we’d gotten all the boxes in before the rain started.
“This is the last one,” Michael said, brushing his hands together as if the box had been dirty. He walked into the attached dining area and looked out the window with a sigh. “You’re way out in the boonies here,” he said.
I knew what he was seeing through that window: the sprawling Brier Creek Shopping Center. Acres and acres of every big box store and chain restaurant you could imagine. Hardly the boonies.
“It’s not that far,” I said, although it was a good fifteen miles from our house in Raleigh’s Five Points neighborhood.
“You don’t know anyone out here,” he said. “I don’t get it.”
“I know you don’t,” I said. “That’s okay. It’s what I want, Michael. What I need right now. Thanks for just…for tolerating it.”
He looked out the window again. The gray light played on his ashy brown hair, the same color mine would be if I didn’t lighten it. The color my roots were. I was really late for a touch-up, but I didn’t care.
“Let me be the one to live here,” he said suddenly.
“You?” I frowned. “Why?”
“I just…” He turned his head toward me. “I don’t like to think of you in a place like this. You’ve worked so hard on the house. You belong there.”
“It’s perfectly nice,” I said. “It’s new, for heaven’s sake.” I was deeply touched; he still loved me so much that he’d be willing to live in this bland little furnished apartment so I didn’t have to. But he didn’t understand. I couldn’t be in our house any longer. I felt Carolyn’s absence everywhere in that house. Her room, which I hadn’t walked into once in the four months since she died, taunted me from behind the closed door. Michael had actually suggested we turn her room into an exercise room! It was like he wanted to erase Carolyn from our lives. He found this apartment depressing. I found it safe, away from my old life. My Carolyn life. The friends and their children I could no longer bear to be around. The acquaintances I didn’t want to bump into. The husband I no longer felt I knew. I didn’t think my friends wanted to be with me any more than I wanted to be with them. They’d been wonderful in the beginning, but now they didn’t know what to say to me. I was a horror to them, a reminder of how quickly their lives could change.
“What do I tell people?” Michael asked. “Are we separated? Getting a divorce? How do I explain to people that you’ve moved out of the house?”
“Tell them whatever makes you comfortable.” I didn’t care what people thought. I used to, but everything was different now. Michael still cared, though, and that was the difference between us. He was still living in our old lives, where what people thought mattered and where he wanted to find a way back to normal. I’d given up on normal. I didn’t care about normal. My therapist Judith’s reaction when I told her that? “That’s normal,” she said, and the old me would have laughed, but I didn’t laugh anymore.
Michael gestured to one of the boxes on the stool by the breakfast bar. “This one says bedroom. I’ll carry it in for you.”
“Great. Thanks.” I watched him lift it into his arms. I used to love his arms, probably more than any other part of his body. He worked out every day and his arms were undeniably ripped. Michael was that rare combination of brains and brawn. “A geek with a great body,” one of my friends had once told me, when we were watching our husbands playing with our kids in someone’s backyard pool. Watching him now, though, I felt nothing.
I walked the few short steps to the living room windows and looked at the reassuringly unfamiliar landscape. Absolutely nothing to remind me of my bubbly and beautiful daughter. You want to run away, Judith had said when I told her my plan to rent this apartment. There was no accusation in the way she said it, although I knew she didn’t think it was a good idea. But she didn’t do the lecture bit like Michael did. “You might be able to run away from home,” he’d said, “but you can’t run away from what’s inside your head.” I’d wanted to slug him for saying that. I was sick of his advice and his finding fault in my own personal style of grieving. Never mind that I found plenty of fault in his. I had deep questions he simply couldn’t relate to. Mystical questions. Would I ever see Carolyn again? Was her soul someplace? I felt her around me. I heard her voice sometimes. When I asked him if he did, he said, “Sure” in a way that told me that he didn’t.
Michael came into the living room and stood next to me at the window. He put his arm around my shoulders and I felt the tentative nature of the touch. He no longer knew what I would welcome and what I would shrug off. Judith tried to get me to have some sympathy for him, but I was too busy having sympathy for myself. I had no energy to pay attention to what Michael needed these days. He’d turned into someone I’d once loved but could no longer understand. I knew he could say the same about me.
“I’m worried about you,” he said now. His arm felt too heavy across my shoulders.
“Don’t be.”
“I think it’s wrong for me to let you do this.”
“‘Let me’?” I walked away from his arm and sat down on the sofa. It was uncomfortably firm, nothing like the big, cushy sofa we had at home. “What are you? My father?”
“When are you going back to work?”
“If you ask me that question one more time…” I shook my head in frustration. I’d tried going back to work. I’d lasted half a day. I made a mistake with a medication that could have cost a person his life and I took off my white coat, turned the order over to the other pharmacist, and walked out of the building without looking back.
“You’re going to sit here in this—” he waved an arm through the air to take in the combined living room/dining room/kitchen “—this place and ruminate. And that scares me, Erin.” He looked at me head-on then and I saw the worry in his eyes. I had to look away. I stared down at my hands where they rested flat on my thighs.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“You need to stop going over every detail of it the way you do,” he said, as though he was telling me something he hadn’t already said twenty times. “You have to stop asking yourself all the what-ifs. It happened. You need to start accepting it.”
I stood up. “Time for you to go,” I said, walking to the door. I’d moved into this apartment, in part, to get away from exactly this. “Thank you so much for helping. I know it was hard for you.”
He gave me one last frustrated look before walking to the door. I followed him, opening the door for him, and he leaned over to hug me.
“Do you hate me?” he whispered into my hair.
“Of course not,” I whispered back, even though there were moments when I did. I could honestly say he was the only man I’d ever loved and i
f anyone had told me we would one day fall apart the way we had, I would have said they just didn’t know us very well. But here we were, as fallen apart as we could be.
I opened the door and he walked into the hallway.
“Bye,” I said. I started to close the door behind him, but felt a sudden rush of panic and pulled it open again. “Don’t touch her room!” I called after him.
He didn’t turn around. Just waved a hand through the air to let me know he’d heard me. I knew he was in pain—maybe tremendous pain. But I also knew how he would deal with it. He’d invent some new video game or work on a repair project. He’d lose himself in activity. He certainly wouldn’t ruminate. He didn’t even know how. I had it down to an art. It wasn’t deliberate. It just happened. My mind would start one place—making a grocery list, for example—and before I knew it, I’d be going over every detail of what happened as if I were describing it to someone. Who was I telling it to inside my head? I needed to relive the details of that night the way an obsessive-compulsive person had to wash her hands over and over again. Sometimes I felt crazy and I’d make myself think of something else, but the minute I let my guard down, I’d be at it again. This was why I loved the Harley’s Dad and Friends group I’d found on the internet. It had been started by the father of eight-year-old Harley, a little girl who was killed in a bicycling accident. The group was full of bereaved parents I’d never met face-to-face but felt as though I knew better than I knew anyone. Better than I knew Michael. They understood my need to go over and over what had happened. They understood me. I spent hours with them every day, reading about their struggles and sharing my own. I actually felt love for some of those people I’d never met. I didn’t even know what most of them looked like, but I was coming to think of them as my best friends.
So, now I was safe. I was creating my own world, in a new neighborhood, with new friends in the Harley’s Dad group and a new apartment. I turned around to take in the living room, thinking my escape. But instead of the bland furniture and the small room, I saw a sky the color of black velvet and the long, illuminated ribbon of the Stardust Pier, and I knew that no matter how far from home I ran, that horrible night would always, always be with me.
5
Travis
Bella ran ahead of me on the beach and I watched the sandy soles of her feet flashing in the sunshine. Labor Day had passed and we nearly had the beach to ourselves. Bella’s brown hair flew behind her like a flag and her pink purse slapped against her side as she ran. She looked so free. I wished she could always feel the way she felt right this second. Free and happy. That’s why I brought her out on the beach today, so she could run and just act like a kid. My wrecked house was only a couple of blocks from the beach, and I usually brought her out here nearly every day, but we hadn’t been once in the week since the fire and she’d become this totally serious and confused little girl. Sort of like her totally serious and confused dad. Our lives had turned to shit overnight. I didn’t want her to know that. I didn’t want her to feel scared, ever. But she was no dummy. She knew everything had changed.
We were staying with one of my mom’s church friends, Franny, but it wasn’t good. She had a slew of grandkids running in and out of the house and a bunch of cats I thought Bella might be allergic to, and you could tell she was letting us stay there because it was the Christian thing to do but that we were in the way. Bella and I shared the sagging mattress of a pull-out sofa and I thought we were getting flea bites in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t like I could say anything about it. We didn’t have a lot of other offers and about three times a day, Franny asked me if I’d found a place we could move into yet. I had—a shithole of a trailer that sat in a row of other trailers along the main road. It was nothing but a one-room tin can, and a good nor’easter would probably send it flying down the street, but it was going to have to do. There was a double bed I’d let Bella sleep in and a futon that would work for me. I thought it was okay for little kids to sleep with their parents, but the books I’d read said it wasn’t cool once they were three or so. Bella was really good at sleeping in her own room at home. At Franny’s, though, we didn’t have much choice and anyway, Bella needed me close. I needed her close to me just as much.
If she asked me one more time when Nana was coming back, I didn’t know what I’d do. I told her Nana was in heaven and had to stay there and then she worried someone was keeping her in a locked room or something. So I explained about God and how heaven was a good place, but I got scared maybe I was giving her the message that dying was a good thing and I didn’t want her to start thinking she should die. Then she started asking me if I’d go to heaven and leave her. Franny told me I was overthinking the whole situation and making it too complicated. She said to Bella, “Your nana’s gone to sleep in heaven with Jesus and when you’re a very old lady, you’ll get to see her there again,” which seemed to satisfy Bella, or so I thought, until about an hour later when she asked me, “Can we go see Nana in heaven today?”
Man, I wished we could.
Mom hadn’t been perfect. She’d smoked and had diabetes and was overweight and didn’t take care of herself at all, but she’d loved Bella and she’d been happy to watch her while I worked. It turned out the fire was caused by some malfunction in the wiring behind the stove, so it wasn’t anything I could blame on my mother and I was relieved by that. I didn’t want to be angry with her now. I didn’t want that to be the last feeling I had toward her. Instead, I felt grateful. She gave her life for Bella. I couldn’t wrap my head around that—my fat, wheezy mom running into the burning house to save her. “God was working through her,” the minister said at her funeral, and even though God and I had never been on the best terms, I liked that thought. I was holding on to it.
I never realized just how much I’d come to depend on my mother. Now I was it for Bella and it scared the shit out of me. I had no job now. Couldn’t work with a kid to take care of, and no job meant no money. My boss found somebody else to finish up the work on those cabinets in the oceanfront house. There’d been about a hundred guys waiting to step into my shoes.
The thing that really sucked was that I’d been getting paid under the table for my work. That meant cash, and my most recent pay envelope had been in the house. Four hundred bucks, up in smoke. I’d had about a hundred dollars in my wallet when the house burned down. That was what stood between Bella and me and starvation now.
Ahead of me on the beach, Bella squatted down and picked up something I couldn’t see from where I stood. She ran back to me, holding it and her lamb against her chest with both hands. The lamb fell to the sand and when she bent over to pick it up, the object she was carrying fell, too, and I had to laugh.
“Need some help?” I asked as I walked toward her.
“I can do it!” she said as she picked up her lamb. By that time, I’d reached her and saw that the object was a huge pale gray whelk, the biggest I’d seen on our beach, and I’d seen some big ones over the years.
“Wow, Bella, you hit the jackpot.”
“It’s a whelk,” she said. She gave up trying to hold both the shell and the lamb and sat down on the beach instead.
I sat down, too, and examined the shell. Busycon Carica. It was nearly one and a half times the length of my hand and totally flawless, the interior the pale peachy color of a sunrise. I was so glad she’d found it. We’d been collecting shells on the beach since she was a toddler, but most of them had been ruined in the fire and now we were starting over.
“Do you remember what lived inside?” I asked.
“A snail!” she said. She sat cross-legged, gently touching the knobby shoulders of the shell with her fingertips.
“Right. An animal like a snail,” I said.
“That’s right.” Like me, she loved hearing anything about marine life. I felt my own father’s spirit inside me when I was on the beach with Bella, teaching her something. I’d hear his voice coming out of my mouth. I wish they’d had a chance to know
each other, my dad and Bella. They would have gotten along so well.
“It liked to eat clams!” Bella said.
“Very good. What else did it like to eat?”
She scrunched up her face, thinking. Her nose was a little pink. I’d forgotten sunscreen. “Scabbits?” she tried, and I managed not to laugh.
“Scallops.” She could never get that word right. Someday, she’d be able to and I’d miss the way she said it now.
She petted the shell like it was a puppy. “Is this the one, Daddy, where the boys turn into girls?” she asked.
I let out a little sigh. Franny was right; I gave this kid way too much information. She really didn’t need to know about hermaphroditic gastropods at age three. Almost four. I’d probably been seven or eight when my father gave me that bit of mind-boggling information.
“That’s right,” I said simply. “Should I put it in the bag and we can look for more?” Over my shoulder, I carried the canvas tote bag we always used for the shells we found.
“Okay!” She hopped to her feet and took off ahead of me down the beach. I followed a few steps behind, moving closer to the water to let it swish over my feet. There was one big difference between my dad and me, I thought. He’d been a plumber with his own successful business and he kept me fed and clothed. I might not have grown up rich, but I never went without. He didn’t fail me the way I felt I was now failing Bella. I wanted more than anything to be the kind of man who would make my father proud. I wasn’t doing such a great job of it right now.
Honestly, if Robin’s father had still been alive, I might have asked him for help. He had plenty of money. The contract he’d made me sign said I would never contact Robin herself—and I was still so pissed at her that she was the last person I’d turn to for help anyway—but I didn’t think her father would be cruel enough to turn his back on his own granddaughter if she was starving. Didn’t matter. He was dead. Mom had been an obituary reader, always checking to make sure her friends were still above ground. I’d felt kind of numb, hearing that he was dead. That man and I had never liked each other. The first time I held Bella in my arms, though, I sort of got where he was coming from. I felt this awesome need to protect her. I’d do anything to keep her safe. That’s all Robin’s father had been trying to do. Protect his daughter. I got it then, even if I still hated the dude.
The Good Father Page 3
