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“Too trendy,” Clara replies, eyes never swaying from the frying pan or the hot water that falls into the stainless-steel sink from a faucet I’ve recently replaced. Our home, a turn-of-the-century Craftsman, is incessantly a work in progress. Clara wanted a newer home; I wanted one with character, personality. A soul. I won, though oftentimes—my evenings and weekends consumed with fixing things—I wish I hadn’t. “He’ll forever be one of three Jacksons everywhere he goes,” she says, and I relent to this, knowing it’s true.
I try again. “Brian,” I say this time, knowing I haven’t met a Brian in recent years who was younger than twenty-five. My Brian will be the only Brian who’s still a kid, while the rest are thirtysomething, balding businessmen.
She shakes her head. “Too conventional,” she says. “Might as well call him William or Richard or Charles.”
“What’s wrong with Charles?” I ask, and peeking at me with her grassy green eyes, Clara smiles. Charles is my middle name, given to me by my father, also a Charles. But for Clara this won’t do.
“Too conventional,” she says again, shaking her head so that ribbons of hair sway on the surface of the striped shirt, all the way down her back.
“How about Birch?” Clara suggests, and I laugh out loud, knowing this is the root of dispute: names like Birch. Or Finbar. Or Sadler, names she proposed yesterday and the day before.
“Hell, no,” I say, going to her and embracing her from behind, setting my chin upon her spindly shoulder, wrapping my hands around her bulging midriff. “My son will not be a Birch,” I assert as through the T-shirt the baby kicks at me: an in utero high five. He agrees. “You’ll thank me later,” I say, knowing how sixth-grade boys have a predisposition for picking on boys named Birch and Finbar and Sadler.
“Rafferty?” she asks, and again I groan, my fingertips finding their way down to the small of Clara’s back, where they press on those aching joints and nerves. Sciatica, her obstetrician told her, describing the softened ligaments that were causing pain, the shift in her center of gravity, the added weight. There was no doubt that Baby Brian was going to be a big boy, much bigger than Maisie—clocking in at seven pounds, eight ounces—had been.
Clara soughs at the pressure of my touch. It feels good, and yet it doesn’t all at the same time. “Isn’t that some kind of ribbon?” I ask, pressing gently on her back, seeing Clara’s meticulously wrapped holiday gifts all trimmed with red and green rafferty.
“That’s raffia,” she says, and I laugh into her ear.
“Need I say more?” I ask. “Raffia, Rafferty. What’s the difference?”
“There’s a difference,” she tells me knowingly, shooing away my hands from her back. She’s had enough of my massage, for now, but she’ll be back for more tonight, after Maisie is tucked in bed and Clara spreads drowsily across our mattress and begs for me to rub, directing my fingertips to the spots it most hurts. Lower, she’ll say, and To the left, sighing when together we’ve found the spot where little Rafferty’s head has lodged itself into her pelvis. She can no longer lie on her back, though the only thing in the world she wants to do is lie on her back. But the OB said no, that it isn’t good for the baby. Now we sleep with a body pillow pressed between us, one that takes up more space than me, and I know it’s only a matter of time before I find myself sleeping on the floor. Maisie has been wandering in, too, of late, concerned about her mother’s swelling belly, knowing that soon she’ll have to share her home, her toys, her parents, with a baby boy.
“Why don’t you sit down?” I say to Clara, seeing that she is tired and hot. “I’ll finish the dishes,” I say, but Clara won’t sit down. She’s stubborn. It’s one of the many things I love about her.
“I’m almost done,” she tells me as she continues to scour that frying pan.
And so instead, I collect the shreds of Sunday newspaper from the breakfast nook where Maisie sits quietly, staring at the comics, the funnies as she likes to call them because that’s what Clara says. At the table, she giggles, and I ask, “What’s so funny?” plucking a piece of leftover Lucky Charms from her chin. Maisie doesn’t say, but she points a gooey little finger at the paper, an image of a gargantuan elephant squishing some sort of prairie animal flat. I don’t get it, but still I laugh, ruffling her hair with my hand. “That’s funny,” I say, as an image of the latest terrorist attack floats before Maisie’s eyes while I pile up the paper for the recycle bin. I see her eyes jump at the image, leaping from comics to the front-page news: an inferno of fire; a building collapse; bits of rubble obstructing what was once a street; people with heads in their hands, crying; law enforcement agents walking around, toting M16s.
“What’s that?” asks Maisie as that gooey finger finds its way this time to an image of a man with a gun on a street in Syria, red blood reduced to a dusty brown so it isn’t evident that it’s blood. And then, without waiting for a reply, Maisie’s finger travels to a woman standing behind the man, caked in tears. “She’s sad,” she tells me, an interested expression on her pale face, one that proudly asserts an aggregate of freckles now that the heat of summer draws near. She’s not concerned. She’s too young to be concerned about the woman in the newspaper, crying. But still she takes notice, and I see the question there in her confused expression: grown-ups don’t cry. So why is this woman crying?
And then Maisie asks the question out loud, “Why?” as her eyes and Clara’s eyes land on mine at the very same time, Maisie’s curious, Clara’s stymieing. Why is the woman sad? Maisie wants to know, but Clara wants this conversation through.
For Clara, when it comes to Maisie, ignorance is bliss.
“Time for you to get dressed, Maisie,” Clara says as she finishes rinsing the frying pan and sets it in the drying rack. She takes a series of short, quick strides across the room to gather the rest of the newspaper in her wet hands, struggling to bend to the floor to recoup the pieces I’ve dropped. My Sunday morning routine and also Clara’s pet peeve: my dropping the newspaper to the ground. As she bends, her hands clutch her midsection, as if worried if she bends too far down, our baby will fall out.
“I’ll get it,” I tell Clara as she drops what she’s collected on the image of the buckled building, the crying woman, the humongous guns, hoping to erase the photograph from Maisie’s mind. But I see Maisie’s curious eyes and know she’s still waiting for my reply. She’s sad, those eyes remind me, begging, Why?
I set a hand on Maisie’s, one that all but disappears in mine. On the kitchen chair, she squirms. Holding still for a four-year-old is near impossible. Her rangy legs kick willy-nilly beneath the table; she shifts erratically in her chair. Her hair is a mess and her pajamas are clotted with spilled milk, which will start to smell rancid the longer it sits, that spilled milk smell that often clings to kids. “There are lots of people in this world,” I tell Maisie, “some bad, some good. And some bad person hurt this woman’s feelings and made her sad. But you don’t have to worry about that happening to you,” I say quickly, before Maisie’s mind has a chance to go there, to envision the collapsed buildings and the M16s here in our safe, suburban neighborhood. “As long as Mommy and Daddy are here, we won’t let anything like that happen to you,” and Maisie beams and asks if we can go to the park. The sad woman is forgotten. The guns are forgotten. The only things on her mind now are seesaws and monkey bars, and I nod my head and say okay. I’ll take her to the park, leaving Clara at home to rest.
I turn to Clara, and she gives me a wink; I did good. Of my little spiel, she approves.
I help Maisie from the table, and together we find her shoes. I remind her to go potty before we leave. “But, Daddy,” she whines, “I don’t have to go potty,” though, of course she does. Like every other four-year-old in the world, she resists potty breaks and naps and anything green.
“You need to try,” I say and watch as she scampers off for the bathroom, where she’ll leave the door open wide while she uses the step stool to climb up on the toilet and pee.
It’s when she’s gone for a whole thirty-eight seconds and no more that Clara comes to me, pressing that baby bump into my body, and tells me that she’ll miss me, her words like some sort of voodoo or black magic, making me melt. She has a power over me; I’m under her spell. For the next forty-five minutes, while I’m romping around the playground with Maisie, my pregnant wife will be at home missing me. I smile, filled with warmth. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve this.
Clara stands tall, just inches shy of my own six feet, unshowered, smelling of sweat and eggs, but beautiful beyond compare. In my whole life, I’ve never loved anyone as much as I love Clara. She kisses me in this way that only Clara could kiss, gauzy, diaphanous lips that brush the surface of mine, leaving me completely satisfied and yet greedy and wanting for more. I set my hands on the disappearing curves of her waistline; she slips hers under the cotton of my shirt. They’re damp. She leans into me over the bulge of our baby, and again we kiss.
But as always, the moment passes too soon. Before we know it, Maisie comes skipping down the hall from the bathroom, calling out for me loudly, “Daddy!” and Clara draws slowly away in search of bug spray and sunscreen.
Maisie and I pedal off down the sidewalk while Clara stands on the front porch, watching us go. We haven’t gone more than a house or two when I hear a voice, grouchy and rude. Maisie hears it, too. She also sees her friend Teddy sitting on his own front lawn, picking at the grass, trying to tune out the sound of his dad screaming at his mom. They stand in an open garage, our neighbors Theo and Emily Hart, and it’s pretty damn quick when Theo thrusts her against the garage wall. I slam on the bike brakes, but tell Maisie to pedal on ahead. “Stop when you get to the red house,” I say, a redbrick home just about half a block away.
“Everything okay over there?” I call across the street, stepping off my bike, ready to make a run for it if he attempts a second assault. I’m expecting a response from Theo—something curt and rude, probably even threatening—but instead it comes from Emily as she wipes her hands on the thighs of her jeans and pats down her hair, stepping away from the garage wall as Theo hovers behind her, watching like a hawk.
“Doing great,” she says, with a smile as phony as spam email. “Beautiful day,” she adds, then calls to Teddy, telling him to come inside for a bath. Teddy rises at once, not all gun-shy and reluctant as Maisie is when we suggest a bath. He does as he’s told, and I wonder if it’s simple compliance or something more. Something more like fear. Emily doesn’t strike me as weak—she’s a tall woman, a fit woman—and yet that’s exactly what she is. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen him buttonhole her with my own two eyes, his hands on her in a way that verges on abuse. If he does this out in the open, what does he do behind closed doors?
Clara and I have had this conversation more times than I can count.
You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.
I watch Emily and Teddy disappear inside, hand in hand. As I continue off down the street, hurrying to catch up with Maisie, who hovers at the end of a driveway waiting for me, I catch sight of Theo and his death glare.
CLARA
The grief comes at me in many ways.
I spend my mornings with sadness, my evenings in melancholy. In private, I cry. I can’t bring myself to confess to Maisie why Nick is not here, and so I’ve taken to lying, to telling the girl who stands before me with pining eyes that her father has run out, that he’s on an errand, that he’s at work. I rely on tired responses—he’ll be home soon; he’ll be home later—thankful when Maisie smiles and prances gleefully away, telling me okay. Granting me amnesty, a reprieve. Later I will tell her. Soon. My father comes and my father goes. He brings dinner and sits beside me at the table and tells me to eat. He sets the food on the fork tines, the fork in my hand. He offers to take Maisie to the playground, but I say no, too afraid that if Maisie leaves without me, she also won’t come home. And so we stay and get soused in sadness. We get marinated in it and submerged. We let the sadness steep into every inlet of our beings, making us tender and weak. Even Harriet the dog is sad, curled into a ball mopishly at my feet, while I hold Felix all day long, staring blankly at Maisie’s cartoons on the TV screen. Max and Ruby, Curious George. Harriet’s ears perk up at the sound of passing cars; a pizza deliveryman at the home next door sends her flying to her feet, mistaking the noise of an idling car for Nick. It’s not Nick, I want to tell her. Harriet, Nick is dead.
Maisie points at something on the TV screen, laughing, tendrils of copper hair canopying her eyes. She’s completely content to watch talking bunnies on the television set for eight hours a day, eating bags full of microwave popcorn for breakfast, lunch and dinner—asking of me, Did you see that? and I nod my head lifelessly, but I didn’t see. I don’t see anything. Nick is dead. What’s there left to see?
But when I am not sad, I’m angry. Angry at Nick for leaving me. For being careless. For driving too fast with Maisie in the car. For driving too fast, period. For losing control and launching headfirst through the air and squarely into that tree, his body continuing to hurtle forward while the car suddenly stopped. I’m also mad at the tree. I hate the tree. The force of the impact wrapped the car around the old oak tree on Harvey Road, while Maisie sat in the back seat, on the opposite side, miraculously unharmed. She sat there as around her the duralumin of the car caved in like a mine collapse, trapping her inside, while in the front seat, Nick breathed his last self-sufficient breaths. The cause: Nick’s warp speed, the sun, the turn. This is what I’m told, a fact that is repeated ad nauseam in the papers and on the news. Crash on Harvey Road leaves one dead. Reckless driving to blame. There is no investigation. Were Nick still alive, he would be given multiple citations for excessive speeding and reckless driving, to name a few. In no uncertain terms, I’m told that this is Nick’s fault. Nick is to blame for his own death. He is the reason why I’ve been left alone with two young kids, a fragmented car and hospital bills. As it turns out, it’s quite expensive to die.
If only Nick had slowed down, he wouldn’t be dead.
But there are other things I’m mad about, too, besides Nick’s lead foot and recklessness. His supply of running shoes strewn behind the front door, for example. They enrage me. They’re still there, and in the mornings, tired and hazy from another sleepless night, I trip over them and feel livid that Nick didn’t have the courtesy to put his shoes away before he died. Damn it, Nick.
The same can be said of his coffee mug abandoned on the kitchen sink and the newspaper spread sloppily across the breakfast nook so that sections of newsprint cascade to the ground, piece by piece. I pick them up and slap them back on the wooden table, angry with Nick for this whole blasted mess.
This is Nick’s fault; it’s his fault he’s dead. The next morning Nick’s alarm clock screams at him at six o’clock, as it always does—a force of habit, as is Harriet who rises to her feet in the hopes of being walked. Today Harriet will not be walked; tomorrow Harriet will not be walked. Your husband, ma’am, that police officer had said, before he welcomed Felix and me into his patrol car and drove us to the hospital where I signed an authorization form, renouncing my husband’s eyes, his heart, his life, was driving too fast. Of course he was, I tell myself. Nick always drives too fast. The sun, he blamed, and again, He was driving too fast.
Was anyone hurt? I asked obtusely, expecting the officer to say no. No one. Oh, how stupid I’ve been. They don’t send officers to collect the next of kin when no one’s been hurt. And then I feel angry with myself for my own stupidity. Angry and embarrassed.
I let Maisie take to sleeping in my bedroom. My father warns me that this isn’t a good idea. And yet, I do. I let her sleep in my room because the bed is suddenly too big, and in it, I feel small and lost and alone. Maisie is a restive sleeper. She talks in her sleep, mumbling quietly for Daddy, and I stroke her hair, hoping she will mistake my touch for his. She kicks in her sleep. When she wakes in the morning, her head is where her feet should go and vice versa.
As we settle into bed at seven thirty in the evening, Felix cocooned in his bassinet by my side, Maisie asks me for the umpteenth time, “Where’s Daddy?” and I reply with the same vacuous response, “He’ll be home soon,” and I know that Nick wouldn’t do it this way. This isn’t how Nick would handle things, were I the one who was dead. Oh, how I wish I were the one who was dead. Nick is the better parent. He would use words, gentle words, euphemisms and colloquialisms, to explain. He would set her down on his lap, and swathe her in his benevolent arms. Resting in peace, he would say, or In a better place, so that Maisie would imagine me in Disney World, napping on a bed in the highest tower of King Stefan’s castle with the exquisite Sleeping Beauty, and there would be no sadness or incertitude over the fact that I was dead. Instead she would forever envision me lying on a luxurious bed in a beautiful evening gown, my hair framing my face, a crown set on my head. I would be elevated to status of princess. Princess Clara.
But not Nick.
“When will Daddy be home?” she asks me, and I run my hands through her hair, force a smile and issue my boilerplate response: “Soon,” turning quickly away, attending to a disgruntled Felix so she will not see me cry.
* * *
The day of Nick’s funeral, it rains, as if the sky itself is commiserating with me, crying along while I cry. The sun refuses to show its culpable face, hiding behind the safeguard of blubbery, gray rain clouds that fill the sky. In the distance, the clouds reach formidably into the sky, a Mount Saint Helens of clouds. Connor, Nick’s best friend, stands beside me, on the left, while my father is on the right, Maisie snuggled in between my father and me. As the priest commits Nick’s body to the ground, we scatter handfuls of earth on top of the casket.
Maisie holds my hand as our feet sink into mud. There are rain boots on her feet, teal rain boots with puppies on their shaft, to pair with the black A-line dress. She’s tired of asking where Nick is, and so she stands unsuspectingly as her father is lowered into the ground.
“What are we doing, Mommy?” she asks instead, wondering why all these mournful people have gathered under a canopy of black umbrellas, watching as a crate is buried in the ground, much in the same way that Harriet buries her bones in the backyard.
“This is unacceptable,” Nick’s mother says to me later as we drift away from the cemetery to our parked cars.
My father says, “You should tell her, Clarabelle,” which is his nickname for me, one I’ve grown to love, but once despised. In the distance, Maisie skips along with a younger cousin, only three years old, both oblivious to the obvious sadness that imbues the air along with the laden humidity. Outside it is hot and muggy, gnats and mosquitoes proliferating before our eyes. I push Felix in the baby carriage, plodding over the pitted lawn and around the granite headstones. Dead people. I wonder how they died.
“I’ll tell her when I’m ready,” I snap at the both of them, my father and Nick’s mother. When I am not sad, I’m mad. My father means well; Nick’s mother does not. She’s never liked me one speck, though these feelings weren’t meant to be mutual. And yet they are.
Only my father comes to my home after the funeral. The rest drift in their own direction, hugging me in these awkward, strung-out ways before saying goodbye. They don’t stay long for fear that death and bad luck are contagious. That if they stick around me too long, they might just catch the bug. Even Connor makes a quick departure, though before he goes he asks if there’s anything he can do for me, anything I need. I say no.
Emily is the only one who lingers for more than two and a half seconds. “Call if you need anything,” she says to me, and I nod my head, knowing I won’t call. Her husband, Theo, stands behind her by three paces or more, checking his watch twice during the twenty-second exchange, and at seeing him Maisie bounds to my side, clutching me tightly by the hand, her body half hidden behind mine. She lets out a feeble cry, and Emily pities the child, saying, “Poor thing,” as if Maisie’s fear has something to do with Nick’s death rather than Theo. Emily is a neighbor, the kind I spend lazy afternoons with on the front porch, killing time while our kids play, my Maisie and her Teddy, who is also four. Teddy, short for Theodore, named after his dad who goes by Theo. Theo and Emily and Teddy. Except we don’t let Maisie play with Teddy when Theo is there. Theo is a gruff man, prone to violence when he’s angry and sometimes when he’s not. Emily has told me as much, and we’ve all heard his voice—Nick, Maisie and me—resounding through open windows and across the still summer night, screaming at Emily and Teddy for reasons unknown.
Theo terrifies Maisie as much as he does me.
“Promise me you’ll call,” she says before Theo lays an autocratic hand on her arm and she turns, walking away with the rest of the drifters who flee the cemetery, one step behind him all the way through the lawn. I promise nothing. It isn’t until they’re out of view that Maisie finally lets go of my hand and steps from the safety of my shadow.
“Are you okay?” I ask her, peering into her eyes, and when she can no longer see Theo or Emily, Maisie nods her head and says that she is. “He’s gone now,” I promise her, and she smiles cautiously.
In my home, my father doesn’t stay long, either. He can’t. There is my mother, of course, sitting at home with a paid babysitter while my father attends to me. He is pulled in two directions. He can’t care for both her and me.
“She’s been seeing things,” he tells me reluctantly. “Hallucinations, like the doctor told us might happen. A black crow sitting on the curtain rod,” he says, “and bugs.”
I grimace. “What kind of bugs?” I ask.
“Ants,” he tells me, “climbing the walls.”
“Go to her,” I say, disheartened to hear my mother’s dementia has taken a turn for the worse. “I’m fine,” I assure him, as I set a hand on his thin, liver-spotted arm, and grant him permission to leave. Felix is asleep; Maisie is twirling around the living room, obliviously dancing.
As my father’s car pulls out of the driveway, I see the resignation. He isn’t sure he should leave. I give him a thumbs-up to be sure. I’m okay, Daddy.
But am I?
* * *
That night Maisie sleeps with me again. She toddles into my bedroom with her scruffy teddy bear in her arms, the one that used to be mine. She’s all but eaten an ear off, a nervous habit that’s picking up speed. She stands at the foot of the bed in a nightgown of spring bouquets, dahlias in every shade of pink—fuchsia, salmon, cerise—her feet covered in white ankle socks. Her copper hair hangs long down her back, gnarled and bumpy, the tail end clinging to a rubber band.
“I can’t sleep, Mommy,” she says, gnawing on the ear of that poor bear, though we both know it was only three and a half minutes ago that I kissed her good-night in her own bed. That I pulled the sheets up clear to her neck. That I kissed the bear’s downy forehead and tucked him in, too. That I told Maisie, when she asked for Daddy to tuck her in and give her a kiss good-night, “He’ll be up just as soon as he gets home,” hoping that she didn’t see or hear the blatant lie.
Felix is in my arms, and with a pat, pat, pat to the back, I slowly ease him to sleep. He wears his yellow sleep sack, likely hot in the torrid room. The air conditioner, it seems, has stopped working. What does one do about a broken air conditioner? Only Nick would know, and again I find myself mad that Nick would leave me with a broken air conditioner and no clue what to do. Nick should have made a list of such contingencies, were he to suddenly die. Who should repair the air conditioner, mow the lawn, pay the newspaper boy?