her nose, the delicacy of her lips and hair. I listened to the sound of her breathing, flat, even breaths interrupted by the occasional gulp of air, the thin blue sheet pulled clear up to her neck, hiding our baby, so that it swelled with each breath.
I stood at the foot of the bed watching Clara sleep, wanting nothing more than to climb back into bed and spend the day wrapped up in each other as we used to do, to run my hands over the ballooning belly and spend hours trying to come up with a name for our baby boy.
There was no way I could have known, as I leaned over to plant a kiss on Clara’s forehead, that outside a storm was brewing, a supercell storm that would soon tear through our lives, and that all that unstable air moving around the atmosphere was waiting for us just outside the front door.
There was no way I could have known that I was running out of time.
* * *
Outside the bedroom door, Maisie stands, arms crossed across herself, her hair standing on end. She’s still half asleep, her eyes trying to adjust to the traces of light that come in through a hallway window. She rubs at her eyes. “Morning, Maisie,” I say in a whisper as I drop down to my knees and take her into my arms, this tiny little thing that collapses against me, tired and tuckered out. “How about we get you some breakfast and let Mommy sleep for a while?” I suggest, hoisting her into my arms and carrying her down the stairs, knowing how Clara’s nighttime sleep has been interrupted of late, always trammeled by her inability to find a comfortable position to sleep. For the last few weeks, the leg cramps have woken her in the middle of the night, either that or the baby kicking in earnest to get out. He’s got his days and his nights all mixed up, Clara said, though I find it hard to believe there’s some sort of timetable in utero, that the baby has any notion of when is night and when is day. But maybe.
I can’t do anything about the cramps or the kicking, but I can occupy Maisie for a while so that Clara can sleep.
I warm frozen waffles in the toaster oven and serve them to Maisie at the coffee table with a side of syrup. I brew my coffee—decaf, as if I am pregnant, too; my vow to Clara that she doesn’t have to suffer through this pregnancy alone—and pour Maisie juice. I turn on the TV for Maisie and set the kitchen timer for an hour. “Please, don’t wake Mommy until after two episodes of Max & Ruby or when the timer rings,” I say to her, adding, “Whichever comes first,” before planting a kiss on her forehead, too, one which is still waxy from sleep. “Did you hear me, Maisie?” I ask, and, “When can you wake Mommy?” just to be sure Maisie was listening and that she heard. Maisie is a smart girl—sometimes too smart for her own good—but she’s also four, eyes and ears lost to the cartoon bunnies that now fill our TV screen.
“When the timer rings,” she says, eyes not meeting mine. Harriet sits at the floor beside her feet, ever hopeful that Maisie will drop her waffles to the floor.
“Good girl.” I stuff my feet into a pair of shoes and find my car keys. “See you later, alligator,” I say, opening the garage door to leave.
“In a while, crocodile,” says Maisie, mouth stuffed full with food.
I make my way to the garage. I’m not halfway there when a text comes through on my phone, and I stop midstride to see who it is, groaning already because of course it’s bad news. Good news never arrives at 7:00 a.m. in the form of a text message.
Take your time, it says. Another cancellation. Wilsons flew the coop. —N
Morning. A stay of execution for those who are grieving. The first few marks of sunlight appear in the darkened sky, bringing oxygen back to the stifled world and making it easier to breathe.
I wake on the floor beside the bathroom door, Felix spread lengthwise on my extended legs. The door to the bathroom, as I jiggle the glass knob for the eighteenth time, is locked. It’s an antique, a 1920s fluted crystal glass knob; we no longer have the key. Perhaps we never had the key, but this didn’t matter, not until Maisie took to locking herself on the wrong side of the door as she did last night when she cried out, The bad man is after us. He’s going to get us, before scurrying from bed.
She won’t come out.
There is glass everywhere, lying unprotected on the floor.
For four hours now, she’s been on the other side of the bathroom door and I’ve listened as her frenzied cry died down to a quiet drone, her requests for Daddy lessening as she sobbed herself to sleep. And now the sunlight appears, chasing the shadows away from the walls.
For hours I’ve replayed Maisie’s words over and over and over again in my mind: The bad man is after us. He’s going to get us. “Please, Maisie,” I beg for the forty-seventh time. “Please, come out.”
But Maisie won’t come out.
* * *
Maisie sits at the breakfast nook staring vacantly at three microwave pancakes set before her on a plate. There was only one squirt of syrup remaining in the bottle, and so her pancakes are mostly dry. But that’s not the reason she won’t eat. On the table before me, there is nothing, no food. I, too, won’t eat. Not until someone makes me, which will be soon. My father fills a mug of coffee for me and brings it to the nook, setting it on the wooden slab before me.
He pats my head. He tells me to drink. He tells Maisie to eat her pancakes.
In my bedroom upstairs, the bathroom door lies flat, the hinge pins tapped out of place with a nail and a hammer. My father talked me through it on the phone. He didn’t need to come, I told him. We were fine. Maisie was fine, Felix was fine, I was fine. But my father didn’t believe for one split second that any of us were fine. Maybe it was the panic in my voice, or the fact that Maisie had locked herself in the bathroom overnight and, on the mosaic tile floor, cried herself to sleep. I don’t know. Or maybe it was Felix, thrown into a state of hysteria once again, his tummy empty, and me too busy removing hinge pins from a raised panel door to feed him, after sixty-seven unsuccessful attempts to lure Maisie out on her own devices.
I can’t be in two places at one time.
“It’s okay to ask for help,” my father tells me now as Maisie stabs at those pancakes with a kid fork, some sort of adorable cow printed on its grippy, teal shank. But she doesn’t eat the pancakes. She mangles and dismembers them. She mutilates the pancakes. “You don’t have to do this alone, you know.”
But I am already alone, aren’t I? No matter how many people are here in this house with me, I am still alone.
My father has yet to go upstairs, to see the bathroom door lying listlessly on its back, the picture frame’s shards of glass sloshed across the floor, the stash of rumpled tissues into which I cried a small lake, my eyes now so red and puffy they’re practically swollen shut.
“I did ask for help,” I tell my father as he hands me my own plate of microwave pancakes sans syrup, with instructions to eat. “That’s why you’re here.” He fills his coffee mug with soapy water at the kitchen sink and swirls it around before plunging a dishrag into the ceramic. He won’t leave that mug for me to clean. He is a lean man, too lean, the hair on his own head reminiscent of that on Felix’s head. He dresses like an older man with the waistlines too high and the patterns of his collared shirts no longer in style but now considered vintage. On his wiry frame, his clothes droop and sag, his body getting swallowed by the fabric. He’s aging far too quickly for me.
“Did you find the check?” I ask him, remembering only then the missing check from my father’s tenants, a two thousand dollar rent payment that he endorsed but never deposited into the account. My mother is to thank for this, to be sure, my mother who is ever wandering about, misplacing things. The missing check was an exigent matter in the days before Felix’s birth and Nick’s death, somehow forgotten in the upheaval of the last few days, though it was less than a week ago that Izzy and I sat together, combing through my parents’ belongings for it, and coming up with nothing. Izzy, the paid babysitter,