She was leaning against the doorframe now. I could see her face in the light. I watched as she raised her eyebrows at him and held them there, the way she did sometimes at the dinner table when Jess and I fooled around too much. Just a glance up from her plate, barely a movement at all, really, a flick of her brows, a tilt of her head. It stopped us every time.
“Allowed?” she asked. There was no sound coming from the kitchen, and then I heard her say in a voice that was high and wobbly, “Allowed?”
I leaned in closer to the mirror at the same time she moved off the wall and took two steps toward him. There was a force to her step that scared me. Dad seemed scared too and sat up quickly, pulling his legs in as if he might need them to fend her off.
“Get out,” she whispered.
Dad’s eyes closed, and I wished in that moment that by some miracle he’d suddenly fallen asleep. Mom was patient, but Dad had pushed too far. I knew this was what Grandma meant when she said Dad sometimes put his head up his ass.
The sound of a chair scraping against the tile sliced through my bedroom, and I peered out through the spaces between my spread fingers. He patted his pocket for his keys, and I rolled my eyes, embarrassed for him that he didn’t see them sitting only two feet in front of him on the kitchen table. Mom saw them, though, and snatched them up and held them in her hand under her folded arms.
“Give me the keys, Hope.”
“So you can leave here in a fit and wrap yourself around a tree?” She tightened the belt on her dress and said in a low mutter, “If I wanted you dead, I’d do it myself.”
It was a line I’d heard them use on each other all my life, always in a joking way: Mom watching Dad fillet fish with his thick bear-paw hands—Give me that knife. If I wanted you to lose a finger, I’d wait until you ticked me off and do it myself. Or Dad catching her wrestling the full barrels down to the sidewalk for the garbage pickup—Let me do that, baby. If I wanted you flat on your back, I’d put you there myself. And so on and so on and so on.
But tonight, it wasn’t a joke.
Dad stared at Mom, and then leaned in until his face was inches from her, and his voice was a growl.
“If you want me dead, keep it up. You’re doing a hell of a job.”
Mom sucked in her breath, loud and sharp, like she’d just bumped her hip bone on the edge of the table. There was a frenzy of movement, and I heard the front door open, and what sounded like Dad’s coat hit the front hall with a thwack. Mom stomped into the kitchen, and something hard hit the wall again. I looked out from under the covers just in time to see Mom launch his shoe from the kitchen, through the living room, clear through the front door, where it landed with a loud thump.
“Jesus, Hope. Calm down.” Dad snapped out of it, but it was too late.
Mom took two big strides in his direction, and there was not another sound as the door slammed shut. The house went silent.
I sat up in bed, hugged the blanket to my chest, and strained my neck to see around the corner. Mom rounded the opening and caught my eye. She let out a small noise, walked into my room, and sat on my bed. I put my head against her, pressed my cheekbone against the sharp edge of her collarbone, felt her heart pulsing on the flat part of my cheek.
She smelled like baby cream, and I wondered if she was still using the tub of Johnson’s on her arms and hands like she did after Maddie died. She’d sit on the edge of her bed and massage the thick white cream on the insides of her forearms, where the skin’s so soft, and then drop her head in her arms and rock that way until I got her for dinner. I thought it was weird. It was the same cream she used to rub on Maddie’s bottom after she changed her diaper. But a lot of things got weird after Maddie died, so I stopped thinking about it.
Mom nudged me over and sank back. I looked at Mom curled up in my bed, and I pictured Dad standing in the hallway in his socks with his coat and shoes strewn all about, and then I remembered what Mom said earlier to Mrs. Alfonso about love not being convenient.
?2
Hope
An hour passed before Kat’s face softened and her breathing changed to the familiar timbre of deep sleep. I lay next to her in bed and wondered whether Jack was sleeping in the truck. Or more likely, he had a spare key stashed somewhere, and he’d gone to the boat. Or maybe to the Salt House across town.
I closed my eyes, but sleep was impossible. The argument with Jack had me twisting and turning in Kat’s bed, restless from a current running through my body. Difficult now, with all the words hurled at each other, to pinpoint what we’d fought about. But something Jack said turned over in my mind.
When was the last time we were together and you didn’t do this vanishing act that you do?
Men like Jack didn’t say such things. Not out loud, at least. It seemed the point of no return. For both of us.
For Jack, it would have been saying it out loud—admitting I was letting him down in some way—that he had expectations. Needs.
For me, hearing him say it, even now, made my body jolt. My hands clench.
It was a year last week. The anniversary of her death. The beginning of the longest year of my life. Of our life. Our marriage.
We need to not let this thing destroy us, Jack said last week. When he said this thing, he meant my grief. But he never used that word.
In bed, when he wanted to make love and all I could muster was to kick off my pajama bottoms and press my lips against the side of his neck where I knew he liked, Jack had questions. Are we ever going to make love like we used to? Are we going to move on from being sad all the time?
He didn’t use the word grief. Grief was too serious. Being sad was temporary, fixable. Grief was deeper, unchangeable, forever.
He didn’t say this, but I knew.
I didn’t tell him that my grief was as familiar to me as a worn sweater covered with loose threads and filled with the smells and sounds of a thousand cold nights and frosty mornings.
Grief and me, we had a history.
On most days something benign brought my grief calling. The smell of apple juice in the morning. A lost diaper in the bottom of a handbag found buried under shoes at the bottom of my closet. A forgotten pacifier I stumbled upon when I pulled the bed out to vacuum.
This grief had separated into various faces, each with its own smell and feel.
Holidays and birthdays were sure to bring one, if not all of them, piling in like crazed partygoers trampling over one another in their haste and excitement. On those days, I didn’t get a word in edgewise; they were overwhelming.