3
In the hours before dawn, in the storm’s first cool blows, thin curtains fill and lift in the dark. They belly out over the bed, rippling, luffing—and abruptly empty again, and for a moment everything is still. The world paused. There’s a terrific light, the room conjures for a white instant, and almost at once comes the shuddering boom, and before it has entirely died away the door opens and a small figure stands in its frame, back-lit by the hallway nightlight. Fine muss of dark hair, pink-hearted pj’s. Angela lifting the bedding and the child slipping into that sleeve and shaping her little backside to her as a hand within a hand.
I’m scared.
It’s all right. It’s just a storm.
The small shivering shoulders. The quick-beating heart.
Where’s Daddy?
I don’t know but we’re all right. We’re safe. Okay?
Okay.
A kiss to her silken skull and Angela holding her as she quiets, watching the doorframe for the boy to come too, but he doesn’t, and here’s the rain pattering heavy on the roof, on the firm green leaves outside the window, and she is drifting down, smelling the rain, feeling the small girl in her arms, the deep drumtap of the girl’s heart, and her only prayer in that hour of love is Dear God, may the morning never come.
But it does, of course it does . . . and all Angela held in her arms was a pillow, and the door was shut, and the room was not her room, and the bed was not her bed.
Before her, on the bedside table: A plastic bottle of water. A small book of poetry with a blue first-place ribbon for bookmark—I cease, I turn pale. A digital alarm clock preparing to sound. An amber vial of pills. She stared at the pills. At the clock. She listened to the house that was not her house, its total stillness. Get up, she thought. Get up now or else lie here and cease.
Cease then.
You can’t, Angela.
Why not?
The girl’s heartbeat still played in her arms. In her chest. She remembered the hour, the minute, she was born: precious small head, the known, perfect-formed weight of it. All her fears of motherhood—of unreadiness, of
unfitness—vanishing at the sight of that plum-colored face mewling in outrage. My child, my life.
She pushed aside the covers and sat up. Got to her feet. Crossed the creaking floor and opened the heavy drapes on a gray dawn. No movement in the leaves of the elm tree. The street and the sidewalk dry. The most ordinary of days. Of worlds.
When she came downstairs in her outfit and makeup, the children were at the table. She touched the boy’s head and then the girl’s on her way to the coffee, one, two. They watched her as if she were someone who’d just walked in off the street.
At the stove in the climbing steam he turned and said, “Well, you look nice.”
“Thank you.”
“Will you eat some eggs?”
“No, thank you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
“These are my special cheesy eggs with dicey ham.”
The smell is enough, please spare me the description.
“No, thanks, really,” she said.
“All right. How about you two monkeys? Who wants more?”
Angela sat at the table to drink coffee and chew at a cold triangle of toast.
He served himself and returned the pan to the stove and sat to her left.
“Are you excited?” he said.
After a moment she looked up. “–I’m sorry?”
“I said are you excited. About today. About teaching.”
She thought how to answer, thinking for so long that he stopped chewing. He swallowed, then picked up and sipped his coffee.
On the wall at the foot of the stairs a vintage sunburst clock ticked prodigiously. As if sound was its only mode of timekeeping.
The children began to talk to him. He listened and smiled and talked back and she remembered the little girl—her little girl—coming into her bed. The firm small body pushed against her. That heat, that smell like no other.
“I’d better be going,” she said. “I’ve got a long walk.”
He reached and touched her then, two fingertips, lightly to the bone of her wrist, and picked up his cell phone and showed it to her. Some sort of colorful image like a bright whorl of bruise.
“That’s something,” she said.
“That’s rain. You should let me drive you, Angela.”
She looked at him. His kind face. The clear blue eyes with their overcasts of worry. She knew how she must look to him. To all of them. It’s going to be all right, she wanted to say, we’re going to survive this, but at that moment behind her a step creaked, and then another, and there was the scuffing whisper of slippers over linoleum, and fingers swept the back of her head, and she watched as her younger sister made her way around the table in her robin’s-egg robe, swooping down to kiss the boy on the head, the girl on the cheek, and lastly the man, fully on the lips.
“Good morning,” Grace said to her husband, to her children, and to
Angela. “Good morning, my loves.”