Days of Awe (11 page)

It's Saturday, and too early for this phone call. I'm standing at the stove, listening to the sizzle of pancake batter on the frying pan, waiting for it to bubble. I'm wearing my fuzzy pink robe, my green monkey slippers—the kind of getup that says
married, done trying.

Hannah just got home from her sleepover, grouchy, with dark circles under her eyes and a wild, tired look on her face. She's thumping around upstairs now, music coming through the ceiling.
Girl, you look so fine fine fine. Say that you'll be mine mine mine.
This is the same song that was playing in the car the other day, the one Hannah asked me to stop singing along to: “Mom. Please. Ew. This song is
heinous.
”

Come over right now,
I want to say to Cal.
Can we just skip all of this? Come over.

He walked me home last night, kissed me sweetly on the cheek at my front door in a pool of light. I went inside and I poured myself a glass of grapefruit juice, splashed some vodka into it—Chris's, a birthday present from his father—and I stood in the middle of the kitchen and I said, out loud, to myself, to an empty house, “Well, Isabel, how do you feel?”

And the answer was stirred. Gently stirred. Pleased to be the object (finally, again) of someone's affection. I was happy, if I let myself admit it, happy for the first time in months, like I was being given a chance….And also, if I was being completely honest, I felt a tiny bit like I'd been kissed on the cheek by Dr. Carlsson, my old orthodontist, who used to like to talk about the trip to Alaska he and his wife had taken in 1976. He would jabber endlessly about it—
the elk! the moose! the midnight sun!
—to his captive audience as he tightened the wires in my mouth, his dexterous fingers working around my canines and bicuspids, his face always so near and intimate, every detail held close for my examination: the spotty brown sun damage on his cheeks, the hairs in his nostrils quivering as he breathed. This is the price you pay for expertise. The rough planes of a lived life. Attraction, repulsion. Cal's kiss was maybe just a little bit like that.

Hannah clomps down the stairs and throws herself into a chair, drops her backpack and Clucky, the rubber chicken she sleeps with, on the floor next to her, and rests her elbows on the table, her face in her hands. Chris will be here soon to pick her up, my poor nomad, itinerant victim of her parents' failure.

“I would like that,” I say to Cal, quietly, the phone tucked between my shoulder and my ear.

“Are you free this afternoon?” he asks. “I have some ideas.”

“Yes.” It's a sweet secret now, a tiny jewel nestled among the lint and old Kleenex in the pocket of my robe. “This afternoon.”

I end the call and set a pancake in the shape of a teddy bear down in front of Hannah, round ears and a slightly misshapen face, into the middle of which I've placed two chocolate chips for eyes, a smiling row of them for a mouth. I know the risk I'm taking and brace myself for a sneer. But she looks at it and grins, delighted. Then she looks up at me and dials back her smile. But it's still there.

“Thanks, Mama,” she mutters. The tender skin under her eyes is so dark it looks bruised. Is she wearing mascara?

I turn back to the stove, busy myself with the pancake batter. Hannah and I are slipping back into the cogs of our Saturday morning routine—a functioning twosome, but still, after all these months, I feel Chris's absence like a presence, an object. It's there in the chair by the window that stays tucked under the table, the gallon of milk in the refrigerator that always ends up going bad before we can finish it, the extra pancake batter.

“I'm starving!” Hannah says, and for a second I envy her hunger, how easy it is, still, when you're almost twelve, just to want something. I make more teddy-bear pancakes, bunnies, snowmen, a fat H. She devours them all.

“Hey.” I slide another one onto her plate. “How was the dog? Lucy? Was she so cute?”

She tips her head up to me, her body still hunched close to her food. Her hair is a tangled mess, and there's a dot of syrup on her chin. She looks a little feral. “Not
Lucy,
” she says. “Lucky. Annoying. Unlucky. Barked all night.”

“So you probably didn't sleep much,” I say.

She glares at me full on. “I didn't sleep at all.” She touches the back of her hand to her chin and wipes off the syrup. “Whatever. I wouldn't have slept anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

Hannah rolls her eyes. I have to stop myself from backing away from my child.

“Do you think I
ever
sleep? Do you think I, like, lie down at night and just close my eyes and, like, dream about princesses?”

When she was little, four or five, Hannah used to crawl into my lap in the mornings, her hair sticking up in tufts, her little body warm from sleep. She would rest her head on my chest and whisper, “I stayed awake and played in my bed
all night
! I did not sleep one wink!”

“What do you mean?” I ask again.

“I haven't been sleeping!” she says, the high, frantic voice of my little girl, and she starts to cry. Without warning the tears are just rolling down her cheeks, a flash flood. “I can't sleep! I keep thinking it's like…dying.” She takes a ragged breath and looks at me like she's drowning, and I'm just standing here, balancing a teddy-bear pancake on a spatula like an idiot, like a clown, doing nothing to save her. “You fall asleep,” she says, “and where do you go? You're gone. It's like…it's like you're practicing to die!”

Well, okay. I have the urge to cut up this pancake and feed her. Actually I want to chew it up and drop it into her mouth like she's a baby bird. “Sleep,” I say, as gently as I can, “is what every living creature needs.” At least, I think it is. Do ants sleep? Spiders? “It's really…Honey, it's the opposite of dying.”

She shakes her head, holds out her hands in front of her to stop me from hugging her. And I wasn't even going to hug her! Because I knew she wouldn't let me. And now I'm just hacking through the underbrush: Why wasn't I going to hug her, anyway? Because I'm so accustomed to her rejections that I've given up? Should I have tried? Are those hands held up in defense just showing me that she needs me even more? My maternal instinct is buried underneath an unexcavated pile of clutter, along with the missing check I wrote for her field trip to the Art Museum and the bike key I lost last year.

“Sweetie,” I say. “You have to sleep.”

She gets up from the table with a clatter of dish and fork and a snort of disgust. “Oh, okay,” she says. Her hair brushes my arm as she breezes past me. “Okay, I'll do that.”

A month or so after Josie died, we took Hannah to a psychologist, naturally. Dr. Melody van Kamp was a middle-aged woman whose practice advertised specialties in adolescence and grief counseling and, peripherally, pet therapy, about which I always wondered: With, or for? She met with Hannah alone a few times, and then with Chris and me.

“She's doing really well,” Melody told us. The sun streamed into her cheery office, which smelled like Lysol and was decorated with pictures of dogs, cats, and, oddly, chickens. “She's not hiding anything. Hannah is open about her feelings, and that's marvelous. And she's not defensive, either. A lot of children have their claws out at times like this.” Melody smiled encouragingly at Chris and me. We were perched on opposite ends of a long couch. Chris was studying his thumbnail, and I was trying to catch his eye, because it seemed that Melody van Kamp had confused Hannah with a different child. “Of course, you never know, with adolescents,” Melody continued. “Anything could come up for her at any time. They can seem fine for a long stretch and then go rabid with no warning!” She laughed and gazed out the window. “But that's parenthood, right?”

Luckily, our insurance covered these sessions.

Hannah has gone back up to her room. The doorbell rings: he's right on time. Even this is a new and jarring development, Chris a tentative visitor in what is still, technically, his own home.

“Come in, come in!” I yell, feeling generous. And because he still has a key, he does.

He walks through the house quietly. In the kitchen, he leans toward me for what I think, with surprise, is going to be an uncomfortable kiss, but which he intends to be an uncomfortable hug, so that, after some maneuvering, our shoulders collide, my forehead bumps into his cheek, and then Chris pats my back twice and quickly moves away.

“Awk!” Josie used whisper to me in weird social situations, an echo of what we sometimes write in the margins of students' essays.
Awk! Awk!
The embarrassed cry of the flightless dodo.

“Hannah will be right down,” I say. “What are your plans?” Before last night, my plans for today were to clean the bathroom, buy some groceries, call my mother, and breathe. I think about Cal, and the amazement of my day opens up before me. With a swoop of my arm, I offer Chris a seat at the table, a pancake. He sits, unsure of what to make of me. I set a plate down in front of him.

When I was in middle school and would come home upset about something, a fight with a friend or a bad grade, Helene used to say to me, “The worst has already happened to us.” It was mortifying, of course, but it was also a perversely comforting sentiment. “The loss of our family,” she would say, “is in our bones.” You could make serious hay with that one. She still trots it out occasionally. I want to explain it to Chris now, although I'm certain he wouldn't understand.
I have a date,
I would tell him,
with an older gentleman. And here is a pancake in the shape of a bunny!

“Life goes on,” Helene sometimes says, “but only if you're lucky.”

“We need to do a few errands.” Chris's knife makes a hideous screech against his plate. “Take Mrs. Reinhoffer to the vet.” Mrs. Beverly Jean Reinhoffer is our cat, of whom Chris has full custody. I never liked her and was glad to see her go. Over the last few months, the absence of Mrs. Reinhoffer has, at times, been my sole consolation. She used to jump onto my lap and dig her claws into my thighs if I tried to move her. Also, she had the habit of finding me, wherever I was in the house, and throwing up. “And I want to pick up that part for the dishwasher. I can try to fix it when I drop Hannah off on Tuesday.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“I know we were just at the vet,” Chris says, “but Mrs. Reinhoffer needs shots.”

“Okay.” Does Chris think I care how many times Mrs. Reinhoffer sees the vet? I really don't care about that cat. “Oh, listen, by the way.” I slide another pancake onto his plate and pull out a chair for myself. “Hannah has not been sleeping well. She says she's scared to close her eyes. She thinks it's like dying.” Morning sunlight plays across the kitchen table between us, reflects in Hannah's abandoned glass of orange juice. I feel, for a brief moment, proud of this intimate knowledge that I possess about our daughter, something private and delicate and mine. In this endless, silent jockeying for position that neither of us would admit to, I am, for one shiny, ugly moment, on top.

And then Chris looks at me in complete confusion. “I know,” he says. He sits up a little bit straighter in his chair. “I know. This has been going on for weeks. Maybe a month. How…” His eyebrows are about to skyrocket off of his forehead. “Iz, how did you
not
know
this?”

I look down at my monkey slippers. They sneer back at me.
Stupid human.
“She just told me.”

“We've been listening to a relaxation CD I got from the library. I bought her some lavender oil for her pillow. I was going to talk to you about signing her up for a yoga class at the rec center.”

“Okay, that's great,” I say. “Good. Lavender oil. Excellent.”

“I don't…” He looks out the window and waits a few seconds. The sleeves of the shirt that I bought for him are pushed up on his arms. The hair that I used to run my hands through needs a trim. “This is kind of a big thing you've missed, Iz. Our daughter is terrified to
sleep.
”

“Yes,” I say, fidgeting in my chair, the proximity of our bodies still reflecting the harmony of five minutes ago, not the defensive anger that's boiling up now.

Hannah has turned on the music again upstairs. It's a different melody, but a similar bass line thuds down to us, deep and intrusive, the soundtrack to a low-grade panic attack.

“I know that now,” I say. “Is this really the time to rub my face in it? When Hannah needs our help?” I see that I am still holding the spatula. “Good for you, that she's confiding in you. Maybe next time she shares such a
big thing
with you, you could let me in on it.”

“Jesus,” Chris says, his voice soft and maddeningly calm. “Uh, I think—”

“What?” Is he asking me to make him more pancakes?

“Your pancakes are burning,” Chris says, gesturing toward the stove with the slightest tip of his chin.

And, yes. They are.

Chris and I met just after I moved back to Milwaukee, fifteen years ago. I was living with my mother and working part-time as a receptionist at the Fraser Feldman Medical Group, where Helene was the office manager. I got the job through sheer nepotism and hung on to it the same way.

The doctors (that's what she called them, reverently:
the doctors
) loved Helene. She was the smiling face of their practice, efficient and organized and compliant in an old-fashioned,
may I bring you some coffee?
kind of way. I was less efficient and more bored and incompetent, still trying to get over the shock of adulthood. (My favorite thing to do was to say, when people asked me to validate their parking, “You're excellent at parking!”) But Helene loved having me with her. She introduced me to everyone—patients, consultants, drug reps, valets—with outsize, wildly misplaced pride.
This is my daughter, Isabel. My darling daughter!
She would pack us identical lunches or treat me to a bagel and soup at the café on the first floor of the building; she'd schedule our breaks together, because she was the office manager, and scheduling breaks was her job. Although I complained about it to Mark—
It's too much! She made me wear her sweater today! I was doing some filing and she complimented me on my alphabetizing skills!
—I actually loved working with my mother, basking in her judgment-free love, gossiping about coworkers, stealing gum and M&M's from her purse. Still, I worked on my résumé during downtime and was counting the days until I could find a teaching job.