My foot misses the first step altogether, falling hard on the second, so that I wobble into the dark, the umbrella wobbling before me. The other foot trips after it, skitters down, the back of my calf scraping the steps, until I spill onto the grass.
I crush my eyes shut. My head brushes against the canopy of the umbrella. It’s encasing me like a tent.
Huddled there, I stretch my arm back along the steps, up, up, up, tiptoeing one finger ahead of the other, until I can feel the top step. I peek. There’s the door flung open, the kitchen glowing gold. I reach for it, as though I could snag my fingers in the light, tug it toward me.
She’s dying over there.
I turn my head back to the umbrella. Four squares of black, four lines of white.
Pressing my hand against the rough brick of the steps, I haul myself to my feet, up, up, up.
I hear branches creaking overhead, take tiny sips of cold air. I’d forgotten cold air.
And—one, two, three, four—I begin to walk. I’m unsteady, like a drunk. I am drunk, I remember.
One, two, three, four.
*
During the third year of my residency, I met a child who, following surgery for epilepsy, manifested a curious set of behaviors. Prior to her lobectomy, she was by all accounts a happy ten-year-old, albeit one prone to severe epileptic episodes (“epilepisodes,” someone quipped); afterward, she withdrew from her family, ignored her younger brother, shriveled at her parents’ touch.
Initially her teachers suspected abuse, but then someone observed how much friendlier the girl had become toward people she barely knew, people she didn’t know—she would fling her arms around her doctors, take the hands of passersby, chat with saleswomen as though they were old pals. And all the while her loved ones—her former loved ones—shivered in the cold.
We never determined the cause. But we termed the result selective emotional detachment. I wonder where she is now; I wonder what her family is doing.
I think of that little girl, her warmth toward strangers, her affinity for the unknown, as I ford the park, to the rescue of a woman I’ve met twice.
And even as I think it, the umbrella bumps against something, and I stop in my tracks.
It’s a bench.
It’s the bench, the only one in the park, a shabby little wooden rig with curlicue arms and an in-memoriam plaque bolted to the back. I used to watch Ed and Olivia sit here, from my aerie atop the house; he’d idle over a tablet, she’d thumb through a book, and then they’d swap. “Are you enjoying your children’s literature?” I’d ask him later.
“Expelliarmus,” he’d say.
The tip of the umbrella has caught between the planks of the seat. Gently I pry it loose—and then I realize, or rather remember:
The Russell house doesn’t have a door leading to the park. There’s no way to enter except by the street.
I haven’t thought this through.
One. Two. Three. Four.
I’m in the middle of a quarter-acre park, with only nylon and cotton for armor, traveling to the home of a woman who’s been stabbed.
I hear the night growl. I feel it circle my lungs, lick its lips.
I can do this, I think as my knees go slack. Come on: up, up, up. One, two, three, four.
I falter forward—a tiny step, but a step. I watch my feet, the grass springing up around my slippers. I will promote healing and well-being.
Now the night has my heart in its claws. It’s squeezing. I’ll burst. I’m going to burst.
And I will place others’ interests above my own.
Jane, I’m coming. I drag my other foot ahead, my body sinking, sinking. One, two, three, four.
Sirens whine in the distance, like mourners at a wake. Blood-red light floods the bowl of the umbrella. Before I can stop myself, I twist toward the noise.
Wind howls. Headlights blind me.
One-two-three—
Friday, November 5
35
“I guess we should have locked the door,” Ed mumbled after she fled into the hall.
I turned to him. “What were you expecting?”
“I didn’t—”
“What did you think would happen? What did I say would happen?”
Without waiting for an answer, I left the room. Ed’s footsteps followed me, soft on the carpet.
In the lobby, Marie had emerged from behind her desk. “You folks okay?” she asked, frowning.
“No,” I replied, just as Ed said, “Fine.”
Olivia was lodged in an armchair beside the hearth, her face rinsed with tears, filmy in the firelight. Ed and I crouched on either side of her. The flames snapped at my back.
“Livvy,” Ed began.
“No,” she answered, rattling her head back and forth.
He tried again, softer. “Livvy.”
“Fuck you,” she shrieked.
We both recoiled; I nearly edged into the grate. Marie had retreated behind her desk and was doing her best to ignore us folks.
“Where did you hear that word?” I asked.
“Anna,” said Ed.
“It wasn’t from me.”
“That’s not the point.”
He was right. “Pumpkin,” I said, smoothing her hair; she shook her head again, buried her face in a cushion. “Pumpkin.”
Ed placed his hand on hers. She swatted it away.
He looked at me, helpless.
A child is crying in your office. What do you do? First pediatric psych course, first day, first ten minutes. Answer: You let them cry it out. You listen, of course, and you seek to understand, and you offer consolation, and you encourage them to breathe deeply—but you let them cry it out.
“Take a breath, pumpkin,” I murmured, cupping her scalp in my palm.
She choked, spluttered.
A moment drifted past. The room felt cold; the flames shivered in the fireplace behind me. Then she spoke into the cushion.
“What?” Ed asked.
Lifting her head, her cheeks smeared, Olivia addressed the window. “I want to go home.”
I watched her face, her quaking lip, her streaming nose; and then I watched Ed, the creases in his forehead, the hollows beneath his eyes.
Did I do this to us?
Snow beyond the window. I watched it fall, saw the three of us collected in the glass: my husband and my daughter and me, huddled by the fire together.
A brief silence.
I stood, walked over to the desk. Marie looked up and shaped her lips into a tight smile. I smiled back.
“The storm,” I began.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is it . . . how close is it? Is it safe to drive?”
She frowned, rattled her fingers over her keyboard. “Heavy snowfall isn’t due for another couple of hours,” she said. “But—”
“Then could we—” I interrupted her. “Sorry.”
“I was just saying that winter storms are tough to predict.” She glanced over my shoulder. “Are you folks wanting to leave?”
I turned, looked at Olivia in the armchair, Ed crouching beside her. “I think we are.”
“In that case,” said Marie, “I’d say now’s the time to go.”
I nodded. “Could we get the bill, please?”
She said something in reply, but all I heard was the skirling wind, the crackle of flames.
36
The crackle of an overstarched pillowcase.
Footfalls nearby.
Then quiet—but a strange quiet, a different quality of quiet.
My eyes spring open.
I’m on my side, looking at a radiator.
And above the radiator, a window.
And outside the window, brickwork, the zigzag of a fire escape, the boxy rumps of AC units.
Another building.
I’m in a twin bed, sheathed in tucked-tight sheets. I twist, sit up.
I back into the pillow, telescope the room. It’s small, plainly furnished—barely furnished, really: a plastic chair against one wall, a walnut table beside the bed, a pale-pink tissue box on the table. A table lamp. A slim vase, empty. Dull linoleum floor. A door across from me, closed, frosted panel. Overhead, a quilt of stucco and fluorescents— My fingers crumple the bedding.
Now it begins.