Next to the laptop there are several remotes, a PlayStation controller, and the book of baby names we bought before I left. I pick up the book. My knuckles are bloody and my fingers leave bright smudges through dust on the cover. I thumb through dog-eared pages. My mouth tastes sour. Some of the ears are new to me. On one such page Abigail is underlined. On another, Emmitt.
The first time we slept together, I rolled over the morning after and found him looking at me with those dark cocoa eyes. “It’s a little early for chocolate,” I said, “but okay, I’ll have a bite.” And I crammed my face in close to his and nibbled at his lashes. I felt him tense and regret spiked through me—I went too far, I ruined everything—but then he laughed, a Big Bang of laughter, the start of everything, the start of us.
In the hall, Brennan moves into my line of sight. He’s eyeing the wedding collage. I wonder if he can recognize me in the photos, with my hair curled and my face all made up, wearing a clean strapless ivory gown dotted with Swarovski crystals. I flip the book to masculine B. Brennan. It’s Irish in origin, like I thought, but the meaning is unexpected. Sorrow, reads the book. Sadness. Tear.
Laughter cracks from my chest, painful.
Brennan looks over.
I close the book and scan the living room, wishing for a Clue. All I see is our life, abandoned. I take the book to the built-in shelves lining the back wall, and slide it into a gap between Cooking for Two and 1984. When we moved in, we unpacked our books first, haphazardly, promising to institute a system once we were settled. The last box was empty within the month, but by then we’d grown accustomed to having to Where’s Waldo anything we wanted to read. We pretended it was a game we’d chosen to play.
“I’m going upstairs,” I say, and Brennan steps aside.
The third step from the top is going to creak, I think.
The third step from the top creaks.
The second-floor hallway is long and narrow, with two doors on either side. To the right, a bathroom followed by our bedroom. To the left, a guest room and our home gym, which was slated to become the nursery. We planned to move the gym equipment to the basement when it was time. The treadmill and the yoga mats, the mismatched dumbbells we never lifted. The basement is a damp cave, but we’d fix it up. That’s what we said.
The bathroom door is open; I glance inside. Our Antarctic-scene shower curtain is scrunched to one side of the tub, but I know which cartoon penguin is which. Fran is posed mid-waddle. Horatio and Elvis are resting on their iceberg in the folds.
Across from the bathroom, the guest room door is closed. The door to the home gym, our nursery-never-to-be, is also closed.
But our bedroom door is open. I’ve been able to see this since I reached the top of the stairs, and now that I’m only about four feet from the frame, I can see a slice of the room beyond. Our double-wide dresser, the opening of the walk-in closet. I can’t see our bed or the master bath. Those are to the right of the doorway, hidden by the wall.
My head feels fuzzy and tight.
You shouldn’t be here.
There is nowhere else for me to go.
I feel Brennan behind me, close. I brace my left hand against the wall, splaying my blood-dabbled fingers atop ugly yellow floral-print wallpaper—another thing we meant to change but never will. Let me be wrong, I wish. Let him be in there, waiting, holding a bouquet of mixed flowers. He always gets mixed, because he knows that lilies are my favorite, but he forgets which ones are lilies and hates to ask. There’s always a lily in a mixed bouquet, at least the good ones, so it works. I think of how sweet that mixed bouquet will smell. Unless he did ask the florist and got only lilies. Lilies with orange pollen bunched along their stamens, looking beautiful but smelling awful and waiting to stain my fingertips.
Maybe that’s what I’ve been able to smell since cresting the stairway. Lily pollen. Maybe the whole room is filled with lilies, and their rotten pollen stench is filling the air, drifting out to the hall to meet me.
“Lilies,” I say aloud. “It’s lilies.”
But this isn’t what lily pollen smells like.
“Mae?” says Brennan.
“I can’t,” I say. I can’t go back, I can’t go forward. I can’t stand here forever.
“I’ll go in,” he says.
I put out my swollen hand to stop him, but he hasn’t moved.
It takes all my strength to lift my foot.
I recognize our maroon-and-gold comforter. The bedding is rumpled, mounded on the far side. My side. A patch of fuzzy darkness near the head.
Pressure builds behind my eyes. This is my punishment. For the cliff, for the cabin. For leaving.
I can’t look. I can’t see you like this.
A baby. Our baby. A little boy with light blue eyes. I left him, crying. I had to have known. His fingers so chubby and grasping, and I left him there and here you are, gone, and I don’t even know for how long because I was off playing another game.
We met playing a game, Wits and Wagers, and in the final round you bet it all on my answer: 1866. I was one year over; you lost it all and so did I. Three years later, your best man framed the story of our mutual loss as the story of our mutual gain in a toast that had us laughing tears. Afterward we wondered: How many other weddings have referenced assassination?
My eyes flicker toward the window. Sunlight blinds me. It should be raining.
I feel myself hit the floor without experiencing the fall, without feeling my knees give.
You’re gone. Right there, but gone.
Brennan walks past me, toward the bed. I can’t watch him; I can’t not watch him. If I blink my skin will rupture. I stare at the nearest leg of the bed frame. Mahogany, bought from a stranger online; we haggled fifty dollars off the price because of a scratch that later buffed right out. Brennan reaches for the covers, doing what I cannot do because I’ve done it before, I’ve seen what lies beneath, and I kneel here willing my heart to stop beating, begging it to—Please. A pair of brown slippers, size eleven, at the foot of the bed. A birthday present, from me to you. The practical gift, not the fun, we promised to give at least one of each, always. They’re askew, and I can see you there, kicking them off before crawling under the covers. My side.
Maroon and gold rise at the edge of my vision. I hate the boy for it. He shouldn’t see you like this. No one should see you like this. You shouldn’t exist like this. My hands are limp upon my lap, one gruesomely swollen and bruised, the other with shredded skin. I can’t feel either. All I can feel is the endless, overwhelming ba-bump of my heart, grotesque in its insistence to keep on beating. The comforter, not falling—being placed. You, covered now. My ears are ringing. The boy’s looking at me. My forehead strikes the floor, the peeling veneer of what we thought was hardwood.
This isn’t what I wanted. This isn’t what I meant.
Pressure, Brennan’s hands upon my shoulders. The floor retreats; I have no resistance left in me. He’s talking—crashing waves, my ears still ringing—and I think: All I’m left with is you. Hatred like flame and fear like fuel. This isn’t how this was supposed to end, how we were supposed to end. The boy’s face in mine, imploring, beseeching, needing, trying. One phrase penetrates. “It’s all right.” Over and over: It’s all right. An automated response; he doesn’t know what he’s saying. It’s not all right, it’s all wrong. I was wrong. Wrong to leave, wrong to fear, wrong to lie, wrong to think that you couldn’t make even raising a child possible. I’m sorry, I was wrong, I will forever be wrong—but I came back.
It can mean nothing now, but I did.
I came back.
22.