I lift a hand to my mouth to stifle a scream that threatens to emerge from somewhere deep within.
“Are you okay?” she asks me, as she returns to the chair, bundling Ruby in the pink blanket. And then, when I don’t respond fast enough, she asks again, “ma’am?”
My hand drops from my gaping mouth to my splintered heart and I lie, “yes, just fine,” finding that lying is so easy to do as an air of serenity disguises my turbulent state, the tempestuous clouds that roll in before a storm.
I’m aware suddenly of the TV in the bedroom, blaringly loud. The reality show has broken for commercial, and suddenly we are being screamed at, chided and admonished, to buy some sort of fabric softener which smells of eucalyptus leaves. It enrages me; the sound of it, loud and emphatic, might wake Zoe from sleep. I curse it out loud, that damned commercial, I curse the TV and the network and the eucalyptus fabric softener which I will never buy. I march down the hall to turn the TV off, pressing power so vehemently that the TV slides two inches or more on the console, scratching the wall. Behind me, in the queen-size bed, beneath the matelassé comforter, Zoe rolls over onto a side, her hands still clutching the remote control though she sleeps.
She lets out a sleepy sigh.
My heart drums loudly in my chest, overwhelmed by that sense of being completely out of control. Powerless. On the verge of going mad. As I stand there, in the bedroom, staring at the blank TV screen, I feel overcome by a sudden wave of nausea, my legs turn to jelly and, for one split second, I’m certain I’ve gone into cardiac arrest.
I inch into the bathroom as blackness sweeps across my eyes like window cleaner splashed on a dirty pane. I drop onto the edge of the bathtub and set my head beneath my legs, forcing the blood back up to my brain.
And then I reach for the faucet and turn the water on so that Zoe, if she awakes from her anesthetized doze, will not hear me cry.
And that’s when I see it: the filigree bird painted a distressed red, the shabby chic hook on the wall. An extra hole, poorly plastered and painted, a reminder that when Chris hung the hook, he hung it askew.
I purchased the hook from a flea market in Kane County, on a road trip Jennifer and I made some six, maybe, seven years ago. The forty-some miles out of the city and to St. Charles was the closest either of us had been to a vacation in years. As Jennifer and I scoured through antiques and collectibles for things we didn’t need, the girls, Zoe and Taylor, rode behind in a red wagon, stuffing themselves with hot dogs and popcorn to stay quiet and satisfied.
The hook, completely bare.
I grope at my neck but come up empty, as I knew with certainty I would do, for I recall hanging the chain—the golden chain with my father’s wedding band, the words The beginning of forever engraved along its inside—from the filigree bird before I kissed Zoe on the forehead good-night. Before I left the bedroom—dimming the lights—and returned to the kitchen to clean pots and pans that awaited me on the cooling stove. Before I gathered the foul-smelling plastic bag from the garbage can and marched it down the hall to the chute. Before I settled down with my laptop to type meaningless words onto the screen, waiting fruitlessly for Ruby to stir.
She has taken my father’s wedding ring.
All at once, it’s as if he’s died again, my father. I’m teleported to the morning my mother phoned from their Cleveland home. He’d been sick for months and so it should have come as no surprise to me, the fact that he was dead. And yet the news of it, the very words slipping from my mother’s tongue, her tone newsy rather than sorrowful—he’s dead—completely bowled me over, left me stupefied. For weeks I went on believing it was a mistake, a misunderstanding, certainly this couldn’t be true. There was the funeral and the burial, of course, and I watched as some man resembling my father—but cold and rubbery, his features pliable and strange—was lowered into the ground, and then, like the dutiful daughter I was, I tossed my roses on top of the casket because it was what my mother carried when they were wed. Lavender roses.
Though I believed in my heart of hearts it wasn’t my father inside that box.
I tried phoning him each and every day, my father, worried when he didn’t answer his cell phone. From time to time my mother would answer, and in her kindest, gentlest voice she’d say, “Heidi, dear, you can’t keep calling like this,” and when I continued to call, she suggested to me, to Chris, that I see someone, someone who could help me sort through my grief. But I refused.
As I refused to see someone—a counselor, a shrink—as the ob-gyn suggested I do after he killed Juliet, after he appropriated my womb.