I lay a shaking hand upon Maisie’s clammy one, and say to her, “Shhh,” but she pushes me away with so much might that I all but tumble from my side, latching on to Felix’s bassinet for support as it lurches precariously on its stand. Felix, rattled from sleep by the sudden shove, begins to cry, a cry that easily trumps Maisie’s and my own cries. Felix’s cry quickly escalates into a caterwaul as Maisie hides her head under the pillow to try to smother the noise or to hide from the bad man who trails her. I don’t know why it is that she hides, though I can imagine because I, too, want to climb under a pillow and hide.
“What bad man?” I ask loudly, over the sound of Felix, as I slip from bed and slide my hands under the weight of him, lifting him from the bassinet. “Shhh. Shhh,” I croon to Felix now, standing beside his bassinet and trying to sway him back to sleep. “What bad man, Maisie?”
“The bad man,” screams Maisie redundantly, her voice muffled by the pillow. As my eyes adjust to the darkness of night, I begin to see Maisie’s legs kicking persistently at the bed before she pulls them into herself and throws the sheets up over her tiny body. I scrabble around inside Felix’s bassinet for his abandoned pacifier, for something, anything, to silence the insistent sound. He’s upset, scared, maybe even a bit pissed off that Maisie and I woke him from sleep.
“What bad man, Maisie? What man? Tell me about the man,” I beg frenetically as I slide my arm from the spaghetti strap of a tank top and place Felix against my chest. It is not quite time for him to eat. By my count, Felix shouldn’t eat for another hour, and yet the pacifier is nowhere; there’s no other way to stop his screaming than to let him suck on me. As his gums latch down, my breasts begin to protest. The nipples are cracked, the skin dry, riddled with a bloody discharge; my breasts are hard and sore and unimaginably clogged. Like water held back by a beaver dam, the milk refuses to flow at the same pace Felix would like—a trickle rather than a surge, and so he slurps and slurps to little avail, making my chest crack and bleed. How has the nursing been going? Dr. Paul had asked in the exam room, and I’d lied, Just fine, before telling her the truth: the pain, the broken skin, the low milk supply. What I expected was a haranguing on breastfeeding, but what I was given instead was a way out. There are other ways, she told me before listing them for me: infant formula, a breast pump, donor milk.
Maisie won’t tell me about the man, and I want to tell her that she’s wrong, because I’ve spoken to the police and I’ve read the newspaper articles. I’ve been at the scene. They all seem to corroborate the same truth, that Nick’s speeding was the cause of the crash.
“Tell me about the man,” I say again, and when she won’t, I ask Maisie to tell me about the car. She’s told me already that the man was in a car, and I picture him racing after Nick on Harvey Road. “Was it a red car?” I suggest when Maisie says nothing. She shakes her head negligibly; it was not a red car. “Was it blue?” I ask, to which she replies with another shake of the head. “Was it a black car, Maisie?” I ask this time. “Was the car black?”
This time she doesn’t shake her head. Her response instead is a long drawn-out cry, a wolf howling at the moon, as she runs from the bed and from the room, calling over and over again for Daddy. She flees the bedroom in search of some other room where she can hide, the bathroom door still removed from its place and lying on the wooden floorboards, which I trip over in an attempt to catch my four-year-old daughter before the click of a lock bisects Maisie and me. In my arms Felix is no longer pressed to my chest, but now trying to imbibe anything he can find: my nightshirt, his hand, my hair. With a handful of my hair in his mouth, he no longer has the ability to scream.
It was a black car. A man in a black car. If what Maisie says is true.
I drop to the floor before Nick’s office door and ask three times for Maisie to come out. “Please, come out.” On the other side of the wooden pane I hear her cry, and imagine Maisie’s tiny body splayed across Nick’s ikat rug, her tears getting absorbed by the weft threads, the frosty grays with the citron stripes. Or maybe she’s hurled herself over the arm of Nick’s club chair, hugging the tufted back, pretending that it’s Nick.
When she doesn’t come, I make my way out to the garage in search of a nail and a hammer.
I’m becoming an old pro at this.
NICK
BEFORE
Her name was Melinda Grey, and I should have known right away, when she walked into my office some six months ago, that she was a problem patient. We’d talked about them in dental school somewhere in between local anesthesia and oral pathology. Problem patients. You wouldn’t have known it to look at her, for her small size seemed to contradict the barracuda she was. She was a pleasant-looking woman, approaching middle age, with soft brown hair and benign eyes, the kind that made great contact when she talked.
Ms. Grey presented as a phobic patient. She blamed it on an extensive dental history complete with emergency everything—root canals, abscesses, a fractured tooth—and a habit of choosing dentists with a lousy bedside manner because they tended to be cheaper, their appointment openings more readily available than someone like me, who had a calendar full of patients, until I met Ms. Grey, at least, and then suddenly I had time in my day to spare.