*
Maisie arrives in the room with her grandfather behind her, bearing a piece of construction paper in her hand. She comes in slowly, deliberately, her eyes locked on the new addition, a puckered creature who lies on her mother’s chest in a blue blanket.
“What have you got there?” I ask Maisie as I reach out to gather her into my arms and place a kiss on her forehead.
“I drew a picture,” she says as she shows me her drawing. “Our family,” she says, and I look down to see that in her drawing, our family includes four, and Harriet of course. “Who’s that?” I ask, pointing at each figure in a row, Daddy, and then Mommy, and then me, says Maisie, but when I get to the pocketsize figure in Clara’s arms, no bigger than a mouse according to Maisie’s drawing scale, she tells me that’s Felix. A buck-naked Felix who, like a bug, has three body parts and maybe an extra few legs. The hair on his head far surpasses mine.
“Felix?” I say, as both Clara’s and my eyes rise up to meet Maisie’s at exactly the same time.
“Who’s Felix?” asks Clara.
“That’s Felix,” she says assuredly, pointing a green crayon at the baby in Clara’s arms as if all along, while Clara and I sat on the fence undecided, she knew that the baby was a Felix. “Like Felix from ballet,” she says and Clara and I release a simultaneous, Ohhhh. Felix from ballet. The sole boy in her class, with his footless tights and his white T-shirts. The love of my four-year-old’s life.
I hear Clara’s voice parrot the word. “Felix,” she says, and there’s a lilt to it, a rising action instead of what has always followed my name suggestions: a firm, deflating no. I turn to Clara to see that she’s reached a hand out to Maisie’s drawing to see if the mousy figure in the palm of her illustrated hand is indeed the same one as the baby sleeping soundlessly on her chest. Her lips display a measured smile, as I set Maisie down and she climbs clumsily onto the hospital bed to join her mother and her baby brother beneath the sheets. Clara looks to me for approval, and I shrug my shoulders and say, “Why not?” Felix. It’s the perfect blend of traditional and trendy all at the same time, and as I lean in closely to stare at the thin, gossamer eyelids of my sleeping baby boy, I see that he really is a Felix. All along he was a Felix.
“Felix Charles,” says Clara, and in that moment, it’s decided. “Welcome to the world, Felix Charles Solberg.”
I sit on the other side of Clara, and Maisie sneaks awkwardly across and climbs up on my lap. Clara lays her head on my shoulder. I set my hand on Felix’s arm, and even in sleep he kicks a firm hello. “Hello, Felix,” I say and Maisie giggles, a sound that is melodious and majestic and pure.
Our family, I think, telling myself how this is the only thing in the world that matters. The rest of it is just packing materials, the upholstery, a filler. It means nothing.
And for one single moment there is bliss.
CLARA
The night comes and the night goes. I sleep, though my dreams are full of zombies, of the undead walking the earth. I dream of Nick as a zombie, alive but dead, in a state of decay. In the dream, his eyes and skin are missing because those things no longer belong to him; they’ve been gifted to someone else. Nick’s blue eyes now disassembled and sent in opposite directions—the cornea one way, the sclera another—so that in my dream an eyeless Nick tracks and trails me, groaning, groping the hollows of his eyes with decomposing hands. Behind him stands a whole horde of zombies, a herd, grotesque figures with rotting, discolored skin, moving in an unwieldy shuffle, as they reach for me, hungry for my flesh.
I wake up screaming.
In the morning, Felix, Maisie and I go through the motions. We eat and turn on the TV, staring vacantly at the animated cartoons that fill the screen. I let Harriet out. I let Harriet in.
It’s then that I remember my father said he’d send photos of my mother’s car to post online. I rise from the sofa to retrieve my laptop and, returning, sit beside Maisie on the sofa where she presses up close to me and snuggles tight.
The truth is that I’m desperate for money, for five thousand dollars to hold me over until I can find another way of earning an income. I hate to take money from my father, and yet desperation prevails. I need the money. I pull up my email to find the same correspondence there that also infiltrates my mailbox: bills and sympathy greetings. I delete them all, delete, delete, delete, looking only for an email from my father. Sure enough, there it is, an email with the photographs attached, and as Maisie clambers awkwardly onto my lap, settling herself somewhere between the keyboard and my legs, she asks, “What’s that, Mommy? What’s that?”
The images slowly load, one pixel at a time, and as she points a gooey, butter-coated finger at the snapshots that start to take shape, I say, “It’s your grandma’s car,” and then we wait for the car to appear as if by magic, the internet connection sluggish, so that by the time the car finally does arrive, Maisie has almost lost interest, eyes reverting from the laptop back to the TV screen.
Almost. But not quite.
I feel the urine well before I, myself, lay eyes on the car. It comes streaming out, a torrent of warm urine with an immediately pungent smell, settling on my lap and dripping into the crevices of the sofa cushions, turning the space between Maisie and me into a tepid lake. The urine is followed by the scream, this desperate, high-frequency scream that makes even the glassware in the dining room’s sideboard sway, a bellow that comes again and again with the only saving grace the breath Maisie summons between each scream, this millisecond of silence as she gathers the oxygen to scream again. And again. And again, and I can say nothing for I, too, would like to scream as my eyes cross over my father’s note—set there above the four photographs taken of the car from all angles, inside and out—the wording he’d like for me to use in the ad. A 2006 Chevrolet Malibu sedan. Four door. Five speed automatic with 94,271 miles.
Black.
And I’d tell myself it was a coincidence, a simple fluke. I would reprimand Maisie for both the accident and the scream, for the urine that becomes subsumed by the sofa cushions so that I’ll never get them clean and that smell will forever persist, were it not for the golden bow tie insignia that greets me in the eye, emblazoned across the front of the car’s radiator grille.