“What’s the dreamy land like?” Brian asked.
“It has a forest. I ran through the forest with my sister. We lost our shoes. We had to run in our bare feet. And then I lost my sister. I have to get back with her, where I belong.”
Brian gave me a look. Don’t overthink this. She’s free-associating.
Gracie looked up at me, relaxed, but sensing my anxiety. “Don’t worry Mama, I will still love you even when I leave you.”
You have got it so wrong, kid. I will leave you. When I’m a brittle husk, a bent wire.
I gathered her up and squeezed. She squirmed down and pulled me by the hand toward her room. I tucked her into bed. She was not in the woods, shoeless, running toward a sister. She was not lost.
I opened the closet. Inside, their shoes lay in a jumbled pile, Gracie’s thin-soled leather sandals with the orange heel straps, Gabe’s bee boots. I wanted to hold the sandals up to her face. These are yours. You are ours.
When she was asleep Brian and I sat on the couch sharing a glass of wine; he thought she was retelling The Wizard of Oz. “Think about it,” he said, “returning home requires the right shoes.”
“Or,” I said, “she could be trying to mentally organize all the scary things she’s endured that she doesn’t understand, creating a sister who died to exorcise the deaths hovering overhead.”
“Maybe,” Brian said.
The dreamy land you can’t get to when you’re awake.
“Or maybe she’s prescient,” I said. “Maybe she senses something coming.”
He looked at me. Calm down. I knew he felt our job was to start seeing her as a regular kid again, to try not to confound our fears with hers. Probably he was right, but when I looked at her, I saw a kid trailing a wake of needles, tubes, midnight drives to the hospital. I saw a child who had lived beside other children, not fifteen feet away, as they died. She never saw their faces but their pain, their parents’ grief, saturated the air she breathed.
We moved to the bed, without talking. When Brian fell asleep, I turned on my side to watch him; his wide forehead erased of all the grooves of the day was once a sight I’d wait for. Now, I wanted him awake and worrying with me.
Brian always had an uncanny way of knowing when I was thinking about him, or us, with any special intensity.
He woke up and looked at me. “Are we OK?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Well, take a guess,” Brian said. It was a peace offering, a chance to laugh. But I didn’t laugh.
“Brian,” I said. “I don’t have the energy for this.”
I wanted to explain, but what I had to say would sound too strange: I want your ear pressed against the glass wall of Gracie’s unconscious. Listening for signs. I want you vigilant.
If I listed my multiplying fears, pointed to the spore of alienation that grew from them, between us, he’d likely say something reassuring, something to set the record straight.
I didn’t want the record set straight. I wanted his internal landscape to look like mine—a grassy field where a little stick man ran in frantic circles, hands up, eyes wide orbs of panic, clutching his corncob pipe. I didn’t know what Brian’s inner landscape looked like—I hadn’t asked in a long time—but I felt sure that if he had a little corncob pipe man, his man was calm, leaning against a fence.
“Yes you do,” Brian said. “You have the energy of ten thousand suns for the things that matter to you. Talk.”
“Your corncob man is too calm.”
“I see, my corncob man. And is he also holding the rope?”
“I want you to be as worried as I am, about everything. That is what I want.”
“I take your worries seriously, I share them. But I don’t think we have to be in the same psychic state to be connected. And I don’t feel like you give much thought to what I want. Or even to what I can give you. It’s like you’ve turned me into some genial uncle who you smile at politely and push out the door before pie.”
I laughed, finally. But Brian grew serious and sad.
“It feels, lately, like you’re pretending to be in this relationship when you’re not. Like our being together is more a matter of geography than desire. If you could go back to the West Coast and I could still see the kids, we might do that.”
I was stunned. Beyond stunned; slapped awake in cold, open ocean. To say such a thing, he must be very lonely. Which I could understand. I was lonely too. But it was more than that.
If I understood him, Brian was saying anything could happen, even the unthinkable. And that included the dissolution of us.
A person you cherished could pass right through you, atom by atom. Vanish into the mystery. We’d seen that happen. Children loved to the farthest star and back again had disappeared from the discernible world.
“Brian,” I said. “I love you. I want to be with you.”
It was true; I could feel its truth as I said it. But I also felt rigid and breakable, encased in a veneer of ice.
Our very first Valentine’s together, I’d written Fiona Apple lyrics into a card: And all my armour falling down, in a pile at my feet. And my winter giving way to warm, as I’m singing him to sleep.
That felt like a hundred thousand years ago.
He was right; I’d given virtually nothing to our relationship since we’d arrived in Durham. I’d assumed Brian had shared my sense that there would be time for each other later. After.
“I just thought we’d see each other on the other side. And this isn’t the other side yet.”
“Let me know when we get there.”
46
A few days later the kids were outside, playing on the porch, when Gracie screamed, “Get back! Get away!” I thought she was hassling Gabe over a toy and ignored them. Brian went out to see what was actually going on and found Gracie bent double, clutching Gabe’s diaper to keep him away from a bag of birdseed. Gabe, in defiance, was struggling to plunge his hands into the bag. Floating above them both was a fat black spider with a red hourglass on its belly. Black widow. Brian scooped them up and carried them inside. “That’s not the spider for us, kiddies.”
They clung to his neck. “Don’t put us down!” He didn’t.
“Gracie, you did good,” Brian said. “You kept your brother safe.”
“I know that,” Gracie said. “I saved his Gabey lives.”
“And Gabe saved yours with his cells,” I said, trying make their efforts at lifesaving sound even.
Brian gave me a look, might be better if we didn’t keep score.
Later, in bed, he said, “We have to get back to civilization. It’s the savage wild out there. The geese, the rude insects keeping us awake, and now lethal fucking spiders.”
Outside, the tame, manicured lawns of Alexan Farms were hemmed with box hedges; the trees were pruned into sleek, obedient obelisks. I rolled my eyes.
“Eye rolling is a sign of disdain,” Brian said. “Very bad on the Gottman scale.”
We’d been reading a book, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail, by this guy, Gottman.