The teapot had been in the back of a narrow table crowded with used and chipped china. Together, at exactly the same moment, we had reached for it. As our fingers touched, two children raced by, jostling Sophie, and she fell into my arms. Instinctively, immediately, I had cradled her, felt, as I steadied her, a nearly primitive need to protect this soft woman with the round face and wild blonde-streaked hair, this creature dressed in a denim skirt, off-the-shoulder blouse in a green—malachite, I remember, a shade that most women can’t wear—and boots with heels so insanely high I didn’t know how she was able to walk in them. And even with those heels, she regained her balance with the grace of a Balinese dancer. Her head just brushed my shoulder. Moments later, I handed money to the woman behind the table—the asking price, no haggling—while Sophie cradled the pot in her hands, just as shortly before I had held her. She laughed up at me then and looked directly into my eyes. “Our first purchase,” she’d said with a confidence I would never have dared, even joking, as if our future had already been decided and we could cut through the dance. So easy. So inevitable. With an innocence nearly arrogant, with not an inkling of what lay ahead.
Another lifetime ago.
Sophie came to the threshold but didn’t enter the room, and I was pulled back to the present. “Don’t go anywhere,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” In the bathroom I peed a long stream, the smell acrid. The cabinet mirror above the sink confirmed the grim news. Unshaven jaw, red-shot eyes, bags underneath, face deeply lined. I opened the cabinet door, shook two tablets out of the bottle, swallowed them dry. The headache was killing me.
When I returned, Sophie hadn’t moved from her spot in the doorway. “You don’t remember calling me, do you?”
Shite. A dim recollection surfaced. Sometime—the previous night?—I’d phoned her at her hotel in DC. The Mayflower. Big mistake, I realized now. Big, big mistake. Huge. I debated whether admitting I remembered the call would escalate the magnitude of my error or if it would be better to plead amnesia. Didn’t matter. Either way was an admission I’d been smashed out of my skull when I’d phoned. Here was an idea: someone should invent a phone with an internal Breathalyzer that would prevent drunks from making calls. It was the kind of crazy concept that once would have made her smile. I could imagine her response and how we would have played with the idea. What would you call it? she’d say. Intoxi-not. Dry-dock. Designated no-call. Think of the friendships it would save, the relationships rescued from rupturing. The coffee was brewed, and I poured two mugs, offered one to Sophie, which she ignored.
“So what was so pressingly important that you had to wake me at two in the morning? Or was it just for some middle-of-the-night drunk talk?”
Yeah, I sure could have used the no-call gizmo. I stalled for time, set her mug on the counter, drank from mine. I was playing catch-up here, trying to nail down the day, what I’d said during the call. Had I been telling her I needed her? Asking her to come home? Begged her? I thought I remembered crying. God, I sincerely hoped not. She hated drunken conversation, the slurred sentimentality. I didn’t blame her. Every inch of my skull ached—behind my eyes, my temples, jaw—and I was nearly cross-eyed from the pain.
“You need help, Will. You’re a mess.”
A mess. “Christ,” I shot back. “That’s rich.” As simply as that I was drawn in to starting an argument.
“What?”
“That you’d tell me that. Have you forgotten?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Last fall. Remember when you had lunch with Jan and Alicia and you overheard them say you were a mess? What did you tell me when you came home? You weren’t a mess. You were grieving. So what is it? You’re allowed grief, and I’m not?”
I was gratified to see she was contrite.
“You’re right, Will. I’m sorry.” She entered the kitchen, picked up the mug, and pulled out a chair at the table. “I don’t want to fight.”
“I’m sorry, too, Soph. I really am. I screwed up. I know it.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“Okay, we agree on that.”
“I don’t know what to do, Will. I can’t handle this.”
“Handle what?” I said, afraid of her answer. Did she mean the drinking? Our marriage?
When she spoke, her voice was heavy with sorrow. “I don’t know, Will. I’ve tried, I really have, but I just can’t do this anymore.”
The void between us was growing wider, and I feared it couldn’t be crossed. How had it come to this? Once I would have bet our marriage was solid enough to withstand anything, but I was no longer confident. I wondered if in even the strongest of marriages there always existed a fault line and it just took one major, earth-shattering disaster to reveal it. “I’m sorry, Soph. What can I say? I feel like a total shit.”
“So what happened?”
I sat at the table and dropped my gaze to my mug, unable to meet her eyes. “I don’t know. It wasn’t anything I planned.” I considered telling her I’d been lonely with her off in DC, and although I was tempted—even scared and on the defensive—I couldn’t use such an unfair accusation as a weapon. “I was out walking and thinking about—you know—”
“No. I don’t know, Will.”
Lucy. I didn’t allow myself to say her name, afraid I would start weeping. “Everything,” I said. “And I was walking by the Nest, and, I don’t know, I thought I’d go in for a beer. Just one beer.”
“Not one of your best ideas, Will.”
“You think I don’t know that? It’s just so hard, Soph. Sometimes I just need to forget.”
She reached over and laid her hand on my arm. “Drinking never erases memory, Will. It just makes you drunk.”
She was still upset, but I saw the conversation was calming her down. “I know. I know that.” But that wasn’t completely true. Drinking did help me forget, at least for the moment. And for this brief respite I was able to block out the pain of losing a daughter and how utterly I had failed my family. My head throbbed so badly I wondered briefly if I had a tumor.
“Will?”
“Yeah?”
“We really need to talk.”
We need to talk. Nothing good could come of that.
I struggled to come up with a response.
“Oh God,” she cried out.
“What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
She was staring out into the backyard. “Lucy’s swing,” she said. “What happened to Lucy’s swing?”
I shifted my gaze to follow hers, saw two ropes hanging freely from the elm tree, saw on the ground beneath it the plank of the wooden seat.
She crossed to the sink for a better view. “Look. It’s been cut,” she said. “Someone came into our yard and cut down Lucy’s swing? Who could have done this? Why would anyone do something like that?”
“I don’t know.” A boozy recollection surfaced. The hacksaw in my hands, the dark, lit only by the glow of the back porch light and the echo of light cast from the Eatons’ house next door. No longer able to bear the sight of the empty swing, I’d sawed away at the ropes, as if they were responsible for our loss. I remembered, too, the wind overhead in the night air and the drunken moment when I thought it had called out to me in Lucy’s voice. “I don’t know,” I repeated.
Something in my voice or my face alerted her.
“Will. Tell me you didn’t . . . tell me it wasn’t you.”
But of course she knew, could see the truth plain on my face. The silence filled the air between us, as wooden and flat as the useless seat that accused me from the lawn in our backyard. “Soph—” I began.