That first time we screwed around with the possibility of insemination looming, I couldn’t focus. I kept thinking about the state of our country, the planet, of catastrophic events—both manmade and natural—and how cruel it would be to bring another person into this world.
I tried to push these thoughts out of my mind while I cupped one of Kristen’s breasts, licked the shallow valley speckled with freckles between them, and worked on her with my fingers. But after she placed her hands on my ass and banged our hips together, she noticed the problem.
“Is it my breath?” she said.
I had a whole list prepared. I started with those right-wing, gun-nut assholes. The “don’t-tread-on-me, all-lives-matter, Let’s go Brandon” dipshits who, if they had the ability to fuck an AR-15, would fuck an AR-15. Then there was Deepwater Horizon, Fukushima, Chernobyl, the Trump presidency, which was another nuclear meltdown in and of itself, Chicxalub, and climate change. I said, “I don’t want our kid coming home from college to 125-degree summers.”
Kristen laughed and playfully slapped my face with her long, delicate fingers, then reached down to begin again.
“You should try focusing on the here and now,” she said.
“I haven’t even gotten to viruses, diseases—fucking bacteria.”
“You need to stop doom-scrolling.”
“I’m addicted.”
“To being an idiot.” She brought up her hand and spit into her palm. She reached down and grabbed again. I flinched. It was surprisingly cold. “You inundate yourself with all the terrible stuff. It’s no wonder you think everything’s fucked,” she said. “It gets better. It always does.”
I wished I could share in her optimism. We read the same news. And maybe I read too much of it, sure; it’s just that I had a hard time pretending things weren’t bad. I’d tried in my mind to live in a mental bomb shelter with fake windows depicting rolling hills covered in apple trees, deer grazing, children spinning on a tire swing, but somewhere in the back of it, I knew the truth—that the real landscape was on fire.
Just last month there was a shooting at East High, not three miles from our house. Seventeen minutes south, the Derby school board banned a novel by Sherman Alexie. Plenty of Kansas politicians cried socialism because they didn’t understand or hated something or someone, and had support from all these morons with room-temperature IQs sporting MAGA hats. Whenever I read about stuff like that, I couldn’t help but bring it up. And it never took long for doom and gloom to consume me. I’d get emotional, go worst-case, and dominate the conversation. I expressed how I was at my wit’s end with these people. Weeks ago, I’d fallen into a deep, Wikipedia rabbit hole on medieval torture devices and wanted to bring every one back for them. And Kristen listened to my barbaric suggestions earnestly, as if I wasn’t unhinged. Her tolerant, impartial lips glistening from saliva out of the habit of licking them when she concentrated. She offered nods, added “hmms” the few times I came up with rational, more humane solutions. When I finished, usually I was left more emotionally exhausted, depressed, and miserable than angry.
“I’m just saying,” I said, “nearly seventy-five percent of all life on Earth went extinct after the Chicxulub impact.”
“That’s the example you’re going with?”
We both laughed.
“Why not?”
“Because it happened during the Mesozoic period,” she said.
“I’m impressed.” “You’ve literally brought it up a thousand times,” she said. “I get it. You’re upset you’ll never get to pet a triceratops.”
“That would have been pretty awesome.”
Kristen’s eyes bobbed down to our waists. By then I was hard.
“Look who’s awake,” she said, removing her hand. “Not so worried about big, bad meteorites now, are you?”
***
An IUD had been out of the question. Besides, we’d loosely talked about having kids in the future, and Kristen didn’t want to go through the hassle of getting one put in, only to have it removed years before it expired. Unofficially, we’d been trying to get pregnant after she quit birth control. She was tired of it fucking with her mood. There had been days when her breasts were so tender wearing a bra was agonizing. She got headaches that bordered on migraines, then turned into migraines. She became anxious, which led to bouts of depression that sometimes lasted days, and during these spells, she’d seldom leave the bedroom and cry so hard I kept spoons for her swollen eyes below a box of fish sticks in the freezer.
Even though Kristen no longer took the pill, I sometimes broke the habit of pulling out.
When I didn’t, there were no theatrics. She didn’t stick her ass into the air or refuse to move, lying prone for twenty minutes so she wouldn’t disturb the swimming lane. We’d clean up and go about our business. We shared, I believed, the same feeling: If it happened, it happened.
If not? It didn’t. We had a good life. We weren’t rich, weren’t poor, but straddled the middle, comfortably. We owned a small bungalow that needed some work. Between us, we had $37,000 in savings; worked careers we loved. Our circle of friends was small, but close. We had decent relationships with our parents, found the humor in memes and bad television. We were young, healthy, and good-looking, which beat the alternative. At worst, which wasn’t bad, for the foreseeable future, things would continue on this same, steady course.
Next thing I knew, we went the better part of a year without so much as a “scare,” or whatever people who weren’t afraid to get pregnant called those. I began to think I was sterile or she was infertile. I never brought it up. If we took tests and it was on my end, she might resent me; if the problem was her, she’d hate herself.
Then one night in bed, Kristen paused from the book she was reading, saving the page with her thumb, looked over at me and said, “If you came into this relationship with a vasectomy already, you would’ve told me, right?”
Trying to lighten the mood, I said, “This is the first time I’ve had health insurance since I was on my parents’ plan.”
Which, at thirty, was true. I worked remotely for a decent-size literary press in Oregon, thanks to a connection a friend from grad school hooked me up with. The salary was great, double what I’d previously made waiting tables and freelancing combined. But it was the benefits that wowed me: medical, dental, PTO, vision—the works. This also played a factor in our venture into unprotected sex. It had been four years since I was insured. Now if something happened, like a long bout with a mysterious illness, or if I careened my car into a telephone pole, a hospital bill wouldn’t send us into the poor house. This went for our offspring, too.
“I know the whole prospect of becoming a father freaks you out,” Kristen said.
“Which is perfectly normal,” I said.
“It seems like something’s up, is all.”
“I’m not snipped,” I assured her.
I grabbed the book out of Kristen’s hand and dropped it onto the floor. She looked at me like she wanted to ask what I was doing, but she knew what I was doing. What we were going to do. When I took off my shirt, she took off hers. I slid out of my boxers, rolled onto my side to face her and while we kissed, pulled down her underwear.
***
Kristen called one morning on FaceTime while I was in bed at the hotel. This was two months later, while I was in Seattle for a week-long conference. Her hair sat messily piled on top of her head, tied in a bun that looked like a ball of yarn starting to come undone.
“I was going to wait to call,” she said, “but I thought you should know right away.”
“Were you in an accident?”
“What?” she said. “No.”
“Everything’s all right?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” She smiled and brought something up, but dropped it. “Shit,” she said, and picked up whatever had clattered to the floor; blew on it, shook it, and held it too close to the screen. “Check this shit out.”
It was small, thin, rectangular, and blurry.
“That your toothbrush?” I said.
She grunted and moved it back and forth. “Better?”
“Sort of.”
She moved the thing again.
“How about now?”
“Is that what I think it is?” I said.
Two pink lines in a small oval toward the middle of a plastic stick.
Kristen started to nod like crazy, her eyes welling.
“We did it,” she said, and burst out crying—happy tears—because we had.
I spent that afternoon in a daze stuck behind a booth covered in books the press released in the last couple of years, some as far back as a decade ago. I was there to promote the titles and authors with another editor, Samira, who was nice to my face, though I knew resented me because I was one of two people who got to work from home and she’d been with the company longer.
I tried to bullshit with writing students, instructors, poets, professors, other editors, novelists, agents, book cover designers, screenwriters, and people who were there because they were interested in becoming one or more of these things. But I had a hard time thinking about anything but the pregnancy.
Once, a young woman asked me three times how much a novel cost, and I stared blankly at her as if she spoke another language.
After she left, Samira snapped her fingers in front of my face.
“Earth to Ben,” she said. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“What?”
“Are you here?”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just—I found out earlier that I’m going to be a dad.”
Relief washed over me soon as I finished speaking. It hadn’t sounded so terrible when I said it out loud.
That evening, after we packed up, Samira surprised me by offering to buy me a drink. “To celebrate.” And after I gave her a suspicious look, she said, “And if I’m going to be honest, I’m sick of these off-site events. This is as good excuse as any.”
We found an empty Irish pub near our hotel. The place was dim, musty smelling, and when we sat in stools, the chair legs barked, summoning the attention of the bartender, who’d been staring at a small wall-mounted television. He looked like a retired biker gang leader, his white beard braided with a red rubber band, a leather vest covered in patches; large, shiny rings glimmering from each of his fingers. He turned around, looking annoyed, and asked what we wanted. I ordered a Guinness—because why not?—and he scoffed. Samira got herself a Sea Breeze.
“Thanks for the drink,” I said.
She held hers up.
“Cheers,” she said, “to your future kiddo.”
A news station played on the small television. A grave-looking newscaster stared straight at the camera, which felt like she stared straight at me. She was reporting on a suicide bombing in Sadr City. “An estimated fifty-three killed,” she was saying, but I stopped listening when Samira clinked her glass against mine.
A few days after I got back from Seattle, I dreamed Kristen and I were in a huge minivan, a Honda Odyssey or something, the kind of car I never dreamed of owning. We were floating in the middle of the sea. It didn’t matter which. The world had become one big ocean. Volcanoes had erupted. Nukes were dropped. Mountain glaciers and polar ice caps melted away. We were the sole survivors charged by a cruel fate to repopulate what was left of the world. But things didn’t look good. Prehistoric fish breached the water nearby, brandishing teeth as large as tombstones. And it was hot in the van, our clothes stuck to our bodies like wallpaper. I tried the air, but, of course, the A/C didn’t work. Then, like all nightmares, things got worse. The van began sinking. Water bubbled up from the floorboards, poured out of the vents, and Kristen squatted on top of the seat, began screaming for me to do something. But I couldn’t do anything. I only watched the water as it rose past her ankles, then her knees.
“Wake up,” Kristen said, and smacked my chest. “Something’s wrong.”
I didn’t know what time it was. Early, I guessed. The room was dim. Except for soft gray light sliding through the blinds. I listened. I didn’t know what for: the smoke detector, someone trying to break into the cellar, gunfire, Kristen telling me what the something wrong was.
Her teeth gritted and she lay on her back blinking at the ceiling. She had the sheets on her half of the bed pulled down, her shirt pulled up, clutched in a fist, which revealed her flat stomach, smooth and pale as bone.
“What is it?” I said, hoping it wasn’t what I thought it might be, already hopping out of bed.
I helped her to the bathroom, with a hand wrapped around her waist, the other gently holding her elbow. Kristen’s skin was cold, tight, and clammy. She walked like an octogenarian on the cusp of another impotent decade, with these small steps that scraped the floor. She slid her hand against the wall to brace herself.
She winced when I flicked the light on, then asked me if I could please let go of her elbow. When I did, she said, “I’m sorry. I’m just not looking for an audience,” and padded in.
In the split second before she closed the door, I caught sight of the blood. A gloopy trail that seeped from the crotch of her underwear and down the inside of her left thigh to her knee.
Then the lock clicked.
And for a while, I stared at the door. I wondered if I was supposed to camp outside in the hallway, make coffee, or maybe call an ambulance.
I waited five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes—forever minutes.
Then I knocked.
“Babe, are you all right?” I said, which seemed like the wrong thing to say. I felt ill-equipped to function in a world where I was expected to provide and care for other people. I placed my ear against the door. An ocean-like hum filled my head as if I’d held a seashell up to the side of it. “Just give me a sign or something,” I said, my hand primed on the knob. “Anything?”
No answer. I didn’t hear the noises I came to expect either. A toilet flush, paper breaking from the roll, the faucet running, the medicine cabinet popping open, clacking shut, the maraca-like rattle of a pill bottle, or the hard, wet sobs that erupted from the depths of Kristen’s throat and collided against the back of her teeth whenever she was upset.
There could be internal bleeding. Would I have heard if she’d passed out and banged her head against the tub?
I rattled the knob.
“I know you’re freaking out. I’m freaking out too.” I gently knocked. “Kris? Kris, please,” I said, as the shower sputtered on.
I stripped the covers and started too large a load. After that, I didn’t know what else to do. I wound up at the kitchen table, the hairs on my neck tingling. I felt nervous and frightened because I wasn’t sure how bad things were or might get. I drank half a carton of chocolate almond milk and stuffed my face with sour cream and onion potato chips. I’d almost gone through the bag when the shower turned off. The washer, near the end of its spin cycle, rocked and thumped against the floor.
The bathroom door opened and I got up so fast the chair toppled over.
I found Kristen sitting at the foot of the barren mattress, her head and body wrapped in towels. She stared at her bouncing knees, phone to her ear, the other hand pressed against her stomach. I wanted to comfort her. Tell her everything was going to be all right, even though I didn’t know if that was true; take hold of her face, and feel her warm, soft skin in my hands. She spent a bunch of money on fancy lotions, exfoliating serums, retinol. She was 27 but feared in a few years she might look 40 from tanning so much in high school. Some nights, lying in bed, we wouldn’t kiss before we turned the lights off. “I have stuff on my face,” she’d say when I went in for one, the lamplight reflecting white, fuzzy discs on her cheeks, sheen from product, which made her seem doll-like and fragile.
She looked fragile now—in a different, more alarming way.
I wished we could trade places. In the next breath, I didn’t. I didn’t want her in mine. Standing there, tongue-tied and incapacitated by insecurity and incompetence, not knowing how to navigate this. I was afraid to say or do the wrong thing, to fuck up. Then I wished we could be other people. Or at the very least the people we were the night before.
I cleared my throat.
It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
She looked up.
Kristen’s eyelids were as puffy as innertubes, and what little I made out of her actual eyes looked glassy, teeming with thin red veins, exhausted, and miserable. I wondered if there might be a spoon I missed when I put the rest away after their usefulness disappeared with the absence of the pill. Forgotten somewhere in the depths of the freezer, mottled with frost, waiting for this moment.
“Let’s get you to a doctor,” I said.
I realized I could have better prepared myself before making this statement. I was shirtless, in baggy, gray sweatpants. It would be easy to misconstrue what I said as insincere. I didn’t look ready to do anything but go back to sleep.
Kristen bunched her shoulders, shook her head, lifted the hand off her stomach to give me the hold-on-a-sec gesture. She tried to smile, but something closer to a pained grimace that barely lifted her ears, eyebrows, and nose stretched across her face.
A moment later she said, “Mom?” in a gravelly, raw voice like she had strep or had blown out her vocal cords screaming, and my heart sank. “Yeah, I know. It’s earlier here if that makes you feel any better. Fine, yeah. It’s just that—could you let me finish?” She mouthed, Unbelievable. “What’s with what attitude? Listen, is Dad with you? No, the both of you, actually.”
I made myself useful in the only way I could think of. I began to transfer the laundry, ignoring the conversation that rebooted in the bedroom on speakerphone.
I knew where it was going. And I didn’t want to blame her for calling, but a small part of me did. I felt replaced, and jealous because of that. Conflicted because I hadn’t known what to do or say and she called her parents because they would know how to do both of those things. They could navigate tragedy.
Steve, her father, had a short-lived affair with a middle-aged Giant Eagle cashier not long after Kristen and I started dating. He’d left a paper trail, got caught, tried to talk his way out of it, couldn’t, and her mother, Tricia, went ahead with divorce proceedings. But Steve atoned, cried, promised it was a stupid, one-off thing, and begged for a chance to make it up to her. And in the end, Tricia gave him one.
“We’re looking at tickets now,” Steve’s voice boomed, deep and staticky as if they were communicating on old walkie-talkies.
“Will you promise me one thing?” Tricia said.
“Are you talking to me?” Kristen said.
“Yes.”
“Sure, Mom.”
“That you’ll go see a doctor,” Tricia said. “Or we won’t book them. Right, Steve?”
I tossed a pillowcase into the dryer.
“You should listen to your mother,” he said.
“I’m fine,” Kristen said.
“You’re not fine,” Tricia snapped. “And that’s okay, sweetie.” Her voice softer this time.
No one said anything for 10 or 15 seconds.
“All right, Mom,” Kristen said. “I’ll make the appointment for tomorrow.”
“How long should we come for? Two days?” Tricia said. “We don’t want to smother you.”
“Let’s round it up to a week,” Steve said.
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“Four days should be fine,” Kristen said.
“Are you sure?” Steve again.
“I don’t want you two to worry about finding someone to catsit on such short notice,” Kristen said.
I shut the dryer and cranked the dial to ninety minutes.
“I’ll fill salad bowls with food,” Steve said, “and leave the toilet seats up in case they knock over their water dishes.”
“What about litter boxes?” Kristen said.
Steve went to add his two cents, but Tricia cut in. “Maybe they’ll finally learn how to bury their shit.”
I pressed START and the sheets and things began to tumble. After all that almond milk I didn’t realize how badly I had to piss.
The stream shot out of me with the force of a firehose. It struck the still, flat toilet water with a slap, splashing some onto the seat and my foot. I flushed and plucked a tissue from the box resting on the back of the toilet, wiped the seat, my foot, plucked out another, blew my nose, and twisted them together. I stepped on the lever to the small trash can next to the lip of the tub and its silver lid opened like a giant, toothless mouth. Resting on top of Q-tips, cotton balls, spirals of frayed dental floss and other junk was Kristen’s bloody underwear.
At 8 o’clock the next morning, while Kristen and I were in bed, she negotiated brunch before her 11:30 appointment. Though her phone wasn’t on speaker, Steve was audible from the other end. He said brunch sounded good. “We could stand to eat,” he bellowed, then complained about the flights. A layover at O’Hare, which turned into a delay, that turned their connector into a red-eye. They landed in Wichita at 3 a.m., bleary-eyed, slogging and starving, having survived on Biscoff and diet ginger ale.
“We’ll meet you at HomeGrown in forty-five minutes. It’s not far from your hotel.” She and Steve talked a little more, Kristen going “mmm-hmm,” more than saying anything. They hung up. She sighed and said, “I don’t think I’ll have much of an appetite.”
She was pale and sluggishly got out of bed, then left the room. A bathroom drawer rattled open; slapped shut. Kristen came back clutching a pantyliner, shucked off her shirt and pajama bottoms and took a bra and pair of underwear out of the dresser drawer, slinging the bra around her shoulder before stepping into the underwear and applying the pantyliner before pulling them up.
Last night, she laid towels out on her side of the bed, tossed and turned all night, wrapped and unwrapped herself in blankets. She let off a series of mumbles and whimpers during brief fits of sleep and got out of bed too many times to count. Each time I listened for a cry or moan while she was in the bathroom, but only heard the dull drone of the overhand fan buzzing like a downed powerline. Each time she crawled back in, I draped an arm over her, and each time she moved it away.
“Maybe let’s skip the restaurant,” I said.
“It’s just breakfast.”
“That you won’t eat.”
“I’ll drink a coffee,” she said, “or have a mimosa. Maybe two. Hell, I could go all out and order a Bloody Mary now that I can drink. I’ll get a decent buzz going and maybe nosh on your pancakes.”
“I don’t think boozing before seeing a doctor is the smartest move,” I said. “What you ought to do is rest. That’s what your body needs right now.”
“What do you know about my body?”
“I know you hardly got any sleep last night.”
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“Because I hardly got any sleep last night.”
Outside, a car horn honked. Birds chirped from trees.
“I laid in bed all day yesterday,” she said. “I need fresh air. The sun.”
“This isn’t some normal, happy visit. Some vacation for your folks. And you shouldn’t feel obligated to entertain them,” I said. “And they shouldn’t expect it. Even as a bargaining chip.”
Kristen opened another drawer and took out a pair of jeans, slipped them on. While she messed with the clasp of her bra, she said, “Who said anything about obligations and expectations?”
She went to the closet.
“Let’s have them over. We’ve got coffee, eggs, mushrooms and arugula. Turkey sausage. Shallots. Half a leek—I think. There’s vodka and whiskey in the cabinet. I’ll run to the store right now for orange and tomato juice; those biscuits that come in tubes. Cheese. Fucking champagne. Whatever else you think they might be into. I’ll be back before they get here. I’ll cook. You literally won’t have to do a thing.”
I pulled the covers off and stood. Kristen reared back and looked at me, perplexed, but she smiled. I was already dressed. During one of her late-night bathroom runs, I threw on clothes in case the worst wasn’t over. My boots were at the foot of the bed.
“No offense—”
“That’s a terrible way to start a sentence,” I interrupted.
“—but the last time I checked, you weren’t exactly Top Chef material.”
“Not even I can fuck up an omelet.”
Kristen dragged a T-shirt off the hanger and put it on. She ran a hand through her thick, curly hair and moved to the foot of the bed, where her shoulders went slack. After placing her hands on her hips, she let out a long, defeated sigh. In that moment, I wondered how much different our lives would have been if I had actually gone through with a vasectomy in my twenties.
“Is there enough room for everyone if we eat on the porch do you think?” she said.
“We could pretend we’re in Kansas City,” I said, “or Vienna, Paris. Somewhere far, far away.”
She nodded and sat down on the bed before she fell back onto it.
“My stomach’s killing me,” she said, and grabbed her phone from the nightstand, unlocking it. Her thumbs tapped the screen a couple of times before she added, “By the way…”
“What?” “Your shirt’s on backward.”
Which I didn’t bother to fix before I left. At the Dillons on 21st and Amidon, I filled a basket with things I came for and things I hadn’t. The cashier smiled when I set the basket on the belt and it started to move toward him. Each item he scanned chirped like a smoke alarm with low batteries. While he bagged, a woman got behind me with what must have been half the vegetarian frozen section piled in her cart. I reached for my wallet, but my pocket was empty. I patted my jeans, front and back. Keys. Loose change.
You’ve got to be shitting me, I thought.
Somehow, everything fit into two bags, which the cashier set down in front of me.
“Machine’s ready when you are,” he said.
“Two seconds,” I said, throwing up a peace sign, trying to sound relaxed. The woman who’d hoarded plant-based bulgogi bowls and fake chicken patties muttered something under her breath. I looked back. She rolled her eyes and I was sure she called me an asshole. Before I turned back to the cashier, I shot her a glare, which she snubbed. “I forgot my wallet in the car,” I said.
It was 8:30 by then, maybe 8:45 when I pulled into the driveway. I reached for the groceries and remembered there were no groceries. My wallet was inside the house. I stared at the side of the house, unsure what the next shade lighter than baby blue was. That’s what color the siding was. The paint faded, cracked, peeling in places. Above some of these places the blinds that covered the living room and bedroom windows were closed, which was strange. It was a cloudless, bright, mild and windless April morning. And Kristen fed off the sun. Needed it like a Kryptonian. She believed people who lived in the Pacific Northwest were never more than one stubbed toe away from killing themselves. I thought of her inside, sprawled on the couch or in bed, lying in the dark, alone, confused, sad, and in pain. Her mouth dry from the four Extra Strength Tylenol she chewed into dust and was counting down the hours and minutes before she could throw back four more.
I felt heavy and couldn’t stand it. One shovelful of invisible dirt at a time, burying me alive.
I couldn’t breathe. I tried several breaths and nearly hyperventilated. What good was I anyway? How could I expect to do anything right if I couldn’t even breathe correctly? I started to think I wasn’t wired properly. Or I had been but something got knocked loose. Either way, I didn’t know how to fix it.
I slapped myself across the face. “Stupid,” I said, and slapped myself again. My cheek and nose burned; my eyes watered. I pinched my nostrils. After letting go, I expected to find blood on my fingertips, but didn’t. I blinked and a tear knocked loose and clung to my cheek.
Yesterday I should have busted the bathroom door down. I should have carried Kristen to the car kicking and screaming or balled up in the fetal position, weeping. People have shown up in a lot worse or less than underwear to the ER. Besides, she had a shirt on. After they admitted her I would have driven home, put on proper clothes, packed Kristen's proper clothes. Filled a water bottle. Brought snacks. Back at the hospital, I’d have sat silently freaking out, fidgeting in my seat, smiling like everything was A-okay whenever someone looked my way. I’d think, Better them than her, if an EMT wheeled someone through the emergency doors strapped to a gurney with a broken neck or gunshot wound to the chest.
I caught a glimpse of my pathetic face in the rearview. My cheek pink-going-red, beginning to swell. I grabbed the mirror and turned it. I couldn’t look at myself. And in it, the mirror, I watched a tremendous SUV pull into our driveway.
People used it all the time to turn around in. Our cookie-cutter street looked like every other one in a two-mile radius. People got confused. It happened. I waited for this ridiculous vehicle to back out and go away. But then the driver’s-side door opened and Steve hopped out in a pink polo and blue shorts looking like an Easter egg. He rounded its front end and opened the passenger’s-side. Tricia swung her legs out and Steve helped her down. She was dressed casually, in an oversized flannel and slim jeans, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail. In tennis shoes, she was still two inches taller than him. She spoke, her lips moving slowly, and Steve nodded at whatever it was she said, then motioned for her to
take the lead after she finished.
They paused at the foot of the stairs and stood talking. Neither of them saw me. I thought about getting out but didn’t. Instead, I was mired by an enormous lethargy. The invisible weight returned tenfold, crushing me. I sat paralyzed, watched them finish their conversation, Tricia saying one last thing to Steve, who placed a hand on her shoulder and began to massage it. She looked down, nodding at the earth while grinding the toe of her sneaker into the concrete. When she was through, Tricia looked up with a crimped smile and Steve kissed her.
How’d they do it? I wondered. How had they put their tragedy behind them?
They climbed the steps holding hands. In a remarkably short amount of time, I could no longer see them. I closed my eyes and I pictured Tricia ringing the doorbell. Kristen, still in bed or on the couch, would think it was me, my elbow mashing the button because my arms were full of groceries. She would resist at first, annoyed with me disturbing the rest I lobbied her to take, especially now that the Tylenol had kicked in. She would roll over, fluff a pillow, plug her ears, hum the noise out. But, the bell again and again. By now she would be up, stomping to the door and making sure that I heard each step. Then, she’d fling the door open. I imagined Kristen’s surprise, happiness, and relief at the sight of her parents. On the backs of my eyelids, I saw the smile on her face so clearly it hurt. And I thought for sure this image would lift away the terrible, unbearable weight. But it didn’t.
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