10. David
DAVID
The room is the color of moss. Erin painted it before the first bag went up, sometime between the diagnosis meeting and the admission date, while I was driving Cleo home explaining what an IV was to a six-year-old who kept asking if it would hurt.
The color sits different than clinic white.
Softer. Dimmer without being dark. The color of something growing in the shade where someone left a window cracked.
Linda’s cot is against the east wall. Cleo’s bed is the converted exam table under the window, Cleo’s own pillow from home on it because I asked if they had one and Linda produced it from a cabinet without asking why I thought she’d have a spare.
The second ATG bag is three-quarters down. I’m in the chair. I haven’t moved.
Erin comes in every forty minutes. Same order every time.
The bag first, then the drip line, then the monitor, then Cleo, then Linda, then me.
I know the order now. I catch myself watching the door instead of Cleo sometimes, not because anything is wrong, but because the intervals have a structure and I’ve come to rely on them.
She checks the drip rate, marks something on the tablet, lifts the tape edge on Cleo’s inner arm to look at the skin underneath and lays it back. Then her hand goes to Cleo’s forehead, two fingers at the temple, and stays a moment longer than the medicine calls for.
She turns toward me when she’s done. "You okay?"
"Yeah."
She leaves.
Between rounds the room is quiet except for the monitor and the radiator and Linda’s steady breathing. I watch the snow on the window glass. I watch the bag tick down. I watch Cleo’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall. The hands in my lap want a board to plane. There isn’t one. They settle.
In the early mornings before the staff come in, when the building is just the hum of the HVAC and the dark outside the window, it is very quiet.
The quiet is familiar to me. I have sat in it before.
The cord at my throat, the ring on it, catches the edge of my collar when I shift in the chair. It settles against my chest.
This quiet doesn't feel the same way it felt the other time, and I don't ask myself why.
Joan comes through the snow twice. Once around noon with a covered pan that smells like onions and butter and mushrooms and beef, once at early evening with cornbread in foil. She hands each one off at the front desk without coming into Cleo’s room.
Through the wall, I can hear Lito running what amounts to a variety show out at reception. The laugh he gets out of Ruth Mae in exam three, the brief argument with his own printer that ends with Nakow! and then silence and then the printer winning.
Thanksgiving afternoon, Whitlock comes in with a pie dish covered in foil.
Sweet potato, he says. His mother’s recipe.
He pulls the spare chair to the corner of the room and sits.
He looks at Cleo sleeping, and stays exactly ten minutes without saying much.
When he’s done, he stands up and goes, no goodbye, and I sit with the closed door a moment before I understand that the absence of a goodbye is its own kind of thing.
Second afternoon, Cleo wakes up. She blinks at the ceiling tiles with the focused expression she gets when she’s deciding something, then says she’s thirsty. I pour half a cup from the pitcher on the tray. She drinks all of it, both hands on the cup, and is asleep again inside two minutes.
On the cot, Linda has not opened her eyes for any of this. But both of her feet come off the edge and back onto it, slowly, the quietest possible version of a fist pump.
Small victories , Erin said the first morning.
I don’t say anything to Linda. When Erin comes in on her next round I give her the same answer I’ve given her all day. She nods and goes, and I sit back down.
The first day Cleo’s home, my hands have places they need to be.
She’s on the couch with her blanket and the stack of library books she was too tired for at the clinic.
How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? on top, two more dinosaur books underneath it, and one about a princess that she checked out by accident and has not admitted she likes.
Sandwiches on a plate cut into triangles because she won’t eat them as rectangles.
I plane the kitchen door at three in the morning because the plane is in my hand and the door has needed it since August. Cleo is asleep, so the work has to go somewhere.
Long cedar curls come up clean off the face of it, pale, smelling like cut wood.
I sweep them before the sun comes in. Then the porch railing, sanded down to bare wood in the afternoon while Cleo reads on the couch and the mountains sit in their cold quiet above the tree line.
Then the bedroom window pane, cracked since September, whispering cold through the gap when the wind comes from the north, replaced with a piece of glass from the shop and putty from a can I’ve had for two years.
The clinic takes two days. The cracked pane in the pediatric exam room, the one with the cold whistle I first noticed sitting in the hard chair not knowing what Cleo’s bloodwork was going to tell us, I reglaze Tuesday before the clinic opens.
The waiting room chair is Earl Ford’s chair, has been since before the paint on the walls, and the left rear joint has been loose for longer than the paint on the walls too.
It hasn't been touched since Earl passed away in September.
I take it home Tuesday night on the truck bed.
On the workbench I pull the joint apart, the mortise worn smooth, the old glue dried to powder, coat the tenon with hide glue, the real kind, clamp it overnight with two bar clamps, and have it back in the corner by Friday morning.
When Linda carries her coffee past it she lifts the corner of her mouth, and pats me on the shoulder.
She says nothing. I take it as the compliment it is.
The fox starts as scrap. Cedar offcut from the back of the shop pile, the end of a board I’d been leaving because the grain curved through it in a way I wasn’t ready to waste on a straight cut.
There’s a natural upward arc in the piece, the kind of thing wood does when it wants to become something other than a board.
I rough it out with a belt knife. A neck, a small head, the wedge of a body.
The tail takes the most time. A fox’s tail has a lift to it, like it knows itself, and I spend the most time on that, working the curve until it looks right.
An hour, then some. Fur lines laid in with the smallest gouge I own along the haunches and shoulders.
Then the eyes, last, always last on a small carving.
Because until the eyes go in, it’s just wood; once the eyes go in, it’s its own person.
I use the point of the smallest gouge for each one — two small depressions, symmetric, set back just enough under the brow line to make the face look like it’s thinking.
I hold it up in the shop light and turn it once.
I bring the fox to the Friday office visit.
Cleo doesn’t run to Erin the way she normally does, the fatigue having taken the run out of her. She saves herself now without knowing she’s doing it.
But the second Erin comes through the door, Cleo’s arms go straight up.
Both of them, the full-body toddler gesture she hasn’t used in two years.
Erin takes her without breaking stride and settles her on her hip for the whole vitals check.
Blood pressure cuff around an arm the width of my wrist. Pulse-ox on the finger Cleo already has out.
The small penlight Erin sweeps past each eye.
Cleo follows it like she’d follow it anywhere.
I get the fox out when Erin sets her back on the table. "I made you something."
Cleo takes it in both hands and holds it up to the exam room light. She turns it once, then again. She inhales, that nose she does when she’s reading something she’s going to devour. "He’s a fox!" she says. "He’s my fox."
She studies the tail, the ears, the haunches. Then she looks at me with the expression that means she has decided something, and my input is available but not required. "Brown eyes. Like Pippi Longstocking’s freckles."
Then she turns to Erin across the table. "His name is Pip. He’s my fox, but you have visitation rights."
Erin laughs. It's not like the small startled sound from the diner in the second week, the one she caught with her own hand before it got too far. This comes from the chest, rolls forward through her shoulders, lifts them, and makes her put her palm flat on the doorframe, steady, like the floor shifted slightly. A real laugh, full and unguarded, out of a room she hasn’t been letting people into.
I want to look at her. I don’t. I keep my face on Cleo’s and let Erin have the laugh without anyone watching her. I tuck what I’m hearing into my shirt pocket, where it can sit without being named.
"Visitation rights," Erin says, when she’s got herself back. "That’s generous, Cleo."
"You have to knock first," Cleo says, with the gravity of someone laying down municipal ordinance. "And he only eats berries. Not blueberries. He doesn’t like the seeds."
She pauses to mull it over. "The good kind of berries," she adds, and holds out her arm for the blood pressure cuff.
"So, strawberries then," Erin says.
Cleo considers this with great seriousness. "Yes."
The thing I haven’t been letting myself look at is this. My daughter looks at Erin the way she hasn’t looked at anyone in four years.
I know when I see it exactly. The Wednesday before the fox visit.
I’m holding the truck door open in the clinic lot for Cleo’s check, and she spots Erin through the window.
Erin’s at the desk doing paperwork, not looking up yet.
Cleo starts waving. Both hands, full-body, her face gone wide and bright with it.
Erin looks up from the desk and waves back the whole time, unhurried.
A smile that’s just for Cleo, no performance in it.
I’m still holding the truck door. I’m not getting in.
Cleo had that same look when she was two.
Claire would be at the stove making dinner and would set the wooden spoon on the counter to look over at our daughter, just look, nothing more, and Cleo would go bright all over, no hesitation.
The person she loves moves through the room or looks up from what she’s doing, and the whole face becomes what she’s feeling.
I haven’t seen Cleo look at anyone like that in four years. I’ve been telling myself it would go loose and transfer, that she is too young to hold the imprint of one person. Three weeks I’ve been telling myself that.
Pancakes are Friday morning. Cleo announced it the night before, decided, and then announced it, which is how Cleo announces things, that Erin needs to eat breakfast and Cleo will be there and it’s an absolute must.
I text Erin from the porch. She shows up at seven-fifteen with wet hair and her coat over what is clearly a pajama top, a bag of strawberries in her hand because she said she didn’t want to come empty-handed.
I don’t ask where she found strawberries in November in Cedar Hollow.
I move the griddle and make room on the counter.
She looks around the kitchen once, at the window with the icicles down the pane, at the blue cup on the drying rack that Cleo will want for her juice.
And then she sits in the chair that isn’t Claire’s and drinks half a cup of coffee.
After a while, she stands up and takes the spatula out of my hand, probably because the first batch has gone a shade too dark on the underside.
I let her take it. The kitchen is quiet and warm.
It smells like butter and the cedar of the woodstove.
I stand at the griddle and keep my mind on the bubbles in the batter, on when to flip.
Cleo eats three pancakes cut into triangles and starts the fourth. She goes face-first into it between one breath and the next, the fatigue that’s been building all morning finally catching her mid-bite.
I get my hand under her forehead before it hits the plate. Erin moves the plate from under her chin. We carry her down the hall together. Cleo’s cheek is against my shoulder, while Erin keeps one hand on Cleo’s back the whole length of the hall — steady, like she’s keeping something from drifting.
We put her down in her room and pull the quilt up and stand in the doorway a moment while Cleo breathes in the dark. She mumbles for us to please save some strawberries for her.
The quiet is just the radiator and the snow against the window glass and Cleo’s breath.
Erin is turning toward the kitchen, reaching for her coat off the hook by the door. I look straight at it, the thing I’ve been navigating past for three weeks.
Cleo loves her.
My daughter, who has not given that brightness to a person since the morning she found Claire on the kitchen floor, has given it to the doctor who came in through a storm and put her hand on her forehead for a few seconds.
And the thing in my chest that has been small and careful and held since that morning cracks.
It isn't loud. It's dull and short, like a piece of dry pine going across a knot. One sound, clean, the grain giving at the place it was always going to give.
I stride to the door and get my coat.
We walk out to her car in the gravel drive.
She gets to it and opens the driver’s door, but she doesn't get in. She stands there with her hand on the top of the frame. She’s about to say the good night sentence.
I can see it forming. The polite-doctor close.
Thank you for the pancakes, see you Monday.
“Erin.” Her name slips out of me before I can stop myself.
I haven’t said her name to her face in five weeks.
I’ve been hedging around it, Doc at the clinic, nothing at the cabin.
Because saying a person’s name out loud means crossing the distance toward them, and I’ve been keeping to my side.
I see her hand on the car door go still.
I look at the cedar trees behind the cabin, the dark line of them against the mountain, snow in the top branches. Then I look back at her.
"I never invited anyone to the cabin," I say. "Never asked anyone to come back. Since Claire."
The porch light times out, and the dark falls over us at once.