13. Heidi
HEIDI
On Thursday morning, I find Dash in Mom's kitchen holding Ivy against his chest and explaining the dishwasher to her.
“The top rack is for delicate things. Your grandmother puts everything everywhere and calls it confidence.”
“She can hear you,” Mom says from the pantry.
“I hope so. I'm trying to reach her through the child.”
I lean against the doorframe. It is ten days since Ivy was born.
My body has stopped feeling like a series of urgent messages and started feeling like my body after something enormous happened to it.
I can stand a little straighter. I can laugh without immediately regretting it, though Dash is working hard to change that.
He sees me and lowers his voice. “You could go back to bed.”
“I could also live under it. Eventually somebody would need to bring me toast.”
Mom puts a plate on the table. “Toast has already been arranged.”
I sit. Ivy turns her face against Dash's shirt with the grave determination of somebody who suspects he has milk and is concealing it.
“She's going to be disappointed,” I say.
“Most women are.”
“Your wife will be delighted to hear that.”
“She knows. It's why she married me. Manageable expectations.”
He brings Ivy over. I take her, and the conversation becomes the small practiced business of a feed.
Mom pulls the curtain halfway across the window without making a production of it.
Dash gives me the remote and retreats to the dishwasher, where he starts moving things into what he considers civilized positions.
This house has held me through measles, exam results and the month I thought bangs would change my personality. I love it. I am tired of being the person everyone looks at before deciding how loudly to close a cupboard.
“Can you two have an argument about something real?” I ask.
Mom turns. “I object to the implication that the dishwasher isn't real.”
“Something you would argue about if I weren't here.”
They look at each other.
“Your brother thinks I'm buying an unnecessary garden bench,” Mom says.
“You have three.”
“I have three places to sit.”
“You have one bottom.”
I laugh, and Ivy loses her latch in protest. Mom starts laughing too. For a few seconds the kitchen belongs to the people who usually live in it, and I can breathe.
Beau calls that afternoon while Ivy sleeps beside me in the bassinet. His face fills the screen only after I answer. He looks as if he has been outside: wind in his hair, a little dirt at the collar of his shirt.
“Can I see her?”
I turn the phone. Ivy has one hand beside her face, fingers curved as though she is holding a secret.
He says nothing for so long that I turn it back.
His eyes are wet.
“Did she sleep?” he asks.
“Twenty-three minutes. Then she objected to the bassinet,” I say.
“She objects to horizontal abandonment.”
“Strongly.”
I turn the phone toward her again. The camera catches my hand resting beside her body.
“Put your palm against her feet,” Beau says. “You told me she likes having something to push.”
I do. Ivy stretches both legs, relaxes, then gives a small sigh.
Beau looks up with delight so immediate that my chest aches.
“You remembered that,” I say.
“You told me during my visit.”
“You would have learned it.”
His expression changes. “I should have.”
I want to take the sentence back because I am the one who turned the phone toward Ivy. I also want him to feel every missing hour.
“Yes,” I say.
He nods and keeps his eyes on Ivy.
I am angry at the tenderness that rises in me. There is nowhere sensible to put it, so I look at the corner of the screen where my own face appears, pale and tired.
“She makes that face when she's about to wake up,” I tell him.
“Your face.”
“She has your whole forehead.”
“I'll apologize to her when she's older.”
A smile nearly happens. I press my lips together and feel mean for stopping it, then angry that I have to choose what to do with a smile at all.
He looks down briefly. “Suzanne said Saturday afternoon still works for the visit. Does it work for you?”
“Yes.”
“I'll come after lunch.”
“All right.”
He doesn't ask whether he will hold her.
I know he wants to. I have seen him with babies at family gatherings, that enormous careful hand behind a head, his whole attention captured by something no longer than his forearm.
I imagined him holding ours so often that the imaginary version sometimes gets mixed up with things that really happened.
“Bring the little blue cardigan,” I say. “It's in the top drawer. I forgot it.”
“The one with wooden buttons?”
“Yes.”
He knows. Of course he knows. He was there when we bought it. Our marriage did not become counterfeit simply because part of it was hidden from me.
“I'll bring it.”
After the call I sit looking at my own reflection in the blank screen. I miss his shoulders in a doorway. I miss somebody who understands which cardigan I mean. I want to call him back and say something that would hurt him as much as missing him hurts me.
I miss the evening weight of him on the other side of a sofa. I miss complaining about his work boots by the door and finding them in the same place the next morning. I miss the warm hollow between his shoulder and chest where my head fits without either of us arranging it.
None of those things makes him safe.
They make the absence specific.
I open the message thread and type that Ivy wrinkled her nose adorably after he left. I erase it. I type that the blue cardigan needs washing by hand. I erase that too.
Then I look at my daughter and understand that silence is beginning to feel like another performance, one designed to prove I can live without him.
I do not know whether I can. I do know I should not have to demonstrate it every hour.
I put the phone on the nightstand and wake Ivy gently for her feed.
Mom finds me crying over a clean pillowcase later that evening.
She does not ask why the pillowcase has offended me. She takes the other end and helps me fold it.
“I can't stop wanting to tell him things,” I say.
“What things?”
“Nothing. Everything. That Ivy made a noise like a little old man. That Dash has reorganized your forks. That my milk got all over the good chair.”
“The chair will survive.”
“He would have made me laugh about it.”
Mom puts the pillowcase on the bed.
“He probably still could.”
I look at her sharply.
“I'm not suggesting anything, honey. You can miss a person who's hurt you. You've had a lot of years of reaching for him.”
“I don't want to be stupid.”
“Oh, Heidi.” She sits beside me. “You aren't stupid for loving your husband.”
“I was stupid for believing him.”
“No. He lied.”
The plainness of that makes me cry harder.
She stays until I can breathe normally. Then she tells me that Beau has made sure the household bills will carry on, and that the two of them have sorted the things Ivy needs while I am here.
I have access to our money. I do not have to call him for a grocery order or a doctor's visit.
We have agreed that he will come regularly and learn his daughter, and that I can say when I need the house quiet.
The bill and visit arrangements take less than a minute to explain. Nobody puts a paper in front of me.
“What do you want tonight?” Mom asks.
I look at the folded pillowcase. It has a little embroidered leaf in one corner. I remember tracing it with a fever-hot finger when I was a child.
“I want you to sit with me while I eat something.”
“Gladly.”
“And talk about your bench.”
Her eyes brighten. “It's a very good bench.”
I let her tell me all about it. When Ivy wakes, Mom carries the plate upstairs with us, and I eat the last bites with my daughter heavy against my arm.
At the end of October, my colleague from school drops off an envelope containing a card, three drawings and a sticker that says Excellent Listening.
“I assume that one's for me,” Dash says.
“I assume it's evidence nobody has met you.”
He props the drawings against Mom's fruit bowl while I hold Ivy.
On the first, I have seven fingers and an enormous red cape.
On the second, a child has drawn a heart inside a rectangle labeled with an ambitious attempt at clinic.
The third is a picture of a chair and a box of tissues.
No people at all. I press that drawing flat against my knee.
The need to be back in the room pulls me forward in the chair.
“That one is my favorite,” I say.
Dash studies it. “A chair?”
“It's where she sits when things are too loud.”
He looks at me, then at the drawing again.
The child who drew it has never wanted to explain herself in front of a class.
Sometimes she comes to my room with a perfectly ordinary temperature and a stomachache that improves after ten quiet minutes.
I know which questions she can answer and which ones make her shoulders creep up toward her ears.
I miss that room. The thought arrives so strongly it feels disloyal to the baby asleep against me.
Mom reads my face. “You can miss work.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You were about to explain why you shouldn't.”
I look down at Ivy. Her eyelashes are so fine they seem drawn on.
“I don't want to leave her yet.”
“Then don't yet.”
It's an annoyingly reasonable answer. I keep the chair drawing beside me for the rest of the morning.
On Saturday afternoon, Beau comes with the nursing pillow I left at home, Ivy's little blue cardigan, and the winter coat Mom has decided I need despite the mild weather. Ivy is asleep, so we sit on the porch where I can hear the monitor through the open window.
He places the pillow beside my chair. Then he sits with his hands on his knees as if he is waiting to be interviewed.
I cannot stand it.
“Talk to me.”
His head lifts. “About what?”
“Anything. You used to manage it without a subject being assigned.”
He looks hurt, and I am instantly furious at myself for caring.
“I don't want to make this harder,” he says.
“Watching you turn into a very polite stranger isn't easy.”
For a moment he says nothing. Then he looks at the porch rail.
“Your mother has bought a fourth bench.”
“She has.”
“Dash asked me whether I could make one disappear.”
“Could you?”
“I'm a builder, Heidi. I could make three disappear and leave a plausible drainage explanation.”
The laugh gets out before I can stop it. He smiles, and there he is: the man who once convinced me he could fix my awful first apartment with a spirit level and a sufficiently stern conversation with the floor.
I look away because wanting him is suddenly physical. His forearms bare below his rolled sleeves. The place at the side of his mouth that deepens when he is trying not to grin. I want to lean over and put my face against his neck.
Instead I say, “I hate this.”
The smile leaves him. “I know.”
“No, I mean this. Being able to laugh with you and then remembering. It's like stepping on a stair that isn't there.”
He rubs his thumb over one knuckle.
“I keep wanting to tell you things too.”
“Don't make us the same.”
He looks at me. “We aren't. I made it happen.”
The air moves between us, carrying the smell of somebody's cut grass. Down the street a child is attempting a bicycle maneuver that appears to depend entirely on hope.
“What did you want to tell me?” I ask.
He hesitates. “When I went to get Ivy's cardigan, I found I'd put it in the wrong drawer. Then I spent ten minutes wondering whether you'd be annoyed when you came home, and I was happy for a second because I was imagining you being annoyed with me in our bedroom.”
My eyes fill.
“Oh,” I say.
He looks down. “That's what I mean about making it harder.”
“No.” I have to wait until I can speak. “That was you talking to me.”
The monitor crackles, then goes quiet. We both turn toward it. That shared movement hurts too, in a different way.
I tell him about the drawings. He asks which child made the chair, and when I describe her he remembers the story I told him last winter about the little girl who wanted the clinic light left on until her grandmother arrived.
“You made the office leave it on too,” he says.
“I was persuasive.”
“You can be terrifying.”
“Apparently only professionally.”
He doesn't smile at that. “You shouldn't have needed to terrify me.”
I look at him for a long moment.
“I hated asking,” I say. “I hated that I had to.”
Then Ivy wakes.
Beau is on his feet at once.
“I've got her,” he says. “Take a minute.”
He goes inside. I hear him talking to our daughter before he picks her up, the low ridiculous voice he used to use through my stomach. He tells her there is no reason to alarm the whole street over one wet diaper. Ivy disagrees at length.
I sit back down and laugh through the last of my tears.
That evening I call the colleague covering my leave. We talk about the children first, then the school-community evening on November thirtieth. She wants to know whether I might like to help prepare the clinic display before I return properly in January.
“I'd like that,” I say, surprising myself with how quickly the answer comes.
Afterward I put the drawings into my work bag. I leave the chair on the bedside table.
Ivy is asleep. Mom is downstairs watching a program she will deny falling asleep through. For the first time in days, I am alone without waiting for somebody to come and find me.
I take out my phone and write to Beau.
The cardigan belongs in the top drawer.
His answer comes a minute later.
I suspected there was a system.
There is. It's called opening your eyes.
I'll try it. Sounds expensive.
I smile at the screen. Then I set it beside the drawing and turn out the light.