Chapter 33
CHAPTER 33
MONDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 18
I hovered in front of Emmy’s closed door. I’d noticed it was shut the first time I’d walked to my own bedroom after arriving home from the hospital, but up until this moment, I’d refused to even look toward the nursery. I couldn’t ignore it forever. As difficult as it was going to be, I’d have to clean out the room. Now was a good time to tackle the task; with my mind focused on Tim’s lie, I’d mull over his motives while I packed up the tiny clothes, crib, and baby monitor. I’d already decided to bring everything to Goodwill. Blinking back the sting in my eyes, I placed my hand on the metal doorknob and twisted.
As the door swung open, I caught my breath. The room was nearly empty—only the two small dressers still in place, their tops cleared of the baby monitor, stuffed toys, and music box. Gone were the crib, the bassinet, and the rocking horse in the corner. I crossed to the closet and flung it open. The gaping emptiness hit me with an invisible force.
As I looked around, I noticed something else: the room and closet had been repainted a cream color. A toned-down version of the sunny yellow Tim and I had painstakingly layered on just before Emmy’s birth, recalling how we’d laughed each time my bulging belly got in the way of my efforts, sending the paint roller veering in different directions.
I stood in the center of the alien space, more alone than I’d ever felt in my life, my eyes searching for anything that would remind me of her, my Emmy. A dropped pacifier under a dresser, a tinge of yellow in the corner where the cream shade hadn’t completely concealed it. Nothing. My knees buckled and I dropped to the floor, a strange keening coming out of me. A sound so primeval I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of making it. It didn’t sound human.
I howled, long and hard, my eyes seeing nothing but empty space, my body feeling under attack from the hard floorboards under my knees and elbows. My mind darted like a victim trying to elude an attacker.
The shadows deepened around me, twilight turning into night. My howls eventually dwindled to whimpers. What was the point of going on without my girl? Flashes of Emmy motionless in the tub invaded my mind, and guilt wrapped me in its vise-like grip. I shook my head, trying to physically dislodge the image from my mind. I’d never get past what had happened. It had seemed possible when the medical professionals had held my hands at the hospital and reassured me. Like angels whispering inspirational messages into my ears. But the reality was nothing like that. It was as lonely and bleak as the empty space around me.
I thought about how Dr. Ellison had advised me to write down everything in my journal. I stirred and began to get up, but the thought of revealing the wrenching story of my loss, self-recrimination, and grief overwhelmed me. I paused halfway between standing and sitting, feeling like a one-winged moth, unable to get where I wanted to be. Destined to flit endlessly in circles until all my energy drained.
I thought about Tim packing up and moving Emmy’s belongings while I’d been hospitalized. Had kindness prompted him to remove every trace of the child we’d once shared? Perhaps he thought my fragile mind couldn’t handle the process of removing Emmy permanently from our lives. I should be grateful, right? Then why did I feel so empty, thrust into a life as barren as the room I’d once rocked and soothed my daughter in?
“You should have warned me,” I whispered, as if Tim were standing next to me. “A text to let me know...”
I didn’t even know what he’d done with Emmy’s things. Probably sold them. He never passed up an opportunity to make a buck. I felt my face getting red, but, standing and leaving the room, I sighed, realizing what was done was done.
I couldn’t expect Tim to change when I seemed unable to. And, in truth, I knew very little about his childhood or family. Growing up in a lower-middle-class suburb of Seattle with three brothers whom he wasn’t very close with—who all still lived on the other side of the country, near his parents—Tim had become independent at an early age. The only one in his family to go to college, Tim once told me mechanical engineers made a lot more money in New York, so he’d headed east upon graduation. And he’d seldom gone home.
His family had never visited us, not even when we married. Tim explained they couldn’t afford the expenditures—airfare, hotel—to join us at city hall. He claimed he didn’t have enough money to fund their trip, as he’d surrendered all his cash on my engagement and wedding rings.
Feeling guilty about Tim lavishing money on me rather than his family, I didn’t protest when they stayed put. I’d dutifully spoken with them all on the eve of our wedding when Tim called them during a family gathering. I’d repeated the same lines, infused with the same cheer, with every family member whose voice boomed through the cell phone mouthpiece: both parents; his big brother, Ben; and two younger siblings, Jake and Todd. All congratulated us and expressed regret at not being able to attend our nuptials. I’d not spoken again with his parents until after Emmy was born, and I’d never again talked with his brothers.
I walked into the bathroom, catching a glimpse of my mottled face. I turned on the faucet and cupped the cool water in my hands, then bent over and splashed my face and pressed my fingers against my cheeks to dislodge the sweat and tears.
I reached behind me to snag a hand towel draped over the rack beside the shower, but my hand connected with nothing but the smooth metal towel bar.
Damn, out of towels .
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done laundry. Water dripping in my eyes, I opened the linen closet door and slid my hands over the nearly empty towel shelf, my fingers connecting with a thin piece of terry cloth. I snatched it up and pressed the flimsy material to my face, freezing as my nose connected with Emmy’s smell, a combination of soap, milk, and fresh bread. I pulled it away from my face and stared, joy and sorrow engulfing me at the sight of the hooded baby bath towel balanced between my palms: white background and yellow ducklings with exaggerated, adorably cartoonish orange beaks.
Forgetting about my wet face, I hugged the towel close, as though it were Emmy herself, shoving away the pain lodged in my throat, thanking God for this gift. When Tim had cleared the house, he’d forgotten about the baby’s items in the bathroom.
Folding the towel and placing it carefully back on the shelf, I scanned the closet floor, searching for anything else of Emmy’s, but the tangled wad of used bath towels wedged between the lowest shelf and the floor obscured whatever else might have been residing there. I bent down, threw my arms around the stale-smelling bundle, and yanked, dislodging the compacted mass. Hefting it upward, I marched the overflowing pile to the washing machine in the basement. Not taking the precious minutes to run a cycle, I headed back to the bathroom and knelt in front of the narrow closet, looking for a tub toy or the oversized pink box of bubble bath. I reached into the dim corner and grasped a plastic bottle, pulling it out and holding it in front of my face.
Baby shampoo.
The lights in the room seemed to darken and my body swirled like I was on a Tilt-A-Whirl amusement park ride. I squeezed my eyes shut and dropped the bottle, hearing the hollow echo of its flat plastic bottom hitting the tile floor. The memory came rushing in: that last day with my baby. Giving Emmy her bath.
Giving Emmy her bath?
I snapped my eyes open as realization washed over me like an acid rinse. Painful and clarifying. I never gave Emmy her bath . Tim did. Sometimes I’d dab at her soft skin with a baby washcloth while he balanced her in the tub, but I never trusted myself around water. The legacy of my dad’s drowning was such that I trembled violently near any amount larger than the contents of a teacup. The thought of submerging my precious infant into its unreliable depths would send me into convulsions. How could I have forgotten that, especially after Brandon’s plunge? And why did I specifically remember reaching into the water and pulling my baby out?
The memory spurred my body into motion, but for once I ignored the trembling. I began pacing, walking out to the living room and around my coffee table. There was something—something at the edge of my mind. I had to access it. Please, God , I prayed. Reveal it to me . I forced myself to recall my hands reaching into the water. How had Emmy gotten submerged? And why were my hands the only ones I could recall? Where were Tim’s?
I paused in the middle of the room, rubbing my temples like a swami tapping into a wellspring of spiritual insight. Slowly, the scene came to me. Tim ordering me to find the baby wash, the tear-free shampoo, as he leaned over the tub, Emmy balanced in his open palms.
I saw my hands rifling frantically through dozens of bottles and jars in the vanity compartment under the sink—moisturizers, petroleum jelly, shaving gel—unable to find the baby’s products.
“They aren’t here.”
“Of course they are,” Tim snapped. “Look harder. And look over here, in the towel cabinet.”
“Why would I put the shampoo in with the towels?”
I saw the back of his head shake. “Why do you do anything?”
I stuck my upper body into the cabinet under the sink, my eyes searching the corners. I spied a bottle of mouthwash and a new tube of toothpaste, but nothing else.
“I’m telling you her wash and shampoo aren’t here.”
His answer was a soft splash like a fish breaking the water’s surface and sliding back under. I leaned out of the vanity cabinet and looked at Tim, just turning back from the towel cabinet next to the tub, one hand still in the water. He looked alarmed.
Confused, I glanced into the tub, at the bubbles bobbing along the surface of the water. I leaned in and there she was, just beyond Tim’s outstretched hand. An encapsulated angel in the water. So peaceful. So still.
“NO!” I plunged forward, my hands instinctively scooping her up, water splashing everywhere. Emmy not moving.
“Caroline!” His voice boomed into my ear as he careened into me, his arms reaching out, snatching Emmy away. “How could you?”
The last thing I remembered was him running from me, our dripping baby limp in his arms.
I didn’t even bother trying to stop the seizures that overtook my body as I relived the horror of that day. Let them come, just like the truth had. Tim had left Emmy in the tub. He’d killed Emmy. Our baby girl.
And he’d blamed me.