Chapter 33
Mr. Man does not come home that night.
Rebecca and Mark have no idea what to do.
Maybe he is gathering solutions for them, as when he returned with the purloined bunny. Maybe he is berserking through the neighborhood, leaving traces of the family DNA at crime scenes. Maybe he is gone for good. What then?
Do they call the police? And say what precisely?
There is no protocol for this, no road map.
The passage of time feels like torture. Seconds tick by. Rebecca does not know what to do with her body, how to get comfortable, how to get off the treadmill of her looping thoughts.
She and Mark let Maddy sleep between them for the first time in years, the nigh-night routine thrown wildly out of whack. Maddy sprawls jumping-jack wide, shoving them to the edges of the king-size bed.
When Rebecca manages to doze off, she dreams that she cannot fall asleep, which makes it all the more exhausting when she jerks awake after five minutes of purgatory.
Mark is sleeping hard but keeps his arm stretched across the mattress to hold her wrist, as he does when she needs him and he needs her. His hand clenches softly, twitching as he battles night demons. His touch is the only thing that gets her through the night hours.
She awakens from another burst of not-quite sleep.
At last there is fragile light at the windows. The morning is quiet.
No clank of pans, no smell of fresh-roast coffee, no sounds of another body moving in the house.
Maddy is still out, radiator hot beneath the sheets. Mark’s hand is sweaty on Rebecca’s wrist. The morning sun, tinged a calming amber through the shades, blankets her face. Birdsong reaches her, warbles and chirps.
For a time, Rebecca lies perfectly still, listening to the sound of the natural world and her family breathing.
What is this sensation she feels?
Relief?
Freedom?
Maybe, she hopes, it will all prove to be a dream.
Maybe she will walk down the hall, and the beautiful blue nursery will be empty as it was before, cribless and humanly sad in a manner she is designed to contend with, however painful it may be.
Maybe there will be no rectangular prism, and she and Mark will be able to resume their life together with all its pain, challenges, and human triumphs.
She manages to slip out of bed without awakening Mark or Maddy.
Holding her breath, she walks down the hall, light on her feet. She peers around the corner.
The prism is still there, bulky and immovable.
The lid is up.
It is empty.
Mr. Man is not waiting in the kitchen.
“Bao-Bao” waits patiently in his cage for a morning carrot, which she delivers through the wire grid.
She makes her own coffee. The simple act of measuring and grinding the beans, inserting the filter, adding the water fills her with surprising contentedness.
More and more, it seems to Rebecca that humanity has reached the end of an era, that more and more of our work is being done for us, that we can outsource and push-button and delegate our tasks and needs until everything exists outside of us. Until we are hollow.
With satisfaction, she listens to the coffee maker burble and brew. It seems so old-fashioned, so obviously pleasing to do something herself.
When the pot is ready, she fills a mug decorated with Maddy’s first-grade school portrait, in which she is smiling as if she never learned how to smile, teeth bared like an adorable and slightly confused chimpanzee.
Still in her jammies, Rebecca carries her coffee outside. The morning chill seeps through the fabric, bracing and invigorating. She’s forgotten how much she cherishes this time, when the family is asleep and she is alone to greet the new day.
Breeze and birdsong open her to optimism.
Perhaps it all has been just a misunderstanding with Mr. Man, as Luca suggested.
Mixed signals about Bao-Bao and a footprint left when Mr. Man went to find her necklace for her.
N0RM LLC is a legitimate corporation after all, its founder a Sun Valley regular.
That means it has legal departments and quality control protocols, actuarial science, and liability concerns.
They aren’t going to release deadly product into the world.
Can’t self-protective capitalism confer some—any—measure of trust?
Her mighty pine thrusts three stories high, stoic against the wind. As she nears, she lets her gaze climb north.
The early sunlight illuminates it through and through, and she notices what she has not noticed before, that half of her tree, the west fork, is dying.
The branches shed mosaic tiles of bark, and the needles look gray and dry.
The west fork is a tree unto itself, heavy, powerful, thick, and the site of its dwindling fills her with dread.
Warming her hands around her mug, she thinks about everything her tree has seen. She’d read somewhere that pines can live over five hundred years.
A hand comes down on her shoulder, and she starts, coffee spilling over the lip, singeing her knuckles. Whipping around, she sees Mark.
“You didn’t hear me?” he asks. “I called your name.”
He is dressed for work.
She tents her fingers over the top of the mug so she can shake her other hand. “Sorry. Lost in thought.”
“Derek called,” Mark says. “He needs to see me immediately.”
“You can tell Derek—”
“Not like that,” Mark says. “He’s at the hospital. He was nearly killed last night.”
It sweeps through her now, a black wave of despair.
This nightmare, it seems, has not ended.
It is only beginning.