A week passed, maybe two. They were slow and foggy. Their passage was marked by routine: Rob delivered me a smoothie each morning. I read a book or fiddled on my computer. We ate evening meals. I’d become thin, my hip bones protruding like daggers from the cotton fabric of my sleep shorts. Andrea made dinner mandatory. In between meals, when I wasn’t reading books, I more often than not napped. Follow-up emails from Elena had slowed to a trickle and then disappeared altogether. I couldn’t work anyway. Fatigue had hit me hard. I’d begun dozing off soon after I cracked my laptop or the spine of a book.
One day Andrea caught me googling Ryan when she brought me my lunch.
“Oh, Maeve, don’t torture yourself,” she said.
“I just can’t believe how much I learned from his obituary.” My voice was thick, as if coming from below water. The sound of it sickened me. “I didn’t know he could speak fluent Italian. Or that he played the piano by ear. I didn’t even know he played the piano at all.” My eyes welled with tears. “How could I have spent all that time with him and known so little?”
“Did he know everything about you?” Andrea asked, and I stopped short, sniffling.
“No,” I said. “You know he didn’t.”
“Well.” She shrugged. “There’s your answer. It didn’t mean you cared about him any less. People don’t always reveal themselves up front. He probably would have told you those things eventually.”
She was right. She was always right. Still, all the things I didn’t know were crowding my brain, plaguing me, reminding me of what I’d lost that I’d never get back.
“I don’t think all this googling is healthy,” Andrea said, gently removing my laptop from my grasp. “Why don’t I just hang on to it for a while. Uh-uh,” she said, when I began to protest. “Just a few days.”
Three days later, Andrea convinced me to give her therapy a try. “You never know. Taking care of something that depends on you might be beneficial. And if it isn’t? No harm, no foul. Just try it out for a day or two.”
“Thanks, but I—”
“I won’t take no for an answer.” Andrea’s voice was firm. “Think of it as a favor to me. If the dolls can help the most reluctant case, I’ll consider them a wild success.”
My doll’s name was Phoenix. I didn’t find her helpful. She was temperamental, often crying when I was trying to sleep. It was disruptive to my hibernation. But, that, I supposed, was the idea. A way to get me to wake back up. I held Phoenix for an hour in the morning and an hour at night, while Andrea held Olivia. I didn’t experience an ounce of maternal drive. I did it for Andrea.
My life upstate started to settle into a quiet cycle—wake up, eat, care for the doll, read, nap, eat dinner with Rob and Andrea—and, on weekends, Micah, Emily, and Henry. Emily was busy getting the NewLife conference organized. Emily, though more pregnant than ever, looked like she was losing weight. I wanted to ask her how she was, but I didn’t have the strength to find the words.
I hardly remembered to bathe. I took my medicine when I needed help sleeping. If I couldn’t enjoy the world, I would blot it out. I wore the same pajama shorts every day, all day. I wore a white shirt with a picture of Betty Friedan on the front until the armpits turned brown. I was tired, always. Sometimes the responsibilities of the doll got to me and I’d turn it off or hide it in the closet so I didn’t have to look at it. Was there ever a time when a person wasn’t tired? I no longer remembered. It seemed an intrinsic part of humanhood.
We were sitting at the dinner table one night when I realized the odor of my body may as well have been an assault weapon. The thought made me laugh. I took a bite of corned beef casserole and shoveled it into my mouth, glad for a thing like casserole, glad it was still being made by the Andreas and Emilys of the world. Emily watched me, her nose twitching like a rabbit’s.
Micah’s fork hit his plate with a clatter.
I looked up, pausing midbite.
“Couldn’t you have … I don’t know. I know you’re in this funk, Maeve, but it’s been more than two weeks. It’s time to address your basic hygiene.” He was fiddling in his pocket again. By now I knew Micah toyed with his pocketknife any time he was agitated.
“I’m sorry,” I said, abashed. “I’m just so tired.”
“Try having a new baby,” said Emily. She was now six months along and seemed more exhausted than ever. Her comment stung, after what she’d shared with me at the bar. But maybe she didn’t remember that night, I realized.
“I have one,” I joked feebly, holding up Phoenix. Emily nodded and pursed her lips. For a second she seemed to have taken my words seriously, so I added, “I know, E. A real baby is harder. You can’t exactly shove a real baby in a closet for an hour with a blanket wedged in its mouth so it doesn’t cry while you nap.” Emily recoiled, and Andrea looked horrified.
“God, the violence of that image,” Emily said, aghast. She looked like she might be physically ill.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “As though we haven’t seen much worse. Right, Andrea?” Andrea froze. I took a great bite of casserole and chewed, feeling all the canned, oniony, salty things lump together inside my mouth. Yum.
Rob’s eyebrows were raised. There was something in his expression … Pity? I didn’t want it.
“What does she mean?” Micah asked. “What’s she talking about?”
“Nothing,” Andrea told him. Her voice was razor sharp. “She’s exhausted.”
“You guys always clam up about your childhood. You know that, right?” Micah pushed.
“Now’s not the time, Micah,” Andrea responded tersely. “Mae, let me draw you a bath after dinner. We have the most luxurious bath salts.”
“Okay,” I replied, and her face lit up, as if this would solve everything. “That’s exactly what I need.”
Emily rubbed her monstrous protrusion anxiously. She looked off, somehow. Then it hit me. She was wearing sweats and no makeup—I’d never seen her not perfectly turned out. She looked thinner in the face—practically gaunt despite her burgeoning womb—and wasn’t teeming with her usual opinions and insights. She seemed quiet, distracted. The Emily I’d met at my birthday, on the other hand, had been radiant with her own womanhood. I wondered if it was work, then.
Henry reached for her from his high chair, but she ignored him. She palmed the bump viciously, as if in punishment. It wasn’t even born yet, and her fetus was already feeling the wrath of its world. Her words through the baby monitor came back to me. She didn’t want a girl. Was it because she wanted another boy?
And why was Andrea pretending a bath could wash away the stench of death that surrounded me? I had broken her only rule, but she was willing to look past it. It sounded nice, anyway. A long soak.
I stood, nearly stumbling. I felt weak but heavy, a bowling pin that had been toppled, with no way of righting itself. Rob stood, too, and extended an arm to catch me.
“I’m okay,” I said, waving him away. “Just a little woozy. I’ve got this.” I reached for my phone, registered the small number of missed calls and unanswered texts—from Tyler, mostly—and felt even more overwhelmed. I placed it back on the table and used my hand to support myself heavily on the chair behind me.
Andrea gave Rob a significant look.
“I insist,” he told me, using both hands to support me up the hall stairs. Andrea followed behind, a bottle of wine in one hand.
They led me not to the small bathroom in the hall just outside my room but to the bathroom in Rob and Andrea’s suite. It had been cleaned recently; the floor tiles quite literally sparkled, and lavender wafted from a candle burning on the edge of the spa-quality tub. Rob pulled a robe from the back of the door and handed it to me.
“Go slip that on while I run the water,” Andrea instructed. “Rob will grab some towels.”
Their bedroom may as well have been the picture of affluent normalcy. Their farmhouse bed was covered in an ivory linen duvet. Their patio doors were open to the night air, and the curtains fluttered in a gentle breeze. A walk-in closet revealed thousands of dollars’ worth of athleisure in muted shades.
I shuffled into the closet and pulled the sliding door behind me, severing my path to the bedroom as well as the airflow from the patio. I pulled the chain bulb. The room wrapped me in its palm, oppressive. I shrugged off my T-shirt, then slipped my shorts to my ankles, and my underwear after them, wondering when I’d last changed them. I felt ripe, about to tip over into spoiling.
The robe was thick and plush around my shoulders. I belted it at the waist and made my way back into the bathroom. The tub was steaming and hazy, covered with a gentle layer of flowers—from the bath salts, I presumed. The lavender scent was even stronger now. Andrea was sitting on the edge of the tub, testing the temperature of the water with one hand. When I walked in, she gave me a compassionate smile.
“Burgundy?” Andrea asked, rising to her feet. She held a goblet of wine in an outstretched hand.
I nodded. I would have liked whatever she’d given me. Steam pooled around us in clouds, veiling our reflections in the mirror. Andrea didn’t make any motions to leave. “Here, I’ll help you in,” she said.
Andrea retrieved the wine from my hand, placing it carefully on the edge of the sink, then pulled my robe off my shoulders and allowed it to slip to the floor before guiding me into the bath. I gasped when my body touched the water. The heat was searing. After a minute, my body adjusted, and it felt like exactly what I’d needed all along.
Andrea handed me back my wine and smiled, pleased with herself.
I took a long swallow and began to relax, relieved to be alone and away from the patter of dinnertime conversation. The room was becoming cloudier around me, shrouded in a dreamy mist. I heard the light sound of footsteps moving toward the door; the latch clicking. A while later, I stared at the sediment in my glass, vaguely realizing I must have finished off the bottle.
“Limestone.” Andrea was suddenly behind me. I jumped, splashing water out of the tub and nearly dropping my glass.
“Easy,” she said, moving to steady me. She caught my glass just in time, transferring it to the countertop. It was nearly empty—I’d managed to drain it. “The sediment is tartrates, bits of grape seeds, maybe some limestone from the soil. Harmless stuff.”
“I didn’t realize you were still here,” I mumbled. I looked at the water, self-conscious in front of my cousin. I needn’t have been; the bath was nearly opaque. Moody swirls of dried flowers made patterns in its surface, and the salt had clouded the water, obscuring my body.
“You need someone to keep an eye on you,” she told me.
“I don’t—”
“Not forever. Just for now,” she said. “You’ve experienced trauma. Again. You can’t be alone.”
I felt myself accepting it, sliding deeper under the water’s fragrant surface, my eyelids heavy. Maybe I could nap, just for a little while. Distantly, I heard the industrial, wood-paneled bathroom door slide open behind me. Then I heard Andrea’s voice.
“Thanks, sweetheart. Maeve? It’s only Rob with the towels,” she said, but the heat of the water was getting to me. I was so tired. Too tired to respond, or even to open my eyes. I made efforts to nod. My head felt leaden.
“Of course,” I heard Rob say, as if from a distance. “Do you need anything else?”
I didn’t hear her reply.