M was gone when I woke up. I had slept like a wall had been pulled down on top of me. Slept like I’d never not slept. I woke up and was a different person, someone who was definitely capable of moving through the day, of taking care of B and E, of sitting by the pump for hours smiling happily, of never wanting for any amount of time even for a single second to run away screaming from wherever I was, whatever I was doing. I had slept all night in the same bed as M. I wondered if we had touched, if we had drifted toward each other in some hour or other, if he had put his leg over mine, or me his. Surely such a thing was possible.
There was a note beside me on the side table but the ink was smudged. Be back late, it might have said. Or, I love you the same as always no matter what. Shoes? it might have said. WTF? it might have said. It could have easily said that. I could have called him and asked him, only he would be in meetings all day, and I hated to interrupt. Also, I had ruined his shoes. Of course I had, and the day, the real day as it would be and not my imagining of it, began to settle down on top of me like some great bird landing on my shoulders with all its unnatural weight.
The apartment smelled of dog shit. I opened the window in the living room and saw the concierge scrubbing at a line of brown stains, footprints on the concrete walk. He had hauled out steaming water, buckets of rags, telescopic mop handles and scrubbers of various sizes, the works. The footsteps as he cleaned them would lead, I knew, down the walk and into the building and straight to the door of the apartment. There would be no denying anything.
I wouldn’t be able to leave. We would have to hide all day inside where we could never be found. I almost couldn’t breathe, the smell was really horrendous, seeping into all the fibres and fabrics, the sheets, the curtains. How had I forgotten about it all while I’d slept?
Perhaps it was possible to construct a new world out of a smaller space, a whole world out of less. Perhaps it was possible to create a world that was less connected to other things. To make the apartment into a meteor: fast moving and unassailable. I lowered the aluminium shutters and shut out the concierge. Winked him out as fast as blinking.
The apartment was dark now, but cosy. A cave for us. We could play bears all morning. E would love it, we could have so many good hours like that, growling at each other, pawing at the rental-company sofa with our so big paws. I could smile so wide when we played, wide like I might tear my face at the corners and show the whites of my eyes and it would be OK because it would be part of a game. When E got tired of being a bear I would shout, Now we are underwater, now we are secret underwater things.
There were bananas for breakfast, just turning brown, milk. I made coffee and worked on my French exercises while I waited for B and E to wake up. Sleep filled the apartment like a magic spell. Soft breathing, the sweat of dreaming babies. Perhaps a wall of roses would spring up and protect me from the concierge. Perhaps there would never be a knock at the door. Perhaps we could stay here in this apartment and sleep for a hundred years. Perhaps we would never be unhappy. Malheur. Malheureux. Malheureuse.
I went to the bathroom to take a shower, leaving my coffee only half drunk on the table. This was of course a dangerous thing, a terrible thing, for a mother to do. A hot drink on the table, steam curling like a snake, tempting tempting little just-woken hands to grab it. I left it anyway, feeling already penitent. Already explaining myself to someone, the police maybe. I was often, almost always really, explaining myself to the police in this hypothetical way. Practising for disaster, for post-disaster, for the moment after, I guessed. Imagining my words, my hysteria. I had just stepped away for a moment! I would say, and I would be feeling like I did now, when I said it, with the panic rising in my chest, slipping its fingers between my ribs and cracking them open, or perhaps I would just be screaming when they tried to ask me. Perhaps I would be standing alone behind a wall of noise.
In the bathroom there was a mess of packets on the counter. A bottle of pills stood half open, painkillers that a pharmacist had prescribed to me for headaches. Packets of vitamin powder were spilled haphazardly in the sink. Several of the little foil and plastic squares that held M’s pink allergy pills were ripped open. The mirrored door of the medicine cabinet swung on its hinges. Bottles of shampoo lay on their sides, everything dripped. Everything was in disarray.
E? Had E done this? I should rush to her room, and wake her, take her temperature, make sure she hadn’t taken any pills, make sure she wasn’t now not sleeping, but drifting in some kind of drug-induced fever, unable to get up. I hesitated, waking a child was irrevocable. It could be nothing, the apartment was so quiet with the children asleep. I was in the bottom of a ship, I could have been all alone.
I crept once, when I was a girl, in the middle of the night into my parents’ bedroom and opened up my mother’s dressing-table drawer which, to me at the time, seemed like the secret key to everything about her. The drawer was filled with her tubes and bottles, her tiny glass jars. I loved to watch her take a dab of one thing, a pinch of something else. I loved to watch her looking at her own face in the mirror, making it, as I watched, beautiful. It was like when the peel falls from the apple whole, without breaking, her true face emerged like that.
In the dark that night, that night that I was sneaking, I pulled open her drawer and grabbed a handful of tubes and tubs and bottles, all small things of various shapes. I meant to take them back to my room and examine them. Out in the hall though, I slipped and fell and the bottles crashed to the floor and spilled everywhere. When I got up I was standing on a handful of sharp little things. I made it back to my room and switched on my desk lamp and found several baby teeth stuck to the bottom of my foot. Afterwards I had a very particular horror of stepping on things and insisted on wearing slippers always in the dark, even under the covers of my bed. Children can be strange for all sorts of reasons.
E wasn’t tall enough to make a mess like this though, she couldn’t possibly reach up into the medicine cabinet or reach high enough to have been the one to have written with the lipstick on the walls up near the ceiling. It was my name anyway, that was written up there on the wall. It really was! And E couldn’t spell. Perhaps M had left for work in a rush. Perhaps he had been feeling unwell. Perhaps he had been upset. I cleaned the bathroom. Returned it to order, screwing the caps on the bottles, wiping down the sink, the faucet, scrubbing until everything was perfect. Standing on the toilet I could just reach the lipstick writing and wipe it away but it was quite hard and I almost lost my balance several times.
There were two trees that stood in a field across the street from the apartment I lived in with my mother. When the rains came as they often did, and clouds hung like a heavy grey ocean over the field it looked to me like the clouds, the ocean-clouds hung directly above these two trees, as if they, poor scraggly things, were the anchor for the whole world. It looked also, when the rains came, as if they, the trees, were about to be destroyed. The birds that lived in the field would fly to the trees and beat their wings just before the rain fell and their wings, then, as the colour drained from the field and everything grew dark, would look like black leaves shining, wet and slick and glinting in the last shreds of light.
The reason I loved and hated to watch them though, the birds, was that they could never decide which tree to shelter in, the one on the left or the one on the right. They could never decide which of the two would save them. Because it was plain that they knew, the birds, that one, but only one, would. They would settle in one tree, calling to each other, screaming almost as the winds came, and then one would leave, make the desperate flight to the other tree, and all the others, screaming, would follow. Perhaps I thought so often of these trees because my mind felt like this now that I had children, my thoughts so often screaming and beating their wings, flying uselessly from one tree to the next. Should I be worried now about the coffee cup or the pills? Was there some other thing I couldn’t see? Some disaster that I could not now imagine? The only safety, the only shelter, seemed to be to stay in the air, in constant flight.
I took a shower. Steam filled the little room, beading on the sink, the mirror. I let the water run over my skin until it began to lose its heat. I dried myself slowly, obstinately taking my time. I wrapped my hair in a towel and opened the bathroom door. B was crying in his crib, E was calling for me.
After lunch we escaped out the window to the little park. I couldn’t face the front door, the concierge, the freshly scrubbed walk, the garbage bins. None of it. The surfaces would be clean now of course of footprints, of fingerprints, of breath. Restored, and I didn’t want to see them restored. I didn’t want to see it cleaned up somehow, what I had done. Besides, it was quicker to go to the park through the window, more direct. If we went through the window we could be there so much faster, there, in the park where we could love each other and play.
So when we left, we slid out of the apartment through the back window and dropped down to the soft green grass that wasn’t ours, that was on the wrong side of the little fence. We’re so fast! I said to E, to make her run across the grass. Look at us! I said to her, holding her hand, holding B in my other arm, his soft little baby head pressed to my chest. No one can catch us! We’re birds, we’re flying!
Well we were a bit like birds just then I suppose, the way they hop hop hop before they fly. Anyway I tried to make it into a game. The game of course being designed to make her hurry, to make her just the right amount of afraid. The fox will eat the baby birds who fall behind, I told her while we streaked across the lawn. The greedy greedy fox will gobble them up.
When we got to the park, I set B down on our blanket and gave him a toy to play with. I settled E with her tools, her pail, and listened to her list of endless duties regarding the proper care of her animals. The baby giraffe was feeling poorly. E seemed pleased to announce this. She flew off to bury it neck-deep in sand. A treatment, she said.
The mother giraffe will be worried, I said. Take her too. E refused and this hurt me somehow. Smiling, I took the mother giraffe to the edge of the sandbox and set her down next to the baby. There, I said, now she can watch. E moved her game to the other side of the sandbox leaving the mother giraffe staring out at nothing, balanced on her spindly plastic legs. It bothered me, really bothered me, to see her like that. I even felt for a moment as if my own eyes were made of paint, as if I were trying desperately to see past a thick smear of acrylic, move legs that would never move, as if my baby might depend on me doing this impossible thing. It was a horrible feeling. E buried the baby, covering its head with a final shovelful of sand. It would almost certainly be lost.
Rain clouds had been gathering even as the heat rose and now the sky crackled with the coming storm. The other women had already gathered their children, calling to them in long and lovely strings of words that I could never hope to follow, and left the park, heading back to their unimaginable homes. On y va. On y va. À la maison.
All except Nell. She wasn’t leaving. She lay on her back on her blanket playing with her baby, kissing his fingers, stopping to whisper in the older boy’s ear. The blanket is a ship, perhaps she said, or maybe, the blanket can fly. We can make this happen if we lie here still together and never leave this one place that we are right now. Perhaps she whispered things like that to him. I had been determined to stay as long as she did, but I saw now that she had no intention of leaving, even as great fat drops of rain began to fall, dotting the sandbox, staining the front of her dress. I didn’t know the word for lightning, couldn’t make light of the weather, couldn’t ask her why she wasn’t leaving.
I called to E to come, to come now. I gathered B, who was beginning to cry, grabbed the blanket. The clouds opened. There would be lightning and plenty of it. E screamed and I pushed her forward, back to our apartment, the still open window, tripping, barely catching myself, B in my arms, all of our things in my arms too. Running away was such an awkward business.
Back in the apartment I dried E’s hair, B’s. Unpacked our wet things, hung the towel up to dry. When I looked back through the window to the park, Nell was still there with her children. They were lying on their backs in the rain.
An hour later, when I looked again, I saw a man standing over them with an umbrella, it looked as if he were yelling at her. He pulled her to her feet, really pulled her. He took the baby. He could have been yelling, she could have been, the rain would have covered up any sound. She could have been screaming and I wouldn’t have heard it. I didn’t think she was screaming. When I looked again they were gone.
After the rain stopped we discovered that the mother giraffe had been left at the park, but when I ran back to get her, I found the sandbox empty, only sticks and rocks and wet sand. E was sad when I told her this, but not overly so. The treatment had, after all, worked. The baby had been cured.
There was a woman’s shoe lying beside the sandbox, an expensive looking ballet flat. It occurred to me that Nell must have lost her shoe, that she must have stumbled home in the rain with one bare foot. There was nothing to do of course but leave it there. Nothing to do but hope that she was fine and would eventually come and find it. When I jumped back through the window I lowered the shutters so I couldn’t see out onto the little park anymore. It seemed better that way, safer. I had never had a man pull my arm the way that man had pulled Nell’s, never in my life. Thinking of it made my skin sting in the places where he had touched her.
We couldn’t go outside that afternoon, I couldn’t, though E wanted to go to the store for ice cream. So I prepared the last of what was in the fridge for dinner. A fish I’d bought at the market, tomatoes, more lemons, more heat and flies and sugar. I cut the fish into pieces and pounded them into the wooden rental-company cutting board. When I picked up the pieces they were still studded with scales, scales that would, if she ate the fish, catch in E’s teeth, that would make her cry, that would cause her real pain, that would stick sharply in her gums and her teeth. I watched it all fry in the pan, the scales, the smashed pieces of fish. The oil speckled my wrists like teeth, while the fish crisped, then hardened into a burnt shell, and the pan became a wasteland strewn with glistening scales, as if the fish had, after death, grown a thousand eyes. We waited for M but he didn’t come. I threw the ruined, blackened fish away and E and I had crackers and cheese and tomatoes for dinner and we all three slept together, exhausted, in the same bed. I saw the coat hanging on M’s side of the closet before I fell asleep, it was as beautiful as I remembered. In the morning I found a rumpled suit in a pile beside the bed, as if M had collapsed there. As if he’d become suddenly so exhausted that he’d fallen out of his clothes and disappeared.