He’s come back ever since, whenever he gets a day. Never once leaves Midge behind. She squeals every time she sees the water. Pulling at her own clothes. Dying for it.
He calls Elmo, and he lies. Tells her he’s giving her a day.
Then, one morning, even though he’d called the night before, he finds her at dawn standing on his porch, ready to start.
“But,” he says, and she says, “What are you doing this for? These days off?”
“It’s just another install,” he says. “You know, teaching her a trade. So she can support me one day.”
She watches him.
He’s got a towel behind the seat of his truck now. A bag with fresh clothes for her. Diapers. Snacks. Where he used to carry a level. A tape. A hammer.
He’s afraid she’ll ask to come along, afraid she’ll say, “Tazmo and Rude?,” but she only says, “Don’t be all day. Okay?”
“No,” he says. “Of course not. It’s only a few doors anyway.” Then he looks at her, catches it. As if he’s leaving her here. As if she’ll stay.
“El?” he says. He wonders if she’ll work on the bathroom herself.
“Wherever it is you go,” she says, looking out the window, “just don’t stay there all day. Not today.”
He swallows. Blushes, he’s sure. How do people do it, he wonders. Lie. Cheat.
She purses her lips. Not in the good way. Disappointed? Disgusted?
“It’s just—” she starts, then looks away, anywhere but at him. “Man, I don’t know if you even know.” She runs her hand up through her hair. Does look at him. “You’ve got a birthday today. And the kid’s got to celebrate.”
Taz does know. He doesn’t. It’s what’s been creeping around the edges of his days, like something in his eye, that he can see, but not quite. He swallows. “I don’t know if—”
“Yes, you do,” Elmo says. “No matter how much you don’t want to.” She looks at him. “For her sake, you have to.”
“I—”
“Yeah. You, Taz. You have to be happy. If only for her sake.”
Taz holds Midge by the hand, ready to walk her out to the truck. He looks down at her.
“There are some people coming over,” she says. “Five o’clock. I’m making the cake. She’s going to make a mess of herself. She’s going to be the center of attention.”
Taz breathes in. Out. One year.
“And you are not going to be the black hole here.”
He wants to throw something at her. Make her go away. Disappear. He wants Midge to eat her cake. Both hands.
“How,” he manages.
“Rudy.” She looks straight at him. “Remember him? Your best friend?”
Taz nods.
She waves him toward the door. The back of her hand. “And then, tomorrow, we start rebuilding. The bathroom. Everything. No more stalling.”
“Aren’t you the babysitter?” he says.
“Yeah,” she says, “I am. And sometimes it feels like double fricking duty, okay?”
He takes a step backward, toward the door. Midge teeters, totters to catch up, free hand waving like a ropewalker’s.
“And, for christ’s sake, brush her hair when you’re done swimming. You know the knots it gets into?”
Taz gets a hand on the door. Holds himself up.
“Someday maybe we can all go. You two can show me this secret spot of yours.”
He just stands there, silent.
“Now go, and don’t come back without your party hat on.”
He steps onto the porch, lifts Midge over the stairs.
“I mean it,” she calls out after him. “Girl’s got her own place to cut in the world. Ghost-free.”
Taz is shaking. He swings Midge up, all the way, into his arms, and has trouble making it down the stairs, as if he’s carrying an anvil. He glances back, the gauze of her through the screen.
Elmo waves her hand, shooing him away.
“She’s not a ghost,” he manages. “She’s, she’s her mother, and she’s . . .”
“Gone,” Elmo finishes, a whisper, almost a ghost herself.
Taz shakes his head, says, “Don’t.”
“I’m just—”
“The babysitter,” he says, before she can say whatever it is she is going to say, and he can see the impact even through the screen. He’s gone off the porch before he can see one more thing.
They float in their river. He tells more stories, new installments. “She’s rounding the Cape of Great Hopes,” he says. “Last I heard, anyway, before she went out of contact. She may already be in Neverland. But she made me promise to tell you how much she loves you. More than anything in the whole wide world. Misses you even more.”
He rolls her over, so they’re chest-to-chest. “She had all the sails on, hair flying, huge dark clouds. It’s not an easy place to go.” He looks her in the eyes, which have darkened, just like hers. “She sends you thirty-two million kisses, one for each second since you were born. Some extras to help you grow.”
He tells her it’s her birthday. Tells her, again, what a swimmer her mother is. “If her ship goes down, no worries there. She’ll carry the whole crew with her.” He holds her out in the water. Works on her kick. Her stroke. Lets her go. She swims like a frog. She squeals when he lifts her back out. No idea how she knows to hold her breath, that one medium is not the other. He tells her, “Your mother, she won’t be one bit surprised to see how perfect you are.” He touches her nose. “Not.” Her chin. “One.” Her belly button. “Bit.”
They circle and circle together. Longer than they ever have. Pruned toes. Fingers.
As he dries her off on the truck seat, his phone lights up. Lauren. He doesn’t pick up. She doesn’t leave a message. He checks missed calls. Lauren. Twice. Elmo. Once. He does the diaper. Tickles her. Snaps the overalls.
He’s late, but he drives back slowly. A hazard to what traffic there is, all the fisherman, the tubers. Marnie says, Step on it, buster. Then, more quietly, She was right, you know. You have to do this for our Schmidge.
There are no cars parked in the drive. Along the street. He says, “Midge, I’m sorry. I’ve ruined everything.” Marnie says, Unbelievable.
He pulls into the empty drive. Midge just waking up in the car seat, dressed in her fresh, practically new Goodwill bibs. No tee. Ready to party.
His phone vibrates. He glances. Lauren. He presses the Silence button. Marn says, You have to answer. I know, I know, but you have to. Midge is hers, too.
He works Midge’s seat belt. She yawns prodigiously.
He carries her up the walk. Swings back the screen. Pushes open the door. Steps through, swinging the baby seat in after him, clanking it against the screen.
They jump. They shout. Blow party things, those zipper deals.
Midge cries.
Everyone laughs, says, “Oh,” says, “Baby,” says, “Sorry,” says, “Beautiful.” Elmo steps forward, takes the seat from his hand, takes Midge out, soothes her. She reaches up, puts a party hat on Taz’s head, the elastic string catching in his hair. She says, “Haircut.”
Rudy blows a party horn at him, the coil stopping just short of his nose. “You made it,” he tells him. “One year.”
“We did,” he says. “We made it.” He watches Elmo move through the people, holding Midge. He’d been so afraid she’d be gone. The babysitter.
Surrounded by people. Some he’s sure he hasn’t seen in a year. Since the funeral. That party. Someone puts a beer in his hand. Rude maybe. They all want to talk to him. Ask him. How it’s been. How he is. All about Midge. Some he wonders if he’s ever even seen before. Elmo never comes near until she bumps him in the back with a shoulder, says, “Candles.”
She sits at the table, Midge in her lap before the cake.
Chocolate frosting so rich it looks nearly black. Knife-swirled peaks. The treacherous black waves off the Cape of Great Hopes.
Taz holds the flame close over the waves, gets the candles lit. They sing “Happy Birthday.” He wonders why there’s more than one candle.
Elmo pulls Midge’s fingers back from the flames. Blows for her. Now lets Midge grab. Everyone claps. Chocolate everywhere. They clap harder. Blow the horns again.
As he starts to back away, Rudy, standing behind Elmo’s chair, catches his eye. Taz bites his lip, shrugs, and opens the back door without looking, without turning around. Rudy nods, a little sideways dip, like he knows.
Nobody knows. Not a single thing.
He breathes in the dark on the porch swing. The world never emptier.
He pulls his phone from his pocket. Looks at the list of missed calls. Pictures her in Ohio, in her own darkness. Her day all about loss. Not even a candle about to go out. He punches Call.
She doesn’t say hello. The ringing just stops. Then, “Has she blown out her candles?”
He says, “She had help.”
The quiet stretches, just her breathing, a mirror of his own. “I would have given anything to see that.”
“There’s a lot of people here,” he says. “Somebody must’ve, their phone or something. I’ll send it.”
“Is that what you’d want?”
He pushes the swing. Tilts his head back the way she used to. Stills it instantly. Foot on the ground. Her birthday present, the first year here. Teak. Only time he’d ever used it. His unveiling and her one word, “Teak?” A sudden blowup over, for christ’s sake, tropical deforestation. His general ignorance about, you know, the whole world. “It’s wood, you know?” she’d shouted. “I mean, I thought maybe you’d at least know about that.”
Her mother says, “Is that how you’d want to see it? On some stranger’s phone video?”
“No,” he says.
She lets that sit.
He says, “As far as I know, the planes still land here.”
He fingers a screw in the brass eye holding the rope. Backed out just enough to feel the edge. The pressure of the freezes and thaws.
“Was that an invitation?” she says.
“You don’t need an invitation. You’re her grandmother.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“I just—” he starts, but lets it slide away. “You can come anytime you want. Stay here. Motel. Whatever you want. I’m working nonstop. You’d hardly even know I was here. You could watch her full days.”
“What about your babysitter?”
He squeezes the phone. “She’s going to be moving sometime,” he says. “Getting a real job.”
She asks, “How’s Midge? Tell me about her.”
He takes a breath. How on earth? “She’s perfect,” he says. “You’d see her every day. In everything she does. Everything.”
She says, “Marnie?” like taking a blow.
He sits, swings just the slightest bit. “There’s a party here I’m supposed to be at,” he says.
“Can I talk to her?”
“She doesn’t talk yet.”
“Taz.”
“She’s in the middle of her cake. She won’t know what’s going on.”
She makes a noise. Maybe some sort of laugh. “Marnie hated my birthday calls, too.”
She did. Made vicious fun of them. The two of them in bed, the 6 a.m. call, insisting, always, that she be the first to wish her happy birthday. Taz doing everything to Marn he could to blow it wide open. Marnie having to jump up, run naked out of the room, trying to keep her voice level, bland. He says, “No, she didn’t.”
Lauren laughs, and Taz can’t help a smile. He pushes the swing back. Tips his head. Closes his eyes. Pushes again.
“You better get back to your party,” she says.
The world sways beneath him. He keeps his eyes closed. “It’s just, you know, a party.”
“It’s about Midge now. Everything is.”
“I know.”
“You have to call, though,” she says. “Before I come out. Tell me when it’s a good time.”
“I will,” he says.
Then she’s gone and he swings until the push is gone, the brass and rope and teak and his own dead weight pulled back straight toward the center of the planet.
He stands. Phone still in hand. Opens his eyes. Draws a breath. And steps back inside. Shields his eyes, looks at the floor.
Rudy bumps up against him. “You okay?”
Taz holds up his phone. “Had to call Grandma.”
“Mrs. H?” Rudy says. “She ask about me?”
“Of course she did, Rude. They all do.”
“I can’t help it,” Rudy says, and Taz asks if he filmed the candle deal, the dive into the cake.
Rudy says he did, says, “Crazy wasn’t it? Just like Marn around a dessert.”
Taz opens his phone, says, “Could you send the video to Mrs. H? She misses her pretty bad.” He reads off the phone number.
Rudy taps it in, says, “Thanks, man. She will be forever in my debt.”
Taz scans the party until he finds Elmo, carrying Midge again. Still some chocolate cake on Midge’s face. Icing between her fingers. A streak of it down Elmo’s cheek, a little in her hair. They’re laughing.
Every single thing Marnie wanted to be.
She catches his eye and smiles, and he smiles back, nods a thanks. There is no way to make it across the room. No way to make his house be empty. He steps backward through the door again. Sees her stop to watch him leave. He holds up his phone, an excuse. He doesn’t know if, through the screen, she sees it.
At Midge’s room, he works the screen’s turn buttons, drops it down beside the house, pushes the window up. He jumps, hooks his belly over the sill. Crawls through. She will not like this. Who would? Marnie says, Are you kidding me?
He hasn’t said a word to her all night. Never got the chance. Just that one bump in the back, like, Wake up.
He curls on the small bed. Punches his pillow. Buries his face in. Their baby’s birthday.
She’s quiet. Just whispering to Midge. Singing kind of. Hardly even breathing. The crib does its squeak. A sigh almost.
He pretends to be asleep.
She stands and waits beside the crib, making sure. The same way he does.
One step back. Another.
His every move.
Around the low foot of the bed. Maybe a finger drag across the post. The hand-rubbed walnut.
She stops.
He waits.
The mattress sags with her weight. Sinking him toward her. He leans a shoulder the other way. Opens his eyes. He is turned away from the door. Her. She won’t see.
She pats him, on the shoulder. Leaves her hand there. In the same voice she used with Midge, she says, “You did okay tonight. You tried.”
One year, he thinks. Not one step forward.
“I know,” she says. “How hard.”
He bites his lip.
“More than I could have done,” she says.
He says nothing. Keeps pretending.
“The window thing, though,” she says. “That one even surprised Rudy, who says he knows your every move.”
She pats him again. Stands up. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” she says. He hears her pause at the door, the touch of her hand on the knob.
She says, “Sleep tight, okay, Taz?” and he listens to her tiptoe out, ease the front door shut behind her, the house like a vacuum around him.