He stares at the ceiling. The dim glow in the nightlight. The railing bars of the crib rattle. “Daddy!”
“Right here, Midge,” he says. “It’s okay. Put your heady down.”
Silence for a moment. Two.
“Da-DEE!”
He sighs. “Right here, Midge. Put your heady down.”
The bars shake again. Like they’re coming apart. A wild beast caged.
Then silence. The measuring of effects.
The first start of a whimper.
Taz rubs his temples.
“Mo,” she says, incorporating it into a whimper. “Mo, mo, mo.”
The mattress bounces as she collapses, sinking into her misery. But it’s the tired whimper, not the half-hour brand of anguish, and Taz hopes he can wait it out. The books warn of the endless loop of broken nights created by running to every cry out. But it says nothing of lying in your own sweat, listening, not moving, making your huge mistakes.
He feels Marn pat his arm, nearly afraid to move, but leaning close, whispering into his ear, You’re doing great.
If he had any guts at all, he’d move down the hall, back into their room.
Midge whimpers herself to sleep, asking for Mo. Again and again until she’s down. Mo, mo, mo.
She’s asleep, her quiet, steady breathing filling every space in the room, hours before Taz is. And when he wakes up, he wonders if he ever was asleep. The room still dark. Head throbbing. Like the first days.
He eases up, stands over the crib, and goes out, loads what he needs into the truck, fixes coffee, fills the thermos. He readies the diaper bag, a few toys, stops, thinks. Midge or not?
Lauren. Due in any minute. Talking about flights home. She’d stay. He knows that.
He looks up into the gray rift of the morning, thinking maybe it’d be better to bring Midge, that she’d help with Elmo, then almost flinches at the whack Marn gives him over that.
But he sits down, pours a cup out of the thermos, and waits for Lauren.
He’s still sitting there when she comes in. She gives him a quick look, a glance to her watch, says she thought he’d finished up yesterday, had a day off, might sleep in.
“Sleep in? Mean, past three? Four?”
“Well, I thought I could help. See her one more day. I’ve got the late flight.”
“Tonight?”
She nods.
He drops his head, says, “I was going to run over to Helena. Check out a job there, maybe.”
She looks straight at him. “Helena?” she says. “Going global?”
He smiles. “I don’t think so. Not just yet.”
“Should I cancel my flight?”
“If, I don’t know. I don’t really know what’s going on over there.”
She looks and looks at him. “If there was something going on over there,” she says, shifts from one foot to the other. “Well, you know Marnie would only be happy for you.”
Taz fidgets at the door. “Like I said, I really don’t know anything.”
“You think about that, and you’ll know it’s true.” Lauren runs her hand up through her hair, another ghost move that just hollows Taz. “She could be a lot of things, Taz, and easy wasn’t always one of them. We both know that. But, this Muppet, Marnie would like her. A lot.”
“Lauren.”
“She’s not here anymore. She’d never want you stalled out for, what, the rest of your life?”
“You’re jumping the gun. Like leaping way, way ahead.”
“Really?”
“She just asked if I could come over, that she needed something. Then she took it all back.”
“But you think you should go anyway.”
“She’d do it for me.”
Lauren looks away, toward the kitchen, Marn’s smiley face maybe. “I believe she would,” she says.
“And?” Taz says.
“Well, what else is there? You’d do anything for each other.”
Taz blows out a long breath. “Marn used to say that when she was little, in trouble, you’d just sit her down and talk to her. Said she wished you’d just beat her, that there was no squirming out of anything once you started talking to her.”
Lauren smiles. “Wishing for beatings? Was I really that bad?”
“Beatings in a good way,” Taz says.
“Go to Helena,” Lauren says. “See what she needs.”
“I—” Taz starts, but Lauren interrupts, says, “And you leave Marnie here with me. It’s time I had a talk with her.”
“I was thinking of taking Midge.”
Lauren shakes her head. “You leave her with me, too. I think this might be something you have to do on your own.”
Already packed, Taz walks out to his truck, scrapes away at the frost. The engine stutters, slurs in the cold, but fires, and he waits for a little warmth, then backs out of the drive, turns on the headlights, follows them down the block away from their house.
Far from staying behind with her mother, the whole way to Helena, the world an early winter gray, Marnie works him over for leaving Midge behind. He wants to say, “But your mother told me to,” but knows how that would go. So, he just drives, listens.
(A) she says, you don’t ever leave her behind, and (B), she’s who your little redhead is all about. You get that, right?
Taz holds the wheel tighter, goes through the curves in the canyon, the red rock walls. “I should have brought her,” he says, and Marnie says, Better late than never.
It makes the ride go quick, but even Marn falls quiet when he pulls up in front of Elmo’s fourplex.
“Can’t just go barging in,” he whispers.
No, I don’t think that would be wise.
“Why didn’t you think of that before?”
He feels Marn’s shrug.
Finally he reaches for his phone, texts, “El, you okay?”
He waits minutes. Then minutes more. Then types in, “El? Kind of freaked me out yesterday.”
It’s another few minutes before she answers. Just, “OK.”
“OK you freaked me out?”
“No. I’m OK.”
“Busy?”
“What?”
“Can I come in?”
There’s a space then, and Taz finds that he’s holding his breath, has to let it out, sit panting like he ran over here.
Then, at last, “Are you here?”
“Look out the window.”
Oh good christ. What if she’s not home?
Do not go there, Marn whispers, sounding breathless herself. The front door of her apartment swings open. Elmo standing there. Just looking out at him. Wearing a T-shirt. Her basketball shorts.
He opens the door. Stands looking back at her.
“No Midge?” she calls out, just loud enough to make it across the street to him.
He shakes his head.
She gives him a wave over, and when he gets close, she says, “I really could have used me some Midge.”
He stops, says, “She’s having a girls’ day with Grandma.”
Elmo turns and climbs the steps, says, “Well, come on.”
Taz stays where he is, says, “I, I just wanted to see. You got me worried.”
She looks down at him and wraps her arms around herself, shivers. “I’m not standing out here,” she says.
Taz follows her in and sees she wasn’t lying about not moving in. A handful of boxes sort of line one wall, some open, stuff spilling out. There’s the same well-worn chair and couch, the chair arm draped with a Halloween costume, angel wings flat, a little ratty, a halo slapped on top. A crimson pitchfork leans across it all.
“So,” she says. “What brings you to town?” She stands sideways to him, looking out the window, as if his truck out there might have been dropped by tsunami.
“Like I said,” Taz says. “Yesterday, your text, I was—”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. But, I told you to forget it. It was nothing.”
“But, still. You never asked me for a thing before, so . . .”
She starts to lift her arms, lets them fall down to her sides. She looks at him, just a glance, then away. “You want anything? Coffee or something?”
“Had it on the way.”
“Need to pee, then?”
“El, I’m okay,” he says, glad he stopped before getting here.
“Well, at least have a seat.”
He picks up the halo, the white dress, moves the pitchfork aside.
“What’s a girl to wear, you know?” she says.
“El. What’s going on?”
She takes her braid, runs her hands along it, starts undoing it. “Big party up here the other night.”
“And?” he starts, but Elmo interrupts, says, “Do you still tell Midge about her mom?”
Taz rocks back a touch. “Um, yeah, I do.”
She looks at him for real, eye to eye. “How do you do it?”
Taz tries to figure out an answer, but Elmo runs over him. “I mean, like, how, you know? What way do you make up the stories? If you make them up.”
“She’s this big adventurer,” Taz says quietly. “Like a pirate, kind of. Sailing around. Not able to get back yet. Like this fairy tale or something.”
“Okay,” she says, standing there, finger-combing her hair, separating it, starting to weave it back into a braid. Over, under, across.
Taz waits, begins to pet, without knowing it, one of the wings, smoothing down the feathers.
She drops down on the couch across from him. “Once upon a time,” she says, but stops, looks at him. “Do you do that? That whole ‘once upon’ thing?”
“Nope,” he whispers.
“Okay, forget that then.” She does the rubber band loops, then lets go of her hair, puts her hands in her lap. “So, there was just this girl, you know? And she was kind of fun, her friends said, and kind of okay-looking—her friends said that, too, she didn’t—and she was in this new place, like the youngest person there, and there was this guy, this new teacher, who wasn’t that old either.”
Taz holds up his hand. “What if I don’t think I like this story?”
She stops, fixes him with a stare. “Does Midge say that to you? Ever? ‘I don’t like this story?’”
He shakes his head.
“Then you just—” she lifts her fingers to her mouth, works the key, tosses it over her shoulder. “I’m the one telling this story. And don’t forget, I didn’t ask you to come here.”
“Well, technically, you did.”
“Okay, there was that. But still.” She twists the lock shut again, and holds his eye, making sure.
She’s pale, Taz sees, maybe even more than usual. And the braid, even redone, looks slept in. If she slept.
“So, anyway,” she says, “this girl, she just minds her own business, does what she has to, because far away, in another land, there’s this beautiful little princess, who has stolen the girl’s heart.”
“Like bad stolen?” Taz can’t help a smile.
Elmo drops her hands in her lap, sighs. “No, ass, good stolen.”
“Okay then.”
“But the little fairy princess, she lives with this terrible, mean, ogre.”
“Hey!”
“Okay, okay. She lives with her father, who, who . . .” Elmo’s voice trails off. She clears her throat, looks into her lap, winds her fingers around one another. “. . . Who a horrible thing has happened to.”
She takes a shivery breath. “But, he may have a piece of this girl’s heart, too,” she says, so quiet Taz has to lean closer just to hear.
“But, the other guy, he doesn’t know anything about this far land, and he sends a glass slipper to the girl, and she doesn’t know what to do, so she sends it back, but he sends it back, and so does she, until finally, she doesn’t know how to keep sending it back, and she goes to this party with him, gets all dressed up, and this guy is a good guy, and he asks her about her life, and he listens, and—the girl tells him stories, all kinds of things from her life, but never once does she mention the far land. Not once.”
Elmo stops, and Taz looks up in time to see her wiping her cheeks.
“And this girl, she wonders why she does not say anything about that land, and, when this guy, who is a good guy, not some creep, at the end of the party, on the way home, at the girl’s door, asks if he can kiss the girl, I mean, he freaking asks, she cannot even look at him, cannot even answer him, only just suddenly realizes that she misses that far land more than she misses anything in the world, so, she panics, runs away, suddenly does not want to waste one more second away, drives halfway over the mountains before losing her nerve, wondering what if that land is not as friendly as she’d hoped, that maybe her heart had been stolen, but not taken in, so she turns around, drives back, one wing sticking out the door, which the policeman is kind enough to point out, sends a lame text instead—”
Taz reaches across the little gap between the chair and the couch, over one of the unpacked boxes, and takes one of her hands, which has been busy strangling the other, and says, “El, breathe.”
“And then, what if the father shows up at the girl’s door, and the girl has been hiding from him, because she doesn’t know what to do, what to do about him, or about the guy, or about herself, or about one single thing, and—”
“Breathe,” Taz says.
She looks up, then down to her hand in his. She pulls it away. “I just don’t know if I’ve been a dumb ass, sending back that stupid slipper. If that far land isn’t anything real at all.”
“It’s real,” Taz says.
Elmo blinks, looks at him, away. “What if that man, what if that horrible thing that happened to him, what if he never comes back from it?”
“I don’t know,” Taz says. He reaches back, doesn’t take her hand, just pulls her little finger a touch away from the others, lets its tip rest on the side of his finger. “Maybe somebody in glass slippers will show up and, I don’t know, pour him a big-ass bubble bath.”
Elmo laughs, just once, a kind of blurt. She wraps her finger around his. “I mean, I just want to know if I’d be stupid, you know, to hope.”
Taz takes a breath. “You’ve been making me wonder the same thing, but, man, wanting in on this? I figured, who’d want to? So, no, not stupid, but I’m guessing there’s a name for it that’s not far off.”
Elmo smiles, says, “Don’t think I haven’t thought that myself. More than once.”
“Great,” Taz says, and they sit there looking at each other, away, not quite holding hands, until Taz sits up a little, says, “Well, Grandma’s flying out tonight, so I better—”
“Wait,” Elmo says, and Taz stops. He fiddles with the staff of the pitchfork.
“As long as we’re airing out all our fairy tales,” Elmo says, quiet again, “when Marnie talks to you—”
Taz jerks like he’s been shocked. “I told you that?”
“A guess.”
Taz stares.
“When she talks to you,” she says, still quietly, “what does she say about me?”
Careful, Marnie whispers.
Taz says, “She says a lot of things.”
“About me, Taz.”
“She says, ‘Don’t be a fool.’”
Elmo sucks in a breath.
Taz can feel Marnie holding her breath, too. “She says, ‘Don’t let her get away.’”
Elmo leans forward to look him in the eye.
“Everyone tells me that, El. Rudy. Even the wicked stepmother. Marn most of all.”
“And she’s the one you listen to most of all?”
Taz nods, smiles a little, one side of his mouth.
Elmo lets out a breath, one it seems she’s been holding for ages. “I am so sorry you lost her, Taz.”
“I know. Everyone is.”
“And you think . . .”
“I think no one would be anything but happy to see me pull some sort of Lazarus.”
“Lazarus?”
“I’ve been given up for dead for a long time, El. Maybe by myself most of all.”
Marnie doesn’t say a word on the drive back, and he’s glad for that. It’s just the way they get sometimes, quiet, cool with it, each looking out the windows, thinking whatever they’re thinking.
He’s back in time for Lauren to catch her flight, but she’s already canceled. “I was worried,” she says. “Your job in Helena.”
Taz is standing at the door, Midge climbing his legs, yelling, “Daddy home!”
“Worried?” he says.
She smiles, draws herself up. “If it worked out all right.”
It’s like talking to Rudy. Then he gets it, smiles himself. “She’s teaching till Christmas,” he says, and doesn’t miss the touch of color that comes back to her cheeks.
Midge grabs Taz’s fingers, tugging on them, climbing up onto his feet. She tugs again, like putting her heels against a horse, shouts, “Go!” Taz starts walking her around on his feet, her new favorite game.
“I didn’t just sit around all day myself,” Lauren says.
Midge steers by pulling on one finger or the other. She directs him into the kitchen, around, back out. “Spending a day with Midge isn’t much like sitting around.”
“Ted,” she says, serious enough to stop him.
He turns.
“I talked to some realtors today,” she says, out with it, fast.
Taz blinks. Midge keeps after his fingers.
“There is nothing for me anymore that is not right here.” She waves toward Midge, still on Taz’s feet, pulling him toward the toy box.
Her living here?
“I won’t even start looking if it’s not something you think you can handle.”
He staggers over to the toy box, lets Midge loose to do her worst. “Sounds like you’ve started already.”
“Ted,” she says. “I’m trying here.”
“I did some looking, too,” he says, before giving it a second’s thought. “Back in the darkest days. Talked to my parents.”
She goes blank, as if he’s left the planet, zoomed off into a whole other world.
“They live in New Zealand. I don’t know if you knew that.”
“Marnie said.”
“I, my dad, he nosed around, about getting me work down there.”
She puts a hand down, steadies herself on Marnie’s gigantic table. Where she wanted to entertain the multitudes. At least build forts underneath with Midge.
“They’ve never seen Midge,” he says. He glances up to her. “They never even met Marnie.”
Lauren takes a second, collects herself. “They could come here if she meant anything to them. Could have at any time.”
“It was just talk. Like what you’re doing with the realtors.”
She’s shaking. “But I am talking about moving here. To Midge.” She stares at him. “You would, would you really take her that far?” she says, like she might come across the table at him. Fight him to the death for her.
Taz shakes his head. “Like I said, it was a long time ago.”
She doesn’t say anything, but drops her gaze, the stare down.
“Truth?” he says. “I don’t really think I could move. Away from here?” He waves his hand around. “After all we did? All the work? The whole fell swoop?”
She looks down, brushes some invisible crumb from the table. “I was afraid you’d leave just because of all that.”
“I know,” he says. “And maybe I should. Still can’t face the bathroom. Even after tearing it out. I can’t even go into the mountains for a Christmas tree. The way she’d eye about a thousand, finding all these invisible flaws, then pick the perfect one, no different, far as I could tell, from any of the rest.”
“She was good on invisible flaws,” she says.
“Wasn’t too bad on visible ones either.”
“Good god, no. I had all mine paraded before me, believe me.”
He keeps nodding. The way she could pick a thing apart. A person. The way she could put him back together.
“So,” her mother says, “my talking to realtors?”
“It’d be a big step,” he says, “just to be the grandma. You know, the old lady down the block she’ll visit less and less?”
Lauren coughs as if punched. “Well,” she says, “Marnie gave you the gift, didn’t she. The old lady down the block?” She smiles. “And you know who you’ll be, don’t you? The dad. The old man who embarrasses her. Who she’ll fight to get away from. Who she’ll lie to, to run off with boys. Right to your face. All your trust. Whose heart she will break as surely as if—”
Taz chops the air between them with the edge of his hand. “Enough!” he says, but he gives out a long “Phew,” says, “Mercy,” says, “Maybe we’ve both got the gift.”
Lauren raises an eyebrow. “We’ll both be obsolete before we know it. It’s in the job description.”
“She’s not even two,” Taz says. “Not even one and a half. Let’s give her a while.”
“Well on her way,” Lauren says. “Believe me. I’ve raised one before. Didn’t even see the sidelines until I realized that’s where I’d been left.”
“That’s our job, though, right? To make sure they leave us behind?”
“It is,” she says. “But who on earth would ever take such a job?”
He says, “Who’d be begging for a second round?”
She spreads her hands flat on the table, bows her head. “Touché,” she says.
They stand that way for a minute, just looking at the tabletop, their hands, the room quiet around them, just Midge’s babble as she searches through the bottom of the toy box, looking for any last thing she hasn’t hurled out into the world.