I met Annabelle and Erik’s kids on Labor Day weekend. Six years later, our summer of perfect happiness would end on that weekend as well. Our story like one of the perfectly structured plays I’d one day watch at Ten Chimneys, though I wouldn’t understand this until long after it was over.
The twins were out front running through the sprinkler when we arrived, naked except for their red galoshes and red harlequin sunglasses. Every part of me was tense—back straight, hands clutched in my lap—as we pulled up behind Annabelle’s SUV, its bumper covered with stickers: Experience Wildlife: Have Twins; What If the Hokey Pokey Really Is What It’s All About?
As soon as the girls saw Erik, they were shrieking and racing toward him, one of them slipping in the wet grass, then erupting into loud sobs. Erik scooped her up and swung her around until she was giggling and the other twin was reaching up, begging, “Me too, me too!” Erik’s shirt and the front of his shorts were soaked.
I stood by the car smiling a huge, nervous I’m-so-glad-to-be-here smile that I wished were real. The look on Erik’s face when those girls came running was so joyful, a wave rising up and curling over in his eyes, but all I felt was fear bordering on panic. I hadn’t been around a little girl in seven years.
The twins were beautiful. Nut-brown from the sun, they had dark hair, Erik’s blue eyes, sturdy little bodies. Lucy had had Nick’s coloring, blond and brown-eyed with pale, almost translucent skin, and she was tiny. I used to marvel at her little wrists, her knees. “Your bee’s knees,” I’d coo, kissing one, then the other, back and forth, as she giggled and blew spit bubbles. Later, in the hospital library I found Etymologies of Sayings, Clichés, and Aphorisms, and when that phrase, the bee’s knees, swarmed out from the page, I’d felt as if I were being stung by wasps.
The meaning dated to the 1920s: One of many silly phrases coined to mean “outstanding”: You’re the flea’s eyebrows, the canary’s tusks, the cat’s whiskers.
The bee’s knees.
At first, I didn’t notice Spencer, a skinny boy with a crew cut, standing against the porch wall. Erik had told me to go slowly, that Spencer probably wouldn’t talk to me the first few times we met, that something as minor as a stranger staring at Spencer could send him into a meltdown. I understood this: how painful it sometimes is simply to have someone look at you. Even a glance can feel too close.
Although I avoided looking in Spencer’s direction, I felt his eyes on me. And though Erik had described Spencer’s tendency to “shut down” around new people and in new situations, I sensed that whatever was going on with this little boy was the opposite of shutting down, almost as if he were seeing too much. Not the details of my life or who I was to his dad. Just me. My aloneness. Erik had told me that Spencer saw the days of the week and certain sounds or voices in colors—Mondays were yellow, and my voice, I would learn, had silver splashes in it, like raindrops. Later, I would wonder if my aloneness that day had had a color too.
Erik was walking across the lawn, soaking wet, the girls giggling and half hiding behind him. “Come on, you two,” he was saying. He grinned at me, and I held his eyes for a second, felt that look go through me like fire as I crouched down to meet his soaked and squirming daughters, who were peering from behind his legs. I was shaking. It felt impossible to smile or say hello.
“This is Claire,” Erik said, tugging one of the girls from behind him. “And, Claire, this is Hazel.”
My breath caught. I could see Lucy so clearly. In a white fur hat that made her look like a little bear. And in an expensive crocheted thing like an old-fashioned bathing cap she wore with a matching sweater. Nick’s mom had loved hats and bought Lucy dozens of them—velvet berets, wool beanies, floppy sun hats. Once Lucy was older, she would throw her hat onto the floor and Nick would retrieve it and say in a booming voice: “Who threw this hat on the floor?” Lucy would bob in her bouncy swing, cooing her big toothless smile and placing her hands on her head, until Nick put the hat back on, and then she’d throw it again and he’d retrieve it: Who threw this hat on the floor?
“You like pink cupcakes too?” Hazel asked shyly.
“I love pink cupcakes,” I said, just as the other twin, Phoebe, toppled into me, her wet hand on my chest. “Mommy breasts!” she shrieked, and then they were both giggling and running back to the sprinkler.
Erik held out his hand and pulled me up. “She’s been fixated on breasts.”
I smiled shakily, and he tugged me close. “I think it’s sweet that you’re nervous meeting my kids,” he whispered.
“What about you?” he’d asked the night before. “Did you ever want children?” We were lying in his bed, and I’d been asking a zillion questions about his kids: Had he been there for the girls’ birth? Was being the father of a son different from being the father of daughters? Had he felt like a dad right away?
That’s when Erik asked, “I know you were pretty young when you got married, but were kids ever on the radar?” Early evening, and although the curtains were closed, it was still light enough outside that the room was shadowy.
“Oh my God, I wanted kids more than anything,” I blurted. It made me smile. No matter how confusing everything became later, wanting Lucy had been pure and unequivocal.
“So, did you try or…you were married three years, right?” We were curled on our sides, my knees against his, the sheet draped over us.
I wanted to tell him how we had planned for her, prayed for her. And the day she was born—how do I even begin to describe that moment when Nick put her in my arms, red and wrinkled with that pale thatch of blond hair, and I burst into tears because I couldn’t fathom, almost couldn’t bear, what it felt like to already love someone this much?
“I can’t have kids,” I said instead, and felt as if a stone were lodged in my throat. I’d had a tubal ligation in the hospital, so it was true that I wasn’t able to have children, though not exactly accurate. Tears burned my eyes.
“Oh, Claire. Jesus, I’m sorry.”
“No, I’ve wanted to tell you,” I said. “I figured you wondered.”
Spencer was walking toe to heel, toe to heel, around the perimeter of the porch. Head bowed, he wouldn’t look up when Erik called his name, wouldn’t look up when Erik walked onto the porch, speaking gently—“Hey, Spence, it’s Dad, I came to say hi; it’s okay, buddy”—wouldn’t look up even when Erik gently touched Spencer’s shoulder.
Wouldn’t look up.
He began twisting the bottom of his T-shirt around his fist, staring at the ground and repeating: “Winds out of the north-northeast at sixteen miles per hour; eighty-three degrees for your high, and we start out with sunny skies.” Erik had told me Spencer loved the Weather Channel and that on nights he couldn’t sleep, he would stare at it for hours, often with the sound off, watching the colored movement of storms and high-pressure systems across the map. When he was anxious, he’d repeat forecasts to calm himself.
I understood this, all the ways we make the world safe when it’s not. After the accident, I became hypervigilant in ways I’d never been before, never needed to be. If I could control all the little things, could I maybe, maybe, control the bigger ones? How desperately I’d wanted to believe that. I walked the same number of laps each day around the hospital courtyard no matter the weather, and I sat at the same table in the cafeteria, and I became rigid about my food in ways I’d never been, counting calories not because I cared about my weight but because whatever the goal was—1,200 calories a day, 1,400—it was something solid and achievable. Even now, though I was a long way from those days, I woke at the same time every morning, ran the same premeasured routes, moved through the weight machines at the Y in the same order. Driving to meet clients in an unfamiliar part of town, I’d check and recheck the route the night before, my anxiety over getting there far greater than my worry about the actual meeting. I was early for everything because to be late was to be hurried and to be hurried was to possibly make a mistake, and I was terrified of this most of all.
“This is my friend Claire,” Erik said.
“Winds out of the north-northeast at sixteen miles per hour…”
“Hi, Spencer,” I said softly.
Abruptly, he stopped talking.
“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
He didn’t look at me, just started walking again, toe to heel, toe to heel, twisting his shirt, which was inside out, and then abruptly, he picked up where he’d left off: “Eighty-three degrees for your high, and we start out with sunny skies….”
He stopped again when he returned to where I stood, but this time, almost inaudibly, he whispered my name before continuing: “Winds out of the north-northeast at sixteen miles…”
And just like that my heart blasted into space, gravity, weight, and sound all falling away.
Annabelle was wearing jean overalls and orange running shoes, her hair in a ponytail. Her back was to us when we entered the kitchen, sunlight falling over her as she stood, one hand on her hip, the other cradling a phone to her ear. She laughed and said, “He’s going to kill me, but who cares?” Her hair was a zillion shades of gold, brown, and red, and when she turned, the dust motes streaming in the air behind her glittered with light. As soon as she saw us, she said a hurried goodbye, hung up the phone, and said, “Claire?” with such surprise it caught me off guard. Who did she think I was? But then she said, “I’m sorry, it’s just the way he’s kept you hidden, I thought you’d have a birthmark the size of Texas across your face.”
“For God’s sake, Annabelle,” Erik said.
She ignored him. “Did you meet Spencer?”
I nodded. “He’s beautiful.”
“Isn’t he?” She beamed.
“He called Claire by name,” Erik said.
She stopped. “He did?” She looked from Erik to me, back to Erik, her eyes full of questions I didn’t understand. I glanced at Erik and felt as if I were walking over broken glass, something long-ago shattered between them that hadn’t been swept away. Maybe she saw my uncertainty, because suddenly, she was grabbing me in an excited hug. She was tiny, maybe five feet tall, no more than a hundred pounds. “I told you, didn’t I?” she said to Erik after she pulled away.
“Annabelle, come on, you just met—”
“Oh hush,” she said. “I told him I had a feeling about you. And I was right. You’re perfect. You’re absolutely perfect.”
I didn’t know what to say, and when I looked at Erik, he just shrugged: Now do you see what I mean about her?
I did.
“It looks like the wild ones got hold of you,” Annabelle said to Erik. “I’ll grab a towel.” As she was walking away, she called over her shoulder, “Did Phoebe grab your boobs yet, Claire?”
I couldn’t help it. I liked her. I liked her a lot.