Winter in Wisconsin is always bleak, but it felt more so that year, the days truncated, light seeping from the sky by midday. It was too cold for snow, something I’d never heard of until I moved to the Midwest. How can it be too cold to snow? I wondered, and remembered thinking maybe it was similar to how you can be too sad to cry.
My parents met me in Chicago on Christmas Eve and stayed for three days. Neither mentioned Erik, though my dad told me, “I’m proud of you, Claire.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For staying in the game. Not giving up.”
A few times that January, Erik’s SUV was still at the Y when I arrived. I went to Starbucks on those nights, hoping he’d have left when I returned. Once, I saw him walking to his car with the people from his spin class, calling something over his shoulder, laughing. There was something so easy and unencumbered in his movements. No scanning the parking lot for my car, as I always did for his. He’s moved on, I thought, and felt as if I’d been cupping my hands around a match flame, and in that moment, a gust of wind had blown it out.
When it finally snowed, nearly fifteen inches, it was her birthday.
She was eleven.
I woke to a world that had been transformed into a silent moonscape with every tree and leaf, mailbox and car, outlined in white. Everything was closed. Schools, work, the Y. I stood at my living room window, feet cold on the wood floor, my coffee mug warm against my breastbone, thinking about snow days as a kid, all the hope and exuberance, how the days always felt like an unasked-for forgiveness. I want that, I thought, and understood, as I hadn’t two months before, that it had never been up to Erik to forgive me. I needed to forgive myself, though I wasn’t sure I could. The autumn with his kids had taught me that with time, I would have been a good mom to Lucy, and I wanted that knowledge to bring comfort—shouldn’t it have?—but if anything, it did the opposite, filling me with so much grief and regret and anger that I felt some days it would topple me. Why hadn’t I fought harder for my child? Why hadn’t I fought harder for myself?
I watched the guy across the street shoveling his drive, the rasp of metal against cement echoing. His kids were building a snowman. I remembered how, when I was her age, eleven, I’d wanted to be a cashier. Kelly and I spent hours pretending to scan food items across a place mat on the kitchen table. My mom used to joke about it. “Other kids wanted to be astronauts, veterinarians, movie stars, and my girl wanted to be…drumroll, please…a cashier.”
“Do you remember that?” I asked when I called her.
“How could I forget? I used to wonder: What am I doing wrong that this is all she aspires to? But it’s one of your best qualities.”
“My lack of ambition?”
“Your ability to find joy in the ordinary. It’s why your collages are so good: You take the most mundane objects and find possibility in them.” She was quiet. “What else do you remember from that age? Eleven’s kind of magical, isn’t it? Right on the cusp before everything changes.” There wasn’t anything specific I remembered, so we talked instead about my mom’s tradition of baking cinnamon rolls from scratch on snow days. We’d eat them for dinner. “I always thought I’d be that kind of mom,” I told her.
After we hung up, I dressed in so many layers I couldn’t bend my arms, then clomped to the Kwik Mart a mile away to get yeast. The morning sparkled with snow and light, the hill near Madison crowded with kids on sleds, their shouts echoing. I spent the afternoon baking, and when Margaret came home just after dark, I brought her a tinfoil-wrapped square of the still-warm rolls.
“God, I could smell these from the car.” She was in her scrubs. “I have whiskey for Irish coffees, but you’ve got to come in. No way are we sitting on the porch.”
Inside, I wandered around her living room while she made coffee. Everywhere—on bookshelves, end tables, the fireplace mantel—were photographs of her and her pilot: the two of them in leather jackets on a motorcycle; at a pool flanked by palms; at a formal event, he in a tux, Margaret in a shimmery sleeveless gown. There were photos of him water-skiing one-handed, in his American Airlines uniform, squatting between two little boys with his curly dark hair and eyes.
I hadn’t known he had children.
“They’re seven and nine.” Margaret handed me my coffee. “Teddy and Owen.”
“You’ve met them?”
“Oh God, no.” She laughed self-consciously. “He’s got a wife too.”
“Isn’t that hard?”
Margaret kicked off her clogs and plunked down on the sofa. “It’s impossible, but we’ve both tried to walk away more times than I can count.” She’d set the plate of cinnamon rolls on the coffee table, and she reached for one as she spoke. “I guess I’d rather have twenty percent of him than nothing.” She shrugged. “Did you know air contains only twenty-one percent oxygen, yet that’s all we need to breathe?”
The line sounded rehearsed, and I wondered who she’d said it to before.
Later, I kept thinking about Margaret telling me, I’d rather have twenty percent of him than nothing. Shouldn’t she have wanted more? Was this why she had so many photos? Proof that her pilot was real. Proof that he loved her. I thought of how, after I terminated my rights, it felt wrong to keep Lucy’s photo, as if I’d relinquished my right to that too. But I wanted one, I realized, and promised myself I’d ask my mom to send some.
The following weekend, I showed the new collages to Colleen, who owned the gallery in Waukesha. We leaned the canvases against the wall, and I watched as she squatted in front of Leavings. “Will you at least think about doing a show?” She looked up at me. “These are beautiful.” She’d asked before and I’d always said no, afraid of the publicity, afraid someone might find out about Lucy. This time, though, I said yes. It terrified me, but in a good way. I didn’t want to not say Lucy’s name. Our story was more complex than what had happened the afternoon of the accident or the awful months after. And the collages were part of that, weren’t they? Not that I felt healed in making them, but repaired, maybe? Less broken?
Repair. Already I was imagining a new collage: photographs torn in half and taped together, letters with words crossed out and rewritten, bandages, a needle and thread…
That night, I sat in bed with a glass of wine and the Dictionary of Word Origins. Repair once meant “to make ready.” Maybe this was what I’d been doing for the past six years. Trying to make my life ready again: for friends and laughter and love.