She lived with her husband in a little bungalow that had a front door with two windows on either side, covered in awnings. When she’d come home at night in the semi-gloom of dusk, the house looked as though it had sleepy eyes and a yawning mouth through which she walked. Her favorite time was when she came home to an empty dark house. She would sit alone in the front room without turning on the lights and she would listen to the wind howl and the glass in the window panes rattle and she would stare out through sleepy eyes at the bare branches of the trees lining the street. It was during one of these times that she was alone that she realized that she had been with her husband half of her life. Certainly all of her adult life and over half of the part of the life that mattered, the years between age 12 and now. They had a quiet little life, filled with the things that occupy their time. She had a leg of lamb in the freezer that she was saving for some kind of divine inspiration or some recipe that did not involve rosemary, which to her tasted like pine needles. And they were happy. They often proclaimed this to no one in particular, congratulating themselves on having achieved exactly what everyone dreams. Her husband loved her and she loved her husband. He also had an insatiable lust for her. It felt strange and unreal that he would want her as much as he claimed he did. Sometimes he would grab onto her and cling as though to a life raft, his hands roaming for purchase. Sometimes they would lay on their oversized sofa together, his hands would wandering over her curves as he talked about ordinary things, such as what they should make for dinner or their plans for the weekend. It was as though he were not aware his hands were doing such things. She felt guilty in that he enjoyed her body so very much while his to her was utilitarian. Motile. Warm and covered in downy fur. A body made for taking out the garbage and wearing denim. It seemed a father’s body, in some ways, although he was not a father and she was not a mother. Her own hands never roamed independently of her brain, but rather dreamt of things to make and draw and weave. They never sought him out. This was not to say that she did not enjoy him or his body. She did, but she knew that he was always there and she did not need to touch him for reassurance. Whenever she got up to use the bathroom, he would immediately ask where she was going. She found this extremely annoying although she couldn’t say why. Even in the middle of the night, when she’d rise from bed, he would ask her this. Finally, one day after many years of such questions, she asked him why he asked her that all the time when the answer was always the same. He told her that he was afraid that she would leave. She sat silent for a bit, not needing to ask, ‘where would I go’ for they already both knew the answer. She did not mind being alone. There was not a question of talking about what they would do or not do. There was not the subtle play for more and more touching. Sometimes she thought back to what she expected her life would have been had she not married this normal, quite content man. But mostly though, she thought about her barely acknowledged belief that nothing could possibly go well for this long and the inevitable feeling that there was another shoe about to drop. She wondered when he would stop touching her, when he would stop asking where she was going when she went to the bathroom. Until one day, she had a dream, a normal dream, that she had a child. A little baby girl, with long eyelashes and big brown eyes even though her own eyes were blue. It was a strange dream because she normally dreamt complex epic dramas, comedies and fantasies with casts of thousands and subplots that wove into other subplots. But this was simple. In this dream, she was bathing the child, only a few days old because she still had that blue umbilical cord piece on her stomach. Simple cupping of the warm water and bringing it over the baby’s skin, taking care to keep her head out of the water. The plastic bathtub was light blue; the fluffy towel that she planned to wrap the baby in was pink and smelled of Dreft. She remembered feeling awkward in holding her daughter and worried that it was too cold or that she would get sick. She knew in the dream that she never wanted to be separated from the baby and knew absolute peace in holding her while she slept. And then she awoke and remembered that she was not a mother and there was no baby. She was confused and snapped at her husband that evening, apologizing later and confessing that she did not understand what had come over her that evening. Her husband sensed that something was troubling her, so he suggested that they plan a trip up the coast to the vineyards. Yes, walking through old buildings made of stone permeated with the sour fermented smell of wine was one of the things that made her happy. She nodded and offered a weak smile to him. It was a lovely idea. They could come home with many cases of wine for holiday entertaining. Yes, it was just the thing. He patted her on the shoulder and asked if they were out of coffee. In her dream that night, she took the baby grocery shopping. While she was searching the shelves for Desitin, an old friend of hers from college was in the same aisle, searching for deodorant. The woman excitedly cooed over the sleeping bundle. In her own cart, a loaf of bread, diapers, formula, cans of soup, cheese, and hamburger. In her friend’s cart, pomegranates, tapenade, brioche, shrimp, and a bottle of merlot. The year on the bottle was 1997. During the day, she found it difficult to concentrate. Sometimes she would feel a sense of panic, wondering who was watching the baby. But then she would remember that there was no baby and it was all a dream. She tried to fill her waking hours with little projects and browsed through her collection of often-ignored catalogs that showed lovely rooms conceptualized by designers. She and her husband went to the bookstore and walked away with large bags full of words and congratulated themselves at being so lucky that they could afford such troves. The following night, she went to the ob/gyn to have stitches removed from giving birth. Her doctor was happy and smiling and asked how the baby was, asked if she was able to get enough sleep. Another night, she sat on the sofa, not the large sofa that sat in her home but a different one, and rested the baby on her legs and they simply looked at each other. The baby would grip her finger and she would softly stroke the loose skin of the baby’s tiny hand. It was the same baby every night. Her subconscious had provided a name although upon waking she could never quite recall it. It was an old name, beginning with a vowel. It was a name you would have seen on crumbling gravestones in churchyards and in the mornings, she would know it upon waking and think herself stupid for having forgotten it, but then after ten minutes, it would be gone, sitting lightly on the tip of her tongue like a sigh. She was left only with the clear feeling that her arms were too empty, her days too long. She was very puzzled about the baby’s father, but then one night she found that it was morning. She walked into the baby’s room, gathered her up into her arms and brought her back into her own bedroom, which was not the bedroom she shared with her husband in the sleepy-eyed bungalow but rather an entirely different bedroom. One with high ceilings and Victorian moldings and a cheery white wainscoting that had a shelf at eye level which contained little treasures, tea cups and colored bottles and tiny rocks she knew instinctively had been collected at special moments and on special trips. She placed the baby on the bed between herself and the sleeping form of a dark-haired lanky male form. This was not her husband, could not be her husband, was much too narrow and thin. She did not look up from the baby but she felt him turn over and speak softly to them both and she could hear a smile in his voice. And she felt the warm sun shine down on the three of them, warming them in a bright morning light, and wanted to weep for the knowledge that it would soon wake her up and they would be gone, leaving only her utilitarian husband in their place. The next afternoon, she broached the subject of children with her husband. He responded that he was too selfish with his time and her attention and very simply did not want to complicate his life with progeny. She was surprised by his candor and at the same time, completely unsurprised. They had discussed this early on, but somewhere, in her certainty that nothing good could come from her choices, she had dismissed the incongruity, thinking that they would have broken up by the time it mattered. She crinkled her brow then consciously pushed the thoughts away and decided instead to think about what she would make for dinner. Perhaps she would attempt the lamb. With roasted autumn vegetables tossed with some imported olive oil. She decided that she would stop dreaming of the baby and the baby’s father. That night, she found herself in bed with the father. Her hands were roaming over his tall frame, his long arms wrapped around her, his whispered assurances that he would be gentle and that she should tell him immediately if anything hurt. But she did not want him to stop, wanted instead to weave herself around him and get lost inside the safe place he made. Afterwards, she wanted to tell him that she was going away, that she would not see him or the baby again, but instead she rested her head against his smooth chest and listened to his heartbeat and the soft sounds of their baby girl through the baby monitor. Before bedtime the next evening, she grimaced as she swallowed a plastic cup full of Nyquil. That night, she had strange terrifying dreams of penguins with teeth and women with white powdered faces, but the baby and the man were not in them. Several months passed, until she had almost forgotten why she began to take the sleeping aids. When she used the last of the ropey liquid, she did not open another bottle. That night, her dream was terrifying. She and the man were waiting to be admitted into the infant ward of the ICU. Her baby was lying there in a little plastic bed, just staring up at nothing. Her once vivid eyes had gone dull and her skin was grey. They both donned gowns and masks and powdered latex gloves that smelled of talc. She wanted to hold her baby but the wires and monitors prevented her from doing so. There was a single pink teddy bear in the baby’s stark little crib. She could only put one latex gloved hand onto her baby’s little chest and feel how cold she felt, despite the heat lamps that tried to keep her warm. The noises coming from the baby sounded like those of an old person, with raspy air and congested wheezes. Looking at what had happened to her baby while she was gone made her need to cry, but she couldn’t. She was paralyzed. She knew that if something happened to the baby, she would not be able to go on, she would not be able to anything. She would simply fall into a heap on the floor and never move until she died. The baby’s father was idiotically chatting with the nurses about visiting hours and she wanted to hit him because somehow this might have been his fault, although she didn’t know how that could be. She wondered if it was really her fault, but could not bear to even consider it. She heard the doctor telling the baby’s father that the next twelve hours would be critical. She traced around the baby’s belly button where just six months before there had been the blue stump of a cord, the place where the doctor had snipped them apart. She looked to the baby’s face, waiting for a giggle, as she knew inherently that the baby was ticklish on her tummy, but the baby could not giggle, could only look up into her mother’s eyes and try to understand why she wasn’t making it any better. She simply hovered over the crib until she noticed drops of water on the pink hospital blanket and realized that they were coming from her, tears dripping off her face. And she wanted to make a deal with someone, anyone, that if they would just make the baby better that she would never wake up and continue to live here with her baby whose name she couldn’t remember and the baby’s father, whose name she never learned. Or if that weren’t a good enough deal, then she would offer that she would just never wake up. She would be neither in her world nor this one. Just make the baby better. Just let the baby be ok. Just let the baby live. She opened her eyes, blinked twice, and stared up at the ceiling of her bedroom of the sleepy-eyed bungalow. Under the blankets, her husband’s hands snaked toward her to draw her closer to him. It was a new day.
