Handle With Care (25 page)

Your body tucked into mine, back to front. “Yeah, Wills. I did.”

“Do you need me to stay here with you?”

I wrapped my arms around you, a parenthesis. “Forever,” I said.

Christmas had been too warm this year, green instead of white, Mother Nature’s confirmation that life wasn’t as it should have been. After two weeks of temperatures in the forties, winter returned with a vengeance. That night, snow fell. We woke up with our throats dry and the heat
humming from the radiators. Outside, the air smelled of chimney smoke.

Sean was already gone by the time I came downstairs at seven. He’d left behind a neatly folded stack of bedding in the laundry room and an empty coffee mug in the sink. You came downstairs rubbing your eyes. “My feet are cold,” you said.

“Then put on slippers. Where’s Amelia?”

“Still asleep.”

It was Saturday; there was no reason to wake her up early. I watched you rubbing your hip, probably not even aware of what you were doing. You needed exercise to strengthen the muscles around your pelvis, although it still hurt you to do it after your femur fractures. “Tell you what. If you go get the paper, we can make waffles for breakfast.”

I watched your mind work through the calculations—the mailbox was a quarter of a mile down the driveway; it was freezing out. “With ice cream?”

“Strawberries,” I bargained.

“Okay.”

You went into the mudroom to pull your coat over your pajamas, and I helped you strap on your braces before stuffing your feet into low boots that could accommodate them. “Be careful on the driveway.” You zipped up your jacket. “Willow? Did you hear me?”

“Yes, be careful,” you parroted, and you opened up the front door and headed outside.

I stood at the doorway and watched for a few moments, until you turned around on the driveway, planted your hands on your hips, and said, “I’m not going to fall! Stop watching!”

So I stepped back and closed the door—but through the window, I tracked you for a few more moments anyway. In the kitchen, I began to pull ingredients from the fridge and I plugged in the waffle iron. I took out the plastic batter bowl you liked so much, because it was light enough for you to lift and pour.

I headed to the front porch again, to wait for you. But when I stepped outside, you were gone. I had a clear view from the driveway to the mailbox, and you were nowhere in it. Frantic, I stuffed my feet into a pair of boots and ran down the driveway. About halfway, I saw footsteps pressed into the snow that still blanketed the stiff grass, heading toward the skating pond.

“Willow!” I yelled. “Willow!”

Goddamn Sean, for not backing a load of fill into the pond like I’d asked him to.

Suddenly, there you were, at the edge of the reeds that fringed the thin ice.

You had one foot balanced on the surface. “Willow,” I said softly, so that I didn’t startle you, but when you turned around, your boot slipped and you pitched forward with your hands outstretched to break your fall.

I had seen it coming. I had seen it, and so I was already moving as you turned to face me. I stepped onto ice, which was still too new and thin to support any weight, and felt the lettuce edge shatter underneath my foot. My boot filled with frigid water, but I was able to wrap my arms around you, to keep you from falling.

I was soaked to midthigh, and your body was slung over my forearm like a sack of cake flour, the breath knocked out of you. I staggered backward, pulling my foot from the muck and the weeds that lined the bottom of the pond, and sat down hard to cushion your fall. “Are you all right?” I gasped. “Is anything broken?”

You did a quick internal assessment and shook your head.

“What were you thinking? You know better—”

“Amelia gets to walk on the ice,” you said, your voice small.

“First, you’re not Amelia. And second, this ice isn’t strong enough.”

You twisted around. “Like me.”

I turned you gently, so that you were sitting on my lap, with your legs on either side of mine. A spider, that’s what kids called it when they did it on swing sets, although you’d never been allowed. Too easily, a leg could snag on a chain, or get twisted with a friend’s limbs.

“It’s not like you,” I said firmly. “Willow, you are the strongest person I know.”

“But you still wish I didn’t have to use a wheelchair. Or go to the hospital all the time.”

Sean had insisted that you were well aware of what was going on around you; I had naïvely assumed that, after the talk we’d had months ago, if you did have doubts about my words, they’d be assuaged by my actions. But I had been worried about the things you’d hear me say—not the messages you might still read between the lines. “Remember how I told you that I’d have to say things that I don’t mean? That’s all it
is, Willow.” I hesitated. “Imagine you’re at school and your friend asks you if you like her sneakers, and you don’t—you think they’re incredibly ugly. You wouldn’t tell her you hate them, would you? Because it would make her sad.”

“That’s lying.”

“I know. And it’s wrong, most of the time, unless you’re trying not to hurt someone’s feelings.”

You stared at me. “But you’re hurting my feelings.”

The knife in my stomach twisted. “I don’t mean to.”

“So,” you said, thinking hard, “it’s like when Amelia plays Opposite Day?”

Amelia had invented that when she was about your age. Confrontational even then, she’d refuse to do her homework and then burst out laughing when we yelled at her, saying it was Opposite Day and she’d already finished it all. Or she’d terrorize you, calling you Glass Ass, and when you came to us in tears, Amelia would insist that on Opposite Day, this meant you were a princess. I’d never been able to tell if Amelia had invented Opposite Day because she was imaginative or because she was subversive.

But maybe this was a way to unravel the tangled thicket that was wrongful birth, to spin a lie, like Rumpelstiltskin, into something golden. “Exactly,” I said. “Just like Opposite Day.”

You smiled at me so sweetly that I could feel the frost melting around us. “Okay then,” you said. “I wish you’d never been born, too.”

When Sean and I were first dating, I would leave treats in his mailbox. Sugar cookies cut in the shapes of his initials, a roll of babka, sticky buns with candied pecans, almond roca. I took literally the term sweet heart. I imagined him reaching in for his bills and catalogs and coming up instead with a jelly roll, a honey cake, a building block of fudge. “Will you still love me when I put on thirty pounds?” Sean would ask, and I’d laugh at him. “What makes you think I love you?” I’d say.

I did, of course. But it was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearably sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into
words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet. Each night he’d wrap his arms around me and tip into my ear that sentence, bubbles that burst on contact: I love you. And then he’d wait. He’d wait, and even though I knew he did not want to pressure me before I was ready to make my confession, I would feel in that silence his disappointment.

One day, when I came out of work still dusting flour off my hands so that I could rush to pick up Amelia from school, I found a small index card wedged under my windshield wiper. I LOVE YOU, it read.

I tucked it into my glove compartment, and that afternoon, I made truffles and left them in Sean’s mailbox.

The next day, when I left work, there was an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch piece of paper taped on my windshield: I LOVE YOU.

I called Sean. “I’m going to win,” I said.

“I think we both are,” he replied.

I’d baked a lavender panna cotta and left it on top of his MasterCard bill.

He countered with poster board. You could read the message all the way from the front window of the restaurant, which made me the object of plenty of ribbing from the maître d’ and the head chef.

“What’s your problem?” Piper said to me. “Just tell him how you feel, already.” But Piper didn’t understand, and I couldn’t explain to her. When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn’t contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted. So I cooked tiramisu and left it wedged between a package from Amazon.com and a flyer for a painting company.

This time, Sean phoned me. “Opening someone else’s mailbox is a felony, you know,” he said.

“So arrest me,” I answered.

That day, I left work—trailed by the rest of the staff, who had come to view our courtship as a spectator sport—and found my car completely wrapped in butcher paper. Painted in letters as tall as me was Sean’s message: I’M ON A DIET.

Sure enough, I baked him poppy scones, and they were still in the mailbox the next day when I went to leave off ginger cookies. And the next day, with those two items untouched, I couldn’t even fit the strawberry tart. I carried it up to his house instead, and rang the doorbell. His blond hair was backlit; his white tee stretched across his chest. “How come you’re not eating what I made for you?” I asked.

He gave me a lazy smile. “How come you won’t say it back?”

“Can’t you tell?”

Sean crossed his arms. “Tell what?”

“That I love you?”

He opened the screen door, grabbed me, and kissed me hard. “It’s about time,” he said, with a grin. “I’m freaking starving.”

You and I didn’t just cook waffles that morning. We made cinnamon bread and oatmeal cookies and blondies. I let you lick the spoon, the spatula, the bowl. Around eleven, Amelia loped into the kitchen, freshly showered. “What army’s coming for lunch?” she asked, but then she took a corn muffin, broke it open, and breathed in the steam. “Can I help?”

We made a raspberry velvet cake and a plum tarte Tatin, apple turnovers and pinwheel cookies and macaroons. We baked until there was hardly anything left in my pantry, until I had forgotten what you’d said to me at the pond, until we had run out of brown sugar, until we did not notice your father being gone the whole day, until we could not eat another bite.

“Now what?” Amelia asked, when every inch of counter space was covered with something we’d made.

It had been so long that, once I started, I hadn’t been able to stop. And I suppose a part of me still functioned cooking for a restaurant crowd and not an individual family—much less one that was absent one member. “We could give it to our neighbors,” you suggested.

“No way,” Amelia said. “Let them buy it.”

“We’re not running a bakery,” I pointed out.

“Why not? It could be like a vegetable stand, at the end of the driveway. Willow and me, we can make a big sign that says Sweets by Charlotte, and you can wrap everything in Saran Wrap…”

“We could cover up a shoe box,” you said, “and put a slit in the top for the money, and charge ten dollars each.”

“Ten dollars?” Amelia said. “Try a buck, peabrain.”

“Mom! She called me peabrain…”

I was imagining whitewashed walls, a glass display case, wrought-iron tables with marble tops. I was picturing rows of pistachio muffins in an industrial stove, meringues that melted in your mouth, the angel-wing ring of the cash register. “Syllabub,” I interrupted, and both you girls turned to me. “That’s what the name on the sign should be.”

That night, by the time Sean came home, I was fast asleep, and he was gone by the time I woke up, too. The only way I even knew he’d stopped in was a used mug sitting lonely in the bowl of the sink.

My stomach knotted; I pretended it was hunger, not regret. In the kitchen I made a piece of toast and took out a crisp white coffee filter for the machine.

When Sean and I were first married, he would make coffee for me every morning. He didn’t drink coffee himself, but he was up early for his shift and would program the Krups machine so that a fresh pot would be waiting by the time I got out of the shower. I would come downstairs to find a mug waiting, with two spoonfuls of sugar already inside. Sometimes, it would be sitting on a note: SEE YOU LATER or I MISS YOU ALREADY.

This morning the kitchen was cold, the coffeemaker silent and empty.

I measured out the water and the coffee grounds, pushed a button so that the liquid would stream into the carafe. I reached for a mug in the cabinet and then, on second thought, took the one Sean had used out of the sink. I rinsed it clean and poured myself a cup of coffee. It tasted too strong, bitter. I wondered if Sean’s lips had touched the mug in the same place as mine.

I had always been suspicious of women who described the dissolution of their marriages as something that happened overnight. How could you not know? I’d thought. How could you miss all those signs? Well, let me tell you how: you were so busy putting out a fire directly in front of you that you were completely oblivious to the inferno raging at your back. I could not remember the last time Sean and I had laughed about something together. I could not remember the last time I’d gone and
kissed him, just because. I had been so focused on protecting you that I’d left myself completely vulnerable.

Sometimes you and Amelia played board games, and when you rolled the dice, they got stuck in a crease of the couch or rolled onto the floor. Do-over, you’d say, and it was that easy to get a second chance. That’s what I wanted now: a do-over. Except, if I was being honest with myself, I wouldn’t know where to start.

I dumped the coffee into the sink and watched it swirl down the drain.

I didn’t need caffeine. And I didn’t need someone to make me coffee in the morning, either. Leaving the kitchen, I grabbed a jacket (Sean’s, it smelled like him) and headed outside to get the newspaper.