Carly came over the next night with the Miracle dressed in a fuzzy brown bear outfit. Small bear ears peeked up from the hood, and soft claw mittens from the arms, and a tail on the ass wiggled bearlike as she crawled.
“Why is she wearing that?” I asked.
“She likes it,” Carly said. “Watch this.” She asked the Miracle, “Who’s a bear?”
The Miracle bared her newest teeth and dropped her mother’s cell phone to display her claws. “Who’s a bear?” Carly said again.
The Miracle squealed, snapped her teeth together and then roared a too-happy roar.
“That’s adorable,” I said, and it was.
Carly looked pleased. She said, “Maybe you should get out of the bath.”
“Some days I thank God I can lock myself in my apartment and no one has to be around me,” I said. “What if I always have those days? A baby is there. All the time.” These things were just occurring to me.
“Have you thought any more about that docent program?” she said. “I could still get you an interview.”
“I’ve already started,” I said, waving her to my nightstand.
“What’s all this?”
“Don’t touch it.”
She hovered over the things Ezra had emptied from his pockets our last night together. They were arranged on the nightstand just as he’d left them, waiting to be labeled and mounted on acid-free paper: a credit card receipt from a bar up the street. The chewed cap of a pen. Some change and a five-dollar bill creased in the middle like an accordion, which he used for a trick where he’d make it look like Abraham Lincoln was smiling or frowning, depending on how he held it. A near-empty sack of tobacco.
“What is it?” Carly called to me.
“Family heritage,” I said. “In case Cranberry wants to know who her father was. There he is, girlie: generous tipper, oral fixater, Civil War buff, roller of exquisitely proportioned cigarettes.”
Carly returned to the bathroom, ineffably bright-eyed. “Do you really think it’s a girl?”
“God. I hope not.”
Carly knelt on the floor beside the tub. She put her hand on my arm. “You don’t have to do this alone,” she said. “Alex and I could help you. Cranberry and the Miracle could be friends. Like us. It could be like when we were kids. Before things got bad.”
I said, “Things were always bad.”
“They weren’t,” said Carly. “You were too young. But they weren’t.”
“Why are you defending her?”
The Miracle screeched.
“I’m not.” Carly stood and lifted her daughter, holding her like a shield. “It’s just—do you have to be so hard on everyone?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
The Miracle took her mother’s earring into her mouth. Carly extracted it gingerly. “You make him sound like some sort of flimflam man.”
“That’s what he is, Car. A flimflam man.”
“Come on—”
“No. That’s exactly what he is. A flimflam man with a nice laugh. A cokehead flimflam man who left me with a nicotine addiction and some trash from his pockets. Tell me a baby’s gonna change that.”
The Miracle clapped her hands on the earring and said, “All right!”
“You’re never going to feel ready for this, Nat. They make you ready.”
“What if they don’t? What if I have it and the only difference is I think, ‘I’m going down and I’m taking this kid with me’?”
She winced. “It won’t be like that.”
I couldn’t help myself. “It was like that for us.”
After some time she said, “You’re right.”
I was thinking of our mother, but I was also thinking of Carly, of a time when I was at her house, just after the Miracle was born. In those early days their place throbbed with people. Alex’s mother and father were visiting from Arizona, and Carly’s girlfriends were constantly stopping by with dinners and hand-me-downs and complicated baby-soothing devices. I watched them the way a person watches a parade she’s accidentally come upon.
Then, one afternoon, a strange quiet overtook me and I looked up from the sink where I was washing dishes. It was as though silence had swallowed the house and we were suspended in the dark warmth of its throat. Carly and I were alone with the baby. The Miracle was maybe four days old. Carly was feeding her in a rocking chair in the living room. When the baby fell asleep Carly motioned me to her. “Can you take her?” she whispered, nodding to the crib. I lifted the Miracle and laid her down the way I’d seen Alex do. When I came back Carly reached for my arm.
“I have to tell you something,” she said. She looked like a badly weathered drawing of herself, exhausted. “I don’t think I love the baby. I mean I do. But not the way Alex does.”
I told her that was natural, that a lot of women feel that way at first. I was repeating some Oprah shit she’d told me months earlier. I said she was tired, that she should try to nap. She nodded emptily. “Of course you love her,” I added as I walked her to her bed. She lay on top of the blankets.
As I closed the curtains she said, “I don’t.”
I said, “Shh,” and went into the living room to fold laundry. The bedroom door was open and I could hear her breathing, her head softly shifting on the feather pillow. “I don’t,” she said over and over. “I don’t.” Then she fell asleep. We never talked about it again.
In this one Ezra and I are drinking coffee and sharing a miniature newspaper. We woke up with that loopy, underwater kind of hangover, the sort that pleasantly expands to consume an entire day. We walked to this shoe-box café, hand in hand. We are carved from wood blocks, and the midmorning sun glitters on our grooved faces. I’ve told him about that day, about how afraid Carly made me. How she was saying things our mother might have said. What I need to know, I’ve told him, is if that feeling ever left her. Because if it never left her, it would never leave me.
Ezra has leaned across the table and taken my face in his hands. “Hey,” he’s said. “Look at me. You’re not her. You hear me? You’re not anyone but you.” I’ve pulled away from him. “You don’t get it,” I’ve said. “It’s in me.” He’s hurt—see his eyes, his soft upturned hands—and I am surprised that I am capable of hurting him. “Christ,” he is saying. “It’s like I’m trying to dig you out when all you want is to be buried with her.” I call it The Truest Thing You Ever Said.
When Carly arrived the next night, she came into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. The Miracle wore a pair of sparkly gold fairy wings and a headband with a giant sunflower mounted to one side. She held a pair of orange plastic nunchucks, the only toy I’d ever seen her interested in.
I was in the bath. “I thought she wasn’t allowed to play at violence,” I said.
“Guns mostly,” said Carly. “We don’t have a nunchuck policy.” Then she said, “I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I brought someone here. You should probably put some clothes on.”
I rose out of the tub and wrapped myself in my bathrobe. Everything was worth it. Ezra would see how I’d kept our world as he’d left it, how I never stopped wanting him. I saw his fingers tracing over our old life. He’d take me in his arms and say what an idiot he’d been. He’d say, I want this. One hundred percent. All the time. Anything he said would have been enough. He could have said nothing.
Instead, bent over the artifacts on my nightstand was Sam.
The Miracle smacked her mother with her nunchucks and said, “All right!”
“Hey,” Sam said. “How are you?”
I said, “Uh, okay.”