Colleagues at work told him all sort of horror stories about teenage daughters. Mary Ellen, the head of accounting, told him how she caught her sixteen-year-old daughter having sex in the house and when she found them, her daughter told her to mind her fucking business. Anthony was immensely grateful Delaney was nothing like that. She could lose her patience, just like Tyler and Brendan, but she was never mean and was always a good sport about being the brunt of so many jokes.
He felt bad about this morning. He and Tyler had ganged up on her and she had been okay with it until they, predictably, had taken it too far, and she had resorted to a comment about Chloe. He almost expected her to apologize for that remark just now, but she didn’t need to and she knew that. No harm done. Especially since she had been right, at least partially. He had not been very persuasive motivating Chloe out of her bed, out of her stupor, hell, out of her depression. He had pretty much let her be and gone on being Dad.
He finished cleaning up breakfast and made Chloe her usual two slices of rye toast. While buttering them, he heard Tyler call out that he was taking Brendan to bowling and then the door sucked shut and silence settled inside the house. He felt bad about Brendan’s bowling, too; Anthony hadn’t been to any of the Saturday games since before the incident. The people there understood, of course, and one of the families was always kind enough to drive him back. At least today Tyler and Brendan could experience some brotherly bonding.
Anthony couldn’t worry about Delaney’s SAT prep or Brendan’s bowling. He had more pressing problems waiting for him upstairs, down the hall in the bedroom whose door had seemed perpetually shut for weeks.
The bedroom door squeaked just enough to make Anthony pause but not enough, not even close to enough, to stir Chloe from her slumber. In this room, their room, darkness reigned perpetually. The curtains had been pulled over the windows and Chloe had draped bathroom towels over them to completely obscure the sun. The first time she had done that, Anthony had told her she needed to seek help, that she was letting her good sense slip away. In response, Chloe pulled up her shirt and thrust the cesarean scar, still fresh and swollen, toward him. “And what about me? What about the life that was taken out of me and then from me? What the fuck about that?” He had not mentioned the towels again.
The air was stale and dead. Motes of dust swam in spirals as he moved through the room to the bed. Whenever Chloe managed to will herself out of bed, to shower or eat, Anthony had used those precious minutes to tear down the towels, part the curtains, and open the windows. He hadn’t aired the room for almost four days now, and in those four days, Chloe had only showered once. He had been hopeful when he discovered her out of bed, but once she came out of the bathroom, she crawled right back into bed and went to sleep almost immediately. He couldn’t remember the last time the sheets had been cleaned.
He set the toast on the nightstand and placed a hand on her hip. She squirmed beneath the sheet and curled into even more of a fetal position.
He rubbed her thigh and spoke in a quiet, soothing voice, like cooing to a baby—oh, the irony. “Hey, babe. I brought your toast. You need to eat. You’ve lost more weight. I can tell. You should take a shower, so I can wash these sheets, air out the room. What do you think?”
She mumbled something, which was a good sign. She wasn’t fully in the depths of sleep then. Anthony had discovered that while it might appear she was constantly sleeping, she actually had a few modes that varied in levels of out-of-itness. When under the heavy hand of her magic pills (her own Pillie Billy), she was completely out of it, practically comatose. When falling into or coming back out of that state, she could respond in small grunts and mumblings, and the occasional full, though sometimes incoherent, sentence. When the pill wore off and she waited too long before taking another, she became restless and irritable.
He knew he should break her of her addiction, but he didn’t want to face the beast that would rise from the bed once her Pillie Billys were gone. He had to talk to Dr. Carroll, he knew, but he kept putting it off. What could he say but Chloe is addicted to those pills you gave her and if you don’t cut her off she’s going to sleep away the rest of her life? He’d call later today. Sure, sure he would.
“You want to eat some toast?” he asked.
She squirmed under the sheet, grumbled something. She was headed into comatose country.
“Come on, honey, just a few bites.”
She rolled over so suddenly that Anthony’s hand was almost trapped beneath her thighs, which had shrunk into small pieces of driftwood. Face half-buried in the pillow, eyes closed, she said, “Not now, no.”
With that, Anthony was back to that day last month when Chloe’s screams broke through the entire house and Tyler ran out of his bedroom to find out what happened, who had gotten hurt, and Anthony had already known before he made it upstairs—the heavy stone in his gut told him so—that something terrible had happened to the baby. He took the stairs two at a time and didn’t trip, though he almost wished he had. If he had fallen, broken an ankle or something, the rest of the day would have played out much more directly. They would have waited for the ambulance that Tyler called instead of grabbing their newborn (face bulging dark blue) and speeding down Route 84 in Chloe’s car to the hospital. The paramedics, who arrived three minutes after he had sped out of their driveway, would have been there to administer CPR or some type of aid instead of Anthony pushing the car to ninety-five miles per hour while Chloe screamed for him to go faster for Christ’s sake go faster he’s turning purple he’s fucking dying Anthony don’t you hear what I’m saying our child is dying and you’re behind a fucking truck. And the paramedics might not have saved the child, but they would have been there at least to help shield him and Chloe from the horror they glimpsed when he passed a truck on the left side shoulder, the car’s tires lost their grip, and the car tumbled off the side and into the median ditch, the slope steep enough to flip the car once and Chloe screamed as the baby slipped from her grip and hit the ceiling only to crash back into her lap when the car landed right side up. The paramedics would have placed a sheet over the baby but instead he and Chloe stared down at their newborn’s dark purple face and the blood gushing from his right eye socket, Chloe repeating again and again like a secret spelclass="underline" “Not now, no, not now, no, not now, no.” There had been a pulse even then after the accident, but by the time the trooper arrived, the pulse had vanished. Then Chloe tried to run into traffic.
“The kids miss you,” he said and hoped she wouldn’t turn away, thinking of the one kid who would never miss her, the child they had not even bestowed a name upon because they couldn’t agree. She had wanted Clayton; he, Michael.
He started to get up and maybe try to motivate himself to make that call finally to Dr. Carroll when she spoke again. “You’re a good man,” she said. “A good father. I mean that.”
“And you’re a good mother, don’t forget that.”
“You’re raising them now.”
“Why don’t you have some toast?”
Her eyes slowly opened. Even with only the light streaking faintly in from the hallway, Anthony could see the swollen redness of her face. Perhaps nightmares did visit her in that drug-induced sleep.
“I can make you some tea, if you want.”
She touched his arm, her first gesture of affection, of even a connection, in several days. “I’m so sorry, Anthony. So very sorry.”