“I’m terribly sorry. How was the marriage going before then?”
“It wasn’t heaven but we were working on it, for the sake of the children.”
“I hate to say it, but that’s not the only reason for making a marriage work. You’re not just a mother, you’re also a human being, with wants and needs of your own.”
“I’m not a mother anymore.” Renee felt the familiar pressure in her chest, swallowed hard, and squeezed the damp tissue.
“And she wants way more than she needs,” Jacob said.
“I understand your anger,” Rheinsfeldt said. “You have a right to be angry for such a loss.”
“Jacob hasn’t been himself lately,” Renee cut in, hating herself for defending him. “He was under a lot of pressure in his business. Jacob never talked much about it, but his partner told me the company was burned by a couple of contractors and—”
“You don’t know anything about land development,” Jacob said. “All you know is a big house and nice appliances, LL Bean and Nieman Marcus catalogs.”
“Let’s get back to Christine,” Rheinsfeldt said. “I know you’d rather not talk about it, but—”
“It was a Tuesday,” Renee said, and her hands grew cold even though the room was as stifling as a coffin in hell. Jacob had never let her talk about Christine, and though Renee and Kim had cried together a dozen times afterwards, she still ached to spill it all again, as if the act of psychological spewing would purge the poison from her system. “I’d just got off the phone with my mother. Christine was down for her afternoon nap, she was as steady as a clock, naps at ten and three. I had soup on. I was trying to save money then, figuring with two children we had a lot of college to pay for one day. The soup was boiling over—”
“She called me at work that morning to gripe,” Jacob said. “Said she was tired of cutting her fingers to get rid of leftover vegetable scraps and why couldn’t she just put some groceries on the credit card—”
“Let her finish, Jacob.”
Renee felt a sick but grateful smile slide across her face. Rheinsfeldt was as tough as any prison warden, and she seemed to be on Renee’s side. “I burned my fingers,” Renee said. “That’s what the medics said when they arrived. I don’t remember much after that, but I took the pot off and then went to check on Christine because it was nearly four and about time for Mattie to get home from school.”
“That’s when she found her,” Jacob said.
“What did you see?” Rheinsfeldt asked Renee.
“You have to keep it a secret, don’t you? I mean, patient-doctor privilege or whatever?”
“Yes. Everything you say in this room stays in this room. Except the parts you take with you.”
Renee looked at Jacob, expecting to see hatred in those stranger’s eyes, but he only nodded in resignation. She would tell it the way he wanted. She’d once promised in front of God to honor and obey him.
“I went in, and Mattie was standing over the crib. I didn’t hear her, but she must have come through the sliding glass doors in back and up the stairs. She was pale and her lips moved but she wasn’t making a sound. And neither was Christine. You have any children? No? Then you probably don’t know babies are never absolutely quiet, no matter what. Even when they’re asleep, they twitch or sigh or wheeze or kick the blankies.”
“Christine was way too quiet,” Jacob said. “Blue.”
“It was the blankies,” Renee said, and the words came easy, just as they had when she talked to the rescue squad and then the doctors and then the police. She’s said them so often that the words were a recitation. “There’s this new thing where you’re not supposed to let babies sleep on their stomachs, so I had blankies in there to prop her up on her back. But somehow she turned and got under them. She—”
“Mattie knew something was wrong right away,” Jacob said. “It was Mattie who called 9-1-1 while Renee tried to revive Christine.”
“How terrible,” Rheinsfeldt said, and the wrinkled troll-doll face looked almost sad. “Where were you?” she asked Jacob.
“On a job site. We were clearing for a subdivision. If it wasn’t for the cell phone—”
“You mean Mattie didn’t call you first?”
“I told Mattie to call 9-1-1,” Renee said. “What the hell is this? We had enough of that stuff from the police. We’re the victims, remember?”
“I’m just trying to understand,” Rheinsfeldt said, her eyes seeming to grow a shade darker and more obscure.
“It wouldn’t have mattered anyway,” Jacob said. “The ME fixed the time of death at around 3:15. Christine must have smothered shortly after Renee put her down.”
“You know the only thing that’s kept me from losing my mind?” Renee saw that Jacob was paying attention now. If only he’d paid that much attention in the immediate aftermath, when depression crushed her like God snuffing a cigarette.
“What?” Rheinsfeldt asked. The woman didn’t take any kind of notes. Maybe she was arrogant enough to count on memory, but Renee knew that memory could lie. Memory told you all the lies you wanted to hear. You could count on it to deceive you.
“Because it seems like it happened to somebody else. I mean, I know I was there, I know I had the baby, but she was gone so fast, I can tell myself she was never born. And don’t preach to me about denial, or the value of acceptance. This is how I grieve—by not letting it have happened, at least not to me.”
Jacob put his head in his hands and spoke to the floor. “I tried not to blame her.”
“How did you deal with it as a couple?” the doctor asked. “Focus on each other? On Mattie?”
Renee pondered the different responses. The truth was not an option. “Jacob threw himself into his work. He pulled away from me, but we each drew closer to Mattie. I took her to visit my parents for a week, and then we took a cruise to the Cayman Islands. The water’s so blue there.”
“Jacob wasn’t with you?”
“No. That subdivision deal—”
“The Realtor balked,” Jacob said. He sounded sober now, as if the hard hammers of business considerations had knocked him awake. “We had a nice row of tract houses, half of them pre-sold. The realty company said we were charging too much, that we were cutting our own throats because we were trying to turn over some upscale houses on the other side of town. The company undercut us and siphoned off some of our buyers, and we took a bath on the mortgages. Never build on spec in this town unless you own the bank.”
“But what about Mattie?” Rheinsfeldt said, nonplussed by Jacob’s passionate diversion. “How did you relate to her after Christine’s death?”
“I don’t know,” Jacob said. “I just felt so helpless. My old man would have told me to pull my balls out of the sand and keep them swinging. When you get a raw deal, you turn it around. So we—me and my partner—decided it was a good time to buy if it looked like prices were dropping. So we went in on a few lots around town, high-end commercial space.”
“He gave me money instead of himself,” Renee said.
“I figured the best way to focus on Mattie was to spoil her like crazy,” Jacob said. “And it took money. The cruise, riding lessons, Disney World, shopping trips to Charlotte.”
Renee didn’t like Rheinsfeldt’s reaction. The counselor’s lips curled as if valuing money was somehow distasteful. She had no comprehension of what it meant to be a Wells.
“It isn’t unusual to throw yourself into practical pursuits when faced with an emotional tragedy,” Rheinsfeldt said. “But how did you feel on the inside?”
“Inside?” One of Jacob’s eyelids twitched. “I don’t have any inside anymore.”
“Please, Jake,” Renee said. “Don’t change into...you know.”
He stood, paced, stopped at the window. For a moment, it looked as if he were going to snatch up the potted geraniums and hurl them against the wall. He turned, fists clenched. “You could never understand, not in a million goddamned years.”