The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel (20 page)

“
Almost?
What sort of ball?”

He looked at the floor. She dropped his hands.

“You went off to Amherst, with the baby? Why didn’t you tell me?” She was still in her coat. Boiling, she flung it off.

“No,” he said, perching on a kitchen stool. He closed his eyes and then looked at the ceiling for a long moment.

“What do you mean,
no
? We never do that, just go with the baby without talking to each other. Is she all right?” She saw his prominent Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed hard.

“I told you, she’s fine. I called you last night.”

Last night.
It was a lucid dream that had become reality. She wished it were a dream. She walked past him to look down at Clara again, unable to face him. His familiar mouth was bleary at its edges, like a mouth in a Rembrandt. “When did she go down?” Veronica asked. She returned to lean against the cool marble island.

“A few minutes ago.” He reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “I know you’re mad, but I want you—I want you to understand,” he said. Taking her by both shoulders, he grabbed her firmly and kissed her hard and fast.

“Don’t!” she said, a vibration beginning to knock in her knees. Why did he always know her thoughts? His mouth came to hers as if he knew she’d thought about it. Despite everything—or perhaps because of it—desire had returned to her in his absence. They breathed hard, apart from each other, and she tasted salt from his kiss, felt the brief wetness from his tongue.

“I missed you,” he said. “I went for you. Listen: I—I wanted you to get some sleep. Did you get some sleep?”

“Of course. Do you understand how tired I am? The chronic—”

He cut her off. “I know, I
do
know,” he told her.

She picked up the note he’d left on the kitchen counter and shook her head. “How could you go without telling me? You took her—”

This time
he
averted his eyes. His gaze skittered away to the stroller, to the counter, to the door. She looked at his long eyelashes, the deeper pores around his nose, and for a moment they were simply mammals with hair, skin, and warm breath.

“I was going to take her out for breakfast,” he said. He walked to the window and opened it, his breath steaming in the chilly air.

She crossed the room and shut it. “So as you were walking to the car and getting in, you didn’t think—” She tried to proceed, but she couldn’t really be righteous. She was massively relieved; they were all home together.

“I didn’t drive. Listen, I don’t want to wake her. Come and I’ll tell you.” He took her hand and pulled her with him. Alarmed by his strong grip, she wriggled free yet followed him out of the living room and into Clara’s yellow nursery. He stood there breathing heavily as he leaned against the changing table.

She folded her arms over her chest as if she were simply annoyed, as she had been on Thursday night. But her anger was enervating. She sat on the crisp twin bed across from the empty crib, frail and depleted.

“I wasn’t
in
Massachusetts,” he said, almost angrily.

His face darkened. A shadow slid across his eyes. Had he been mugged? She was embarrassed for a moment. She’d misunderstood. He had been taken away, beaten up.

“What happened?”

He smiled at her then, a solicitous but sorrowful smile. The black fleck in his eye was as dense and sharp as India ink. “We went to Barbados.”

It was a strangely simple phrase.

A loud snort emerged from her nose. “You did not!” Her own laughter, familiar in its rueful disbelief, calmed her for a moment.

He continued, almost eagerly, his eyes glittering. “I really did.
We
did.”

The radiator clanked loudly. She saw the large dark freckle that always emerged on his collarbone when he was in the sun, the pinkish burn on the tops of his white hands where he always forgot to put lotion.

“What?”

He nodded.

“You did not! How did you do that?” Slopes of understanding were jagged in her brain. She fell from one to another. “What? What did you
do
? You went to the airport? You
took
her out—you— Holy fucking shit!”

“I didn’t plan to,” he said, sitting down on the glider. “It wasn’t something I planned. I missed you so much. I
still
miss you.”

“You actually went.” It was hard to breathe, and her words were hushed, trancelike. “With Clara…” She stared at her black boots as they dug into the white sheepskin rug at her feet. It could not be. “I don’t know where to begin.”

“I can’t really comprehend it either,” he said, and she saw the odd glee in his face. He was excited by this shred of commonality, as if it were something to celebrate.

The room’s edges were crisp and outlined, almost artificial. Their words, clattering objects. “Wait. You had plane tickets?”

“Well, no, not until I got to the airport, and then I got one ticket. There was one flight—” He had an infuriating smile on his face that she could tell he was trying to contain.

“You had passports. You’re like one of those people who—you took her out of the country!” Veronica bent herself down over the pillow in her lap. She stared at his feet, both with sunburned tops. A few grains of sand rested on his big toe.

“I checked the mail as I was leaving and the passports were there. I didn’t have tickets,” he said,
“before.”

Veronica lifted her face. John and the window behind him blurred through her tears. “Oh my God.” She covered her mouth with one hand and shook her head.

“I don’t know. I just went.”

“I’m her mother.”

“I didn’t plan it.”

“It doesn’t matter where I am; I know where she is—I know. I follow her whole day, her whole night, what she eats. When she wakes up from her nap. Everything! I do it! You don’t do it. It’s me.”

“It’s not only you—I go in there every night and check on her. I promise you, I took care of her.”

Veronica’s skull felt like it was simmering, lifting apart. “You go in there every night and wake her up when she’s sleeping. You think that’s checking on her?” She tore off her black sweater and threw it to the floor. The heat in the room, the heat within her, had become unbearable.

“I go in to make sure she’s breathing! All right?”

“So that makes it better? You think you’re like me? I go through the day and imagine her every minute, call Rosemary to ask about icing carrots for her gums and call back to tell her to make sure they’re organic, and then hang up and think about how they can’t be baby carrots, because she could choke on one and how they have to be full-sized carrots! Call again to ask what’s in her diaper, hear about a reddish tinge, wonder if she had somehow ingested beets and worry that it’s blood. You’re proposing that you go through your day doing this too? Wondering about her stool when you should be working? I’m her mother. You go away and forget. You have your needs.
You
are paramount. To
you
. I don’t have needs anymore. Do you even get that? I don’t know if I am hungry or tired. I have no idea. I don’t need a single goddamn thing!”

She tore out of the room and down the hallway. Reaching the stroller where Clara slept, Veronica bent down and touched her forehead. It was burning up.

“That’s total bullshit,” John said, rushing after her. “You don’t need a thing—you never think of yourself, is that what you’re saying?”

She picked up the baby. “She’s on fire.”

“You never think of yourself? Then what the hell were you doing when she was two months old? What would you call that? Excellent parenting?”

“The Tylenol’s above the microwave, up in that cabinet.” Her tears started falling and she wiped them away. “You know I’m sorry. We’ve been through this,” she said quietly. “Hurry up.”

“But, see, we haven’t been through it. Not really,” he said, as he cracked open the seal on the tiny pink bottle.

“I fucked up. But I’m not a terrible mother.” Finally, accidentally, she had asserted it. She did not have to wait for his verdict. “Please. Don’t turn this into something else.”

“It’s not something else. Can’t you see?
It’s all one thing!
”

Veronica stood and swayed with Clara’s hot, limp body in her arms. She stared into the stroller for the beloved lamb. With her free hand, she rummaged nervously under the stroller pads, then looked for it in the basket beneath the stroller, but the lamb was gone.

“You kidnapped her,” she said, almost laughing with incredulity. She caught a drip from her nose with the back of her sleeve.

“I should have told you where I was.” Veronica cradled Clara and, with her pinky, opened the baby’s mouth. John administered the medicine.

“Okay,” she said. She didn’t know what to do with the impossible new information. He had acted without thinking, just as she had.

“Meanwhile, you’ve been fucking impossible,” he said, renewing their argument.

“Art told me you think I’m crazy.”

“I don’t.”

“You do. You think I’m a crazy bitch. And because of that—your own unfair characterization—that justifies … You said she was okay. How long has she had a fever?”

“She had a low one last night and some diarrhea.”

“Were you even going to tell me that?”

“I was going to—I haven’t had a chance. I know it was strange, leaving, I know, but it was also kind of
extraordinary
.”

“Extraordinary?” She noticed that his eyes danced and shimmered, until she started to move toward him. With her free hand, she grabbed a pillow off the sofa and swung it at him. She felt his unshaved face against her palm, his nose and his oily hair. He shielded himself with his arms. A great lash of fire whipped up and through her, propelling her toward him. She yanked at the neck of his T-shirt and held on.

“Extraordinary! Wow. It was extraordinary to lie to your wife and take your baby to a foreign country without telling her?” He looked at her hand on his shirt. “And now she’s sick?” She hadn’t had this much energy since she was pushing, trying to get Clara out into the world; like a tidal wave her whole body was washed and lit.

Yet before she could say any more, a feeling of sheer defeat gripped her; in that effort, despite that singular energy, she’d failed. She let go of his shirt, walked across the room to get the thermometer and take the baby’s temperature. The thermometer beeped and read 101. It wasn’t as high as she’d guessed.

“You were sick and overtired and I thought you’d needed to rest for a
long
time. You needed a break. That’s all I wanted,” he said, as if their world were still cohesive. “I never wanted you to be hurt. I tried to protect you; even in the hospital I tried to do everything for you. I would do anything. Anything you want. I didn’t plan on going there.”

She moved down the hall with Clara in her arms.

He followed her to the door of the nursery and watched as she put the baby in the crib. Clara’s lack of protest was worrisome. “Listen. It’s me, Veronica.” He was standing, his nostrils flaring, his arms open, as if ready to capture her. “It’s me.”

“Whatever that means. What does that mean?” She stood there, burning, fluttering as if a million birds beat their wings in her chest. She could have run in giant steps, scaling Manhattan, the earth. She could have flown. “Who are you?”

*   *   *

They were silent for what seemed like a long time. An old Snoopy digital clock John had salvaged once from Irvington made its loud click from one minute to the next. An impossible distance. Dust motes shivered around the air purifier near the window. An ambulance screamed. Two people walked by on the street and their conversation floated up: “Did he get the bacon?” one woman asked. The other assured her friend: “He did.” How Veronica wished they were talking about bacon.

“I admit it must seem strange to you,” he finally said in a choked voice, a meager concession. But she wasn’t ready to comfort him.

It was disconcerting how John wouldn’t look away, how he stared at her. Something hummed there between them like a moving painting, something that breathed when you didn’t expect it to. From the airing came a strange mutual relief.

“I’m not crazy,” he said.

“You left me,” she said, as if aware of it from a different angle.

“That’s what Derek said.”

“Who’s he?”

“A friend.”

When had he had a friend she didn’t know? “I suppose you went to Glittering Sands.”

“I tried to, but they wouldn’t let me in.”

Veronica shook her head.

“Veronica,” he said, “listen.”

“No, I will not listen to you!” She could not. She had to get away from him. But when she moved to go through the door, he blocked her path.

17

Sunday

John

He could not let her go. He had to tell her what had happened, how he’d finally understood, how valiantly he’d searched for goat milk. The dream of the white flower in her hair, the dialogue with his father: It was all fueled by love for her. “Where are you going?”

“Away.”

She tried to squeeze past him, under his arm, but he held her there, prying her hand off the knob. He didn’t let go. Her wrist felt stiff in his grasp, like polished wood. She smelled clean, her hair freshly washed with some new shampoo.

“Let me go, okay?” He heard a crack of fear in her voice.

He held on to her. “I will not let you go,” he said. He needed to tell her everything. He felt her body grow tense beneath his hands. He looked at her white neck and wanted to nibble it; that used to happen so easily and was now so improbable. Lately she would never let him touch her. Now he could imagine it again; he could devour her.

“Let me go, John, okay? Let go.” She spoke pleadingly, gently. He held on tighter, his fingers sinking into the flesh of her wrists. A softening had emerged in her voice; her words were peeled and alert. In this state, maybe he could reach her; maybe she could finally hear him.

“No.
I need you,
” he said. He was too tired to think straight. For months she had been this way, withholding and unreachable. She was simply evasive because he was touching her, like she always was. His mind darted close to and then away from knowledge: She was leaving him. She would be gone, as he had feared the night of the birth, as he feared in the subsequent months of her coolness and removal. His mind was going to the darkest places. He took shelter in something simple: lust and the pleasant awareness of his size compared with hers. His relative power.