A Little Hope by Ethan Joella
For Rebecca, Gia, and Frankie.
Because, because, because.
1. Rain Day
Freddie Tyler wakes at six and watches her sleeping husband breathe for a moment. The dog lifts his head from his place at the foot of the bed and jumps off to join her before she slips out the door. Downstairs, she flips the switch by the fireplace and flames spread out among the river rocks.
The coffee sputters and drips as she opens the back door for the dog, Wizard. Freddie relishes the rush of autumn air against her ankles, watches the dog trudge through the dewy grass, goes back in to feed the cat, which has been waiting in the kitchen.
She shouldn’t be worried.
Freddie has always loved mornings. She likes the margin she gains when she’s the first awake. She likes the way the back lawn outside the window looks rested and raked. She likes the way half the kitchen is dark. The sun through the skylight makes lazy shadows of trees across the wood floors, and she wanders around the house as if she has just discovered it.
Beyond the yard’s back fence are two wooded lots, and she wishes she and Greg could buy them so no one ever builds there. The trees are starting to turn, just blushing now with hints of red, and she pictures a deer somewhere tiptoeing its way around. She imagines knowing those lots would always stay the same, knowing they could make that happen. But this isn’t a good time to talk about the future.
She breathes the way she heard Greg breathe in bed. She stands by the counter and places one hand on her chest and feels its steady swell and release. She imagines the clean air filling her body. She thinks of their daughter, Addie, breathing in her room, knows she will have to wake up in less than an hour.
These past few weeks Freddie has had a need to save, to hang on to everything—Addie’s drawings, receipts, and even land that hasn’t been built on. She wants to put yellow caution tape around everything good.
Her intentions for mornings are always optimistic. Yoga in front of the French doors. Or taking Wizard on a walk to Woodsen Park, pausing so she can glimpse the fallen leaves and observe the quiet houses: the papers still in driveways, the cars still tucked in, the lights in windows slowly coming on.
She waits for the coffee and even thinks of writing again.
Freddie used to be a writer. Used to the way someone refers to once being a gymnast or having lived in London. How did she let that part of herself get away? The part of her who spent so many hours as an undergrad sitting in a circle of dramatic people workshopping pieces—pieces was what the professors called everything. The piece you submitted. She even published stories and poems years ago, in decent journals.
Could she find her writer self again, at almost forty? It hasn’t really left her, has it? She is still always, always recording information in her head. Maybe she could write a poem today. Maybe the first paragraph of a piece on grief—or potential grief. She knows what she will say. How grief comes in shyly, like a new season. How grief is something else before it is grief. She could write about detecting grief.
She shakes her head. This could all be nothing. This thing with Greg might keep being nothing.
She pours her coffee and remembers the clothes in the dryer and thinks if she just folds five things, the pile won’t be so big, and there will still be enough time for yoga. For dog walking. For the beginning of the essay on grief or nongrief. She wipes the spot where the coffee has spilled. She folds two kitchen towels, a pillowcase, a T-shirt of Greg’s, and a pajama shirt of Addie’s that Freddie holds to her face for a second. She looks longingly at Greg’s shirt, the collar frayed, but she thinks of Addie, who doesn’t know anything about this. Addie, who thinks a bad day is when Curious George isn’t on. She feels a swelling in her throat when she thinks of her tiny daughter but shakes her head, clearing the thought. But this little pajama shirt with the horses on it bothers her. It’s too brazen in its innocence: horses without bridles, meadow flowers, small squiggles of clouds and birds in the sky. Whoever made this shirt must think nothing bad can happen to anyone.
It’s not fair.
She looks around and sees the bananas she bought on the way home from work yesterday. The green has just vanished, and they sit in front of the subway tile backsplash. The contrast of bright yellow against white stuns her. She used to write about beautiful things: mountains, old red bridges, fields of geese.
On the refrigerator, Addie’s drawing of a pumpkin with trailing vines and a thick stem. Freddie sees Greg’s appointment card and she straightens it: October 17. One week away. She doesn’t think she can wait a week, but then she wishes seven days would last forever. Greg. Her Ken doll, she always called him.
Greg. Still real, still sleeping upstairs in their bed.
Nothing has happened.
Wizard waits at the door to come back in, and she wonders for a moment if Mrs. Crowley could get by without her today. But there are those bridesmaids’ dresses—five of them in that awful paisley print—and that miserable Bob Vines who owns the Regent Theater in town wants his pants ready for pickup tomorrow. Now isn’t the time to call in sick.
Even if a sick day meant the walk with Wizard, the undisturbed yoga, the newly hatched plan to pick Addie up from school early and go to Shake Superior (Connecticut’s newest restaurant chain) for a midday burger and fries, convincing Greg to meet them afterward, could all happen. Maybe they could go to Woodsen Park and watch the kite club, the group of retired men who meet there to fly box kites. They could even drive to the farm with the donkeys and buy gourds and cider. There is a whole world out there—in their small city of Wharton and beyond—that they miss every day.