Our Crooked Hearts(70)

“It’s okay.” I was trembling. “I’m here.”

There was a moment, I was sure of it, when she understood what I’d done and seared me with a look I’d remember until consciousness stopped. Then she went still, the box cradled to her chest like an open mouth. Her body twitched and kept twitching, as if every memory had to be yanked like a weed.

It was horrible. So horrible I moved her onto the bed and covered her body with my own. She writhed beneath me and made no sound.

I looked at her rigid face and remembered drawing pictures with our fingertips in sheets of falling rain. I heard her screaming at the stench of the blemish charm Fee taught her to make when she was eleven, and crying when she managed to turn her hair bright orange instead of pink before the first day of sixth grade. I felt her quiet beside me in the soccer fields at midsummer gathering the flowers only we knew about, that opened in the rift between the sky’s lightening and the sun showing its face. The memories blossomed and withered, and now they belonged only to me.

I heard the clap of the awful box. When I looked it was closed and seamless and Ivy was asleep. Her chest moving slow and even, her eyelids smooth as suede. A damp whip of red hair wrapped around her neck like an umbilical cord. I started to nestle against her, then stiffened and drew back. Gently I lifted her hair, sweeping it over the pillow and pulling the sheets to her shoulders.

Rob was sitting blearily at the top of the stairs outside her room. I could tell by his face he hadn’t been there long. “Hey,” he whispered, reaching up to touch my hip. “Did the hostage negotiate?”

Shame pooled in my stomach. It nested between my teeth like a capsule of cyanide.

“It’s done,” I said, and slid past him down the stairs, to lie sleepless on the couch until morning.



* * *



When Fee saw me on her doorstep at six a.m. she cursed softly and beckoned me in.

She’d always been my mirror, always let me know when I’d gone too far, been too impatient or too unkind. When I was done talking her face was slack as a dead woman’s, both palms pressed flat to the table. “What did Rob say?”

I shook my head.

Fee closed her eyes. “Go home to your husband. Go home to the child you’ve…” Her face spasmed. “Go home, Dana.”



* * *



I could hear Rob making coffee when I walked in. I’d looked at Ivy before leaving the house and she was lying as I’d left her, color good and heart rate steady. Still I lingered a while at the foot of the stairs, watching her bedroom door.

I found Rob in the kitchen. “Hey.” His tone was cool. “What’s going on?” He looked irritated and weary but still like he knew me, and I tried to hold it around me like a coat. The last time he’d ever look at me that way.

I started talking. The whole time I kept my eyes on the window, and the clumsy fly that bumped around its upper corner. Then my story was through and I was refocusing on his face.

He’d looked at me with confusion before, with exhaustion, even disgust. But never with all three boiled together, into something that might have been hate.

“Are you gonna divorce me?” I whispered.

He twitched back like I was dirty. Like he was looking down on me from a long long way. And later he’d apologize for it, and months after deny he’d even said it, but he did. He did say this: “Of course not. If I left, you’d get the kids.”



* * *



So: open the box, right? Restore everything you’ve stolen.

“Do not touch that box.” Fee’s voice, sizzling across a bad connection. “I know you’re tempted, but you can’t just erase this.”

“Why? What did you learn?”

“Common sense,” she snapped. “She’s too young, her brain is too flexible. If we’re lucky she’ll be fine, just … minus some memories. But we can’t flood her system with god knows how much information.”

“Till when? How long do we wait?”

“There’s not a manual, Dana. What did Rob say?”

“He hates me.”

She sighed. “I’m almost at the shop. Stay home today, try to map the fallout. I’ll come by tonight.”



* * *



We waited in blistering silence for our daughter to wake. Finally we heard the creak of the upper hall, the toilet’s flush. Then she was walking down the stairs humming something. She walked in, saw us sitting there like mannequins, and did a double take.

“Whoa. What’s up?”

Rob got up and folded her into a hug. “Everything’s fine,” he said unconvincingly.

“Dad,” she said after the hug had gone on too long. “Dad.” Then, craftily, sensing she held some mysterious advantage, “Can we go to Walker Bros.? I want a Dutch pancake.”

She could’ve asked for the moon.

We were only alone for a minute that morning, washing our hands in the women’s room. All morning I’d been searching for changes in her face. When our eyes met in the mirror, she squirmed and rolled her eyes.

“Mom. Stop staring at me.”

My heart seized. “Ivy.”

Her brows drew down at the panic in my voice.

“Rooibos, lavender, bay,” I recited. “Lead dark hearts astray.”