The Other Mrs.(21)

But it didn’t matter because soon enough Mouse was clambering into a laundry basket full of dirty clothes on the bedroom floor. As she did, she took extra care not to step on the floor, breathing a sigh of relief when she was safely inside the basket. Because even though the basket was on the floor, it was safe. The basket couldn’t get swallowed up by lava, because it was made of titanium, and Mouse knew that titanium wouldn’t melt. She was a smart girl, smarter than any other girl her age that she knew.

Inside the laundry basket, the girl rode the waves of the volcano until the lava itself cooled and crusted over, and the land was safe enough to walk on again. Only then did she venture out of the basket and go back to playing along the edge of the rag rug with Mr. Bear and her dolls.

Sometimes Mouse thought that that, her tendency to disappear to her bedroom—quiet as a church mouse, as her father put it—and play all day, was the reason he called her Mouse.

It was hard to say.

But one thing was certain.

Mouse loved that name until the day Fake Mom arrived. And then she no longer did.



SADIE


I’m sitting on the floor in the lobby of the clinic. Before me is an activity table, the kind meant to keep kids entertained while they wait. The dark carpet beneath me is thin and cheap. It’s unraveling in spots, with stains that blend into the nylon so you wouldn’t see them unless you were as close to it as I am.

I’m cross-legged on the floor, sitting on the side of the activity table that faces a shape sorter. I watch on as my hand drops a heart-shaped block into the appropriate opening.

There’s a girl on the other side of the table. At first glance, she looks to be about four years old. She wears a pair of crooked pigtails. Strands of blond hair have come loose from the elastics. They fall to her face, hang into her eyes where she leaves them be, not bothering to shove them away. Her sweatshirt is red. Her shoes don’t match. One is a black patent leather Mary Jane and the other a black ballet flat. An easy enough mistake to make.

My own legs have begun to ache. I unknot them, find a different position to sit in, one better suited for a thirty-nine-year-old woman. The waiting room chair catches my eye, but I can’t rise from the floor and leave, not yet, because the little girl across the table is watching me expectantly.

“Go,” she says, grinning oddly, and I ask, “Go where?” though my voice is strangled when I speak. I clear my throat, try again.

“Go where?” I ask, this time sounding more like myself.

On the floor, my body is stiff. My legs hurt. My head hurts. I’m hot. I didn’t catch a wink of sleep last night and am paying for it today. I’m tired and disoriented. This morning’s conversation with Officer Berg has rattled my nerves, made a bad day even worse.

“Go,” the girl says again. When I stare at her, doing nothing, she says, “It’s your turn,” pronouncing none of the r’s, but turning them to w’s instead.

“My turn?” I ask, taken aback, and she says to me, “Yeah. You’re the red, remember?” Except she doesn’t say red. She says wed. Wed, wemember?

I shake my head. I must not have been paying attention because I don’t remember. Because I don’t know what she’s talking about until she points it out for me, the red beads at the top of the roller-coaster table, the ones that go up and down the red wire hills, around the red corkscrew turns.

“Oh,” I say, reaching out to touch the red wooden beads before me. “Okay. What should I do with the red?” I ask the girl, her nose oozing snot, eyes a bit glazed over as if febrile, and I don’t have to think hard to know why she’s here. She’s my patient. She’s come to see me. She coughs hard, forgetting to cover her mouth. The little ones always do.

“You do it like this,” she says as she takes her dirty, germy hand and grasps a train of yellow beads with it, driving the beads over the yellow hill and around the yellow corkscrew turns.

“You do it like that,” she says when the beads finally reach the other end and she lets go of them. Her hands fall to her hips as she stares at me, again expectantly.

I smile at the girl as I start to move the red beads.

But before they’ve gone far, I hear “Dr. Foust” hissed at me from behind. It’s a woman’s voice, clearly annoyed. “What are you doing down there, Dr. Foust?”

I turn to see Joyce standing behind me. Her posture is straight, her expression firm. She tells me that my eleven o’clock appointment is here, waiting for me in exam room three. I rise slowly to standing, shake out my stiff legs. I have no idea why I thought it would be a good idea to get down on the ground and play with the little girl. I tell her I have to get back to work. I say that maybe we can play again later and she smiles shyly at me. She wasn’t shy before but she’s shy now. She’s changed, and I think it has something to do with my height. Now that I’m standing, I’m no longer three feet tall like her. I’m different.

She rushes to her mama’s side, wraps her arms around her mother’s knees.

I say to her mother, “What a sweet girl,” and her mother thanks me for playing with her.

Around me, the waiting room is crawling with patients. I follow Joyce through the lobby doors and down the hall. But once there, I head the other way from the exam room, going to the kitchen instead, where I help myself to a sip of water from the watercooler, taking a moment to catch my breath. I’m tired. I’m hungry. My head still hurts.