From A Table, Falling

E.H. Hahn

1.

           I core the green apples slowly.  I gleaned a lemon juice trick to keep the slices bright during brief stints as helper-guest at Panhellenic wine-and-cheeses, but I haven't any in the house just now, so I'm prepared to watch the apples darken.  Freddy's got lemons on his list; he'll be here before the pies go in the oven.  Baked fruit turns brown regardless.
           Green apple peel looks like fat blades of April grass.  I cup a strip between my thumbs and blow:  no sound but my own futile breath.  I dump my effort down the drain, motor up the disposal.
           Pupup grumbles, shifts, settles, starts again when Freddy swings himself, his bike, and a lumpy brown grocery bag through the kitchen door.  He leans the bike on the wall and digs into the bag, tossing me a lemon.
           “Nice catch, Baby Doll.” 
           “Nice pitch, Mr. Baseball.” 
           He stoops to have a word with Pupup.  I lay the lemon on the cutting board, give it one good whack with the chopping knife, and examine its happy yellow innards.  I poke my tongue into the pulp.  Pupup's tail pounds the linoleum.
           Pies are not my forte, but it's October and we're in the Shenandoah Valley and so they are necessary.  I usually concern myself with the slicing of the apples, the placement of the vents, but tonight for some reason I am taken by the white sugar that has spilled across the formica, softening the sharp edges of the knives.  I press my lemon-wet palm to the pile, examine the granules, square, uniform, indistinguishable.  In Happy Home I read that they use toxic chemicals to make sugar white, a false purity intended to appeal to young wives like me.
           “Baby Doll, tonight we sleep under the stars!”  Freddy is pulling the red flannel sleeping bags from their dusty hiding places behind the armoire.  I know he imagines the night will go like this:  We will sleep on top of the trampoline in the back yard.  Pupup will stay inside and whine.  Freddy will wake me between 3 and 4, when the meteor shower is at its peak, and he will take pictures while I scribble notes in the pitch dark.  Through the kitchen window I see he's already set up his instruments:  medium-format box camera duct taped to the cardboard shaft of the handmade telescope, tripod, shortwave radio, tape recorder, journal, sky chart, level, lanterns.  I notice what Freddy has taught me to see:  a haze of condensation blunting the sheen of the unlit lanterns—the sudden sundown-cold called radiational cooling—signaling seasonal high pressure, crystal skies.
           It was this time last year, just after we were married, after I’d framed our fresh VPI diplomas and we’d driven up from Blacksburg and rented this shepherd’s cottage, pitched like a tree house over a jagged hillside and featuring an unexplained trampoline, in this odd village in Highland County—too dense to be rural, too isolated to be anything but—to be together, to be alone, to be nearer the heavens; this time last year as the air turned cold and the sky inked blacker and the ewes on the hills below stopped bleating for their lambs; this time last year that the telephone pierced the gathering quiet with news that my father had died.  Freddy held me and told me everything would be all right, an exquisite fiction, and I believed him, as I had Papa three years before when Mama died, and he’d said what people say, that everything would be all right.  This time last year, I chose to believe Freddy, my husband; to believe there must be truth to his hypothesis that my father passed in perfect time, before the universe presented him with unbearable circumstances; and so I’ve steeled myself to absorb whatever obscenity time may hurl that my father would not have been strong enough to endure, or to witness.
           Everything’s all right.
           “You dreamin’, Baby Doll?  The sugar spilled.  You crying?”  Freddy pauses at the porch door, dragging sleeping bags.
           “No, Mr. Wonderful.  I’m just making pies.”
           The screen door slams.  Pupup barely stirs.
           Out the window I watch Freddy drop the sleeping bags on the pile of damp brown leaves and crawl onto the trampoline for a bounce.  “Catch a rising star, Baby!” he calls from the yard.  “When you wish upon a star,” he sings in a schmaltzy vibrato.  Pupup shifts, settles.  Working the top crust, I switch from carving leaves to cutting stars, and a sliver of moon.

           It’s August now, and my hair is half stuck to my face, half flying out the window.  We have to go over the mountain to Charlottesville, so Freddy couldn’t object to taking the car.  He doesn’t even remark when we zoom past the Sunoco station in Waynesboro, lines of idling cars extending into the street from every entrance and exit, like spokes on a bicycle wheel.  The radio plays the thing we’ve heard forty-four times already today:  “Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.”  No comment on the irony of this endless anniversary loop juxtaposed with eighteen-and-a-half minutes of missing tape; Freddy just reaches across the bench seat, pulls me in close, puts his right arm around my shoulder.  It’s hot for this, but I rest my head and try not to breathe too deliberately.  A gust of wind through Freddy’s window slaps hair against my cheek, stings my eyes, brings tears.  He moves his hand to my forehead and for the next hour, holds the hair off my face.
           Until last week, it had been—what?—another joke between us?  Before a litany of vague but apparently troubling symptoms made my doctor frown; before a thin nurse coaxed too much blood from a milky blue vein; before a quiet, nearly apologetic Tuesday evening phone call telling me things are as certain as can be without going in for a look, Freddy and I had been able to keep each other hopeful and laughing.  Freddy:  “What if they tell me it’s cause I beat off too much?”  Me:  “What if they say I’m not worthy of your seed?”  Freddy:  “They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.  Do you feel pregnant?   ’Cause, Baby Doll, you sure look ripe to me!”
           Now, after stumbling our way through the hospital—park near the emergency entrance, take the second right past Radiology, the gift shop will be on your left, take the elevator down to the basement, if you pass the cafeteria you’ve gone too far, Surgical Consulting is straight ahead near the underground parking garage, but that’s only for doctors, so park near the emergency entrance—after sitting in the waiting room too long not reading the identical “One Year Later” stories in Time, Newsweek, and Life, after squeezing hands politely with “our team” and squeezing hands frantically with each other as the word is said and the room goes sideways and consent forms are signed and the date is set…the thing that’s left to laugh about is a name.
           “Ridiculous name for an oncogenius,” Freddy says when we’re back in the car.
           “Maybe that’s why he became a surgeon, so people wouldn’t laugh at him anymore.”
            Freddy considers my theory.  “James Timmie.  Dr. James Timmie.”  We ride a while.  I look at him looking at the road ahead.  Then he says, “I’m going to call him Jimmy.”
           It’s sticky and drizzling as we summit Afton Mountain, but new Leonard Cohen has broken through all the Nixon, like the sun.

           That night in the shower a sob gets away from me, and all at once Freddy is there.  “I thought you were out back,” I say.  He pulls a towel down, and me out.
           “Tell me,” he says.
           “All of it.  Everything,” I begin.  “It’s too much.  You’re going to miss your show outside.”
           “Tell me one thing.  Just pick one.”
           I inventory my fear and offer up the least of it:  “I’m afraid of falling off the operating table.  What if I fall off the table?”
           He tells me, “It’s not a table, Baby Doll.  It’s just a trampoline.  You’ll close up your eyes, and I’ll be there, and Pupup, and Jimmy Timmie will just scalpel up some stars on your  belly, and maybe a little bit of moon.”
           “I don’t think I can do this, Freddy.”  I look down and see the hem of the towel shaking around my ankles.
           Freddy starts humming, then singing the Leonard Cohen we heard in the car today, giving me time to absorb and accept his doctored vision of crisis.
           “No pictures of me in recovery, okay?”
           He smiles, offers me his blue bandana for the tears, but I lean into his chest.

           The operation happens the first week of September.  They don’t get all of it.  They don’t get everything.  It is too much.  They pick one thing to dig out—the least of it, I think—and tell us that cobalt treatments and intravenous medicines will “clean up the rest.”  I’m advised to invent an image of “benign cleansing.”  A nurse suggests my white cells are ladybugs, eating aphids.  Instead, every morning when I get sick, I imagine I am throwing up cancer.

           In December, Freddy gets a job as a news photographer in Charlottesville, so we move there, into a dollhouse-size bungalow with an improbably large back yard, near the hospital.  We have proximity.  We have access.  We have decent television reception.  On TV, everyone who has cancer is a hero.  Morley Safer profiles a black opera singer who “overcame incredible odds” to be here, at the Met, and to be here, on this earth.  Where do you get your strength?  Where does your fighting spirit come from?
           “What’s the motherfucking alternative, Morley?” Freddy hollers at the screen.  I look at his profile, watch him watching something that has nothing to do with him, and wonder at his intensity.          

           My hair is gone by early spring.  We shave Pupup to keep him cool in the coming heat, and to keep fleas at bay.  He looks embarrassed.
           I plan a garden of plants I’m least likely to kill and start seedlings in Dixie cups:  morning glories, ornamental honeysuckle, jasmine, coreopsis, begonias, coneflowers, and moonflowers for symmetry with the ungainly, apparently barren night-blooming cereus, a potted hand-me-down from Freddy’s grandmother.  Maybe come August it will sprout a redeeming bud.

2.

           On the fifth anniversary of the operation, Freddy starts the long slow creep toward a Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Virginia.  I visit Jimmy Timmie, who tells me to go away and enjoy my life.  In celebration, I buy a Yashicamat for Freddy, which he immediately loads and points toward heaven.  “Baby Doll, you can’t go spending money like this.  <click> We’re poor <click> students now, not Reagan richies!”
           “You’re the student; I’m the one with the job. <click> And as the home economist, I respectfully ask that you <click> stop wasting film on a bright blue sky.”
            “Sky’s blue all right, Baby Doll.” <click>
           I watch him for a while, jumping around the back yard as if the trampoline were there, snapping shots of leaves, of overgrown honeysuckle, of pregnant moonflowers coiled so tightly around themselves it’s impossible to imagine them flowering, ever, never mind tonight.
            “What’s the occasion, anyway?” he finally asks, focusing on a heart-shaped leaf.
           “I saw Jimmie today,” I say.
           “I saw him, too, during lunch.  The TV was on at the White Spot, but they had the sound turned down.  <click>  Looked like he was somewhere hot, Mississippi or somewhere.  What’s he doing on his home turf?”  He needs to concentrate where they don’t already love him.  <click>  What was he saying?”
           “Not Jimmy Carter, Freddy.”
            “Oh.  I thought—you’re working for the guy now, I thought you meant him.  <click>  Who are we talking about?”
            “Nothing.  Never mind.”
           “Well, with you running that campaign, he’s going to <click> kick Ronald Reagan’s ass.”
            “Freddy, I’ve told you, I’m not working with him personally, just his campaign.  I don’t see him.  I never see him.”
           <click>
            I step out of my right shoe and run my foot across the grass.  Then I take off the other shoe and walk into the house, letting the porch door slam.  On the kitchen floor are the remains of the thawing ground beef that Pupup has nosed off the table.  “You’re bad,” I tell him.  He looks into my eyes, so I kiss him on the head and clean up the mess.

            On the tenth anniversary, Freddy is immersed in a postdoc fellowship—working day and night with a man whose name I come to know as The Legendary John Beachum—to develop a giant mirror lens system for a space telescope he tells me will get us all a front-row view of the stars.  “Galaxies!  Supernovas!  Black holes!”  Freddy promises.
           “Babies!  What about babies?” I wonder.
            “Baby Doll, this is my baby for now.”  And, glancing up from his charts, “I got something for you today.”  He reaches into his jacket pocket and tosses me a tape.
            “Nice pitch, Mr. Baseball.”
            “Nice catch, Baby Doll.”  But he’s back down in his graphs again.
            I go out to my car and pop in the new Leonard Cohen.  I close my eyes and listen to the whole record, rewind, listen again.  When I go back inside, the house is quiet and dark.

           The Hubble Space Telescope is launched with great fanfare in April 1990, a month to the day after Pupup died.  We asked the vet to cremate the bony body and scattered the ashes under the moonflower vines.  Freddy has been so consumed with the launch that I’m concerned he hasn’t taken time to grieve Kubler-Ross-style.  My heart hurts.
            “It’s time for babies,” I tell him.  We’ve slept late for the first Sunday since forever and are in the back yard, pretending it’s warm enough to drink coffee in our skivvies.
            “You really want to bring babies into this gruesome GOP world?”  He shakes an early gnat from Book World, flips the page and re-creases the seam.
            “We personally won’t be bringing anyone into this world, Freddy.”
            “I know.  You’re right.  I saw an Oprah the other day, they were talking about how women are always confounded by men who resist, but that it’s the natural order.  It’s in our genes to have this knee-jerk negative reaction.”
            “Or just jerk reaction.”  I pinch his thigh under his boxers.
            “Baby Doll, you want babies?  Then babies you shall have.  Go ahead and start looking into them.”
            “We’ll need a new house, too.”
            He doesn’t look up, but I hear the smile behind the newspaper:  You’re trying to change my mind?”

             Days later a man calls and tells me Freddy has retained him as our real estate agent.  He wants to set up an appointment to go over our “mandatories and nice-to-haves” and in the  meantime we are to get pre-approved for a mortgage.  I tell him I’ll check with Freddy on a time to meet and write down his name and number.
            In the back yard that evening, Freddy’s fooling with a new macro lens, shooting a heap of just-hatched mantids.  “Marc called today,” I say.
            “Marc?  Who’s that?”  <click>
            “Marc’s the human palindrome you hired to help us find a house.”
            He stops shooting, flashes a smile.  “I couldn’t help myself, Baby Doll.  How can we not have a real estate guy named Marc Cram?”
            “Does he know that’s why you hired him?”
            Freddy says, “Of course.  Why else would anyone hire him?” and I’m sure he is not joking.
            It turns out there are lots of reasons a person would hire MarCram.  It takes him just three months to find the house we want more than any other, wear down the elderly couple who insist it’s not for sale, dispense with our ethical objections, and draw up a contract for thousands below assessment.  On the fifteenth anniversary of the operation, we move in.
           “Welcome home, Baby Doll,” Freddy sings as he carries me over the threshold.
            “We’re not newlyweds, Mr. Wonderful.  All we did was steal a big old house from a nice old couple.”
            He carries me all the way back to the kitchen, puts me down on the counter like a sack of groceries, and kisses my mouth.  “We did steal this house, didn’t we?”  I look at him looking around our new-old kitchen and I think he must be imagining babies crawling on the black and white tiles.

3.

            No one will give us babies.  For three and a half years, we welcome a parade of wide-eyed, too-young social workers through our house, into our marriage, our work, our childhoods, our hopes for the future, our “parenting philosophy,” and inevitably our health histories.  It’s called a Home Study, but really it’s a ghost hunt.  Without exception, all leave shaking their heads, not looking at us, offering only the most meager chances:  perhaps the mother of an AIDS baby will feel we may be more empathetic than other couples and choose us in spite of our limitations; it could be that a special needs child, one with moderate to severe disabilities, may be placed with us, but generally the state’s health and financial standards are even higher for the parents to ensure there isn’t tragedy upon tragedy for these children; have we considered fostering instead of permanent parenting?
            “What in the everliving fuck?” Freddy yells after the last gaunt blonde woman leaves.  “You had cancer a hundred and thirty-seven years ago.  Don’t they know that everyone has cancer?  Goddamn!  Turn on the fucking television set, that’s all you see, cancer.  Why don’t they eliminate people with fucking parking tickets, or baldness?  Will they give me a baby if I go bald?”
           I look at him looking out the window as the woman clips efficiently down our sidewalk to her Ford Escort.  I say, “No, they won’t give you a baby if you go bald, because you’re married to me.”
           I hear him breathe.  I match my breath to his.
           “What was her name?” he asks without turning around.
           “Barbara.  Brenda.  Something with a B, I don’t know.”
           “Barbara.  That figures,” he says.

            Freddy goes head-down into his work, adapting Hubble lens technology for surgical and medical applications.  I start looking beyond.
            One month before the twentieth anniversary of the operation, on the night that Freddy’s grandmother’s cereus promises to blossom, we travel across fourteen time zones, bypassing the whole United States, pushing against the jet stream, flying above western Canada, across the Bering Straight, arcing with the earth, chasing daylight until we reach Guangzhou, where we fall in love, instantly, and become parents, permanently, to the most perfect creature in captivity, our new nine-month-old, moon-faced daughter, Victoria.
           “Does she speak Korean?” the stewardess inquires as we leave Dulles for the final leg of our days-long trip home.
            “She’s a baby,” Freddy replies, “so she speaks baby.”
            “She’s from China,” I feel compelled to explain.  “I mean she was born in China.”
            “She’s adorable,” the woman says.  Then, incredibly, “Do you need chopsticks?  I think we have some onboard, I could get you some if you need them.”
            I jump in before Freddy decapitates her:  “Just some hot water so I can mix a bottle would be fine, thanks.”  Once we’re up, Freddy stands Victoria in his lap so he can show her the night sky.  An almost perfectly full moon obscures the stars.

            Time is upside-down for two weeks.  All three of us give in to jetlag, waking at three o’clock, watching movies and playing and eating.  During the day neighbors bring baby gifts and food, which I groggily accept with thanks.  On Day 14, an overnight hurricane slams through Charlottesville, uprooting trees and flooding creeks; for the first time Victoria sleeps through the night in her crib.
            Freddy goes back to work.  I get formal announcements printed and send them, along with pictures of the three of us in China, to everyone we’ve ever met or come near.  Jimmy Timmie.  Jimmy Carter.  MarCram.  Every one of the umpteen social workers who declined to write a favorable home study report; BarbaraBrenda.  The Legendary John Beachum, who sweetly sends an inscribed first edition of Sy Barlowe’s A Child’s Book of Stars.

4.

            We spend the next ten months stumbling through our new lives. I plant a few bulbs, make pies when the air turns cool, struggle to remember the words to children’s songs. Freddy works, I take care of Victoria. We are her satellites. It is exactly what we wanted, and nothing as we imagined. Victoria is utterly perfect, as friends and neighbors invariably remind us; Freddy and I less so. We fail to notice some things, focus too intensely on others. Freddy doesn’t notice how slowly the days go when he’s at work, or how quickly time passes between stages. Victoria is walking. Victoria has outgrown stacking cups. Victoria is too social to remain at home all day with an unamusing mother. A mother who is too tired to play, too cranky to teach, too desperate for naptime to go smoothly. Am I doing this right? This can’t be right. I don’t notice how exhausted I have become, how insulated, how overwhelmed. Instead, I focus on my love for her.
           “I’m going to eat the baby,” I tell Freddy.
           “Don’t eat the baby, Baby Doll.” Freddy focuses on her, too, filling every available wall with stunning black-and-whites, giving away books to free shelves for photo albums. “So much fabulousity in one tiny critter,” he whispers in her ear.
           One afternoon, rather than napping, Victoria is sitting on my lap at the computer while I struggle to compose a letter for a local Democratic fundraiser. Her hands are all over the keyboard; it is a game. I nibble her right cheek, pull her hands away. She leans into the keyboard. I squeeze her arms to her sides. “I looooooove you,” I say. She smiles and bangs the keyboard. I wrap my lips over my teeth and bite her on the cheek. She jerks her head away from the pain, looks at me, and screams. I carry her to the kitchen and hold a piece of ice to her face, but it makes her cry even harder and does nothing to mitigate the bruising. When Freddy comes home, I tell him she slipped out of my arms and banged her cheek on the desk.
            We send her to diaper school so she can get stimulation and I can get rest. Her first sentence is, “Don’t eat me, Mama.”
            I read a New York Times article on post-partum depression; it is under-diagnosed, its symptoms range from emotional to psychological to physical, it can be debilitating, it can be ruinous. Can it be experienced by mothers who’ve not physically given birth? It can.
            At the UVa medical library, I am poring over obstetrical and neonatal texts, taking notes, concluding, diagnosing, wondering if I can pick a therapist out of the phone book or if insurance requires a referral, when I see Jimmy Timmie step away from a group of young interns and come toward me.
            He is smiling. He may as well be wielding an axe.
            He looks at the titles I’ve pulled, looks at my notes, asks me how long it’s been since my last checkup. Eleven months. He looks at his watch. “I’m not due in surgery until one. You have some time right now to cheat the lunar calendar? Come on, those teenaged doctors over there don’t need me.” He is folding my notes, pulling my purse off the back of my chair, helping me up. “Don’t worry about the books, just leave them there. Let’s take a walk over to my office and rule out some things.”
           On the way he asks about Victoria. “Perfect,” I tell him. We pass a restroom and I ask him to wait. Inside, I choose the large handicapped stall, pull back my hair, and vomit.

           “I saw Jimmy today,” I tell Freddy as he swings through the kitchen door with Victoria, their bike helmets, and a bag of peanuts.
           “Jimmy Carter? What’s he up to?”           
           “Smartass. Hey, don’t give her any of those peanuts. The pediatrician says no nuts or shellfish until she’s two.”
           “Oops. Too late.” he says. “At least we know she doesn’t have food allergies.”           
            “You’ve fed her peanuts, or shellfish, or both?”
           “Peanuts today. Does sushi count as shellfish?”
            “Depends,” I say. I breathe. “So, I saw Jimmy today. He wants to take some pictures.”
            “Why?”
            I smile at Victoria, reach into the bag, and give her an unshelled peanut.
            “He just thinks it’s time for pictures. With the CT scanner thingy.”
            Freddy is silent for a moment. He and I watch Victoria bite into the shell and make a face.
            “OK, Baby Doll,” he says quietly.  “The one at the hospital has the lens I made. We’ll get some good pictures with that.” Victoria winds up for a cry of frustration, but Freddy pops a shelled peanut into her mouth just in time.
           
           We get horrible pictures. Crystal clear. Irrefutable. Jimmy Timmie uses a pen to point out the tumors on the screen: one big one just below my rib cage, and some smaller, skinny ones farther down. The composition looks like a fetus.
         
            Time collapses in on itself. We make space in our lives for surgery, for chemotherapy, for more surgery. I am in the hospital for our daughter’s second birthday. I am too sick to make pies.
           
           Victoria’s first conversation is with me, in her Big Girl Bed, a month after she turns two. “They paint my foot,” she says as I tuck her in.
            “Oh, did you do an art project at school today? Good for you. Mama wants to see it tomorrow. Night-night now.” I reach too quickly to turn off the light and backhand the lamb-lamp, which falls off the table by her bed.
            “They paint my foot, Mama.”  I sit on the edge of the bed partly to retrieve the lamp, partly to rest, but mostly because I sense she has something to tell me.
            “Who painted your foot, my sweetheart?”
            Victoria pulls her left foot from under the quilt, pats the sole, and says, “Papa hold me up and they paint my foot and I cry.”
            I take a moment. “You remember that, little kitten?”
            She nods her head. “I cry,” she says again.
            “That was when we were in China,” I tell her. “That was the day you and Mama and Papa became a family. They got your footprint and we signed papers and then you were ours and we were yours, forever and ever. You remember?” She nods again.
           I kiss her head and pat her back and push through exhaustion to go all the way downstairs, to the kitchen, to tell Freddy. He reminds me of the photograph the slim young Chinese clerk snapped of the three of us that day: Freddy and me beaming, holding between us a miniature red footprint and a screaming Victoria. “She saw the picture, Baby Doll. She remembers the picture, not the day.” But now I am crying, and wondering what else she will remember.

            In the spring, I let Freddy take a series of pictures of me as I lose my hair. He photographs the scars on my belly, and the bump under my chest where the catheter is implanted.
           He takes time off from work to go to movies with me while Victoria is in school. Neighbors offer to bring food, but Freddy wants to cook for us, so he declines. Instead they send books and too-big clothes for Victoria, which I make him put away so he’ll know where they are when she needs them.
           In the car on the way to chemo one day, he plays Leonard Cohen and asks me if I am afraid. “As far as I can tell, I have the easy part. I’m only worried for you and the munchkin,” I tell him. It’s not quite true, but close enough.
           “We’ll be fine, Baby Doll. Don’t you worry about us.” He reaches across the seat and holds my hand. 
          During treatment that day, in and out of sleep, I see him looking at me.

            The drugs, the worry, the logistics all conspire to distort memory. I can’t keep anything in my head, have no sense of time beyond treatment intervals, Jimmy Timmie appointments and CT scans. Things are speeding up. Three months, then six weeks, then one month between assessments; planning is truncated based on the next milestone, beyond which there is always another milestone, which Jimmy reminds me is better than running out of milestones, but still, should we call a sitter three weeks out and accept the invitation now, or do a conditional RSVP, or what? Will we be up for meeting Victoria’s friend Izzy and her parents at the zoo in two weeks? Should I really invest in a six-month supply of contact lenses?

            My hair comes back in sketches. Freddy documents the transformation. The chemo doesn’t make me sick like the first time and my hair’s coming back. Should we book flights to Phoenix for The Legendary John Beachum’s son’s wedding?

            Victoria at bedtime: stories are read, lights are off, NPR is on, and she will not release from the hug. “What’s going on, my love?” I say into her ear.
           “I scared.”
            “Why, baby?” She sits back a little and looks at me.
            “Where is your hair, Mama?”
            “It’s growing, honey, see? Want to feel?”
            She puts her hand on my head, rubs, laughs, and lies back on the pillow. “Mama, Izzy said you are sick.”
            “Izzy said that because I lost my hair? Well, my angel, I was sick, but I took some very strong medicine that only grownups take, and now I’m getting better.” My head explodes with a silent bang, and I’m thankful the light is out. “You don’t have to be scared for me, Victoria. Mama’s all right. Everything’s all right. I love you love you love you.”           
           
           Freddy and me at bedtime tonight: I’ve put the crossword down, the light is off, and he pulls me into him to spoon. “You’re shaking, Baby Doll. Are you cold?”
           “Scared,” I say, and begin to cry.
           He rocks me, and I push my face into the pillow so Victoria doesn’t hear.
           “Come here, turn around. Turn around to me,” he says. I do. “Look at me.” I do. “I’m right here. I’m right here. I’m scared, too, but I’m here. I need you to be here, too.”
           “But Freddy.” I take a deep breath. “I’m already somewhere else.”
           He rocks me more. “I know, Baby Doll.”
           This night is long.
           And in between sleeping and not sleeping, I wonder what future obscenities the universe might offer that my husband and my little daughter could bear and I could not.
           And tthis is how I imagine it will go:
           He’ll want to do for me, so I’ll close my eyes and say, Sing me the Leonard Cohen.
          He’ll stop, smile, breathe, lower his forehead onto my shoulder for a moment before he lifts his eyes, looking at me, looking at my face. I open my eyes and see both of his. Both of his. He looks at me. His breath warms my cheek as he whisper-sings.  I can barely listen for looking into those eyes.  And so I look away. This time I am the first to look away.
           He pulls me closer, rocks me, and his breath goes still.
           Then, “It’s all right, Baby Doll. Everything’s all right.”
           I close my eyes and he rocks me. And I’m falling back, falling for his fictions, falling into him, falling away, falling deeper, deeper into love, into love, into stars.