And we practice, the drawing in, the pause, the release. Again and again until we are both soft and a little bit melted into each other there on the bed.
“Like what?”
“Like taking a deep breath,” I say. And we practice, the drawing in, the pause, the release. Again and again until we are both soft and a little bit melted into each other there on the bed.
And then she asks me one of those Gabby questions, the kind that can’t be answered in any real way but I try anyway because I am stubborn or because I love her or because I can remember what it felt like to ask someone the big questions, my mother or God or myself, and not get any real answer either. “Why can’t we keep things?”
I don’t think she means it any philosophical way, not on purpose anyway. I think she means that toy, whatever trinket had been taken away from her and inspired her wrath in the first place. Or maybe she means her teeth. And maybe she means her grandmother, because of course that’s where my brain goes immediately, or the flare of her anger, or her babyhood, but I doubt it, mostly.
I answer her with a story that bubbles up from the bowels of my memory, surprising us both. I tell her how many years before, when her Daddy and I were new parents, we took Jack for a walk in his stroller. I tell her too how it had been one of those gorgeous days in the fall where you know your communion with the sun is now on borrowed time and so everything feels a little extra bit like a gift, and while life with a new marriage and a new baby was incredibly hard a lot of the time, right then it felt full of promise.
And we had hiked up the summit of the reservoir’s water tower, where you could see the whole city and also the dot of white siding that was our own little house. “Look baby!” Nick and I had said, pointing. “It’s our house!” and Jack, being a baby, said nothing, although knowing him as well as I do now I suspect he was thinking something snarky about how it takes a special kind of idiot to walk all this way just to look for home.
Just then a butterfly had flown by, and operating on a lark and a wish or just instinct, Nick reached out his hand.
AND HE CAUGHT IT.
