The Air We Breathe

by Christa Parrish

  Downstairs, she unwrapped an herbal tea bag, dropped it into a mug of water, and heated it for two minutes in the microwave. She toasted an English muffin, smeared peanut butter on it, and when she reached into the microwave to grab her tea she saw them—Caden and Amelia—flashing behind her eyes—mental ghosts, real ghosts, perhaps—and their faces surprised her so much she dropped her mug; the scalding liquid spilled on her thigh, the cup shattered on the ceramic tile.

  “Mmm, oww,” she cried, peeling off her jeans, leaving them to sop up the tea as she ran upstairs to the bathroom and pressed a cold, wet cloth to the welt blooming on her leg. “Shoot, shoot, shoot.”

  She didn’t care about the burn. She swiped at her sleeve, exposing the wristwatch Daniel had given her for their third wedding anniversary. Thirty-three minutes. That was how long she’d been awake, how long it took her to remember her children.

  At first, in the days immediately following the accident, there wasn’t a minute she was able to shake them from her head, not a second her grief didn’t hang from her neck, choking her, dragging her down so sleep was her only escape. Even in the hazy moments before she woke, she still knew some part of her was missing, some ugly monster was waiting around the corner to pounce as soon as consciousness crept back in, and when it did she remembered her children were dead.

  Three years. Three years without them, and now each morning it took a little longer for her babies to come to mind. Yesterday, twenty-nine minutes. The day before, twenty-eight. It wouldn’t be long before she went a day without thinking of them. A week.

  What kind of mother was she?

  A childless one.

  In her clean pants, she went back down the stairs but went through the kitchen to the living room, where the last photo of Caden and Amelia sat on the mantel. Her son, forever nine, with his black hair and dark eyes, his body rigid with all the intensity that was Caden, his arm protectively around his sister. Amelia laughed—she was born laughing, and for six years had filled their home with unbridled joy and wonder and trust—her nose small and flat in her chubby face, her tongue protruding between her teeth, white Brushfield spots flecking her irises.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, stroking the picture, smearing her fingerprints across the glass.

  She cleaned up the broken mug, dumped the shards in the trash with the uneaten muffin, stepped into her rubber mud boots—not because of the weather but because they slipped on easily—and in her jacket walked four blocks to the Newsstand, the small periodical and tobacco shop nestled between the barber and a florist on Broadway.

  Malachi smiled as she pushed open the door. “Late today, Lady Claire.”

  “I spilled my tea on me this morning. Burned the skin off my leg.”

  “Glad it’s nothing serious.”

  Claire laughed. “Thanks so much.” She folded the New York Times under her arm without looking at the date. She knew it already; it had been creeping up on her since the beginning of the month. Determined not to think about it, she dropped two one-dollar bills into the undergrad’s hand. “How are you doing?”

  “It’s all good. Know what I mean? I’m breathing. I got a girl. I’m passing physics. Barely. But D equals diploma. I can do that math, all right. ’Bout the only math I can do.”

  “Not so good for physics.”

  “Ah. That’s why I’m a psychology major. Tell me, how long does it take you to do one of your puzzles?”

  “It depends. My best time is two fifty-seven, but that was a Monday. I haven’t managed a Saturday in under seven minutes yet.”

  “You are one determined woman,” Malachi said, pushing two quarters across the glass counter. “I can’t finish one in seven hours.”

  “I have a lot more time on my hands to practice,” Claire said. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Only if you’re sitting in the dreaded physics.”

  “D equals diploma.”

  “I hear ya, Lady Claire. I’ll be back in on Thursday.”

  She felt calmer with the newspaper against her body, knowing in minutes she’d be home—the puzzle section folded in a tidy rectangle, the side of her hand and pinky bruised with ink as she filled in the small squares. She lived her life in those boxes, the point of her pencil jumping from one to the next, her whole world summed up in concrete solutions.

  Safe inside her front hallway, she walked out of her boots, shrugged off her coat, and opened the paper with a shake, the musty newsprint smell fanning her body. She twisted one Ticonderoga pencil in her hair, clutched another in hand, sat at her desk, and set the timer.

  She had her own technique, completing the across clues first, until she got stuck, and then she worked the downs.

  1. Society newbies. Four letters.

  DEBS

  5. Disreputable. Five letters.

  SHADY

  11. Earthbound birds. Four letters.

  EMUS

  The phone rang, and with the first tone, Claire tried to ignore it. Planned to, moving through two clues before the second tone came, a gentle tweeting from the mobile in her pocket. Daniel’s ring. She’d never changed it, and it still surprised her the rare times he called. Six times, maybe, during the two years they’d been divorced, and only once in the past six months. On Caden’s birthday.

  Hesitating, she flipped the newspaper over.

  September 4, 2002.

  She managed to dig her phone out and flip it open by the fourth ring.

  “Claire, it’s Daniel.”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah, of course. I’m sorry. I just . . . I wasn’t sure you’d pick up.”

  “I thought about it.”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have called.”

  “What do you want, Daniel?”

  He swallowed loud enough that she could hear it in the five hundred miles and all the unspoken disappointments between them. “She would have been nine.”

  She said nothing.

  “Are you still there?” he asked.

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have called, but I wanted to . . . I mean, I needed to remember her with someone who . . . understands.”

  “Lisa not cutting it today?”

  “Claire—”

  “You called me.”

  Daniel sighed. “Lisa is fine. Thank you for asking.”

  “She’s due in February, right?”

  “How did you—?”

  “Your mother. We still talk, sometimes.”

  “I wanted to tell you. There just didn’t seem like a good way to do it.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She sighed, jabbing the pencil point deep into every O in the newsprint. “You apologize a lot.”

  “I can’t imagine I’ll ever be done,” he said. Swallowed again. “Have you been to the, uh, you know—”

  “No.”

  “But you are going?”

  Forgetting, she’d discovered, was an art. People spent their lives mastering it, using all manner of techniques—prescriptions, delusions, a fifth of, well, any old cheap liquor from the discount warehouse—but she had a certain knack. Give her eighty clues and a pencil, and the world disappeared. Give her thirty-three minutes and her daughter’s birthday . . . “Yes.”

  “Could you . . . tell them I love them?”

  “Yeah, okay,” she whispered, and hung up.

  Claire swept her fingertip beneath her eye, expecting tears but finding none. She flattened the timer into the desk, number side down, and buried it under the newspaper. She changed her clothes, again. This time into a soft cotton dress—plain gray like her favorite rainy-day sweatshirt—and red flowered clogs, because it didn’t seem right to wear jeans or mud boots to the cemetery.

  She walked back down the street to the florist and bought three small bouquets of carnations—red and white and yellow, half still closed and wrinkled. She kept her eyes turned down, avoiding the faces of those she passed. Her feet
, sweaty with the exertion, slid forward in her shoes, her toes grating against a rough inside seam. She removed her shoes and continued, barefoot, to Saint Victor’s, walking beside the gravel path rather than on it, in the sharp broad-blade grass.

  She could have found their stones with her eyes closed—all three of them, gray rectangles with glassy fronts, the unpolished sides gritty with tiny peaks and divots. She rubbed her hand over the middle marker—Amelia’s—the dry skin on her palm catching on the rough marble. Rubbed until she felt heat, then pain. “Oh, my baby,” she said, turning her head up toward the sun. She tried to suck the tears back inside her with a deep sniffle, but they came anyway, and she let them, wiping her cheeks with the cuff of her sleeve.

  The cellophane crinkled, and she hugged the carnations to herself as if they were her children, pushing her face into the tops and breathing deep, imagining undertones of cherry ChapStick or Johnson’s No More Tears or gingerbread houses in the floral scent.

  Unwrapping the bouquets, she placed a bunch on each grave—first Caden, then Amelia, and then Alexis Rose, her baby born into God’s arms.

  No, I put her there.

  She sat, and beneath her dress pulled her knees to her chest and tucked the hem under her feet to keep the cold September soil away from them. “Your dad called,” she said. “He couldn’t . . . make it, but he wanted me to tell you he loves you.” How idiotic, trying to protect them from their parents’ divorce. If they could see her and Daniel, they already knew. And if they couldn’t? Well, then it didn’t matter.

  She didn’t say anything more but stayed there, finding small words in the larger ones on the headstones, watching ants scurry around the stems of the carnations, exhaling down into her collar, into the tent made by her dress, to stay warm, dozing for a while, head clamped between her knees. Finally, when the white clouds turned pink and flattened along the horizon, she walked home wearing her shoes.

  She unwrapped a Healthy Choice ravioli meal and heated it in the microwave. She didn’t cook anymore, hadn’t turned a burner on in months for anything except to make tea. One plate at the table, one serving in the pot . . . All that depressed her. More reminders of her failures. She ate in front of the television, watching a Friends rerun, black plastic tray balanced on her thigh, and when she finished she tossed her trash into the can with the day’s paper, stuffing the wad into the too-full bag. Then she found one of her puzzle books on the bookshelf and filled in boxes with letters until she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore.

  3

  HANNA

  MAY 2002

  She wore dresses on Saturdays. Every other day it was jeans or leggings or shorts, but Saturdays were special. It was errand day for her father, and he took her with him. They would walk to the bank and post office, would pick up any odds and ends her mother decided she needed, and then he’d take Hanna for ice cream. Stewart’s mint chocolate chip, usually, but on rare occasions she had a chocolate shake instead. Her father always had the shake, with extra malt powder, and he let Hanna have as much as she liked even after she finished her cone.

  He’d tried to get her to have something else when the weather turned cold—the convenience store had hot dogs with free meat sauce, and chili, and sometimes chicken noodle soup, which was better than her mother’s but she would never say that aloud—but Hanna stuck with the ice cream, despite her father’s rhyme. “Ice cream on a winter’s day, will pneumonia bring your way.” Or whooping cough. Or brain freeze. Or warts. He substituted a different ailment every time, and Hanna would giggle and order an extra scoop for only fifty cents more.

  She wriggled into her favorite polka-dot play dress without undoing the button at the neck, tugging and twisting until her head finally emerged, her fine blond hair alive with static electricity, clinging to her face and dancing in the air around her. Hanna licked her palms and smoothed her hands over it; and the strands settled as Hanna twisted an elastic around them, gathering it all at the nape of her neck. Though Hanna was eleven, her mother still babied her hair, combed it, blow-dried it, and called it corn silk.

  She fumbled around the top drawer of her dresser, the one that kept her underpants and socks and half undershirts she pretended were real bras, and found her favorite pair of cotton tights. A rainbow wrapped around each leg from ankle until just above the knee, six thick colored stripes starting with red and ending with purple, skipping indigo completely. That’s what her father told her each time she wore them. “So much for Roy G. Biv.” Hanna didn’t care. She liked stripes even more than polka dots.

  “You look like the gypsies dressed you,” her mother told her as she twirled into the kitchen. Susan crammed a handful of spinach into the blender on the counter in front of her, shook in some frozen blueberries.

  “Nuh-uh,” Hanna said, slipping on her fat, squishy beach clogs. Bright green. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “Here. Here,” her father said.

  “Well, let’s go,” Hanna said.

  “It’s warm out there. Like summer. You may not want your missing-indigo tights.”

  Hanna opened the back door. It was hot. “Okay, hold on a minute.” She peeled off the tights in the downstairs bathroom, leaving them hanging over the shower bar.

  Her mother hated that.

  “Now I’m ready,” Hanna said, pirouetting back into the kitchen. She grabbed her father’s hand, tugged it. “Come on.”

  “So, I’ll see you at Peg’s for lunch?” Susan asked.

  “We’ll be there,” Henry said, and before Hanna could get the words past her teeth, he lifted her arm above her head and twirled her down the hall and through the front door. “Let’s make like a bee and buzz off.”

  “Dad.”

  “Sorry, Hanna-Bee. Scientists and funny do not mix.”

  The sun shone sharp and white, reflecting off most of the outside surfaces—mailboxes, car hoods, the thick, leathery leaves of her mother’s azaleas. Hanna squinted, the light overwhelming her. Blue eyes were more sensitive than brown—she knew that, but she despised sunglasses. They pinched behind her ears and slid down her sweaty nose, and worse, they made everything around her look dull and dirty. Her mother tried all the time to get her to wear them, saying she should protect her eyes. Susan’s baby blues were bothered by the sun, too, and she walked around with saucer-sized brown lenses dwarfing her thin face whenever she went outdoors.

  “Why’s she coming?” Hanna clamped her arms across her chest. She loved her mother, but so did Henry, and Hanna got lost in the shuffle of his attention toward Susan. She wanted her time alone with him.

  “We want to talk to you. Together.”

  “You talk to me all the time.” She paused and then said, in a puffed, almost teenaged voice, “Together.”

  “Don’t get fresh.”

  “Sorry,” Hanna mumbled. She kicked a stone off the sidewalk; it fell through the grate in the road. She looked through as she walked over it, but of course couldn’t see the rock down there. All the grays and blacks blended together.

  Divorce.

  The word bloomed somewhere in the center of her mind—if she concentrated on it, she could see it, a seedling pushing through black dirt, right in the space behind where her nose and forehead met, that heavy space, the one that filled up first when she had a cold and never completely cleared away. She tried to visually stop the intrusion, but the idea grew larger, like watching time-lapse photography; the green plant-word unfurling toward the light, leaves stretching out, reaching, stem thickening, growing tall.

  Don’t be stupid. They never fight. Then again, Charlotte Conrad’s parents split last fall, and she said she’d never heard them argue, never ever. Not even when they went into the bedroom for privacy; she knew because she listened at the heating vent that connected their room and hers. “They said they still loved each other but just grew apart, whatever that means,” Charlotte had told her at the school lunch table as she licked a chocolate pudding blob from a plastic spoon.

  Hanna didn’t wa
nt to ask, but the thought was too large now, and if she didn’t open her mouth the pressure would be too much, so she did and asked, “Are you guys getting divorced?”

  Her father looked stunned for a moment, then laughed, his deep snuffle that sounded like the noise huge pigs make when pushing their snouts through the mud. “Of course not. What on earth gave you that idea?”

  Shrugging, Hanna said, “What else can’t you tell me without Mom?”

  Henry slung his arm around Hanna’s slim shoulder and squeezed her against his side. “It’s good news. Trust me. At least I think it is. No one is dying, leaving, or moving. Or turning into a zombie.”

  Hanna giggled. “Okay. I trust you. But, can we still get ice cream after?”

  “Oh, fine,” Henry sighed an airy, exaggerated sigh. “If we must.”

  They walked through their neighborhood’s sidewalked streets lined with large painted-lady Victorians and early 1880’s brick two-stories and soon entered the area of the city where the houses were smaller, packed tighter together, vehicles parked on the side of the street because most had no driveways. Then the buildings grew into storefronts with three or four floors of apartments above as they approached downtown.

  “Bank or post office first?” Henry asked.

  “Post office.”

  Hanna pushed the button on the crosswalk light and waited for the little white man to pop onto the screen and displace the red hand, and when he did, she grabbed her father’s hand and they walked through the intersection, Hanna tugging slightly and walking more quickly. She had always been afraid of getting stuck in the middle of the road when the light changed, vehicles zooming past her, honking and yelling for her to move out of the way. She knew that wouldn’t happen, had seen drivers wait, both patiently and impatiently, for a straggling pedestrian to get out of the crosswalk. It didn’t matter. The fear didn’t go away.

  The Avery Springs post office was an old stone building with marble floors, high ceilings, and rows of metal mailbox doors. The air was naturally cool inside, cooler still if she flattened herself against the wall, which she did as Henry chatted with the clerk and bought a book of stamps. She sucked in a few gulps of water from the fountain, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand to keep the drops on her chin from landing on the front of her dress, but they did anyway. She wanted ice cream now. Her skin, damp before coming inside, now felt tight with dried sweat. She would have washed her face in the fountain if there had been somewhere to dry it—other than her shoulder.