The Year In Review

The Dad waits until the kids are pretty much screaming before he goes in and gets them out of bed.

They’re fine.

They’re fine in their beds with their stuffies and water bottles, plus they have each other. Plus, he wants to teach them that it’s okay to be awake in their beds in the morning, and maybe if he doesn’t run in there right away, they’ll do some rolling over and getting back to sleep.

That’s the goal.

Plus, he’s tired. The Dad is always tired. They both are.

The Mom is still asleep, deep sleeper that she is. It’s fine.

He can let her sleep while he goes and gets the kids out of bed.

Devin is three, shy, reverting to babytalk. Eliza, at sixteen months, likes to pull to a stand inside her crib and let herself fall sawed-tree style backwards onto her mattress. They can stay in bed until 7:30 and there will still be enough time to get everyone dressed and fed before work.

If they’re screaming before 7:30, the Dad goes in and opens the curtains and brings them each something to read: a board book with mirrors for Eliza, a magazine for Devin. Then he goes back to bed or uses the bathroom and gets dressed.

Devin’s bed has an open side to let him get out on his own, but he never takes advantage

of it.

Some days, 7:30 comes and goes, and the Dad shoots upright in bed.

The silence feels too dense to not be masking something terrible. The Dad creeps down the hallway and eases open the door to the kids’ room. Inside, half light peoples their little menagerie: a giant plush giraffe, an elephant rocking horse. He gets down on the carpet and crawls on his hands and knees between the crib and the bed, and then he reaches out to touch both of them at the same time.

One time, he woke Devin, feeling for the breath on his lips, and had to pretend that he was looking for something on the floor.

Sometimes, not so much anymore, but sometimes the Dad has been so tired that he wasn’t sure what was and wasn’t real.

Today, they wake him up around 7:20. The house is blurry but clean.

Circling back towards the bathroom after dropping off the magazine and the book, the Dad begins to take in how clean the house really is. It’s not that the house is usually dirty, but it’s an old house, the kind of house where every door has a personality, and with the kids, things tend

to pile up in the corners. Totems of growing inner lives – straw wrappers, loose change, dog toys repurposed as regular toys – drag themselves around and accumulate.

A collared shirt, his own, draped over the railing by the stairs, comes briefly to life as he walks past.

Now he sees with increasing clarity the fall light falling unfiltered through dustless windows, the way the corners of hand towels form fingers pointing down and out, as if to accuse the hands that hung them the night before. The bathroom mirrors that reflect each other just right, so that it looks like you’re walking up behind yourself, are so finely buffed that it’s tough to see where they end.

He sits on the toilet, opens the news app on his phone, sees the date as the app loads. Shit.

Of course.

When she doesn’t sleep, she cleans.

He washes his hands, turning the water on and off with his wrists so that he doesn’t smudge the knob.

In the bedroom closet there is a bag with a book and a card.

He nudges his way into the closet, brings the bag quickly downstairs, and comes back up. On his way back up, he grabs the shirt off the railing and throws it onto the stairs going up to the attic, where he works.

The book is for the Mom.

She and the Dad insist on maintaining a perfect understanding.

They’ve always had a hunger to know each other deeply. They’ve always wanted to know each other more fully than it would be possible to know more than one person in a single lifetime.

This started long before they were the Mom and the Dad. When they were dating, they used to play a game called popping secrets where they would tell each other things that they had never told anyone else. They imagined laying all of their secrets out on the bed, his bed or hers, and pressing down on them until they popped. The secrets could be true secrets, things they actively hid from other people, or they could be early memories, or they could be patterns of thought grooved into their minds so deeply that they’d never noticed until they found someone to share them with.

One time, the Dad said that on his way to work, he tended to rank people.

This was in response to the question, What’s the most unappealing thing about you?

Back then, he took the bus to work. He would rank the people riding with him on the bus. “Rank them how?” asked the Mom.

“Just kind of overall,” said the Dad.

But by what? Best dressed? Best looking? Was there a scoring system? Was race involved?

“It’s more of a feeling,” said the Dad. “A gestalt.”

He can still remember sitting on her bed having the sinking feeling of like he’d made a terrible mistake.

And where would she rank?

He swallowed. “Cream of the crop.” “But tell me. Based on what?”

This was the Mom before she was the Mom. He can picture her moving towards him on her bed, in her rental above a grocery store that held dominoes games in the back storeroom.

By which he took to mean, So what? That’s the worst you can do?

So what?

At 7:30, tiny hands are balled and pushed down shirtsleeves. Socks selected.

Devin always drags his socks on by the cuff rather than using the scrunch and pull method that the Dad has shown him, and the Dad is trying, trying, to let him find his own way.

And then, slowly, the trip downstairs.

They pass three circular windows along the stairs, each of which offers a slightly different vantage of leaves blowing against their neighbor’s fence.

At the kitchen table, the kids eat yogurt side by side. Eliza is silent, focused on bringing the spoon to her mouth and back to her bowl. Devin babbles until Eliza reaches her spoon over towards his bowl and he says, No Elida, this is my yogurt, before going back to babbling.

The Dad stands while he eats his own yogurt and makes coffee for himself and the Mom. Upstairs, a phone alarm starts going off.

“She’ll be down any minute,” says the Dad as he wipes Eliza’s face, wipes the kitchen table where she’s spilled.

The Mom will come down and have her coffee and breakfast and then, because it’s a Tuesday, her mom will come to take care of the kids, and the Mom will drive to work while the Dad works in the attic.

A year ago today was probably the same. Coffee, yogurt. A year ago Eliza was most likely just starting out on yogurt.

The Dad pokes into the dining room to check on the gift, which he’s left on the table, and startles at a green fleece hung over the back of one of the chairs that no one ever uses.

They only need three chairs really, for the Mom, the Dad, and Devin’s booster seat. Eliza has a high chair. Which leaves two seats at the table, the two heads, always empty.

The fleece is hung over the chair closest to the kitchen doorway, so that it looks at first like the back of a person waiting to be joined at dinner. That’s what startles him.

The Dad wonders how he hadn’t noticed it before.

It’s her friend’s fleece, the fleece she got from her friend. From her friend’s father, actually.

He’d thought he might see the fleece today.

If the fleece were any other jacket, he’d hang it in the closet by the front door where it belongs. But if she’s left the fleece here on purpose, she’ll notice that it’s gone, and she may take that as a sign that he’s trying to hide it from her. But if she didn’t leave it out on purpose, it’s like he’s making a choice to remind her, when maybe she’d just as soon have it be hidden away.

He’s stuck, and he’s still stuck when the kids say the Mom’s name in unison and he turns around and there she is.

Sometimes, the Dad is struck by a sense of gratitude for the way that everything they say to each other has the advantage of having everything they’ve already said in front of it.

Everything they’ve ever said to each other has cleared the way for the thing they’ll say next. And even then, some things are difficult to say.

In front of the kids they need to use code, and that can make even simple things hard to say, too.

For instance, if either kid hears them talking about chapstick, they’ll want to use it, and then they won’t give it back until they’ve smeared a shiny film all the way from their nose to their chin, and the stick is flattened backwards over the tip of the tube.

“Do you have an ointment to moisten my mouth?” the Dad will ask.

Or their conversations will be interrupted so many times they’ll forget what they’d meant to be talking about.

They’ll say, Let’s talk about that later, which Devin sometimes repeats when they ask him to tell them about his day.

Let’s talk about that later, Mama, he says, laying his hand out to rest on her shoulder.

And the important things, the things that would be difficult to talk through even with all the time and all possible words, are even harder still.

The kitchen table where the kids are sitting is the same place where the Mom and Dad were standing when they heard.

They were standing at the table when the Mom’s dad called her and told her he’d just spoken with the dad of her friend. The Dad had had his arms around her, trying to hear the voice over the phone.

It would be difficult to describe something like that in front of the kids.

Or the fleece. It would be difficult to describe how the Dad felt when he saw the Mom carrying the fleece down the stairs at her friend’s parents’ house. She was carrying the fleece and a pair of boots and some jewelry and books, and two of her other friends were behind her,

similarly burdened, followed by the friend’s dad. They’d looked like captured barbarians made to carry the spoils of their own defeat.

That had been, barely, before either kid’s time, and the Dad wouldn’t get halfway through telling the story without having to stop.

“It seemed like you were up all night,” he says.

In front of the kids, the Mom is chorus-line smiles. She shrugs.

“I got you something,” says the Dad. “It’s in the dining room.” “Do you want to bring it in here?”

“It’s in the dining room.”

Devin makes a sound like he’s trying to form the word room.

He’s imitating Eliza, they’ve decided. He’s trying to save his job as the baby of the family. And he does, they’ve admitted to each other after the kids have gone to bed, he really does a killer Eliza.

The microwave clock beeps as the Mom and Dad watch each other over their kids’ heads. “Do you want to see it?” he asks.

“Just a second,” says the Mom, and wipes another dab of yogurt off of the kitchen table.

She stands for a moment with the towel pressed between her fingers, looking for something else to clean.

Then she says, “Okay,” and follows the Dad into the dining room.

He sweeps the bag off of the table and hands it to her, standing in front of the green

fleece.

The bag is paper, one of the standard gift-bag options at the bookstore and has a pen and ink drawing of a half-full bookshelf printed on its side. In this moment, it feels very twee, and the Dad wishes he’d got something in a solid color.

The Mom reads the card.

She lifts the tissue paper out of the gift bag and reads the back cover of the book inside. It’s the type of book that therapists assign for take home work.

“What’s this?” she asks. “It’s a book,” he says. “Right, but why?”

Why a book, or why this book? She might as well be asking about something as obvious

as air.

“This is a book that I read,” says the Dad, choosing carefully. “I thought you could read it

too.”

“This is your book?”

“I thought we each could have our own copy.”

She looks at the outline of a face on the front cover, turns it over and looks at the back

again.

The front door opens and it’s the Mom’s mom, come to take care of the kids. The dog, hiding in another room, runs into the kitchen to say hello.

“Thank you,” says the Mom. The book goes back into the bag. She adds, “Let’s talk about this later.”

What’s there to talk about? It’s a book.

On her way out of the room, she grabs the fleece as well.

“Dara?” the Dad calls after her, which is the name he uses when they’re not in front of the kids.

Breakfast is finished.

Hands and mouths are scrubbed. The Mom leaves for work.

The Dad takes the dog outside.

It’s cold outside, and blowing, and he finds himself stretching his legs so that his footsteps don’t land on any cracks in the sidewalk. The dog stops at every corner to find the scent of all the dogs that have already walked this way ahead of them.

Maybe the book wasn’t the right gift. Maybe there is no right gift. But the Dad can’t accept that – that there’s nothing he can do. He doesn’t want today to always be the day where they review the year behind them and mark their progress towards the point where today will be just any other day. He wants to text and say that he knows that it’s a strange day to get a gift, but he wanted to get her something anyway. But he waits.

By the time they get back, the kids and their grandma are already playing in the basement.

He stops in the kitchen to refill his coffee.

There is, somehow, still yogurt residue in front of where Eliza was sitting.

They were standing at the kitchen table when the mom’s dad called them with the news. The memory feels physically warm, as if it’s meant to be stepped into.

The Mom is standing at the kitchen table on the phone with her dad, and the Dad has his arms around her, trying to hear what’s being said.

The Dad is sure there’s been a mistake. A rumor has wormed its way into truth.

But the tinny voice on the phone confirms the outline of a terrible thing that has happened.

Life has divided. A sudden, irreversible, thing has happened to the Mom’s best friend, a person she has known for as long as she has known herself.

All the air goes out of both of us together.

The one of us who is holding the phone shrieks and falls to the floor, and the one who is holding her falls, too.

We land on the floor.

And the Dad is already thinking, on the floor by the kitchen table, maybe she thought he would catch her.

The Dad fills the dog’s bowls and heads upstairs to start work.

On the stairs, he passes by the set of three circular windows. The leaves in their neighbor’s yard are still being gathered, scattered, and thrown against the fence.

He stops into their bedroom to get a sweater.

On the Mom’s bedside table, she’s folded the bag into a square with the book laid on top.

His card is tented on top of the book. Maybe she’ll read it after all.

The Dad takes the card and tucks it against the book’s title page.

At the top of the attic stairs, there is a hunched little doorway into his office, where his desk faces another window looking at the same neighbor’s leaves. His shirt, the one he’d left on the stairs, is now dressed over the back of his chair, its arms hanging limply.

What’s the most unappealing thing about you?

Outside, there is not a single thing that is not in motion.

He ducks through the doorway, crosses the room, and unlatches the window. He raises it a few inches, as far as the creaking frame will allow.

A draft of thick attic air, escaping, begins to tremble the hair on his arms as it rushes past, and the door behind him throws itself bindingly shut.