NINE days after Opal was born I pushed up off the nursery carpet and my legs set me right back down on it.
Not the tired everybody warns you about.
This was my body letting go of the rope, one finger at a time.
Every breath cost more than the one before it.
The corners of the room went soft.
I had a basket of her laundry half folded next to my knee.
“Greg,” I said. “Come here a second.”
He was across the hall in our bedroom with the closet light on, squaring his shoulders in a new checked polo, checking his hairline in the mirror.
His duffel had been sitting closed by the front door since Thursday.
Five days at a lake lodge two hours out of Bettendorf with the guys from the branch.
His weekend. He had been saying it like a title since June.
“Something’s wrong with me,” I said. “I can’t get up off the floor.”
He let his breath out through his nose, the way he does when a call runs long.
“Brandi. Every woman feels wrecked after. That’s what it is.”
“This isn’t that.”
“Noreen did hers by herself and she was up making supper on day five.”
The floor tilted under my knee.
My fingers were numb from the second knuckle out.
I said it plain.
“I need the hospital.”
He turned around then.
Not worried.
Put out.
“Don’t do this. Not today. This is the one thing all year that’s mine.”
“I’m asking you for help.”
“And I’m asking for two days where nobody needs anything off me,” he said. “You can’t stand me having something good without you sitting in the middle of it.”
Then he brought his voice down soft, like he was handing me something.
“The sitter starts Monday. Take two Tylenol and lie down.”
“Noreen’s coming by at four,” I said. “Isn’t she.”
He picked a thread off the polo.
“I told her not to bother. She’s got enough going on.”
“You told your sister not to come.”
“She’d have been here half the night.”
“Greg.”
“DO NOT CALL ME unless the house is on fire,” he said.
He took the duffel up by the middle strap.
The storm door caught on the frame the way it always catches and he pulled it twice.
There was a gutter-cleaning coupon wedged in that door all week and none of us ever took it out.
Then the truck backing down, the click of the signal, the engine going small at the end of the road.
And the house got so quiet I could hear the refrigerator.
I gave myself a job.
Phone.
It was up on the flat part of the changing table, by the wipes.
I got my elbow onto the edge and swung it, and the phone came down beside my ear.
Then my knees went and I went with them.
I hit the carpet on my side with the crib wheel a foot from my face.
The basket tipped and her clothes came out over my legs.
Opal started crying above me.
That crackly wind-up cry, the one that means she is about to get serious.
I got two fingers on the crib rail.
I pulled.
Nothing came.
My arm was there. My arm just was not mine.
Something in me was shutting rooms off in order, the way you close a house for winter.
I found Noreen in my favorites and pressed her name.
It rang the whole way through and went to her recording of the shop’s hours.
I pressed it again.
Same.
Then the screen changed all by itself.
A notification. His name. The little blue ring.
Greg on a dock rail with the lake behind him, flat and brown-green and going nowhere.
A cooler open at his feet.
A beer in a foam koozie, held up at the camera.
He was laughing. Head back, all the way laughing.
“Boys, look at me,” he said into it. “No bottles. No crying. Nobody needing a thing off me. A man’s got to mark his wins. TO THE NEW DISTRICT MANAGER.”
Somebody off camera hollered his name.
The clip hit the end and started over.
To the new district manager.
To the new district manager.
It went around like that while my cheek stayed in the carpet.
He was toasting himself on a dock.
I was working on keeping my eyes open.
Opal’s crying got thin and stretched out.
My hands went cold from the outside in.
The gray came in from the edges of everything and started closing.
And I finally had the thing I had been refusing for eleven years.
He picked the dock.
Over her.
Over us.
My eyes shut.
The last of it was her cry going thinner, and then not being anywhere.
Five days later he came home at supper time, humming.
He told this part himself, later, to people who were not me.
He had a bourbon bottle in a wood box under his arm, the ninety-dollar kind, bought for himself at the place by the marina.
He came in expecting the house he left to be standing there waiting for him.
The kitchen light was off.
No dishes in the sink. No radio. Nobody in the chair.
The nursery door stood open on nothing.
The crib was empty.
The sheet was off the mattress and folded over the rail.
Her clothes were still on the carpet where the basket went over.
The humming stopped in the middle of a bar.
The duffel came off his shoulder and hit the floorboards.
The wood box went out from under his arm, and the bottle inside it broke, and the whole hallway went to bourbon.
“Brandi?”
Nothing.
“Opal?”
Nothing at all.
He went room to room with his hand out in front of him like somebody had moved the light switches on him.
Noreen’s truck was not in the drive.
Our car was.
He said my name at the top of the stairs and then he said it in the garage.
And for the first time since I had known him, my husband was scared of something.
He stood in that doorway with the dent still in the carpet where I went down, and he added it up.
What he did not have was the rest of it.
Somebody came through our front door about forty minutes after his tailgate cleared the road.
Somebody who heard her through the storm door and did not knock.
It was not Noreen.
Whoever it was made a phone call, and then made a decision, and that decision is the reason there was nothing in that crib for him to find.
So the question standing in that empty nursery with him was —
Who came in that door, and what were they carrying when Greg finally ran them down?
Pam Ostrander
The woman who came through our front door was Pam Ostrander, sixty-three, gutter guards and downspouts, half of a two-truck outfit out of Pleasant Valley.
She was the one whose coupon had been stuck in our storm door since Monday. She was walking the street back down that afternoon pulling the flyers nobody had taken, because she says they go yellow in a door and then people think the company went under.
She heard Opal through the glass. She stood there long enough to hear it change. Then she tried our handle and the handle turned.
What she was carrying five days later, when Greg finally ran her down on the third floor of the hospital in Davenport, was my daughter. Car seat in her right hand, level, the way you hold a full pan. A plastic sack of clean onesies in her left.
He came off the elevator still in the polo. He had been to the house, and to the garage, and he had done the math with our car in the drive and nobody in it.
He looked at the car seat. He did not look in it.
“Who are you,” he said.
“I’m the woman whose coupon was in your door,” Pam said.
Seven minutes
We bought the house because of the drive.
I was twenty-six and not pregnant yet and Greg had a spreadsheet with school ratings on it, and I stood in the empty kitchen and said the thing I actually cared about, which was that his mother’s house was forty minutes from anything and I was not going to live like that.
So we timed it. He drove and I held the phone. Seven minutes from our mailbox to the emergency entrance, on a Sunday, hitting the light at Middle Road.
“Seven minutes away,” he said in the driveway. “You’ll never need it.”
That is the man everybody knows. He drove his mother Delores to her cataract appointments both times. He brought the maple long johns to the branch on a Saturday. When my father died he wrote the obituary because I could not, and he got the middle name right.
He did my phone too. He always did my phone. He took it in for the upgrade in March and sat in the plastic chair for an hour and brought it home with everything moved over, my photos, my passcode the same one I use for everything, my favorites already set. Noreen was in there as the shop. Kolar Upholstery, the shop line, the one with her recording of the hours on it.
I did not think about it. You do not think about it. Somebody hands you your phone back and you say thanks.
Noreen came to the shower in March with a car seat cover she had sewn out of the cotton off a chair she reupholstered. She held my elbow at the door on the way out and said if I needed anything, day or night.
Then she stopped coming. Greg said she was slammed with the shop.
I was on the fourth floor before anybody told me she had been calling the nurses’ desk since Saturday morning.
Room 314
Noreen came in on Sunday with a sack of grocery-store carnations still in the plastic.
Four units of blood by then. They had taken me at four in the afternoon Friday and worked on me until sometime Saturday, and what they said afterward was that the bleeding had been going on inside where nobody could see it since about day six.
She did not sit. She stood at the end of the bed with her keys still in her hand.
“Nobody called me,” she said.
I told her Greg had called her off. I said it like a fact I was handing over, because that was the fact I had.
“Friday, sure,” she said. “I mean since the baby.”
Greg got there Wednesday evening. He came into that room like a man coming into his own kitchen. He had bought flowers downstairs at the gift shop and he set them where Noreen’s were and moved Noreen’s to the window.
He was good with the nurses. He is always good with the nurses. He told the one with the clipboard that he had come the second he heard, that there had been no service out at the lodge, that the lake sits down in a hole and you have to drive up to the highway for a bar.
The intake woman had already told me they could not reach next of kin.
I asked him about it with Opal asleep on my chest and the blood pressure cuff filling up on my arm.
“Nobody called me, Brandi,” he said. “You think I’d sit there?”
Dale
Dale Prine runs the Eldridge branch and has known Greg nine years. He is the one hollering Greg’s name off camera in that video, the one you can hear but not see.
He texted me the Friday after, at ten at night, which is a coward’s hour and I have never once held it against him.
He asked how I was. Then he asked if I had seen Greg’s phone.
The hospital called Greg at 6:12 that evening and again at 6:31. Emergency contact. Greg was on the dock with the cooler between his feet and the phone went off in his hand and he turned the screen around and showed it to three grown men.
He said, and Dale typed this out word for word, “That’s my wife. She does this.”
Then he set the phone face down on the cooler lid and got another beer out of it.
Dale said he asked Greg about it Saturday morning and Greg said his sister was at the house with her.
Dale sent me a photograph of Greg’s own call log. He had taken it in the truck on the way home, on the Wednesday, before he knew there was anything to know. Two calls, declined. A voicemail nobody ever opened.
I sat in a recliner in room 314 with my daughter’s whole hand around one of my fingers and read a text from a man I have met maybe six times.
It said: He knew at 6:12.
The back room at Kolar Upholstery
Noreen has a back room with a cutting table and a coffee maker that does not work, and that is where she handed me her phone.
I was eleven days out. She had driven me to the follow-up and we came back to the shop for the car seat base.
She had the thread pulled up already. My name at the top of it, my picture, the one from the wedding.
March, the night of the shower: thank you for coming today, it was a lot, I’m going to be quiet for a while.
April: please don’t come by unannounced.
June: we want it just us for the first while. Please respect that.
August the second, at 2:14 in the morning: I’m not up for visitors when we get home. Greg will let you know.
I was in a room at Genesis at 2:14 in the morning on August the second with a monitor belt around me and a nurse turning me over every hour. I know because they printed all of it out for me later.
And then Friday, one forty in the afternoon, an hour and a half before I went down on the carpet: don’t come at four. I’m asleep. He’ll call you.
I scrolled up and down that thread three times looking for one I sent.
He had my passcode. He had had it since March, in a plastic chair, doing me a favor.
Noreen took the phone back and put it face down on the cutting table.
“He answered me as you,” she said. “For six months. I sent that woman a birthday text.”
The kitchen table
We did it at the house on a Tuesday because Delores would not come to the shop.
I had three things on the table. The printout of the thread off Noreen’s phone, forty-one pages because the shop printer will not do it small. Dale’s photograph of the call log. The gutter coupon, still folded, that I had pulled out of the storm door myself on the way in.
Greg did almost all the talking. That is the part nobody tells you about a reckoning. You plan what you are going to say and then you sit there and he uses up the whole afternoon.
He said the texts were him managing a situation. He said Noreen is a lot, she has always been a lot, and that I had complained about her in the car in February and he was protecting my peace.
He said, “You were not well. You were not making decisions.”
He said the lodge was booked in June and you cannot get that weekend back.
He said Dale Prine has wanted Eldridge and Bettendorf both for four years and everybody at the branch knows it.
Delores sat with her purse in her lap and told me a marriage is not a court case and that I was going to be sorry for what I was doing to his mother.
Noreen did not say one word for an hour. She sat with her hand flat on the printout.
Then Greg leaned forward with his elbows on our table and asked me the only question he actually came for.
“Has any of this gone to Denning?”
Denning is the regional. Not the doctor. Not his daughter. Denning.
“No,” I said.
“Then we can fix this.”
I wrote a number on the back of the coupon and slid it across to him. My half of the house, minus what it would cost me to fight about it, and it was low, and both of us sitting there knew it was low. I wanted out that week and he could count.
He looked at it a long time.
“You’re going to let her take my daughter out of my house,” he said. To his mother, not to me.
Delores said his name and then did not follow it with anything.
I got Opal’s seat off the counter. Noreen picked up the forty-one pages and squared them on the table like a woman who does that for a living, and she carried them out with her.
The storm door caught on the frame the way it always catches. Noreen held it with her hip until we were both through.
Thursday, over the shop
Six weeks later I live in three rooms above an upholstery shop and the whole place smells like glue and cut foam.
Opal is on a quilt on the floor by the radiator. I get down there with her now. I get down and I stay a while and when I want to be up, I am up, and that is not nothing to me.
Noreen has not spoken to Delores since that Tuesday and does not bring it up. There is a chair at her mother’s table with nobody in it now, and that is on my account, and she has never once said so.
The coupon is taped inside the cabinet over the sink. Not for a reason. It is just where I put it.
Pam came by yesterday with the ladder on the truck and stood in the alley looking up at the shop’s gutters with her hands on her hips.
“Those are shot,” she said. “I’ll do them Thursday.”
I wrote her a check for the whole amount and she took it.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who was on her own in the first weeks with a baby. She will know exactly which part of it was the worst.
For more tales that tug at the heartstrings, you might enjoy reading about My Husband’s Rule Was That Everybody Who Sleeps Here Signs Something or even the story of My Name Was Notarized On Page Four And I Have Never Met The Notary. And if you’re in the mood for another family anecdote, don’t miss I Gave My Sister That Cardigan The Year She Turned Forty.
