“You’re right,” I say. “I don’t know what to do about that.”
“I don’t know either.” Jack takes hold of my left hand across the table, rubbing his finger across the rings I’m wearing. “I don’t know if it’s too late or not. I don’t know if we can get past the things that haunt us. I don’t know if you can let go.”
He’s talking about the nursery—the secret shrine in the third bedroom. He’ll want to box it up and put it in the storage unit in the basement of the building and all my hope will be in the dark and damp of that forgotten nowhere where people dump old grills and camping equipment and bicycles with flat tires and boxes of things from their childhood that they can’t throw away but don’t really need and when the baby finally gets here, I’ll have to explain to people that the nursery is in the basement.
How will you hear him crying way down there? they will ask.
“I don’t know if I can either,” I say. “I don’t know how.”
“Do you want us back?” Jack asks.
“I want Cassie back,” I say, honestly.
“Is this about Elliot?” Jack says.
“Oliver,” I correct him. “And no, it isn’t. He and I aren’t together. I don’t know that we ever were, really. Not like that. I know I’m not going to have another baby. I know I neglected Cassie, and I ran you off. I know all the things are my fault. I just don’t know that I can forgive you. I don’t know that you can forgive me.”
“Maybe not,” Jack says and lowers his head.
“I have to go,” I say. “Good-bye, Jack.”
Desperate to get out of the restaurant, I hurry past the people waiting in the foyer and fling myself out into crisp night air. The heat from the restaurant gives way to the chill of early November.
I remember Lola and me as teenagers in the grocery store, staring at the ice cream. Lola couldn’t remember what any of it tasted like.
What does mint taste like with chocolate? What is fudge? Black cherry? Toffee?
She opened up the cooler and cold air fell out as she reached in and picked a pint.
You don’t like cherries.
I put it back and handed her a different pint.
This is your favorite one—cookie dough. She took the container and looked at it, then back at me, as if waiting for instructions. You always save two little balls of dough for the very end. You pick around them and save them for last.
She had no idea if what I said was true. This wasn’t forgetting Aunt Rose’s name or the words to the birthday song. It wasn’t about remembering the past. It was about living in the present and knowing what mint chocolate chip ice cream tasted like.
I remember Mom found us by the ice cream coolers.
Everything ok?
She picked cookie dough. Just like always.
Lola looked scared.
Everything’s fine, I said to her. Everything is fine.
Are you sure? the genie I had hoped for says to me, straightening out his cummerbund and righting his hat.
I don’t know.
“Nina,” I hear Jack calling me, and I turn around to meet his frightened eyes. He’s out of breath like he’s been running, even though we’re just outside the restaurant door. “Cassie. She’s hurt.”
◆ ◆ ◆
A doctor relays all the details of the accident as told to him by the father of Cassie’s “boyfriend.”
“A simple case of running around the pool,” he says as if our daughter isn’t lying there with all manner of tubes and wires protruding from her, with monitors timing the rhythm of her heart, her breath.
I try to piece together the story. Apparently, Cassie was running around at the edge of the pool playing tag with this boy, Zach, and she slipped. Her feet came out from under her, and she fell directly onto the back of her head. She slipped off the pool deck and under the water. It took a few moments for Zach to drag her out.
I hear it, but it doesn’t seem real. I feel like I’m underneath the water, drowning.
“All her organs are functioning,” the doctor is saying, still talking at a fast clip as if he thinks there is any way I could be keeping up with this. “Watching for brain swelling . . .”
I’m sinking, sinking down to the bottom of the pool with Cassie.
“. . . will be critical. We’ll have to see if there is any lasting damage.”
I look up from beneath the water and see fireworks.
Not again. Please, not again.
Jack puts his arm around me, and I don’t shrug it off. I’m too stunned to cling to him, to fall to my knees, to cry out, or any other dramatic thing I’ve seen in the movies. I just stand there, tears burning silent trails down my face, looking at Cassie lying still and quiet except for the beeping of the monitors which are all I have that tells me she’s still in there somewhere.
Jack has my phone and calls Mom and Lola and Ray. He asks me if I want to talk to them, but I shake my head. So long as I don’t have to speak about it, this might not actually be happening.
While Jack stands by the window talking on the phone, nurses and doctors and people whose purpose I’m unsure of come and go on an invisible tide. I sit, holding Cassie’s hand, and say nothing to anyone. I’m reminded of watching the waves at the beach. Seeing them roll up in sets. Sudden and furious, one on top of the other and then
