Scott and James stayed in the driveway to get in a game of basketball without their usual bad knees and arthritic hands. Rosie and I packed a bag with bathing suits and towels and took a walk down to the park. Top 40 music bounced from houses, and small groups of people hiked up and down the street, chatting with each other and grinning. All the strangers looked at us as though we all knew each other, as though we were all in on the same secret together. And we were. As we walked down the hill, a rivulet of water from garden hoses flowed in the gutter. Rosie walked in the stream, getting her sandals and feet wet.
“It always amazes me how many people want to wash their cars on Break Day,” said Rosie. “Is that fun? Is there something great about washing metal that I just didn’t get in the life manual?”
“If there is, then I missed it, too,” I said. I swung my arms. “I feel so light.”
“Well, you just lost, what, thirty pounds?”
“Ugh,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone, but it’s more like thirty-five and I’m hoping to keep it under forty.”
“That’s not bad,” said Rosie. “Or so I hear.”
The tree canopy of the park made the midday heat bearable. Crowds were already gathering at the picnic tables, laying out potato salad and cupcakes. Old men had taken over the park’s grills, their walkers left behind at nursing homes. Their white-haired friends stood near them, ancient men who only came outside on this one day a year. They stood without the hunches in their backs, punching each other in the arms like college students.
“I love the smell of lighter fluid and charcoal,” Rosie said.
“Why didn’t we ever come here when we were growing up?” I asked.
Rosie made a snorty little laugh. “Can you imagine Dad wanting anyone to know that there was something wrong?”
“People could have imagined that someone in our family had migraines,” I said. “Or insomnia. Or maybe we were there to support everyone else.”
“Please,” said Rosie. “If you even had a thought about illness, Dad would take it personally.”
We’d never talked about Break Day when we were kids. It wasn’t the only day in the year when Dad was sober. He sobered up on other days, too, but this was a day when he got sober without having to work at it. Some years we’d gone on a hike in the mountains. On rainy days, we’d all stayed home to play Monopoly and eat popcorn. Just the four of us together and nobody daring to mention that anything was out of the ordinary.
Rosie led the way to the picnic area where feasts were spread on top of bright tablecloths. Someone had laid out their good china and assembled huge bouquets of roses.
“Cancer support?” Rosie asked a middle-aged woman wearing sparkles on her eyelids.
“Yes!” said Sparkle. “And don’t you look beautiful today!”
“You, too!” said Rosie, and Sparkle beamed. “This is my sister,” Rosie said. “She’s going to have a baby next month.”
Sparkle looked at my strange little body and laughed. Loneliness struck again like a chime.
“Eat, eat!” Sparkle said.
We filled plates with chocolate-covered strawberries, watermelon spears, deviled eggs, Brie, crusty bread, homemade pickles, cupcakes with frosting fluted to make tiny lavender flowers. Someone had rigged up a sound system, and as we ate, Sam Cooke sang about love.
Afterward, we went to the swimming pool at the other side of the park. Scott and James joined us. The guys and Rosie just wanted to splash each other, and Rosie kept dunking Scott. I pulled myself from the water and sunned on a towel. There were a few groups of kids splashing around. Some of them looked like siblings. Which kids were the sick ones? Which kids would be dead in a year?
I fell asleep on my towel and imagined us all holding hands, our heads bobbing just above water. I woke to the sound of Rosie standing over me and laughing.
“I’m done with fighting,” she said, “so what now?”
“I have to get out of here,” I said. “I have to get things done. What if the baby is supposed to be coming right now? What if I’m suddenly in labor at midnight? Or what if I miss the whole thing?”
James knelt beside me. Little beads of water clung to his beard. “That isn’t going to happen,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know.”
“Because you know in the way that means you’re making it up?”
“What do you want to do?” James said. “Is there anything left that you still want to do?”
2. Homecoming Day
I gave birth to Anna, but my body did not return to me. When James was home, I called him from across the house: bring me bottles of water, a pillow, a book, an apple, a cardigan. I could do nothing but feed Anna’s red and hungry mouth.
I stood with her in the yard, the crunch of morning air soothing her cries. “See how the leaves become golden,” I told her. “Look at the big, round pumpkins.” On the good days, I walked her in the stroller until she slept, then hurried her home so that I could collapse. On the bad days, Anna would not sleep unless her mouth was full. She and I took naps together in the big bed, her still sucking, my arms at painful angles. When I could not sleep, I watched her strange light. She was so freshly drawn from the deep well between the worlds, a tiny goddess in my arms. I would not let her feet touch the ground.
When had I last slept for more than an hour at a time? When had I last felt strong? I was a ragged traveler at Anna’s shrine, kneeling and praying, bruised and starved. I would carry water for her. I would lay wreaths of flowers around her neck.
Was it Homecoming Day, or was I dreaming again, dreaming while still listening to Anna’s cries? I knelt in the house where I grew up, on the family room floor, tracing a Matchbox car over the orange and brown carpet squares. Beside me, Rosie had built a tower of blocks, humming the theme song from The Smurfs. She smelled like peanut butter and Cheerios.
“Tell me about your castle,” said Mom. She sat beside us, old and young at once, wearing the sweater I had forgotten about, the one with the big silver buttons.
“It’s a cathedral,” Rosie said. “The lions are going there to get married.”
Monster shadows seethed on the walls. “Why are you crying, Mama?” I asked.
“It’s a special day,” Mom said. She made us tuna casserole and green beans for dinner. She let us eat off of our special bunny plates. When we asked, she said that Dad would be home soon. But then he wasn’t home. “Soon,” Mom said.
Rosie and I splashed our boats in the bathtub, and Mom piled bubbles into crowns for our heads. “Why do you cry and smile at the same time?” Rosie asked.
“It’s something grownups do,” said Mom.
She dried us, tucked us into our bed, and there was the smell of clean Rosie. Mom read to us from A Child’s Garden of Verses. Later, I lay in the dark, watching the maple tree shiver against the window.
In the half slit of my eyes, I was on the living room couch with Anna, her head tucked into my armpit. I craned my neck forward into the long hallway of her life to come: favorite teachers and bad roommates, piano lessons, mopping with pine soap, her own child on her lap as they read about zoo animals, willing herself to rise from the driver’s seat and begin working the night shift, the shock of unexpected obituaries, the first tomatoes of summer, knocking down spider webs with a broom. Was she with me now because she really was a baby, or was she with me because it was Homecoming Day? Was she three months old, or had time passed? Was she thirty-five years old, here to bring me yet another chance to hold her and rock her? Was she older? And how old was I? Was I at the end? Was there really any moment besides this quiet, frozen instant: a tired mother, a warm child, a breast to suck, the brink of sleep?
3. Secret Day
The air froze and went silent. Each day James left in the dark and returned home in the dark. Several times a week he woke during the night to gi
ve Anna a bottle so I could sleep. In the moments when my hands were free, I dismantled the contents of our pantry, putting everything into the slow cooker: cans of tomatoes and beans, barbecue sauce, marinara sauce, onions, potatoes, artichoke hearts, cream of mushroom soup, chicken noodle soup, pineapples. We ate our horrible dinners in front of the television. We piled laundry like haystacks throughout the house. I filled garbage bags with Anna’s baby chick pajamas, with her little lamb pajamas, with her turtle pajamas, the heartbreaks of tiny clothes that she would never wear again. Somehow we needed to find time to take them to the Goodwill. But where was time?
My body had healed, but James and I did not touch.
Anna learned to laugh, and I spent my days trying to draw the laughter from her, blowing up my cheeks and making the noises of geese. I brought her spoons and spatulas, and she lay on her stomach, thunking her toys against the wood floor.
When Secret Day came, I thought about staying home, but the day was made of melting snow and a fussy wind. The yard was full of mud. Staying home wouldn’t make the day any less itchy.
I wrestled Anna into her car seat, tossed a bag of toys beside her and drove to a coffee shop. I fought the wind to open car doors, and made the wet walk across the parking lot. Inside the shop, customers spoke in hushed pairs, glancing at the door. They were probably just as nervous as I was.
On Secret Day, I never knew what was going to show. Rosie said that she liked it, because she got to see how she wasn’t alone. She had called me last year, announcing that she had just been to the grocery store.
“I could see all of the other women who were wearing wigs!” she said. “We kept stopping our carts to hug and say how beautiful we looked. We ended up having a little party right in the dairy isle. No one else could get to the yogurt, but that was their problem. They didn’t have to be bald ladies!”
It was sort of like that for me as a kid, when I got to see other thumb-suckers and bed-wetters. But I hated it ever since cheating on a test in high school. I had thought it was just a little thing, that once it was Secret Day, I would see in everyone else’s faces that they had cheated, too. Then the day came, and it was just me and Tyler Hart, Tyler with his long fingernails and the blister always at the edge of his lip. He grinned at me like we were two of a kind. I told myself that I would live so that I never had to have secrets again.
It didn’t work. I have more secrets than nonsecrets. Some of them aren’t so bad. One year, Secret Day let me see everyone else who loved to read tabloid magazines in dentists’ offices. One year, I saw everybody who puts away all of their own clutter from around the house, just so they can be angry with someone else for leaving out their shoes. I saw everyone who leaves bad tips when they travel out of town, everyone who likes to have their own car be in front of the others when they drive (not many), everyone who pees in the shower (a disturbingly large group), everyone who waits until food in the refrigerator gets moldy before throwing it out (almost everybody). But Secret Day would never be easy like that again. That was why I had called in sick last year and stayed home, hiding in the basement so that the mail carrier couldn’t see me.
I tried to keep from looking at anyone in the coffee shop. I told myself that it would be okay, that there couldn’t be too many of us. But then: the light in the face of one other woman in the corner of the room. I turned to leave. I could hear her following me. I tried to rush getting Anna into the car.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman was saying. “How long ago was it?”
With Anna fastened in her car seat, I opened the front door and got in without talking.
The woman banged on the window. “It really is better this way,” she called out. “You know you did the right thing.” She was crying.
I backed out of the parking space as the stranger hammered.
When James came home that night, it was the same secret in his eyes.
I had forgotten that it was his secret, too. How had I forgotten? “Oh, James,” I said.
I did not touch him. We were beyond touch. We stood in the kitchen, and I held Anna, a monkey in my arms, squirming for the glasses on James’s pain-chipped face.
Did anyone really need a special day to see the loss we carried?
When Anna was asleep, we lay beside each other on the couch, our bodies still and warm.
“I was thinking,” he said, “how she would be a year and a half old by now.”
“That’s old enough to walk and talk.”
“But she probably wouldn’t have.”
“Probably not.”
“Do you think she’s Anna?”
“No. I think she’s gone.”
“Me too.”
4. The Day of Return
I want you to look nice for my father,” I said to James. I opened the window, letting the yellow breeze swirl around the house.
“It’s not like I’m making a first impression,” James said.
“Yeah, but when we stayed home last year, I guess he wasn’t too pleased. Apparently, he didn’t think very highly of someone who helped me make the decisions I made.”
“We made.”
“You know what he was expecting. Can you imagine how surprised he must have been?”
“So, we’ll show up with a baby this year.”
“Right. And you’ll both look your best.”
“I can stay until five o’clock,” James said. “Then I have to go to my aunt’s place for my cousin’s Day of Return party.”
James’s family always has a full house. There are plenty of grandparents and great-grandparents who come back, but the one everyone really tries to please is his cousin, Brian. Poor kid. Leukemia took him at fourteen, even after the prayer circles and the fundraising and his whole former basketball team shaving their heads to match him. That first year, Brian’s family got everyone to come to his party: all of his teachers, the news reporter who had covered his story, nearly every kid from his freshman class. But Brian was shy and hid in the basement, playing video games with his two best friends. His parents were sad but understanding. The next year, they only invited his friends over, bought a lot of ice cream, and everyone sat around the kitchen table, trying different flavors and laughing. The year after that, Brian was still fourteen, but his friends were sixteen. Conversations became tedious, especially since one of them had been out of the loop of the social world for two years. The day ended with Brian locking himself in his room and watching TV, which must have been the same as being dead anyway. When he came back the next year to find only his family was waiting for him, he yelled about how nobody cared about him. He was fourteen years old after all. The following year, his parents were desperate to see their son, desperate to see him happy, to do things right. They went to his former high school and advertised to the new freshman class, convincing parents to send their kids to his party, encouraging teachers to give extra credit to students who attended, even getting one less scrupulous teacher to offer double extra credit to girls. They fixed up the basement like a nightclub and hired a DJ. After the disappointments of the previous years, Brian was flattered. He sat on the couch, watching the others, never one to know how to jump into social situations even when he had been alive. Two girls took him into the bathroom to, as they said later, “make a man out of him.” They had been ten-year-olds when he died. Brian’s parents found out from one of the other kids, and that was the end of the big parties.
It was rough for several years, with very, very quiet Days of Return. When Brian’s best friends graduated from college, they came back to see him, and although the conversation was stilted, it was kinder than it had ever been. A few years later, his best friend brought his tiny son, and Brian held the little boy and sang to him. Now each year, Brian plays with the child of his best friend. The little boy is seven years old now, old enough to remember his strange friend from one year to the next, old enough to draw him pictures and
prepare stories for him. In a year, they will ride bikes together, and perhaps in another year, one of their parents will drive them to go fishing. It won’t be long before the heartbeat of time when they are the same age, and then it will pass, and nobody knows what they will do for Brian then. Perhaps he will stop coming back, and then he will be truly gone. The dead do that. From one visit to the next, their memories fade, and their personalities become smoother, rounder, like stones washed in a river. In the end, they return to the one great soul of all people, and are truly present, truly lost.
Last year, when James and I stayed home from the Day of Return parties, I was twenty weeks pregnant with Anna. I had begun to feel her reliably, thumping like a baby rabbit. On the Day of Return, the sister who got to live swam beside the sister who gave her life so that the other could live. I imagined them in two separate placentas, side by side, as if looking through a glass at one another. It was the closest that Anna would ever come to knowing her sister, the closest her sister would ever come to knowing anyone.
Life and death were indistinguishable inside of me. “This is her,” I had said to James, my hand at the bulging place on my side. “No. This is her.”
This year, when the first baby came back, I pulled Anna against my suddenly round belly, held her to the kicks of her impossible sister. I put on the loose dress that I had saved, and James and I took our two daughters to the party at my mother’s house.
In the years since my father’s death, it had felt strange to go to his Day of Return party and see my father calm, mellowed by death. He took Anna into his arms and bounced her, let her feel his stubble against her soft cheeks, held her in the upside-down positions that made her laugh, the positions that came so naturally to James and so awkwardly to me.
I went to the daffodil-covered buffet table that my mother had laid out: my father’s favorite macaroni and cheese, the chocolate-covered pretzels he liked, the lasagna that he made so perfectly that my mother could never quite replicate, the table-hard cookies that my grandmother believed should be at every gathering, my grandmother’s signature Jell-O salad, her favorite chicken salad sandwiches in neat triangles with the crusts cut off, the lemon bars my sister made in perpetual batches, the chocolates that we ordered her from specialty shops even when the chemo taste made her mouth too bitter to enjoy them, the Petit Bordeaux she had so loved from her favorite winery.