Storm

Chapter One: Day 1

The bed was cold on her side.

Dylan reached across the sheet without opening his eyes, the way he did every morning—fingers searching for the curve of her shoulder, the warmth of her back. Nothing. He opened his eyes. The pillow still held the shape of her head but the sheets were pulled back and the room was quiet.

He lay there for a moment, listening. Down the hall, nothing—no crying, no stirring from the boys' room. The clock on the nightstand read 5:47.

Three months. That was how long it had been since Lisa, and in those three months the mornings had become unreliable. Some days he woke to Catherine already up, sitting at the kitchen table in the half-dark with a cup of coffee she wasn't drinking. Other days she was still in bed at noon, the covers pulled over her head, and Annika would call the firm and he'd hand the desk to his second and come home and make grilled cheese for the boys, rock William on his chest, tell Bryan again that Mommy was tired. He'd wait for the bedroom door to open. By evening he'd be back at the firm.

Today she was up. That was something.

Two days ago he'd come home to find Annika giving the boys their bath. Catherine was in the living room, sitting on the couch, not reading, not watching anything. Just sitting with her hands in her lap. Bath time had always been hers. Since Bryan was born she'd done it—the warm water, the washcloths, the rubber toys lined up on the edge of the tub. It was her time with them the way the early mornings were his. He'd walk past the bathroom and hear her singing to them in Italian, the language she'd learned for the paintings. "You've Got a Friend in Me," since November — Bryan had seen Toy Story once and would have nothing else, and she'd had it in Italian by the second bath. Her voice low and off-key and happy, and Bryan would splash and she'd say hey, easy, mister and it was the sound of his family.

He'd stood in the living room doorway and said, "You okay?"

"I just needed Annika to do it tonight."

Her voice was flat. Steady. Wrong. He'd almost pushed. Almost sat down next to her and said, Talk to me. Tell me what's happening. But she'd turned on the television and the moment closed and he'd let it close.

That was two days ago. She hadn't done bath time since.

He swung his legs off the bed, pulled on sweatpants, and padded down the hall. The boys' room was dark, the nightlight casting a low orange glow across the carpet. Bryan was asleep on his stomach, legs splayed at angles that looked uncomfortable and weren't, the stuffed bear wedged under his cheek. Three years old and already a sprawler. Dylan crouched beside the crib. William was on his back, arms above his head, mouth slightly open, the small chest rising and falling.

He stood in the doorway and counted breaths. William in the crib. One. Two. Three. Then Bryan in his bed, the same. He'd been doing this since the hospital. Since they'd come home without Lisa and he'd stood over both of them for twenty minutes, terrified one of them would stop too.

The kitchen was empty. No coffee made. Catherine's coat was gone from the hook by the door. Her sneakers were gone.

A walk, he thought. Good.

Her therapist—the one she'd seen twice and refused to go back to—had suggested fresh air, routine, movement. Catherine had smiled politely in the way she smiled at everything now, a mask so convincing that only someone who knew her real smile could tell the difference. But he knew. He'd known her real smile since she was eighteen years old, leaning against a wall at a dorm party in Boston, mouthing along to whatever was playing, and he'd turned to his buddy and said, Who is that?

That smile had been gone since December.

He made coffee. Filled William's sippy cup with milk from the refrigerator. It had started a few weeks ago—Catherine couldn't nurse him to sleep, Annika had tried water, the crying was the kind Dylan couldn't undo. He'd stopped at the market on the way home from the firm and brought milk back, and now there was always milk in the fridge, and William drank it from the sippy cup like it was the thing he'd always done. He set the cup on the counter and got Bryan's cereal ready. Blue bowl, the one with the bear painted on the bottom that Bryan liked to uncover by eating everything above it.