Thinking back on it, I still don't have an explanation for what happened that day. Maybe it was that I noticed how Carmen was a bit too comfortable around Donny. Maybe I was overcome with nausea; that would make sense, since my "morning" sickness symptoms had lingered into my second trimester.
But Carmen's reaction – to yell at me for being pregnant, when I didn't even want to be – was bizarre. I still can't reconcile it with the friendship I thought we had.
That was the last time I spoke with Carmen. She never apologized for her outburst, and I never explained what had made me run away. After that afternoon on her porch, we remained secluded from each other, never crossing the barrier of woods between our properties.
There's something particularly tragic about our relationship ending over life circumstances that are out of our control. It's why I was curious to follow her and Marcus when they left so abruptly after stopping by the other day. I regret hiding from them in the parlor while they were visiting with Owen. That must have come across to them as rude. The lasagna was a nice gesture, but if Carmen had been intending to apologize, she clearly changed her mind.
While part of me mourns the loss of Carmen in my life, I also have to admit a sense of relief. We started our friendship out of convenience about half a decade ago now, when Owen and I moved into the cozy colonial that backs up to the Dolans' much more ornate, expansive house. It had always been easy to be friends with Carmen and Marcus, since they lived so nearby, even if our personalities were mismatched.
Owen and I, as a couple, communicate most things to each other nonverbally. In conversations with others, I find myself rambling along, trying to talk my nerves out of trembling. Owen, on the other hand, is an attentive listener and observer. But he prefers solitude and predictability to parties and relationship drama.
Carmen and Marcus, on the other hand, are both artists who nurture each other's volatile personality. Their families' accumulated wealth has allowed them to pursue their dreams for longer than would be feasible for most people. Their twenties were spent in New York, in and out of an open relationship with each other and several recurring characters with names like Elsbeth and Alastair and occupations like Bike Messenger and Performance Artist. Carmen danced in respectable productions but never landed a role in one of the big ones. Marcus picked up gigs in the film industry and was perpetually "working on a screenplay." Neither of them, apparently, mastered the skill of anger management during that time.
Their fights, according to Carmen, are intense. She never tells me what the fights are about, or the details of any one fight in particular. But over a year ago, when I squinted at the layers of concealer she'd caked on around her eye and asked what the hell happened, she snorted and told me to go find Marcus and take a look at his black eye.
When I told Owen about that, it was enough to end their friendship, which was tenuous anyway. Neither Owen nor I knew much about domestic violence situations, but we agreed that we should do our best not to upset Marcus. It just seemed best to try to keep him in a mellow mood and to follow Carmen's lead. She didn't seem concerned, so were we just being nosy?
Doing nothing didn't quite sit right with either of us, but over time, I'm ashamed to say, we got comfortable being uncomfortable with the situation.
That was before I saw the way he looked at her when they were standing in our kitchen. The way his eyes simmered black and his nostrils seethed and his jaw clenched and twitched. He looked down at her as if to say, "You are so lucky we're not at home right now..."
I don't know if Carmen saw him looking at her like that.
Why did I act like such a weirdo that night? I should have announced my presence and told her she might be in danger. I'll tell her if she comes by again. I wonder if she will. Thinking about the whole thing nauseates me, like all social interactions seem to these days. Interacting with other people has never felt so arduous.
Oh, my god. What if Carmen does come to visit, and Diana answers the door? What if that's already happened? Could I have slept through that happening? I probably could have.
I cringe, imagining what the stilted interaction would be like between an emotional Carmen and my reserved, judgmental mother-in-law. My mother-in-law who has, officially, moved in with us for who knows how long.
Until I can get my shit together as a mother, I guess.
For the few days that she's been here so far, she has mostly kept to herself, taking care of household chores so Owen and I can spend more time bonding with Thomas.
Diana's bedroom shares a wall with ours and I know she comes in to feed Thomas at night. Before she can bring him over to the window seat, she has to reach across my body to scoop him up from his portable little bed, wedged between me and Owen. She thinks I'm sleeping during those times, that I don't sense her there, but I do. It doesn't really bother me; Owen needs his sleep, and I appreciate her help during the night. She just doesn't have to be so goddamn furtive about it.
Tonight, the footsteps that creep across into our bedroom in the middle of the night are much lighter and less confident than Diana's.
They belong to a child.
The threshold creaks as the footsteps pause, hesitating. I open my eyes and see Sadie, Owen's four-year-old niece, standing in the doorway.
She's staying at our house for two nights, ostensibly so Owen's sister and her husband can have a "staycation" in Boston, where they live. Even Sadie knows that it's really because they need a break from the responsibility of being parents. Since both of them are former heroin addicts, it's in everyone's best interest that they get a break to prioritize taking care of their mental health when they feel they need to. Especially after losing her husband to a gruesome suicide, Diana is terrified of losing her only daughter to a heroin overdose. I once overheard her say to Owen that her worst fear is that not only will Sadie's mom die, but that Sadie will be the one to find her body.
In addition to taking the little girl off her parents' hands, I think Diana also hopes that her granddaughter's carefree, wide-eyed presence will bring some much needed joy into our house, if only for the weekend.
Unfortunately, as soon as Sadie arrived it started to rain and it hasn't stopped. Stuck inside for the day, she hasn't proven as difficult to keep entertained as I had feared. Diana provided her with a huge box of crayons and a pile of coloring books, and that activity held her attention for hours. Then she begged Owen to read to her from our "fancy books" in the parlor, even though they don't have any pictures in them. I think she just enjoys listening to the warm sound of his voice.
Earlier today, when she had awoken from her afternoon nap, Sadie joined me at the big bay window in the parlor. Owen was still napping in the rocker before the warm embers in the hearth. Sadie and I watched the rain drops as they fell and burst on the front walk. Their fat little bodies splashed open violently – plop – as they died.
Suddenly, the raindrop I was watching became Paul's limp body falling down, down, past open-mouthed shoppers on the mall's mezzanine level, and landing with a wet, sickening thud.
Dead.
To distract myself from fantasies of suicidal raindrops, I whispered to Sadie, "Do you know the song about the rain and the old man?"
Her eyes widened. She looked up at me, slowly shaking her blond head back and forth.
I cleared my throat. "It goes like this:
It's raining, it's pouring
The old man is snoring
He bumped his head and went to bed
And couldn't get up in the morning.
... or something like that." I scrunched up my nose. "I forget the exact lyrics."
Sadie tilted her head back and looked at me through narrowed eyes, skeptical. "That's the same as A Tisket, A Tasket!"
"Sadie, you're right!" I told her, honestly amazed that a four-year-old had put that together.
She sniffed, proud of herself.
"But..." I raised my eyebrows conspiratorially. "Right now it makes sense to sing the lyrics about the rain and the old man, don't you think? Because we have rain..." I nodded toward the window, "and we have an old man snoring..." I smiled broadly, pointing in Owen's direction.
As if on cue, a snore caught in his throat. He coughed, sighed, and fell back into a restful sleep.
Sadie dissolved into giggles.
"Okay, sing it again," she whispered, grasping my hand in her sweaty little one. "I'll sing it, too."
So we sang it again, and again, until Sadie knew all the lyrics by heart and could sing it on her own. I'm glad we had that moment of connection today; we were both feeling invisible.
While she's here, Sadie is sleeping with Diana in the room next to ours. She refused to spend the night in the third bedroom, where we'd blown up an air mattress for her. It's not just that she adores Diana and wants to be near her all the time, which she does.
It's that she thinks our house is haunted and doesn't want to sleep alone.
But tonight, she's not asleep at all. Sadie appears otherworldly as she walks slowly toward the foot of the bed. Her short, blond waves shine silver in the moonlight and float like a halo around her face. When she reaches the foot of the bed, she stops.
Her eyes have been trained on me the whole time.
"Sadie?" I whisper.
She doesn't respond. Just watches me with wide, fearful eyes.
The clock next to the bottle of Ambien on Owen's bedside table blinks just after two o'clock in the morning. Sadie must have had a nightmare. If I whisper any more loudly from here, I'm going to wake up Owen, so I swing my legs over the side of the bed and approach her.
I kneel down so my face is right at her level. "Sadie, Honey, is everything okay?"
She slowly shakes her head back and forth.
And then in a tiny, trembling voice, Sadie sings the same tune I taught her in the parlor today. But she doesn't use the lyrics about the rain and the old man. I follow her gaze to the portable baby bed, right next to where I was lying moments ago. Sadie sings:
"Some-things wrong with the ba-by..."
My eyes widen in horror.
The bed is empty.
The baby is gone.