One More Day (4 page)

John's father had recommended Dr. Kenney, but John hadn't told Carrie that. His family had been concerned when John described his wife's behavior; they'd thought Carrie should start therapy right away, but John had waited a few months to mention it, since Carrie's emotions were still so raw.

John drove his wife to the first appointment. Carrie stared out the window and chewed on her nails, which were already short and ragged. The doctor's office in Wayne was on the lower floor of a small sunlit house that had been retrofitted for a Pilates center, a family therapist, and a dermatologist. Dr. Kenney came out and greeted Carrie warmly but merely nodded at John, as if he hadn't spoken to him already at length.

Carrie went into the office, and John sat down in the waiting room. The back of his head leaned up against the soft grass-cloth wall. He hoped to hear something, not actual words but a sense of what was happening—laughter, sobs, soothing. Something. But no voices broke through. The room buzzed in his ears, an audio stew of furnace and light, the tick of a clock. He started to squirm, as if he was the one expected to speak. As if the noisy quiet was a perpetrator of some kind, a weapon to make him cry out.

He got up, stretched, then sat back down, closed his eyes. He stayed in the too-stiff chair for over half an hour, until another man came in. He was around John's age, taller, well built. John stood up and said hello out of politeness, thinking this was another doctor. When the man finally made eye contact, his eyes were dark, long-lashed, and startling, like a model's. He looked away quickly, sat down a few seats away. He tapped his feet and jingled his change, his face angled toward the floor, until Carrie and Dr. Kenney finally came out of the other room.

On the drive home, Carrie was quiet, but she didn't cry and her eyes weren't red. The silence in the car was only slightly different from the silence in the office.

Finally, John spoke. “What did you talk about?”

“He kept asking me about my father.”

“Your father? Really?”

“You sound disappointed.”

“No, just…surprised, I guess.”

“He said many women who marry young have issues with their father.”

“We weren't that young,” John replied, screwing up his face. “And you don't really, do you?”

“He asked me what my first memory of my father was, and I—I remembered the strangest thing.”

“What's that?”

“He was sleeping in a hammock in the backyard, and my mother told me to wake him up. But when I did, he called me another name, a man's name, like he was dreaming.”

“Well, he probably was. A sleep talker, maybe.”

“But then he opened his eyes, and he looked…afraid. Like I was going to hurt him.”

“Then what happened?”

“That's all I could remember.”

“I mean, what happened after that with the doctor?”

“We talked about being parents and stuff.”

“Did you lay down?”

“No. I made another appointment at the same time next week, which is what he recommends to all his patients. Pick a time and stick with it.”

“I guess that makes sense,” John said. “It's easier to remember.”

“I guess.”

Outside, the clouds threatened rain again. They hung above the trees as if daring people to hurry home before things got worse, but John didn't hurry. He was never in a hurry to get home to that empty house.

“So what's the first memory you have of your father, John?”

“Mine?”

He waited a long time before answering. He tried to answer all of Carrie's questions, but it wasn't always easy.

“I don't know. Little League?”

“No, that can't be it. What about when you were younger? Before you went to school?”

“I don't know. I never thought about it.”

When they got home, John went into the den and emailed Dr. Kenney. He asked if the man he'd seen in the waiting room had the same appointment every week, right after Carrie's. “If so,” he wrote, “we would like to change ours.”

Carrie liked staying busy. In college, she had signed up to supervise the cancer walk—because of her grandmother, everyone had thought. She had volunteered at the soup kitchen—because of the lean years with her mother, John had always thought. And she would spend one night a week tutoring kids whose parents were divorced or had died—because of her father, they'd all assumed. Her mother had thought it simply the safest kind of rebellion. She, after all, had always been too busy and volunteered in the smallest slices—cans for a food drive, a toy for a tot. Carrie was different. And she'd been keeping a list of these differences, logged in a small, worn notebook, since her senior year of school. It lay tucked in her drawer, beneath her heaviest winter socks, a list of pros to weigh against unstated, unshared cons.

When Dr. Kenney had urged her to start going out again, it was almost as if he knew about the contents of that drawer. That was the thing about Dr. Kenney—Carrie had wanted to not like him, to think John had merely pressured her into seeing a therapist, that he wasn't worth the money. And then he'd pried open her heart and her mind and given her excellent advice.

He'd even listened patiently when Carrie insisted John was actually the one who needed therapy.
John is the one who isn't grieving. He's the one who is in denial. He cried the first day and then never again!
It chilled her to think of how easily he coped. Cleaning the house, detailing the car. Going out to get a haircut right after it happened. Researching alarm systems. But when she questioned him, probing the corners of his psyche before they fell asleep each night, asking him if he wasn't
sad
, she'd felt his flesh cushioning the word, absorbing it, the minute it came out of her mouth.

“Of course I miss him,” he said, as if that had been what she asked. Even when she'd caught him at the Y, he didn't sound quite right. He couldn't say the word
sad
;
miss
was so much easier. John's parents had dozens of smiling family photographs clustered atop the piano, scattered on tables, lining the hallways. Everything about the Morgans telegraphed
happy
. Carrie had once told her friends the most negative thing anyone could find in that house was a needlepoint pillow with the words “I'd rather be playing lacrosse.” Even in her darkest moments, when she'd been sure the whole family was talking about her behind her back, the worst she could imagine was that they simply felt more sorry for their son, who'd not only lost his baby, but also had to buttress his wife.

John had thought Carrie was going off the deep end, Carrie had believed she was having a normal reaction, and Dr. Kenney had seemed to think they both were behaving fine.

“There's no right or wrong way to grieve,” he'd said.

“If there's no wrong way to grieve, then why did John suggest I come here?”

“Well,” Dr. Kenney had replied, “it's not about grieving; it's about living. John wants you to start living again.”

“You mean John wants to start having hot sex again.”

Dr. Kenney had blushed, and she'd almost apologized.

But Carrie had been prone to crying fits that summer and fall, even after she started leaving the house. She still didn't want to talk to the legions of people who knew everything, who'd memorized the media details of her personal business.
There's the woman whose son was kidnapped. There's the woman who couldn't protect her own kid. There's the woman who didn't even see the kid taken. That's her. There's something fishy about her.

And, of course, there
was
something fishy. She was the only witness. There was scant physical evidence. Dozens of overlapping, smudged, mostly useless partial fingerprints on that rear car door—Ben's, John's, Carrie's, their babysitters'—along with strangers'. The window washer from the stoplight outside Philadelphia who'd leaned in close to John's window, resting his palms on the roof and the door; the dreadlocked college kid who'd loaded Carrie's groceries at Whole Foods; the older man who'd carried a table for her across the IKEA parking lot. They'd been found, fingerprinted, ruled out.

Carrie had been surprised by John's recall of the window washer, his description of his teeth as “yellow and crowded, a double row almost, like shark's teeth.” Had John ever looked at Carrie or Ben that carefully? If Ben had been taken from John's car, would
he
have been able to recount what clothes his son had on?

And then, worse than almost everything, were the looks she'd gotten from Detective Nolan when the lab report came back with all the partial prints. He'd waved it in the air as if it were some kind of bad report card and sighed. “Mrs. Morgan, don't you ever wash your car?” She'd looked at the bulging buttons at the front of his shirt and wanted to scream,
Detective Nolan, don't you ever eat a salad?

And John, dropping his head, not bearing to meet her eyes, knowing he was winning the car-washing battle—he was always on her about how dirty that car was!—but losing the loving-his-wife war.
They
should have washed it more often, not her. John should have taken the car on a Saturday, washed it himself, done it as a loving favor to his wife. Then they might have a fresh, clean fingerprint!

That same incredulous look on Nolan's face was replicated occasionally by strangers, who glanced at the name on Carrie's credit card and searched her face. If they looked at her carefully and watched the way she zipped shut her wallet and walked to her car, would that solve the mystery? Would they see something in her body language that solved the whole puzzle? If she listened to everybody whose child had
not
been stolen, well, they all had spidey sense, got a feeling, saw a look, thought they could figure it out.
It must have been someone the child knew who grabbed him! Or else why hadn't he cried? Why hadn't anyone seen? And how long does it take for a grown woman to find a freaking quarter? And why hadn't she locked her door anyway?

Now, Carrie was standing in the kitchen entry, listening to John's car screech into the driveway, door slamming, feet running, trying to use his key and realizing the front door wasn't locked, just like the car. Knowing she hadn't listened to his repeated warnings. Carrie tensed inside, waiting for him to yell at her for that too. Everybody said the same things to her: She needed to lock the doors to keep people out but open her heart to talk to them, to help them, to let them in. But how on earth would she know the difference between who to keep out and who to let in?

Inside, John's face was paler than usual, a trickle of sweat sliding down one of his dark sideburns. He put the bag from the farmers' market on the coffee table.

“You stopped for food?” she said incredulously.

“I went out earlier,” he said. “Put it in the office fridge.”

She stood in the entryway of the kitchen. “He's in here,” she said, as if he couldn't see that.

He stepped in. “Oh my God.” His voice cracked. “Benny boy,” he said softly.

“Daddy, Daddy!”

Ben ran to him, wrapping his arms around his father's khaki pants, burying his face between his knees.
Is he smelling us too?
Carrie wondered
. Inhaling the memory of metal, the steam iron hovering over the fabric?
John closed his eyes for just a moment, as if his lonely knees had missed his son, then bent over and picked him up.

Ben had a face full of John's features—small nose, dimpled chin. But his coloring was lighter, more like Carrie's, as if someone had mixed in sunlight. The best of both families, Carrie's mother said once to John's mother, and John's mother had agreed. Carrie couldn't always trace the good in her own family tree, but Ben had it. He had the sweetness, the light, that she remembered from her own early youth.

“You see what I mean,” Carrie said.

John held him aloft, smiling, then tossed him, caught him, wild giggles in the air. He was both loving him and testing his weight.

He glanced at his wife but didn't say anything. Didn't want to tell her the truth: that he didn't remember, that some of the details of his son had slipped away, that he had changed the wallpaper on his phone to a picture of Ben just to help him stop that erosion but that it seemed impossible. John carried Ben past the small island, past the pantry door with the vintage
Eat
sign on it.

Carrie eyed the half-open pantry door. There, on the molding, the pencil lines that were fading and a little smudged, the evidence even John couldn't bear to paint over, to erase. They both knew they would own the molding of that door forever, with the marks of their son's height.

“Let's measure him,” she said.

“Me big!” Ben said.

“Yes, you are, buddy. You're big. Come on, Carrie. He's a little bigger; he's just—”

“No. Take him upstairs, get the scale. Maybe we should call the pediatrician? Find out what he weighed—”

“None of that matters, Carrie,” John said. “Let's call the police, and let's…just love our son, okay?”

John's eyes met Carrie's over the top of their son's head, and she nodded.

But when she nestled Ben back in her arms, she bounced him, trying to remember how heavy he was before. She thought of every time she'd strained to pick him up, balancing a shopping bag on the other hip, thinking he was too big to carry anymore.

Like so many things, she wanted to take it all back.

The night before Ben came back, John and Carrie had stopped at Trader Joe's to get milk and eggs, but Carrie had waited in the car. John had started buying most of their groceries, had gotten in the habit of it during the months when Carrie refused to leave the house. At first, she had thought he was being helpful, but then it had started to grate. She had asked him point-blank:
Don't you trust me to do anything? Do you think I'll lose the fucking lettuce too?
He'd bitten his tongue and told her not to be silly, that he didn't care who bought what. But the truth was that John liked to choose the spring mix with the big set of tongs, to squeeze the cucumbers, to see the eye of the fish. If they wanted half a tray of lasagna, he seemed to glimpse something in the plastic containers that Carrie didn't—as if the way the cheese was nestled in between the meat and noodles and the pattern of the herbs peeking through meant something, mattered.
It's noodles
, she'd say, shaking her head as he compared one package to another.
Not a Rorschach test.

Sometimes she went inside with him, to the farmers' market or Trader Joe's or even 7-Eleven, and sometimes she tired of his specificity. On that particular night, she'd let him shop alone. She'd squinted through the windshield. She'd never noticed it before, but from the angled parking spot, through the line of squat trees that paralleled the sidewalk, she could see down the road, the corner of the Starbucks sign.

How long had it been? When she tried, she could still conjure the particular concert of tastes on her tongue, the sweetness, but always the bite of the acid. She closed her eyes and thought of it, felt the pull of memory and hunger.

A careful, perfectionist woman doesn't allow herself many indulgences. At least, not many they would confess to. Carrie's indulgences were occasional messiness, occasional laziness, but always, always caffeine. For her, it had started long before the current coffee craze had taken hold, when she struggled to stay awake in high school. Some days she went straight from school to her job at the Gap, then stayed up till two a.m. doing homework. She'd gotten in the habit of not only drinking coffee with her mother in the mornings before school, but also taking whatever was left over in the pot as an iced coffee for the afternoon. Add in a Coke at lunch and she was pretty much buzzed all day, nearly every day. Going to college and studying all night, then becoming a parent only exacerbated her need.

Ben had been a terrible sleeper in the beginning, always hungry, often restless. They'd tried four different kinds of pacifiers and two types of baby swings before he finally learned to settle. Back in the days before he started walking, when he was still relatively happy being in a stroller, she'd taken him anywhere there were Starbucks stores. She was comforted by the speed and familiarity of her favorite brand. She liked the little scones that fit so well into Ben's hand. She took pride in her complicated drink order, the tangle of flavor and size and embellishment rolling off her tongue proudly, as if she were reciting a long, complicated poem for an appreciative audience. She enjoyed the challenge of plucking a single balsa wood stirrer from a thick gaggle of them. She liked knowing exactly where the napkins were.

The baristas stopped writing her name on her cup—they knew her. Her order was her own, like a signature or hairstyle, quirky and telling, a little sweet, a hint of salt, complicated. She liked to think she was the only one who ordered it, but once, standing in line, she heard another woman, old enough to be her mother at least, ask for her coffee with
one pump of chocolate, one pump of caramel, sprinkle of salt, no whipped cream
, and she felt her cheeks burning. Was the woman a regular? Had she overheard Carrie ordering this before, standing daily in this same long line, and just thought to herself,
Gosh, that sounds good. I'll try that too
? And then, just as quickly, she felt a long finger of shame pointing, burning. Why couldn't she be more generous? She had invented the drink, yes, but it didn't belong to her, and even if it did, why couldn't she share it? She considered changing her order, tinkering, trying something new, and then tried to put the incident out of her mind. After all, if she baked a pie from scratch, without a recipe, wouldn't she be glad if someone else liked the way it tasted?

Her response to this, the jealousy topped with shame, bothered her at the periphery for weeks before the realization began to creep in, slowly, that her daily ritual was all too important to her. She had no job and no direction—and happened to be blessed with a happy, healthy child who didn't need a whole lot from her. Other people, yes: his father's roughhousing and sporty attention, definitely. But what did Ben want from her exactly? So little, it seemed. The world made him happy, no matter whether she was in it.

And then, each afternoon, there it was: her cup held aloft, her name in the air—they had become a kind of clarion call. She was just beginning to understand that something was wrong about this, that something had to change. She'd wanted to be a stay-at-home mom who shared a snack with her son every day. But it was less about her son and more about the snack. She needed it, needed it all too much. The sermon at church that Sunday was about addiction, and that sealed it: she needed to change.

Did she need to go back to work? That was the first thing she considered. She hadn't told John, but right before they'd lost Ben, she'd sent a few emails to friends in PR and asked about freelance opportunities. She'd asked at the church about the price of day care there and was surprised by how affordable it was. The delicate filaments of her low-level ambition, her love of work, were just beginning to tingle in her again, and then, that final trip for her afternoon pick-me-up. The parking space just outside—
So lucky! How seldom that happened!
—followed by her luck turning on a lack of dime, quarter, nickel.

That awful night, after the search party had quit around midnight and Carrie and John had gone home, she'd taken out her Starbucks card and stomped it under the heel of her Converse, pounding it until it stretched and nearly cracked, like a sheet of dry, tensile dough. She'd vowed that night never to go back there again. If she hadn't gone there in the first place, if she hadn't stopped every day, if she had just brought a sippy cup and animal crackers and a bottle of water to the Y like everyone else, she would still have her son. She blamed the coffee. She blamed the hunger. She blamed herself. Of course she did.

Carrie opened the car door and stepped forward to get a better look at the storefront. Just one more look. She had no intention of going in. She'd made her promise; she'd made her deal with God. She would give it up, all of it. But when would God do his part? Her bargain seemed impossible, silly, remote. She stood outside and watched the people streaming out of the door with their matte white cups paired with deckled brown sleeves. Laughing, happier leaving than when they entered. A part of her wanted to be one of them again but knew she never could be. She wanted more.

She wanted a sign, she thought suddenly.
Give me a sign that I have been heard.
But the logo through the trees, mounted on wood—that couldn't be her sign anymore. Could it?

A horn tapped behind her. She startled, then turned. John's face behind the windshield of their car, filled with love and concern. How long had he sat there, still clutching the small Trader Joe's tote, watching her? His eyes stayed on her as she walked back to the car, and it struck her how often he managed to spot her, to find her, even in a crowd. He could follow her at a distance and always know where she was. She knew it was wrong—they both did—but it was an intoxicating dance, taking a terrible risk and knowing he was in the background, ready to save her, prove that he was strong. He looked so handsome inside that car, watching her walk.

Nothing had changed. And the next day, everything did.