Numbered Days

IX
Mommy said she’d take me to the store today if I cleaned my room, but Harry got back from camp at 8:00 this morning, and I want to have a play-date with him. Harry lives across the street from me at 783 Arbor Road, and he was away for a whole week (that’s 7 days) at baseball camp, and I was sad because no one was here to play with me. Sarah doesn’t count. She’s my little sister, and she can’t even play Monopoly without Mommy. She’s very stupid sometimes. Harry is even better than me at Monopoly because he’s older. He is 10 years old and he’ll be in the 5th grade next year with Miss Jones, so he’s better at math.

I hope Harry still likes me and will want to have a play-date with me. Sometimes I think he likes Sarah better. He was away for a very long time.

XVI
I’ve come to the conclusion that Mr. Carmichael is Satan’s spawn and that AP Calculus BC finals are his preferred torture devices. I don’t care that a certain eclipse intersects with a certain parabola at right angles, or that (y2x5)(8hx) = z, or even that two plus seven equals nine. I only care that Harry is graduating exactly two weeks from today, and that then he’ll be gone. And I’ll be alone. Sarah doesn’t count. She’s in seventh grade and can’t even do long division without having an emotional breakdown.

It will be so different without him there, across the street, waiting to greet me with a kiss and walk with me to school. Instead, I’ll plod along with my hands shoved in my pockets and my head down, waiting for another letter that won’t arrive; counting the days, the hours since he’d left me.

He’ll forget me after a week. He’ll meet some other girl who’s smarter, prettier, better at sex – and I’ll fade from his mind. He’s going to be away for a very long time.

XXVII
Ella has her days and nights flipped, and the trenches under my eyes must look like those big blue shopping bags you get from Baby GAP after you’ve spent half a month’s salary on clothes that won’t fit your child in three weeks. Harry has taken to staying at the office later and later – he says he’s working hard on a new program and that there’s bound to be a break-through soon, but I know that if he wanted to, he could make it home for dinner. I tell myself that there isn’t another woman – there can’t be – and I know I really shouldn’t worry. But I still talk to John, Harry’s co-worker, every Saturday. He doesn’t know he’s spying for me. He thinks I’m merely an eccentric wife whose hormones are still out of control from giving birth two months ago.

Having Sarah here on the weekends helps a bit, but she doesn’t really count. She’s in her senior year at Yale now, and she holes herself up in her room most of the time. I can hear her still scribbling away when I get up around three to feed Ella. Sarah’s convinced this novel of hers will make her famous; that it’s the novel sophomores will read in high school and actually enjoy. She tells Harry all about it. He doesn’t like to tell me the things they talk about, but sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can pry a tidbit of information from him. I just hope her heart isn’t broken too badly when things don’t turn out quite her way.

At least she doesn’t have to deal with seeing me around campus anymore. I was granted maternity leave from teaching freshman math. Not that Sarah saw much of me, anyway – she never was one for numbers or logic.

Harry will get used to things soon, I know. He’ll come back to me. He just has to get his head around the idea of being a father. He’s a responsible man; he won’t stay away for too long.

XXXIX
Brian took the bus for the first time today; I almost cried when Ella took his hand and led him up the three little stairs. Now my days are completely empty.

I keep thinking that maybe I should go back to teaching, but after Harry’s success, there really isn’t any urgent need for me to start working again. Besides, I doubt my nerves would be able to handle a lecture hall full of college students – this Wednesday makes exactly one year since Sarah’s death.

Sometimes I still hear her writing in the middle of the night, but her manuscript is just collecting dust on her desk upstairs. It’s so God damn unfair – she printed out her final copy the day before the accident. She never got it published. I haven’t read it yet. Can’t bear to, I suppose. Harry says I have some kind of complex; that I can’t read the novel because Sarah loved it more than she loved me. I tell him he’s full of shit, and then we kiss and don’t speak of it again until the next time he finds me sobbing on the bathroom floor at four o’clock in the morning. Hysteria always pounces on its victims at such inconvenient hours.

I do have some grocery shopping to do before the kids get back from school, though. Menial tasks are wonderful distractions.

Harry should be home around six to help the kids with their homework – I wonder if first-graders get homework on the first day? – it’s nice that he doesn’t stay away very long at all, these days.

L
Harry lost it as he walked Ella down the aisle this morning, and seeing him cry set off a domino effect around the church. It was the first time I’d seen him in tears since he broke his arm when he was nineteen. He didn’t even cry at Sarah’s funeral – I only remember that because we’d fought about it. He’d always been closer to Sarah than I ever had.

Daddy and his little girl…. He’s going to miss her so much. She was the only one he ever sang to, the only one he ever danced with, the only one he wouldn’t go to sleep without kissing goodnight. I hate myself for feeling jealous at times. I tried to remind him how squeamish he was about Ella during the first three months, but of course he denies the whole thing. I let it go.

After the reception, I went up the twelve steps to Sarah’s old room. I suppose giving up another little girl had made me want to get one back. Her door had been locked ever since Brian had gone exploring around the house and impaled his foot on a rusty nail when he was eight. When I turned the tarnished handle, the scent of mothballs almost choked me.

And there it was. Titled 163. Her manuscript.

I read it in two-and-a-half hours, but at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to say whether it was a lifetime or a second. It was beautiful, and the words carried me aloft on their gentle waves; I didn’t notice that I’d cried until it was over, and I’d put my hands to my face. She’d never mentioned she’d written about me.

She’s been away for such a long time.

LXXIV
Lenora, Ella’s eldest, called me up this afternoon to tell me about her day at school. They’d started reading “Aunt Sarah’s” novel in English class; she wanted to ask me a few questions about my sister, about myself…

Sarah had been nineteen when she’d started the book. She’d always loved history class in high school. No, I didn’t know what the title of the novel meant – no one really did. Yes, I really was a mathematics geek. Yes, Sarah had always been a quiet, kind girl.

But then, as I hung up the phone, I tried to picture Sarah’s face in my head, and I found that I couldn’t recall the color of her eyes. Something as simple as that; I should have been able to remember her eyes.

I went to find Harry to ask him if he knew. He was reading the Sunday Times in his chair out on the deck. After a moment of silent reflection, she smiled and said, “They were green, and always very sad.”

I asked him why I couldn’t remember that – why I couldn’t see her in my mind’s eye – why I couldn’t hear her voice or feel her in my arms or –

Harry settled me onto his lap and slowly rocked me back and forth, back and forth.

“My darling,” he said quietly, consolingly, “you always said she didn’t count. I know you didn’t mean it, Sweetie, I know, but you told her that. You told her one-hundred and sixty-three times.”

I cried then, and he held me for a very long time.