Colleen turned on the dim, fluorescent light above the kitchen sink and opened the cabinet on her right. She took down the tin Maxwell House coffee canister, empty but for a wad of crumpled dollar bills. She selected five twenties and a range of fives and tens, and then she put the lid on the canister and lifted it back into the cabinet. This was their emergency money, and she didn’t know if what she was doing qualified as an emergency. Her emergency, yes, but was it an emergency for both of them? She believed she could make the case that it was, but she didn’t imagine that Scott would agree.
A jolt of nervous panic careened through her body, and she folded her arms across her chest and tucked her fists, one of them still hiding the wadded-up cash, beneath her armpits as if trying to warm herself. For a moment, she considered fleeing up the stairs and back into their bedroom, but then she remembered the money in her hand, and she felt that some invisible line of trust had already been crossed and she couldn’t turn back. Then she considered opening the refrigerator and reaching for a beer to settle her nerves. The clock on the oven read 3:12 a.m., and Colleen tried to gauge the appropriateness of having that beer by calculating the hours from the previous night to the coming morning. She was closer to 2:00 a.m. than she was to dawn, and there had been times in law school, and certainly times in college, when she and her friends were still drinking when the sun came up, and although that was a few years ago, Colleen decided it wasn’t so long ago as to feel unfamiliar, and, by now, nothing was more familiar to her than the taste of a beer when tasting it alone.
She opened the refrigerator and took out a Coors Lite, the chill of the glass bottle against her hand soothing her with its sharpness. The night and the house felt too dark and too quiet for such a sensation. After she popped the cap and took a long drink, she felt a calm settle over her that brought with it a clarity of action. She stood there, confident and barefoot in her pajamas, until she finished the beer, took another out of the refrigerator, and then left the kitchen and walked into the foyer.
A packed suitcase, shoes, and a change of clothes were hidden in the closet beneath the stairs. Colleen found the stash and stepped into the half bath off the foyer to change out of her pajamas. She left the light off in the bathroom, just as concerned about waking Scott as she was about seeing her face in the mirror in the midst of her escape. She feared that looking into her own eyes would shame her out of her bravery, and as she opened her second beer, she knew that she didn’t need any more shame. She took a sip, set the bottle on the bathroom counter, and then got dressed.
Outside, the sky was still dark and the streetlights still shone, but something about the feel of the air and sounds of the neighborhood’s birds told Colleen that morning was near. Before leaving the house, she had gone back into the kitchen for the beer bottle she’d left there, and now she walked to the side of the house by the driveway where they kept their trash can, and she lowered both bottles inside one at a time so as to make as little noise as possible. Her suitcase in hand, she walked around to the front of the house and followed the brick walk to the street, where she sat down on the curb and waited. The previous afternoon, she had scheduled a taxi pickup for 4:00 a.m. The prospect of leaving her car at the airport to accrue parking fees while she decided when and if to return seemed like a particularly selfish thing to do to Scott, and he didn’t deserve her selfishness any more than she deserved his. They were two people constructed of pain and grief, and, in spite of that, the world would not be making allowances for them, so Colleen believed they had to make allowances for one another when they could. She hoped Scott felt the same.
The feel of the predawn neighborhood excited something in her, and Colleen remembered the first time she had ever felt this way. She had been in college back in Asheville, and she had been up late studying during the fall of her freshman year when she decided to leave her dorm room long after midnight to walk around the quiet, empty campus. What had thrilled her then thrilled her now: no one in the world knew exactly where she was. She had these predawn moments all to herself.
But she couldn’t help wondering what the neighbors would think if someone were to peek through their blinds and see her sitting on the curb in the early morning with a suitcase beside her, her and Scott’s front porch absent the carved, glowing jack-o’-lanterns, hay bales, and scarecrow decorations that dotted so many other lawns and doorsteps in the neighborhood. Even from the street, even at this time of night, it was clear that their home was a home without children.
During the spring and into the early summer, the neighbors had seen her coming and going, greatly pregnant. They would cock their heads and smile and wave, ask how she was doing, and ask her to remind them of when she was due. And then, one day, she had not been pregnant and she had not had a baby in her arms. Most of the neighbors had reacted like skittish animals, scurrying from their cars to their front doors in lieu of making eye contact. The few who did speak to her held their heads at the same cocked angle as before, but instead of excitement their faces portrayed embellished grief and sympathy, and she realized then that she preferred the cowardly neighbors to the bold ones.
The differences between the doctor and the nurses postdelivery had prepared her for the reactions of others. The doctor—a black-haired man she’d never met before—had rattled through a list of explanations that he acknowledged might not even be the correct explanations at all: perhaps her placenta had become detached; or maybe the cord had become constricting, “and the child—” He’d stopped there. The nurses, on the other hand, had lowered their voices and relaxed their faces, speaking—no, whispering—not with pity but with assurance, especially after the baby was delivered into a world completely silent except for the beeping of her own blood pressure monitor. It wasn’t her fault, the nurses said. She’d done nothing wrong. Her son was beautiful. She was a mother. She always would be.
“Who knows?” the doctor had said. “These things happen.”
These things did happen, and it had happened to her, and, a few months later, it felt like it was still happening.
She leaned back on her hands, stretched her legs into the street, and crossed her ankles. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She could feel the weight of the house behind her, Scott’s presence in their bed pulling her toward him as if he were her life’s centrifugal force. How do you go home when you already have a home? she wondered. And what would she do when she arrived? She could take another taxi from the airport to Oak Island, knock on her parents’ door, and wait for them to answer. She could play it off like a surprise visit instead of an act of desperation. Or she could wait until they’d gone to bed, and then she could find the front door key where they kept it hidden beneath one of the old flower pots on the front porch. She could let herself in, stash her luggage beneath the bed in her old room, and then find a place to hide. She would be able to be at home without her presence being known, to hear her parents’ voices without those voices asking her questions she didn’t know how to answer. She wished she could go back into the house and open the refrigerator for another beer.
She kept her eyes closed, and although her fingertips pushed down into the dense grass of her front yard at her and Scott’s home in Dallas, she felt herself tumbling backward into a memory.