Instead, Doug stares at her, flat-footed, in his rumpled khakis and flannel shirt. He’s a regular guy, her husband. A dad sort, and that is not a knock. He enjoys putting up Christmas lights and coming up with family itineraries for the weekend and talking hypothetically about the dog he plans to get when “things slow down.”
“Pastor Ben told us we should have fun with it.” She evokes the pastor’s name like a shield: Don’t blame me, this wasn’t my idea.
Mary Beth could have sworn she was warned—many, many times, in fact—that she would spend much of her married life concocting sorry excuses to stave off the unwanted advances of a pawing husband. She thought that once there were no longer sleepless nights with babies in the house, the space in their minds and bodies would open up naturally, but perhaps they needed a jump start. Enter Pastor Ben.
“It was on sale,” she says. It wasn’t.
“I mean, I like it.” Doug can’t seem to sort out what to do with his hands. He scratches behind his ear, pets the back of his neck, checks the buttons on his shirt.
“You do?”
“I haven’t seen you wear lingerie since our wedding night.” He grins now, his turn to look silly.
“But that was just yesterday,” she says, which they both know is the most ridiculous thing of all. Their wedding feels like eons ago. Recently, in a morning breath fog, as she fumbled for coffee, she had the thought: Wait, does the Earth go around the sun once a year, or is it a day?
It takes something like five or six or fifteen seconds for Doug to cross the room to her, and though his fingers do not twine through the roots of her hair, what they do instead is quite nice.
An absurd number of throw pillows rains down onto the floor and the playsuit soon becomes irrelevant as Mary Beth forgets all the things she’s been forgetting lately and time swirls in a way that doesn’t feel draining and she is very thankful for her soft, cushioned mom body, which is rarely if ever ogled when—ouch! ouch!—there’s an alarming pinch on her heel.
“Did you do that?” Her head picks up from the mattress.
“Do what?” He hovers over her, a sheen of sweat slicked across his wiry chest.
She rolls him off the top of her, and then emits a bleat of distress when she sees the blond top of her four-year-old’s head sticking up over the edge of the bed.
“Honey!” she shrieks, unsure to which member of her family she’s speaking. “Noelle! Noelle, sweetie! What are you doing up?” Mary Beth huddles her knees into her chest while Doug’s busy pulling pillows over his most sensitive areas.
“I couldn’t sleep.” Noelle has a sweet, high-pitched voice that reminds Mary Beth of angel bells.
“Okay. Well…” She trails off.
The door. They should have locked the door.
“Watch it.” Doug points. “You’re dripping.”
She is momentarily horrified by his implication before she sees what he means.
Blood slowly bubbles up in the spot on her ankle where she’d felt the pinch. A bright bead falls onto her white duvet spread. “Shit.” She scoops her hand underneath her heel.
“Language.”
“Sorry.” She takes a closer look and counts. There are six separate puncture wounds. “Did you … did you bite Mommy, Noelle?” There it is, that absurd third person, which, for whatever reason, has come to sound completely natural to her ear, as though that Mary Beth—Mommy Mary Beth—is her own person. As though she lost the I of it all once she became somebody’s mother. If witness protection really wants to know the quickest way to make a woman disappear, just make her a mom.
Noelle gives a wide-eyed nod. Tears are welling in her little-girl eyes. “I’m sorry, Mommy. I—”
Mary Beth scoots her bare ass off the end of the bed and, in a few quick strides, wraps herself in her plush, white robe.
“It was probably just a reaction to—well—to what we were doing.” Pink blotches have erupted at the tops of her husband’s cheeks. “She’s traumatized.”
Mary Beth sinks to her daughter’s level. “Did we scare you?” Noelle shakes her head. “Were you not able to get our attention? Was that it?” Noelle shrugs.
“Oh my god,” Doug says, but there’s a hint of a chuckle in his voice. At least bewilderment. “Should I phone the child psychologist now or wait till morning?”
“Shhh. She doesn’t know. She’s too young.” Then to Noelle—“Mommy and Daddy were just play wrestling, that’s all. We’re so silly, aren’t we?”
Come to think of it, Mary Beth herself feels a tiny bit traumatized.
She uses toilet paper to blot the spot on her heel, which continues to ooze. What on earth got into Noelle? That hurt.
She feels sorry now for her discarded playsuit and its truncated spin around the block—so much for adult time. What’s the etiquette of wearing it again, anyway?
As she leads her daughter back to her bedroom, Mary Beth wonders if, given everything, it still might be perfectly honest to successfully check off day number 6 in her challenge. She’s not one to bend the rules, but just this once it might be harmless. They can always do better tomorrow.
THREE
Darby hit her child. Hit her. The things you say you’ll never do as a parent, and yet. Is a “bop” a hit?
Griff screamed, “You can’t hit her!”
That was all her husband did, though.
All he did as she shrieked bloody murder. “She’s got me! Let go! You’re hurting Mommy!” Bop, bop, bop. Panic climbing her rib cage like a ladder.
Her wrist now has a visible heartbeat. The surface puddles of eight wounds—a top row and a bottom—ooze in rhythm with her pulse. The two holes where the little incisors pierced remind her of natural hot springs, their depths ominously unknown, mystically terrifying.
What was she thinking moments earlier? What was it? She feels like her earth has been scorched, razed in the rush of searing pain, shocking and distressing as her daughter bit the shit out of her.
Moments before the bite, Griff was rubbing his whole face with his palms, ruffling the boyish mop of chestnut hair that hangs down over his forehead. “This just—this can’t be normal! What if there is something wrong with her? Like, psychologically? But we don’t know! Because you’re so against the idea of asking the school to do a workup with the counselor for no reason! Except that it wasn’t your idea, probably.”
Lola’s cartoonishly red face dripped with snot and tears, lubricating her cheek as she slid it over the hardwood floor like a wonder mop, knees tucked underneath her, tiny bottom spiked in the air, knuckles wrapping around her hair as she screamed and sobbed, then screamed some more.
And Darby shouted back, “It is normal. Four-year-olds have tantrums. Normally.”
But the violence of Lola’s fits has been getting incrementally worse lately.
Griff went for the stern-dad voice. “Lola, if you don’t stop crying in five seconds. One … two…” The volume of her cries only increased.
“No! No! No! No! Noooooo!” she shrieked.
“Three … four … five.” Griff finished the pointless exercise.