(CW: Mentions of infant/child loss, obsessive thoughts/OCD tendencies)
First, the living room. Its name a cruel irony. Consider the TV, sleek and dusty and dotted with small fingerprints. A falling TV sends a child to the ER every thirty minutes*. Then there are the nighttime hours you spend watching it, unwrapping chocolates and creamy wheels of Babybel cheese. Sitting in its blue-light glow, blank and dissociated, until your shoulders crust with lichen, until your roots twine through the couch cushions. Notice that twinge in your calf: likely a blood clot, preparing to shake loose and begin the journey to your tired paper lungs. It’s not your fault**. An object at rest will remain at rest. Except when your children stumble sleepy-eyed out of bed, startle you into motion, like sparrows from skeleton branches. Notice the burrow where the couch cushions meet—just wide enough for an infant to slither inside and suffocate. You might think she’s too big to fit, but remember, you forced her into the world through a four-inch hole, and you hardly even tore.
*There are anti-tip straps you can buy to prevent this. You have some in the junk drawer, still in the package. For years, you and your husband have agreed to install them next weekend.
**Of course it’s your fault. Who else’s fault could it be?
The kitchen. The most dangerous room in the house. 1. Barn wood table, an heirloom built by your grandfather, its unyielding corners perfect for splitting soft, still-ripening heads. 2. The stove where the dandelion-yellow kettle hisses, exhaling ribbons of steam. Even if you use the back burner, your children will find a way to reach it, and even after you turn off the burner, there is scalding hot water to contend with. Don’t let your guard down, not until the tea goes lukewarm. 3. The stainless-steel fridge, whirring reminder of your own mortality. Once, during a game of hide and seek, your son tucked himself inside, his four-year-old body wedged between bell peppers and red grapes* and a block of aged cheddar. He laughed when you found him, still alive, brazenly unafraid. There is everything the fridge contains: processed lunch meat**, off-brand cola***, pistachio ice cream****. At night, you eat potato chips by the handful and gulp down cola and finish half the ice cream before you feel too sick to continue. Then you wait for the emptiness to come back. Your therapist says you have an adjustment disorder. The thing you are having trouble adjusting to is motherhood. Your mother says you are doing great, you are doing your best, you just need to try not to think so much. She says the days are long, but the years are short. She says today is a gift, and you hang up before she can reach the punchline.
*One of the most common causes of death by choking, in both toddlers and adults. Your husband likes to toss whole grapes in the air and catch them in his mouth. His recklessness astonishes you. You slice grapes for your children like most people slice apples, neatly, into small wedges.
**colon cancer
***tooth decay, diabetes
****high cholesterol, heart disease, anaphylaxis from sudden onset pistachio allergy.
The bathroom: Fuzzy pink rug, shower and toilet, cupboard and medicine cabinet. Remember that Facebook post about the 1-year-old who fell headfirst into the slippery-smooth toilet? He drowned with his mother in the next room, humming along with her Spotify playlist, heating water for mac and cheese*. Remember that time your son (age three) slurped toothpaste from the tube like it was one of those squeezable yogurt pouches? You called poison control, your bones wracked with small earthquakes. The woman on the phone said gently that, no, your children would not need to be put into the custody of the state. She said your son would be fine. She said most people she sends to the ER for fluoride poisoning are adults who eat the entire tube. They can’t help themselves, she explained, and you began avoiding normal tubes of toothpaste after that, you bought the 3oz travel sizes only, mint or flavorless. Speaking of temptation, where do you keep your Tylenol, your Tums, your cough syrup, your Xanax? You might not think your children would be interested in drinking Tylenol, but all it takes is one time. The infant flavors are made sickly sweet, bubble gum or strawberry, but the bitterness is still there.
*You didn’t want to know this. You can’t unsee it. I’m sorry.
Your bedroom. 1. The dresser. Solid oak. You can’t stop thinking about that story on channel 3, the parents who woke up to find their baby girl crushed beneath the dresser. If there were muffled cries, no one heard them. This tortures you. If the dresser falls in the night, surely you would hear it? You have never been a deep sleeper. You have anchored the dresser to the wall. You are 70% sure you installed the wall anchors correctly. 2. The bed. A cheap platform frame from Ikea. Your son used to shimmy underneath and stay there for hours. His own prehistoric cavern, glittering with carpet beetle larvae and lost earrings. You used to imagine the bed slats giving out, his body pinned beneath the memory-foam mattress. You used to wonder if it was bad for his lungs to breathe in all those dead skin cells. 3. The bed, part two. Your daughter, when she was tiny, used to wail all night like a firehose, and that metaphor doesn’t make sense but neither does anything when you’ve only slept two hours in three days, and in desperation you brought her into your bed. You shoved all the blankets on the floor and placed her on your chest, ignoring the cautionary tales about parents who roll over on top of their infants, ignoring the AAP guidelines about safe sleeping spaces*. 4. The mirror. Splintered glass. The side of your hand bleeding, your face somehow more logical with all those spidery cracks.
*You dreamt about watermelon rinds, sticky with pink juice. You woke up clawing the sheets around you, convinced that it was already too late.
The kids’ room. You worked so hard to make this room safe. You bought firm mattresses and an air purifier. You smeared lamb’s blood over the door a few years ago*, and the rust-colored stain is still there, your own little secret. You anoint the beds with oil every Sunday, telling your husband that a drop of lavender on the pillows promotes relaxation. You spread table salt along the windowsill while your children sleep and brush it into a small bowl the next morning. You know this is irrational, all of it. You are an atheist, but sometimes you forget. You forced two children into the world and they are not safe here and you are having trouble adjusting. Even in their bedroom you can find problem areas—the drafty windows with flimsy latches, the stale air from ducts that badly need cleaning, the fresh coat of robin’s egg blue over old poison. Your house was built in the 1950s**. Age has stiffened its bones and also softened them. The floors creak and you understand why. You long to let the paint peel—to flake it off with your fingernails, to press the soft blue flecks to your tongue.
*You were making kofta kebabs.
**Houses built as recently as 1970 can have lead-based paint on the walls; water pipes can have lead or copper lining. The effects are slow, insidious, irreversible.
Midnight: Slide out of bed, where your husband sleeps like a bear in hibernation. Push open the door to your children’s room, creep through the darkness like an invasive weed. You cannot hear your children breathing and this worries you*.
*Your therapist says to treat intrusive thoughts like footnotes: read them, acknowledge them, move on. They are only footnotes. They are not your story. You wonder what kind of stories she’s been reading. You wonder if most of them have happy endings.
Your daughter’s bed: empty.
Scan the corners: dirty clothes, piles of books, no faces, no one breathing, no one at all. Check the window: shut and latched, and the latch with dust on it, and the windowpane glazed with ice. You are beginning to hyperventilate, you are finding your daughter’s broken body in a cornfield, you are seeing the flowers and roadside crosses and flickering tea lights and viral Facebook posts that spring up in her absence, but first you wheel toward your son’s bed: empty, too. Your heart throwing itself against its cage—your lungs, both of them, cleanly removed—your legs stumbling toward the kitchen, your hands groping for the keys—
Your children are sitting at the kitchen table. Sitting in darkness, drinking chocolate milk from juice glasses, the ones with the yellow polka dots.
Mom, your son says, are you okay?
You want to tell him yes, you’re okay, yes, but he’s too old to believe you, also too smart, and you’re still trying to remember the intricacies of breathing. You flick on the overhead light. Your children squint like subterranean creatures, and you turn it off again.
I couldn’t sleep, your daughter says, her voice apologetic. I counted, like, a thousand sheep.
The chocolate milk clings to her lips before she licks it off. She’s an inch taller than you now, the same watchful eyes, the same sleepless nights*. Your son is several inches taller than you, taller even than your husband. Your son doesn’t sleep much either, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. You pour yourself a glass of milk. You go to the cupboard for a tin of molasses cookies** left over from Christmas. You sit with your children at your grandfather’s barn-wood table, eating the cookies, drinking the milk, your tongue crackling with ginger and cinnamon***. You sit here with your children, the most dangerous room in the house, your eyes adjusting a little at a time.
*Chronic sleep deprivation has been linked to a higher risk of hypertension, diabetes, heart attack, stroke, anxiety, depression, and cognitive decline. The surest way to make sure an insomniac won’t sleep is to tell them this.
**They are dipped in sugar and drizzled with icing. The icing contains milk. Is it still safe to eat, nearly a week later? Will you all end up with food poisoning? IV fluids, a hospital stay, one of those rare cases that ends in severe dehydration and kidney failure and death?
***This moment bright and weightless. Like the morning after your daughter’s fifth birthday, streamers flapping for no reason, the whole family eating sheet cake for breakfast, rainbow sprinkles crunching between your teeth.
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