I’d cried while he held me, promised me it would be okay. “We can do this,” he’d said. “We can have this baby. But if you don’t want to—”
From the moment I saw that plus sign, there was never a question in my mind. I knew I wanted this child. I was scared, yes. Felt like I was too old, like it might test me in every possible way. But yes, I wanted her. I wanted her desperately. I told Mark all of this, asked if he was sure it was what he wanted too. He agreed without hesitation, both of us crying as he kissed me, kissed my face, my belly, started talking to the baby, who was only the size of a sesame seed. He went out and got pickles and ice cream to celebrate (a truly disgusting combination) and we stayed up all night after putting Izzy to bed, talking about what they might be like, this new child who’d come into our lives.
“Our little accident,” I called her jokingly, and he corrected me.
“There are no accidents,” he’d said. “Not really. Everything happens for a reason.”
Then my worrying started. “But I’m thirty-seven. There are risks. What if something’s wrong? What if we can’t afford it? What if I—”
“It’s a leap of faith,” he said, wrapping his arms around me, kissing me. “A leap of faith we’re taking together, side by side, just like always. Forever and ever.”
I BROUGHT THEmonitors upstairs to the kitchen and loaded them with fresh batteries. They seemed to work fine.
I went into Olivia’s room, made the bed, and piled it with all the stuffed animals that were on her floor. I grabbed a book and a few toys to stage a play session with them: Big Dog was reading a book on Labrador retrievers; Samuel the skunk was playing Go Fish with Hedgie the hedgehog; Trixie the rabbit was hanging upside down from the bedpost—she was always getting into mischief. Olivia got a kick out of seeing what her menagerie had been up to while she was away at school.
Then I went into Izzy’s room, stepping tentatively, as if there might be a bear trap or trip wire waiting. A secret camera stashed somewhere maybe, ready to capture proof that I’d trespassed, had been nosing around, searching for… what? Drugs? A stash of unexplained money? Some tiny thing that might give me some insight into my older daughter’s world and what secrets she might be keeping?
It felt all wrong, violating her privacy like this.
I froze, took a step back, telling myself this wasn’t the right thing to do. Mark wouldn’t approve. He was all about everyone in our family respecting one another’s personal space.
“Teens need autonomy,” he was always saying. “We need to give Izzy permission to make her own decisions, her own mistakes.”
Izzy, who tended to rebel against anything she deemed normal and conventional, sometimes even rebelling just for the sake of rebelling, was a straight-A student. One of those kids who excelled at whatever she threw herself into. And she’d thrown herself into a whole variety of things over the years: ballet, field hockey, gymnastics, chess club, drama club, and, these days, the high school film club and her art projects.
“She’s exceptionally talented,” her art teacher, Ms. Paresky, had said at our last parent-teacher conference night while showing us a series of collages and small sculptures Izzy had made from trash collected from the river behind the high school. Hiding in each sculpture was a monster with red light-up LED eyes. A symbol representing the scourge of pollution, Izzy had explained.
She had one of the trash collages hanging on the wall above her bed now: an old bicycle wheel transformed into a strange mandala, the spokes woven with ribbon, candy bar wrappers, rope, hair. Peeking out from behind the spokes was a dark face with glowing red eyes: the monster of things abandoned and discarded. It spooked me—my daughter’s ability to bring life to trash, to make it feel like a sinister creature watching me from her wall.
I turned away from the wheel monster and took in the rest of Izzy’s room, which was in its usual state of disarray. There were clothes scattered on the floor—impossible to tell what was dirty and what was clean. The desk was cluttered with her computer, books, drawings, a strange assortment of objects she used for her collage and assemblage pieces: cut-up magazines and newspapers, broken clock parts, blue jay feathers, nuts and bolts. There was a soldering iron and a hot glue gun. TheI Chingand the tarot deck I’d noticed last night.
I stepped forward, studying the bedside table: a coffee cup, an empty energy drink can, chargers for her phone and headphones. I opened the drawer. More chargers, pens, a single earring, a safety pin, hand cream, the butt of an old black eyeliner pencil, a couple of AA batteries. Nothing shocking or nefarious. No weed or vape pens or strange pills. I shut the drawer, and held very still, listening.
There was a faint buzzing.
I thought of last night. Of my dream. Of my mother chasing me, my mother the wicked insect angel. I was sure I could feel her behind me, watching, reaching for me with quivering little feelers, grotesque wings outstretched.
I swallowed hard. My mouth tasted like tin. I turned around.
Nothing.
Of course not.
My mother—my actual mother, not the nightmare insect-angel version—was sleeping downstairs. And the girls were at school. Mark was at work. Moxie was curled up on her dog bed in the living room.
It was only the first full day of my mother being here, and I was already losing it.
Not good. Not good at all.
I needed to get a grip. Take a nap to help clear my head, maybe. I thought of Penny’s advice and took a deep breath.
Then held still, listening again.
There was something there in the silence; something that didn’t belong. Not the hiss and thump of the old radiators or the click and hum of the refrigerator coming on downstairs. Not the sighing creak of the house settling.
This was a small buzz. The tiniest taps, like fingertips against glass.
Thump, thump, thump.
