—
In the morning, Adam and Jess didn’t get up until after nine. Jess stumbled out of their room looking like the Bride of Frankenstein, her hair gone vertical and her face green. She ran straight to the bathroom, and everybody politely ignored the sound of her throwing up, followed by another five minutes of retching.
“We were supposed to leave an hour ago,” said Adam, who was loitering in the kitchen.
“Shouldn’t you go check on her?” asked Clara.
“I tried,” he shrugged. “She told me to go away.”
So Clara went instead, knocking first, opening the door when she got no response. Jess was slumped on the floor, her chin resting on the edge of the toilet bowl. She didn’t even open her eyes when Clara came in, but she admitted, “I’m pretty wrecked.”
Clara said, “I can see that.”
“So much for that restful, relaxing weekend you promised.”
“It’s been memorable.”
“Sure thing,” Jess said.
Clara knelt and pulled Jess’s hair back, securing it with an elastic she found in her pocket.
Jess murmured, “Too late.”
Clara said, “I suppose breakfast wouldn’t be entirely welcome.”
“Something bland,” said Jess. “Toast. White-bread toast. I want that.”
“I was thinking eggs and bacon,” said Clara. “But toast—okay.” She went back out to the kitchen to get it ready. Adam was frying bacon to speed things along, but when Jess came out of the shower looking better, she couldn’t stand the smell and took her toast outside.
Adam said, “Things got a bit out of hand last night.”
Clara shrugged. “It happens.” She meant it. Jess and Adam owed her nothing, not after she’d made them trek all the way up here. She’d been asking more than she realized, she saw that now.
“She hasn’t been having the easiest time,” Adam said. “Since the baby. She didn’t mean it, what she said. None of it was about you.”
“No, I know,” said Clara, except that itwasabout her. She’d always thought the intensity of her connection to Jess, the basis of their mutual understanding, could overwrite the need to talk about everything all the time, incessant conversation only serving to deliver you to precisely where you already were.
But sometimes you had to take the long way, and that’s what Adam was doing now, fumblingly apologizing on Jess’s behalf while trying not to let the bacon burn. “I’m sorry,” he was saying. “She’s so sorry—”
Clara flipped on the kitchen fan to prevent the smoke alarm from going off. This was friendship. “It’s done,” she said over the din. “I get it, totally. We’re good.”
HOT CARS
2008
A few months after Bella’s first birthday, with Jess returned to work, she finally read the article everybody had been sharing about children dying in hot cars. One man’s motion-activated car alarm had been going off all afternoon, but he could see the vehicle from his office, so three times he deactivated the alarm with his key fob and simply went back to his job.
Jess was curled up on the sofa, scrolling on her phone and weeping. She told Adam, “You have to read this. It’s going to break your heart.”
There were no common denominators; the kind of person it happened to was everyone. A slight change in routine—a usual route closed to traffic, a stop to pick up dry cleaning, the other parent doing drop-off—and with that, something goes amiss, a gap in the memory as the baby sleeps in the back seat. There were scientific explanations, commentary from a psychologist. It was the sort of tragedy that, until it happened, nobody ever imagined.
Adam refused to read it; he said the article was tragedy porn. It was gross to become so caught up in a story thatwasn’t yours, almost voyeuristic, when at the press of a button you could have the whole thing disappear.
Except it was a kind of insurance, Jess’s attention to the details and her refusal to look away—but she wouldn’t tell him that. How she had to be prepared to face such disaster if ever called upon to do so. And somehow, however karmically complicated, being prepared would also mean she probably never would be.
—
The article was still on Jess’s mind as she got Bella ready for daycare a few days later, overly conscious of her motions, still finding her way into her new life as a working mom. She fastened the baby into the car seat’s five-point harness, Bella protesting until Jess popped in the soother. Once she was driving, she checked the rear-view mirror to see Bella’s face reflected in the mirror that hung over the back seat.
