The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [58]
Now I went back to where I had been standing before. The windows in the children’s rooms faced north and west, and hadn’t received their treatments yet, so everything Dana did was apparent in an indistinct way. She went to the crib and bent over it. She stood up and bent over it again. She held out her arms, but Leah did not come into them. I could hear the muffled staccato of her screams. Dana stood up and put her hands on her hips, perplexed and, probably, annoyed. There was a long moment of this screaming; then Dana came to one of the windows and opened it. She leaned out and said, “David Hurst, goddamn you, I know you’re out there!” She didn’t see me. She turned away, but left the window open, so I could hear Leah shouting, “No! No! Daddy! Daddy!” Now the glow of the hall light appeared in the windows of Lizzie and Stephanie’s room, and then Lizzie appeared next to Dana. Dana bent down and hugged her, reassuringly, but the screaming didn’t stop. At last, Dana picked Leah up, only with a struggle, though, and set her down on the floor. I didn’t move. I was shivering with the cold, and it took all my will not to move. It was like those nights when Stephanie used to wake up and cry. Each of us would go in and tuck her in and reassure her, then go out resolutely and shut the door. After that we would lie together in bed listening to the cries, sometimes for hours. Every fiber in your body wants to pick that child up, but every cell in your brain knows that if you pick her up tonight, she will wake up again tomorrow night and want to be picked up. Once, she cried from midnight until about seven in the morning. The pediatrician, I might add, said that this was impossible. You could say that it is impossible for a man to pull all of his own teeth with only the help of a few swallows of whiskey. Nothing is impossible. I know a man who dropped his baby in her GM Loveseat down a flight of stairs. Having carried that burden uncountable times myself, having wrapped my arms and my fingers tightly around that heavy, bulky object, I might have said that it was impossible for a father to drop his child, but it happened. Nothing is impossible. And so I didn’t move.
Stephanie got up and turned on the light in her room. Dana turned on the light in Leah’s room. Soon there were lights all over the house. After that, the light of the television, wanly receiving its single channel. I saw them from time to time in the downstairs windows, Dana passing back and forth, pausing once to clench her fists and shout. What she was shouting was, “So shut up, just shut up for a moment, all right?” A sign that she has had it. They always shut up. Then she opens her fists and spreads her fingers and closes her eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath and says, “Okay. Okay.” She went out of view. The light went on in the kitchen, and she reappeared, carrying glasses of milk. She went away again. She reappeared carrying blankets and sleeping bags. Then they all must have lain down or sat down on the floor, because all I saw after that was the wall of the living room, with half a Hundertwasser print and the blue of the television flickering across it. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to two.
At two thirty, lights began going out again, first in the kitchen, then the dining room. The television went off. Dana passed the window, carrying a wrapped-up child, Leah, because that was the room she went into. She went to the window and closed it. Then she carried up Lizzie and Stephanie, one at a time. Don’t stumble on those blankets going up the stairs, I thought. The living room light went out. The hall light. The bathroom light. The light in our room. It was three by now. The house was dark. I imagined sleep rising off them like smoke, filtering through the roof and ascending to the starry sky. I stayed outside. The sun came up about six. I went inside and made myself a big breakfast. I sat over it, reading the paper