The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,75
with him almost, in an effort to erase whatever Peter might have done. Two men in the same night, and not so very long afterward, another small man arrived: my son. Mine. He belonged to both of them, or neither of them. I felt the singularity of this, the finality of my life coming together even as Peter’s was tearing apart.
I turned around and went to the shelf to get the hooded towel, then shook it out on the floor, and when I turned back, the baby was underwater. Not because he slipped in the bubbles. Not because he wasn’t strong enough to sit up for long. No. Because Emma’s hands were on his chest, pinning him down.
“Emma!” I screamed. I pulled her off and brought him up, sputtering, startled.
I wrapped him in a towel and held him close as I wagged my finger in her face.
“Don’t you ever do that to him again! You could have killed him, Emma, killed him!”
When I stopped talking, I saw it in her eyes: recognition. She knew she could have killed him; she wasn’t surprised. Did she know exactly what she was doing?
“I was just playing,” she said.
“I’m putting him in the playpen and I want you to think for just a second about what you’ve done!” I said.
“Okay,” she said flatly. That was all, the only word I remember. Dull and ordinary as an old spoon.
I wasn’t gone long. A minute? Two? Long enough to diaper the baby and nestle him in his playpen with a pacifier. Long enough to lay him in the light blanket and give him a rattle. That’s all. I didn’t rock him, or sing to him, or play patty-cake. I hurried back. I did.
But when I returned, there she was, underneath, floating, her hair looking soft, almost delicate. My first thought horrified me: that she’d done it on purpose. She was big and strong, so strong. She was almost four! Did she want me to rescue her as I’d rescued the baby? To save her? And prove that I loved her as much as I loved him?
I pulled her out, dripping, and bent her over my knee, opening her mouth with one hand, thinking she just needed to spit out some water. I hit her with the flat of my hand between the shoulder blades, waiting for the wetness to spill across the floor, but nothing came.
I laid her on the floor and tried desperately to remember the lifesaving course I took the summer before college. I tilted her head, pinched her nose, blew into her mouth.
“Breathe, Emma!” I screamed. “Breathe!”
I ran to the phone and dialed the rescue squad. When they arrived I was still hunched over her, counting breaths. One of them had to pull on my shoulder to move me away. They worked on her for a few minutes and I stood back in the doorway. When they stopped and looked up at me and told me she was gone, all I could think was that the baby had slept through it. How was it possible that Emma wasn’t talking and the baby wasn’t crying?
The silence. I will always remember the silence.
The police took my statement; no one doubted what I said, or what I did. Of course she was old enough to leave in the bath for a moment. Of course you weren’t gone long. Of course, of course. No one doubted. Not Theo, when he came home and held me, broken heart to broken heart. Not the police, not Betsy, not Aunt Caro, no one. And not even Peter, watching from the curb as the ambulance pulled up, watching again as they loaded my daughter’s body inside. His soft face was all startled love, no accusation.
“It was me,” Peter said to the police. “I rang the doorbell urgently and called her away from the bathroom.”
“What time was this, sir?”
“I don’t know—but I rang it five or six times,” he said. “I should only have rung it twice.”
“Must have been important,” the patrolman said.
The glance we exchanged held too much; I dropped my gaze. It was more than either of us could bear.
“His wife is terribly ill,” I said quietly.
Peter’s story provided a worthy distraction; no one needed to know why I’d put the baby in the playpen. No one needed to know what Emma had done. But I know Peter said this for another reason: to take the blame. To make it seem as if it wasn’t my fault.