who pushed her on the swing, put her to sleep at night, kissed her when she fell. When I sat down, I worried. With the stress gnawing at my stomach, worrying. I worried that my paycheck might not cover bills that month. I worried about Christmas, still four months away. I worried that Mia’s cough might become a sinus infection that would keep her out of day care. I worried that Jamie’s behavior was escalating, that we would get in a fight, that he would go back on his offer to pick her up at day care that week just to make it difficult for me. I worried that I would have to reschedule work or miss it altogether.
Every single parent teetering on poverty does this. We work, we love, we do. And the stress of it all, the exhaustion, leaves us hollowed. Scraped out. Ghosts of our former selves. That’s how I felt for those few days after the accident, like I wasn’t fully connected to the ground when I walked. I knew that at any moment, a breeze could come and blow me away.
21
THE CLOWN HOUSE
I called it the Clown House. The wife had an affinity for Thomas Kinkade landscape paintings, which filled most of the walls on her main floor. But the long staircase leading to the upper level was lined with paintings of clowns. Sad clowns. Close-ups of clown faces with eyes that followed me around. She had clown figurines, too, but the paintings were the worst. They made me feel helpless. I’d stare in a mix of horror and disgust and curiosity—why would anyone want those on their wall? What if the electricity went out and the beam of a flashlight caught one of the faces? Didn’t it scare the shit out of them?
Once a month, I cleaned the bottom floor, where two bedrooms and a bathroom were set up for their two adult sons. It seemed like the boys had never lived in those rooms, but most of the relics from their childhood were neatly arranged. I dusted the Bell Biv DeVoe cassettes, the yearbooks, the Mickey Mouse clock; fluffed the pillows; and sat the teddy bears upright afterward. But that day, the first day at work after the accident, I again went straight for the bathroom first.
Shutting myself in the tiny room with the toilet seemed a natural response to blaring emptiness pulling at me from every direction. Bathrooms were a good place to hide. I wanted to crouch, belly-down on the floor, fingers laced over the back of my head like a tornado drill, like everything was about to fall on top of me. After the accident, the Clown House, a massive, three-story home with views of the town I used to live in with Travis, seemed to amplify how out of control my life was. How unsure I was of our future. How, financially, we might not survive.
I sank to my knees in front of the toilet and took a breath in, counting to five while I let it out, before stopping to fold the toilet paper into a triangle on the bottom—one corner tucked under, then the other, until a neat point formed. My hand dropped down to my cleaning tray to pull out my yellow gloves. Bits of glass from the crash flew all over the floor.
The tears blinded me. The toilet closet, which moments ago had comforted me like an embrace, now seemed like a trash compactor. I reached for the door handle and bolted out, gasping for air. From my throat came the sound of a guttural yell before I broke into sobs. The day before, Jamie had glared at me on the ferry dock after he rushed to take Mia from me like he was some kind of superhero rescuing his daughter from the evil witch who’d put her in danger. Mia started crying, reaching for me. “No, my love,” he’d said, “you need to come with me.” Then the glare.
I sat in front of the shower, my forehead resting on my knees, running the fibers of the maroon rug through my fingertips. The sound of car windows exploding shook in my ears, an overwhelming tightness rising in my chest. I’m on the clock, I said to myself. I’m having a nervous breakdown on the clock.
There were pieces of glass in the fingers of the gloves. I shook them out and put the gloves on, but the tears kept blinding me, so I pulled them off