in for some tea?” I ask, immediately taking it back because Malcolm is giving me the evil eye.
She shakes her head, crushes the half-smoked cigarette under a Bally pump, and jangles her key fob nervously in one hand. Lexus SUV, Swiss shoes, monogrammed Tiffany key chain. No daughter, though. So much for the cocooning effects of money.
The only thing left to do is trade emails, so we spend a silent moment tapping in letters and numbers and @ signs before I head back into my own house. Malcolm has already gone inside, but not before the bus drives off with his child, who I can visualize on that yellow bus, head bent to the cold glass of the window, counting trees and telephone poles and mile markers.
I don’t know whether there’s a word for what I am now. Many come to mind, all of them with a negative cast, but none seems to fit; none spells out the horror-grief-anger-loss-sadness-hate that I feel. There should be a new word, a new concatenation of sounds and syllables to describe the desperation inside me. It might sound like thlug. Or frake. Or a scream.
“Did they make a mistake?” I ask Malcolm as I nuke my now-freezing coffee and take it back to the window where I can hold vigil over Jolene. These are the most words I’ve spoken to my husband since yesterday morning when he blackmailed me into going to breakfast with him and Alex. Even then, the most I could muster were a few one-word answers to Alex’s questions about the girls.
He looks up from his phone. “About what?”
“About that girl. Last week she was in Anne’s school. Now she’s got a yellow ID card.”
It would be too much bother for Malcolm to join me by the window, so he speaks from the dining room chair, where his computer and coffee and ego are keeping him company. “Maybe she failed everything on Friday,” he says.
“Anne says she was doing fine. Great, even.”
Malcolm’s only response is a noncommittal shrug.
Across the street, the Lexus’s driver door opens. Jolene sits, half in and half out of the car, and lights up another smoke. It’s seven in the morning. I have a feeling this is going to be a two-pack day for her.
“I’m taking a mental health day and going to my parents’ house,” I say, texting a message to Rita.
This gets Malcolm’s attention, and he turns toward me. The bruise on his cheek has developed a yellowish corona. “You’re coming back, I assume.” It isn’t a question.
“Of course.”
Malcolm doesn’t care if I come back, if I stay at my parents’, if I grow a beard and run away with a traveling circus. This much is obvious from his tone. Without me in the way, he and Anne can have their own private little dinner parties; he can fill her head up with ideas about his brave new world of education.
He throws a coat over his shoulders and walks past me on the way to the front door. “Just don’t spend so much time with that grandmother of yours that you screw up your teacher assessments tomorrow.”
Did I really love this man once upon a time? “I won’t screw them up.”
The front door shuts with a definite slam, separating more than the outside from the inside, and I sit in Freddie’s bedroom. The pillow on her bed still smells of my younger daughter, and I bury myself in it, breathing in the last of her. Everything is a shade of candy pink or moss green or butter yellow in this room, soft colors that should comfort me but don’t. Dolls watch me silently from their perch on the little shelf I whitewashed last year, reproach in their black eyes. A stick of bubble gum—strawberry, I think—has fallen between the nightstand and the bed rail. I pick it up and hold it, imagining Freddie’s small fingers unwrapping the foil, folding it into quarters the way she always does.
I shouldn’t be so selfish. I’m not the first woman, not the first sister or mother or wife, to sit in an empty bedroom with nothing but colors and icons for comfort. Women have been