Ava sat at the kitchen window, watching darkness invade her block. The streetlight outside the window flickered and failed to turn on, leaving a double gap in darkness between the lights down the hill. To Ava, it looked like all the lights might fall apart, like a necklace missing a pearl, held together by habit in the moment before they scatter. She leaned her forehead against the curtains, breathed in the perfume of dust, boxed Chianti on her breath, and the lingering presence of dinner smells, the dinner she cooked for her family and no one ate. She used to love those smells, the way the house would hold on to dinner long into the night. It made her feel safe.
She turned her back to the window, removed her glasses and placed them on the kitchen counter. The plastic clicked on the laminate. The sound felt so obtrusive to the quiet she finally inhabited. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply and rubbed the peaks of her eyebrows. Her hands felt alien on her own face.
She caught a hint of onion in the air. She had always especially loved the smell of onions being sautéed in butter. Ava’s mother was known for her lasagna. If tragedy befell anyone in the neighborhood, they could expect a week’s worth of frozen lasagnas from Rosemarie Sullivan. The lasagnas weren’t especially good but Rosemarie was reliable and loyal, two of the qualities most valued in the Irish Catholic Southside universe. Ava wondered if her mom would have had her brother deliver her a neat stack of Tupperware containers when Bridget was still sick, or if now was the time she would have felt obligated to step in with noodles and cheese and red sauce with butter-sautéed onions.
Ava missed the unsolicited wisdom she could have relied on if she could have called her mother for lasagnas. She needed someone to tell her what to do now, now that her daughter’s cancer was in remission, now that her husband’s business was taking off, now that everything should feel back to normal. What was that, normal? The word made her feel slow-motion, like her mouth was full of peanut butter. Normal.
Ava pulled a clean spoon out of the drying rack next to the sink. She opened the freezer, pulled out an actual jar of peanut butter and went out to the front porch. As a teenager, when her mom was sick, she had taken great solace in the time she could spend alone on the front porch before dawn with her private jar of frozen chunky peanut butter. Back then, she could house a jar a week and never feel like her ass looked like frozen chunky peanut butter. She wondered if Frank noticed she was looking different lately. The cement steps felt cold on her butt cheeks through her thin, striped pajama pants. She shivered and smirked, feeling her nipples get hard under her Mt. Calvary sweatshirt. Ava felt at the edges of her right sleeve where Maggie had chewed at it when she was a baby. She wondered if, in her tiny baby body, Maggie carried some of the pain of Bridget’s cancer, too. Kathleen, not the oldest daughter but the bossiest, had insisted that all four girls share a room when Bridget was sick. Maggie, only two at the time, couldn’t have understood what was happening, why her sister had no hair or why she hated to have her neck touched, but it had to be in all of them. Mary Rose, Kathleen, Maggie, her and Frank. Probably even the dog. But Bridget was cancer free now. The words made her feel like a moth in an old lady’s closet. Cancer free.
The night Frank gave Ava that gray crew neck with the big white letters was now twenty years ago. She surprised herself with that calculation. They had been together for twenty years. A gush of wind rushed through the drying trees and a familiar electricity ran down Ava’s back. She closed her eyes and filled her mouth with peanut butter. The spoon clicked on her front teeth. She remembered their first kiss, how their teeth bumped together under the streetlight in the alley by the park, how Frank smelled faintly like chlorine and warm beer.
The world seemed to move so slowly then. From the night she saw the pink plus sign on that pregnancy test in the bathroom at Keegan’s Pub, on Frank’s 21st birthday, until the day the doctors came back into Bridget’s hospital room with the words “cancer free,” life had moved at a screaming speed. They had been so good at that speed. Ava and Frank surprised everyone who had so expected them to fail. Four daughters, 12, 10, 8 and 3 - all healthy now - a dog, a bungalow in the neighborhood, Frank’s contractor business was even doing good. It all walked, talked and looked like success, like triumph over adversity even. That phrase sounded like the college essay she never wrote.
Yet lately, Ava felt like she fell in fresh cement. Time didn’t drip by in that lollygagging lightning bugs first cigarettes and kisses hand holding honeyed kind of slowness, but in a suspected affair pediatric chemotherapy bills inexorable brutality kind of slowness. She remembered that she had forgotten to mail a check to Little Company Hospital today. She would do that when the sun came up.
Ava sat up straight. She heard a crash from upstairs inside the house, an impossible sound like a thunderclap. She rushed back inside, leaving the peanut butter on the porch, but not forgetting to lock the door. She barreled up the stairs, the dog close at her heels, and went straight for the room her girls shared. Ava had a no-knobs-closed policy so she quietly slid open the door and the egg yolk of dim hall light cracked over her four babies, all sleeping. Kathleen had crawled into bed with Bridget and covered her with all her long, skinny limbs.
It was surreal to watch them all breathe together, their tiny bellies rising and falling as God intended, Bridget’s face flushed with the heat of a room full of sisters. After so many nights of choreographed chaos, this peaceful moment struck a chord of fear in Ava. She heard an echo of the thunderclap, fainter this time. The girls didn’t stir, so she closed the door carefully and went to check on her husband.
When Ava opened the door to her bedroom, the dog pushed past her and assumed her spot on the floor at the foot of their empty bed. The tidiness of the bed, still made, lit Ava up. He should have been home by now. Before her full frustration could register, Ava heard the rumble a third time. This time, she felt she knew it was coming from the room that had been Bridget’s during chemo.
Ava walked across the hallway, all her senses heightened. She felt the carpet pile under her bare feet. She felt the headache pulse between her eyebrows. She pushed her tongue against the roof of her mouth and felt the peanut butter on the backs of her teeth. This time, the rumble carried on. It seemed to pulse as she walked closer to the door. This knob was always twisted shut. Ava reached for it and the dog crouched down and back in a hunting posture.
Ava threw the door open without crossing into the room, as if she stood on a cliff above the sea. The room was filled with light despite the defective streetlight outside the window. The dog ran back into Ava and Frank’s room. A warm breeze floated Ava’s hair. The rocking chair she had spent so many nights in swayed and, on it, rippled the green scarf Bridget had worn around her head when she was sick, almost like it was reaching for Ava.
The floor creaked behind her and Ava turned.
“Mom, I had a bad dream.” It was Bridget, barefoot in her pink pajamas, rubbing her eyes. “Can I have a cup of water?”
Ava, relieved, scooped Bridget up in her arms. She was still small for an 8-year-old, though Ava was pleased to see her daughter gain a little something in her face again. She had been such a fat, happy baby. Bridget burrowed in her mother’s neck.
“Why are you so cold, mom?”
Ava didn’t answer. She drew back the blankets and laid Bridget in her empty bed.
“Mom?”
Ava walked to the bathroom and brought Bridget a paper cup of water. The cups had tiny black birds on them and felt soggy almost as soon as you filled them. Bridget gulped back the water and burped. She smiled at her mother and shrugged, her sweet face glowing in the light from the bathroom adjacent to Ava and Frank’s room. Ava didn’t notice and Bridget felt as though she had done something wrong.
“Sorry, momma.”
Ava shuddered and snapped out of her reverie.
“Oh honey, no, no. I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s ok. Lay down now, get some sleep.”
Ava tucked her daughter in on all sides like a mummy, the way Bridget liked, and kissed her warm forehead. She held her face there, next to her daughter’s, and breathed her in. When Bridget was undergoing chemo, she had smelled like cotton candy mothballs made of metal. Ava remembered holding her in her rocking chair one night last summer, sitting awake all night trying to pick the words that fit the smell that her daughter’s swollen body radiated. She remembered feeling a near trance-like elation, so grateful that Bridget was safely asleep for a six solid hours. Tonight, Bridget smelled sweet and sweaty and healthy. Her scent was new. The sweetness was somehow different, yet connected to the chemo smell, like that smell had taken up residence inside Ava’s nose canals up to her brain. Ava wondered if she would ever not be haunted by that smell.
She padded over to the bathroom, flipped off the light, and crawled into bed beside Bridget. Her little body made the bed so warm. The dog walked in a circle at the foot of the bed and returned to her favorite spot. Soon, the whole house settled into sleep.
A low rumble awoke Ava. She blinked and tried to focus her eyes. Immediately in front of her face, she saw a form that immobilized her. She wanted to blink again but couldn’t. It was as if Bridget’s face had been rearranged, blue and choked. Ava couldn’t breathe. The form morphed and reached for Ava. She felt the urge to riot, yet like a paralytic poison had invaded her body. She rolled out of the bed and melted down the side of it.
Ava took three deep breaths. She felt the breath whistle through her nose and distend her belly. She thought of her baby in bed with that demon, fought to her knees and peered over the edge of the bed.
All she saw was Bridget, sprawled out in a tangle of blankets and sheets. Ava exhaled and pulled herself up. Bridget twitched and pulled at the empty space beside her that her mother had left behind.
Ava tidied the blankets around her daughter and mummied her back into a neat burrito form that only a mother could know her child craved, leaving the left side of the sheets loose so she could stick her foot out like Ava knew Bridget liked to. She stood there for a moment, feeling relieved, and realized that Frank was still not home. She walked downstairs to see if he was on the couch.
Ava found no Frank, but saw the dog pawing at the back door — from the outside. They didn’t have a doggy door and Ava didn’t remember letting her out. She opened the door and the dog dropped something at Ava’s feet, then sat back on her haunches, proud, like she had delivered something important. Ava bent down in the darkness, the room only lit from the streetlight in the alley behind their house. A cold current cut through the open back door and made the skin on Ava’s hands tighten as she reached for the objects the dog had dropped. She picked up a piece of cloth — green, Bridget’s green scarf. Under it, Ava saw a dead black bird. She fell back and kicked the floor to create distance between herself and the carcass.
Ava clutched her chest, collected herself and went to the kitchen to get an oven mitt with which to pick up the bird and carry it to the alley. As she walked away, she heard a sound like flapping wings. She paused, thinking that it must be a bag blowing in the wind outside. She started to walk again and it grew louder. She turned around and saw the bird, dead on the ground. Ava admonished herself for her paranoid thoughts, turned and continued to the kitchen. As she walked, her back filled her back with the sensation of sunlight. A dark shape flamed past her. The flapping sound caught up with what she saw, more furious now. The bird cut past her again, so close she could smell the death on it. It ripped out the still-open back door. Ava heard a creak in the old kitchen floor over by the stairs. She looked back, saw Bridget standing there, and released a scream worth all the screams she had been swallowing into her guts for the last two years.
She collapsed on the ground like her bones had disappeared from her body, she was just a skull with guts and skin holding them together. When she stopped screaming, she had no idea how much time had passed, she heard the front door open behind Bridget. She looked up and could only see her daughter’s silhouette illuminated by light flooding in behind her. Ava felt nothing. She heard the rumble of her other daughters running down the stairs but couldn’t see them. She sensed all their hands reaching for her and all she could see was light.
It’s morning. Ava stands in the empty kitchen, filled with the loveliest morning light. She holds a mug of hot coffee in her hands. She breathes in the steam and can’t remember making the coffee or pouring it. The dog is asleep at her feet. There’s a note on the counter. “Thank you. I’ll be home early tonight xx.” She hears the floor creak upstairs. A familiar fear fills her body but she can’t place it. She follows the sound.
Ava checks in on her girls. Bridget and Kathleen are in one bed, Mary Rose and Maggie are in their own beds. They’re all sleeping. Ava hears a flutter of wings and follows the sound to Bridget’s old bedroom. The dog is guarding the door, but she moves out of the way when Ava approaches.
When Ava opens the door, she finds the room flooded with sunlight. The windows are wide open, the curtains flutter gracelessly, and everything is washed in gold. She feels a bird rush past her but never sees it because she is focused on the green scarf on the floor beside the rocking chair. Ava walks over, sits down, holds the scarf in her hands and breaths in its smell. She ties the scarf around her eyes, lays back, and feels the room fill with moths, the cool current drafting off their wings makes her feel so young.