I couldn’t sleep for days after meeting her.

I couldn’t sleep until I went into the basement.

I brushed off the layer of dust on the storage container. Inside were Sam’s things. Onesies, blankets, footed pajamas, a few other little things he loved. Benny the Bunny. I carried the box upstairs to the foot of my bed and began my ritual. Night-light on. Organic lavender lotion on my hands, the kind I used to rub on his skin after his bath. The white noise machine was at the bottom of the box. Ocean waves. I placed it on the bedside table.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember every last thing of his inside. The soft mint-green one-piece from your mother. The pajamas that matched Violet’s. The muslin blanket with the hearts on it. The tiny red socks. The flannel blanket from the hospital. I could list them all, I could do it again right now, a game of memory. None of it had been washed. So much of him was in those fabrics.

This was an indulgence I’d allowed myself only a few times since Sam died. I saved it for when I needed it most.

I lifted each item slowly to my face and inhaled as deeply as I could until my nose stung, letting my mind soak up whatever it could find . . . banging pots on the kitchen floor while I made oatmeal, sucking soapy water from the wet facecloth in the bath, cuddling for stories, naked, happy, the risk of a diaper-free bum on our duvet. I craved these little silent movies of him. It didn’t matter to me that these memories were not exact, that most of them hadn’t happened precisely as they did in the scenes that played through my head—I just needed to see him, and then I could feel him with these things in my hands. If I focused just enough Sam could be right there next to me, and I could feel alive again.

When I finished caressing each of his things, I chose the pajamas he wore the most, thin in the knees from crawling after Violet, stained at the neck from blueberry jam. The light-knit blanket from his crib. And Benny. I used to be able to find him in that fur, distinctly, breathing him in to fill my brain like an anesthetic. But now Sam’s scent was nearly gone and Benny felt a bit damp and musty. I ran my thumb over the stained part of his tail that looked like nothing but old rust now.

I’d kept an unused diaper, too. I laid everything out on the bed, each article as it would have been: the diaper inside the pajamas, the blanket laid underneath, Benny tucked in near his neck. And then I picked him up and I cradled him in my arms, and I smelled him, and I kissed him. I turned off the night-light. I tucked in the corners of the blanket so he was wrapped and warm. I swayed to the ocean waves and hummed the lullaby I always sang. I rocked him back and forth. And when he was still and heavy, when his breathing was long and deep, I carefully slipped into bed so as not to wake him. I moved the pillows, made a safe spot. And I slept there, with him in my arms.

* * *

? ? ?

In the morning, I put everything carefully back. I carried the box down to the basement. Back in the kitchen, I put the kettle on the stove, pulled up the blinds, and began another day alone.

67

My father told me he was going to drop me off at my mother’s house on Sunday for lunch. I was stunned. We hadn’t spoken much about her in the two years since she left, and I hadn’t seen her since the time at the diner with Mrs. Ellington. He told me she had called the week before and extended the invitation. I didn’t seem to have a choice, the way he told me about it, but I remember wanting to go despite her betrayal—I was curious. Maybe he was, too.

When she opened the door she looked past me to the driveway, searching for my father through the reflection on his windshield. She watched the car until it turned off the street and then looked down at me. I wore my hair a different way, in two long braids, and my face was speckled with new freckles from the summer sun.

“Nice to see you,” she said, as though we’d run into each other at the grocery store.

I followed her in. Her house, modest on the outside, was filled with fancy items I hadn’t seen before, not even at the Ellingtons’. Proper runners on the tables and glass statues on pedestals and pictures lit from above with their own special lamps. None of it felt real to me. It felt like a set, like actors would sweep in any minute and take over the stage. Richard called for us and she shuffled me to the kitchen, where he handed me a dark pink drink in a cocktail glass.

“I made you a Shirley Temple.” I took it from his huge hand and they watched me have a sip.

“This is Richard. Richard, this is Blythe.” She sat at the table and looked around her kitchen, prompting me to do the same. Everything looked pristine, unused. Maybe it was.

“I’ve ordered some sandwiches.”

Richard stared at me and then back at my mother. She raised her eyebrows at him as if to say, Happy now?

He asked me a few questions about the first week of school and told me he liked my name, and then excused himself to make a call. My mother unwrapped our lunch from cellophane and asked me what I had been up to. For the past two years, or just this weekend? I wanted to ask. But it was clear that we were supposed to pretend—just like the house she had set up. Just like this life she had wanted to show me for some reason. She leaned over the counter to reach a knife and her blouse touched a blob of mayonnaise.

“Shit,” she hissed and rubbed at the stain with a dish towel. “I’ve worn this once.”

I ate my turkey sandwich and listened to them talk about somewhere on the coast of France. They’d gone for the summer. I wondered where all the money came from, why they lived in that boring house in that mediocre neighborhood a half hour outside the city. I’d always imagined she left us for an urban, bohemian life full of people who were as beautiful as she was. That was clearly not Richard. But he certainly didn’t match the glass statues and the elegant china either. He looked as out of place as I knew she was.