Stories: All-New Tales

He was sitting on his daughter’s bed one Saturday, remembering a conversation they’d had. Can I still live here when I get married? she’d asked, and he’d grinned and said that would be perfectly fine.

But what about your husband? he’d asked.

His daughter had considered this carefully. Well, we could set up the cot, like when I have a sleepover.

The doorbell rang, and when Abe went downstairs, he found the little girl his daughter had considered her best friend—the last one who’d used that cot, actually—standing red eyed beside her mother. “Hi, Abe,” the woman said. “I hope this isn’t too much of an imposition.”

“No!” he said, too brightly. “No! Not at all!”

“It’s just that Emily’s having some trouble, with, well, you know. She drew a picture, and wanted to bring it here. She thought maybe you could hang it up.” The little girl thrust out a piece of paper toward Abe: a crayon drawing of two little girls—one dark-haired, like his daughter, one fair, like Emily. They were holding hands. There was a melting sun overhead, and grass beneath their feet.

Abe realized he was nearly at a level with Emily; he barely had to crouch down to look her in the eye. “This is beautiful, honey,” he said. “I’m going to put it up right over her bed.” He reached out as if to touch the crown of her head, but realized that this might hurt him more than it would offer comfort, and at the last minute pulled his arm back to his side.

“Are you all right?” Emily’s mother whispered. “You look…” Her voice trailed off as she tried to find the right word, and then she just gave up and shook her head. “Well. Of course you’re not all right. I’m so sorry, Abe. I truly am.” With one last look, she took Emily’s hand and started to walk down the driveway.

Abe held the crayon picture in his hand so tightly that it crumpled. He watched Emily kick the unraked leaves along the sidewalk, setting up small tornadoes as her mother looked straight ahead, not even aware that she was missing this one small, wonderful thing.

SARAH AND ABE DID not really speak to each other, not until Abe walked into their daughter’s room and found Sarah taking the books off the shelves and putting them into boxes. “What are you doing?” he asked, stricken.

“I can’t move past this,” Sarah said, “knowing it’s all right down the hall.”

“No,” Abe answered.

Sarah hesitated. “What do you mean, no?”

Abe reached into one of the boxes and took out a fistful of picture books, jammed them back onto the shelf. “Just because you’re ready to give her up,” he said, “doesn’t mean I am.”

Sarah’s face bloomed with color. “Give her up?” she whispered. “Is that what you think I’m doing? For God’s sake, Abe, all I want to do is function like a normal human being again.”

“But you’re not normal. We’re not normal.” His eyes filled with tears. “She died, Sarah.”

Sarah winced, as if she had taken a blow. Then she turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

Abe sank onto the floor, his fingers speared through his hair. After a half hour, he stood up and walked down the hall to their bedroom. He found Sarah lying on her side, staring at the sun as it shamefully scuttled off the horizon. Abe lay down on the bed, curling his body around hers. “I lost her,” he whispered. “Please don’t tell me I’ve lost you.”

Sarah turned to him, and rested her palm on his cheek. She kissed him, all the words she could not say. They began to comfort each other—a touch here, a brush of lips there, a kindness. But when their clothes had dissolved into pools on the floor, when Abe braced himself over his wife and took hold of her body and tried to settle her curves against his canyons, they did not come together seamlessly, the way they used to. They were off, just enough to make it uncomfortable; just enough for her to say, Let me try this and for him to say, Maybe this way.

Afterward, when Sarah had fallen asleep, Abe sat up and stared down at the end of the bed, at his wife’s feet hanging long and white over its edge.

THE NEXT MORNING, ABE and Sarah lay in the dark. “Maybe I need to be alone for a while,” Sarah said, although it wasn’t what she’d hoped to say.

“Maybe you do,” Abe replied, although it was the opposite of what he meant. It was as if, in this new world, where the impossible had actually happened, nothing fit anymore: not language, not reason, not even the two of them.

When Sarah got out of bed, she took the sheet with her—a modesty she hadn’t needed for fifteen years of marriage. It prevented Abe from seeing what he would have noticed, in an instant: that the growth Sarah had experienced was exactly the same amount Abe himself had diminished; and that, if you could measure anything as insubstantial as that, it would have been exactly the same size and scope as the daughter they’d lost.