Gloria Mayfield had not left the house in seven days. Most of her time had been spent slumped on the couch, flipping idly through channels, standing only to use the toilet down the hall. When she slept, she slept restlessly, kicking her blankets to the floor as her dreams devolved into nightmares. Sometimes, she’d wake in the middle of the night to the sound of her daughter’s feeble voice, calling for her mother over the quiet hum of the radiator.
But when Gloria reached out into the darkness, she was met with only silence.
On the morning of the eighth day, Gloria ran herself a bath.
***
Gloria DiMarco had been like most teenagers in her rural Ohio town. She craved the thrill of the city, a vast new land she had never seen. The possibilities there were endless: a Hollywood actress, a motorcyclist, a Nobel-winning physicist.
Unlike the others, however, she was quick-witted enough to land herself a full ride to a West Coast university, where she could bask in the glow of opportunity. Her days in the fields, hiding in the corn, were over. By her 18th birthday, she was long gone, having left behind the life she knew for the first and final time.
Jack Mayfield, on the other hand, was the campus heartthrob, the kind of boy who could wear a white T-shirt and patched-up jeans and still look California chic. With his bronze surfer’s tan and perpetually messy hair, he was a sun-drenched Adonis. In class, he was brilliant, and outside it, he was considerate. It was no wonder every bachelor and bachelorette from San Diego to Seattle wanted to catch his eye.
But it was Gloria that he picked as his lab partner in biology on the first day of his junior year. It was Gloria that he asked to dinner three weeks after that. And despite the best efforts of half the student population, it was Gloria that he decided to go steady with for the next four years of his life.
She could hardly believe that he had chosen her, a quiet, unremarkable freshman from a town in the middle of nowhere. This wild, experienced boy with girls falling at his feet left and right was hers, and it felt like the city itself had swept her up and sworn never to let go.
Was this, Gloria wondered, why wars were fought for love? Why kingdoms were surrendered and cities united? For the first time, she understood. She couldn’t imagine a brighter future.
They married in a rose garden on Jack’s 25th birthday, just six days after Gloria’s graduation. That same week, they moved into a cozy Brooklyn brownstone. There was a park just down the street and a library on the corner. It was the perfect place to raise a child, they agreed, determined to be the best parents they could be.
It wasn’t easy. There were days of numbness after each negative test result, each time the small blue line appeared in solitude. Her first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage after only three months, and her second, a son, was stillborn. Some nights, Gloria would wake with no one by her side and find Jack sprawled out in the hallway, shitfaced, sobbing their son’s name on repeat with his fists opening and closing like he could grab that shriveled blue face and drag it into life. They had lost so much; they dared not lose each other.
But after four long years of trying, Gloria gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, wispy golden curls already present just above her fat pink face. Jack kissed his wife’s forehead, then his daughter’s, hands trembling with the realization that he was now a father.
“Hello, Marilyn,” Gloria giggled through her tears, swaddling her baby close. “Hello, hello, hello.”
***
Her Marilyn, the light of her life.
Gloria sank into the water with a sigh, letting the warmth seep into her stiff muscles. It was about time, too. Her hair was dull and greasy, and the stench of sweat clung to her skin. For that first week, bathing seemed inconceivable. The washcloth would scour away the old cells, and within seconds she would have changed completely, become a new body that had never held her daughter. How could she wash Marilyn from her skin, the memory of her small hands clinging tightly to her thigh?
The memories mapped in her body, the last remaining proof of her motherhood. Her stomach, pudgy and riddled with stretch marks, marking the directions her body had swelled in strange new ways. Her thighs, only a few shades darker than the bathtub, padded with the fat she’d never been able to lose. Staring at her lower half, submerged in the water, Gloria felt a thousand years older than 31.
She thought of Jack, who had not been home in six days.
She couldn’t blame him. Marilyn’s toys still lay scattered on the floor. The blinds were drawn tight; the sun stung Gloria’s eyes. The house was dark and silent.
He’d lasted two days before the emptiness became too pressing, and then he too had gone. Gloria had, of course, expected it. She’d known him long enough to tell when the ache would culminate.
Weren’t they in their prime? Hadn’t they done their best? Wasn’t this the kind of thing that only happened to those tragic women on the television, with their sorrowed, sallow faces, their empty eyes, their silence? To lose a child—to build a world in orbit around that bright, bright star only to have her ripped away—wasn’t that reserved for Someone Else?
It was a horribly selfish thought, lodging guilt like a boulder in the narrow column of Gloria’s throat. She wouldn’t wish this grief, this dull December day in her chest, on anyone.
Still the bitterness burrowed into her. What had they done to deserve this? It wasn’t like the Mayfields were strangers to grief; they had, after all, lost children before.
But they had been safe. Marilyn wasn’t like the others. She was healthy and young and alive, falling ill only a few times in all five years they’d spent together, until…
Until the street and the truck and the blood, the blood and brain and bone. The sirens, the screaming. Spine plunging into icy cold horror, stomach convulsing, heart grinding to a halt.
The scene replayed in Gloria’s mind over and over again, echoing with the sound of skull giving way to windshield, the smell of burnt rubber biting at her nostrils, acrid and angry. Above it all, a tiny, pitiful wail. Jack’s footsteps, their desperate, even meter on the asphalt. And the piercing needle of certainty, sharp and precise, as she watched her daughter tumble to the ground and lie there, ragdoll, unmoving; there was nothing to be done.
Gloria closed her eyes and let her head sink until it hit the floor of the tub, wishing the water could soothe her thoughts like strained muscles, turn them pliant and soft and easy to tuck away. Give the sounds the fragility of bodies.
***
For the first few years, mornings at the Mayfield household were cheerful.
Jack and Gloria took turns making breakfast (progressive, they joked), while the other kept their daughter busy. When it was Gloria’s turn, she’d watch Jack and Marilyn dashing round the living room, sunbeams turning their hair twin shades of gold. Breakfast can wait, she’d tell herself, marveling at the way mirth lit up Jack’s face when he swept Marilyn into his arms and lifted her to the sky like a treasure, the way Marilyn’s bubbling laugh rang out in high, silver peals.
Gloria had never loved anyone more. Sometimes she felt like an overripe peach, soft and sweet and aching to burst.
At 4, Marilyn developed an obsession with birds. It probably had something to do with the way Jack made airplane noises and flew her around the room. She always talked about flying now, sometimes asking when she would grow wings of her own. Every night, she’d beg her parents to read to her, peering over their shoulders and sounding out the words: robin, blue jay, crow. During walks, she pointed out every bird she recognized, most of which were pigeons. Always tugging on her mother’s hand and saying, “Mama, can I keep it? Can I keep it, Mama, pretty pretty please?” until Jack shushed her, gently reminding her not to scare the flock.
So when Marilyn, bouncing with impatience at the crosswalk, gasped out, “Mama, look, the colors,” Gloria thought nothing of it. Perhaps it was a downy gray finch. Perhaps it was a grassy-headed mallard that had escaped from Central Park.
Of course, it didn’t matter now.
The things that mattered: Marilyn’s hand slipping out of her mother’s grasp. Tires screeching. Jack running.
And Gloria, reaching out for her daughter, fingers closing around empty air, turning just in time to see the colors: a dot of gold, a flash of silver, and then all of it colliding. Arching toward the sky. Blooming against the skyline in brilliant, brilliant red.
***
Hours had passed, probably. Gloria wasn’t certain exactly how long she’d been sitting there, but her fingertips had wrinkled into raisins, and the water was no longer warm.
Her hands shook, either from cold or from grief or from both at once. It was silent in the bathtub, a bleak, oppressive silence. She could hear every steady iamb of her heartbeat. If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear Marilyn’s footsteps down the hall.
There was a knock. Gloria couldn’t find the voice to respond.
The door creaked timidly open, and Jack stepped in.
He looked awful, as awful as Gloria felt. His hair lay flat and heavy on his forehead, weighed down by sweat and grime. She could smell the alcohol on him from several feet away. His knuckles were scraped, and his jeans were stained in some places with blood.
He walked as if every step caused him pain. There was mud on his right shoe. It seemed he’d lost the left one.
“I’m sorry.”
Gloria stared at him as his eyes welled up. She’d memorized every detail of them, every fleck of gold amongst the green. At 18, she had written poems about the way his lashes fanned out against his cheeks. They still curled the same way. A tiny flick upwards at the ends.
“It’s OK,” she said, her voice hoarse. It was the first time she had spoken in a week.
Jack fell to his knees beside her. “Gloria,” he said, softly, something cracking in the steady line of his mouth. Like her name was a prayer, an anchor.
She thought of the three of them wrapped warmly beneath the sheets, Marilyn in the middle, framed by the two people who loved her most. She thought of Marilyn’s newborn cry, how hard her tiny lungs had worked to take in air, then trumpet it out, hurl her voice at the ceiling of the operating room. She thought of the warm weight of Jack’s palm against hers as they watched their daughter toddle toward them, arms outstretched for balance with each new, hesitant step.
That weight, she realized, was not only in her head.
Gloria looked to the rim of the tub, where Jack’s hand rested in hers. His solid grip was the only familiar thing in the cold and solemn room. She’d entwined their fingers without noticing, as if she’d done it so many times over the years that it had become a reflex.
How strange, then, that such a small and simple thing brought her to tears.