Days of Awe Read Online Free Page A

the night she was born, just flipping through the details in my mind. I’ve told her the story so many times:
It was three a.m. Daddy blew through four red lights. One of the nurses was on the phone when we walked in, ignoring us, chatting. “Lasagna,” she said to the person on the other end of the line, and I thought,
Who is she talking to about lasagna at three in the morning?
She held up the “just a minute” finger to us, and Daddy yelled at her. You were upside down, breech, and they were preparing me for a C-section, and then, at the last minute, just for me, you turned. You were born howling, loud as a freight train. But then, when they set you down on my chest, you stopped crying, and we just looked at each other, familiar mammals meeting for the first time.
    I never tell her how Chris circled the parking ramp twice, looking for a good spot. I never tell her how as he walked me slowly down the hospital corridor he said, “Actually, I don’t think this is such a good idea, Iz,” and then laughed unconvincingly. Some details you keep to yourself; you polish them up in private, smooth, shiny jewels of resentment that you save for when you might need them.
    “Okay,” Mark says, after he and Hannah have caught their breath and their laughter has subsided and we have all swung safely back to the right side of miserable. “I think we can leave now.” It’s raining harder. Chris is trying to clean his glasses again. I fumble around for the small stone I’ve been carrying in my pocket and place it on Josie’s gravestone. We were here.
    Hannah is quiet in the car, texting. Chris drops her at the library to meet some friends. (
Are you sure, sweetie?
She’s sure.) And then he takes me home, driving slowly along the silent streets. He pulls into the driveway and gets out of the car, and before I realize it, we’re walking together into the house, wordless routine and muscle memory. In the entryway near the back door he kicks off his shoes, then arranges them neatly on the mat. He shrugs off his jacket, takes mine from me, hangs them up. We’re performing the steps of our oldest dance. And even in this strange, sad, suspended state, I know that we are elegant at it.
    The house is cold. Someone left the light on in the hallway. Our socked feet pad together past the kitchen, which is still a mess from breakfast, up the stairs, into the bedroom, where the curtains are drawn, where although it’s two in the afternoon, it’s still twilit and dim: romantic or depressing, depending.
    “Well,” Chris says, moving toward me. “If there’s nothing else…”
    “Nope,” I say, inching closer. “Bye.”
    After fifteen years together, there is very little about this man that surprises me. His arms around my waist, hands tight against my back: not a surprise. His mouth on my neck, breath heavy and warm: not a surprise. The smell of his skin, like celery and oranges. They say you’re attracted to a mate based on his scent, that somewhere, in the simian recesses of your brain, you’re sniffing out the smell of genes complementary to yours, the intoxicating whiff of healthy offspring. So there’s always that, with Chris. And it, too, is not a surprise. The way he pulls at my clothes as if he doesn’t understand the mechanics of buttons and zippers. The speed of his heartbeat, animal desire, heightened now and all this past year, crazier than it has been in all of the fourteen years that came before: well, I guess that’s been a surprise.
    “Iz,” he whispers, the nickname that sounds like an existential proclamation.
“I need you.”
    And I laugh out loud.
Who’s writing your lines?
Need? Need! I suck in my stomach at the sound of that word. Tiny spider veins crosshatch my thighs, new ones popping up like dropped stitches; I just noticed one this morning. I caught a glimpse of my upper arm in the mirror a few weeks ago and it looked like my mother was in the bathroom waving to me. There are seven wayward pounds