The Husband's Secret(27)

            She selected a red one and took a tentative bite.

            “Oh, God,” she moaned a moment later, and thought, for the first time in she didn’t know how long, of sex. She took a bigger bite. “Mother Mary.” She laughed out loud. No wonder people lined up for them. It was exquisite; the raspberry flavor of the creamy center was like the barest touch of fingertips on her skin, the meringue light and tender, like eating a cloud.

            Wait. Who said that?

            “It’s like eating a cloud, Mummy!” An entranced little face.

            Janie. About four years old. Her first taste of pink, sticky, sugary fairy floss at—Luna Park? A church fete? Rachel couldn’t zoom back her memory. It was focused only on Janie’s shining face and her words: “It’s like eating a cloud, Mummy!”

            Janie would have loved these macarons.

            Without warning, the biscuit slipped from Rachel’s fingers and she hunched over, as if she could duck the first punch, but it was too late, it had her. It had been a long time since it was as bad as this. A wave of pain, as fresh and shocking as that first year when she woke up each morning and for one instant forgot before she was punched in the face with the realization that Janie wasn’t in the room down the hallway, spraying herself with too much sickly Impulse deodorant, pasting orange makeup over her perfect seventeen-year-old skin, dancing to Madonna.

            The almighty, towering injustice of it tore and twisted her heart like contractions. My daughter would have loved these silly biscuits. My daughter would have had a career. My daughter could have gone to New York.

            A steel vise wrapped around her chest and squeezed so she felt like she was suffocating and she gasped for air, but beneath her panic she could hear the weary, calm voice of experience: You’ve been here before. It won’t kill you. It feels like you can’t breathe, but you actually are breathing. It feels like you’ll never stop crying, but you actually will.

            Finally, little by little, the vise around her chest loosened its grip enough for her to breathe again. It never went away completely. She’d accepted that a long time ago. She’d die with the clamp of grief still wrapped around her chest. She didn’t want it to go away. That would be like Janie had never existed.

            She was reminded of those Christmas cards from the first year.

            Dear Rachel, Ed and Rob, We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

            It was as if they’d just closed up the space where Janie had been. And “merry”! Were they out of their silly little minds? She swore each time she’d opened another card, ripping it into tiny pieces.

            “Mum, give them a break, they just don’t know what else to say,” Rob had said to her tiredly. He was just fifteen, and his face seemed to belong to a sad, pale fifty-year-old with acne.

            Rachel swept the macaron crumbs off the sheets with the back of her hand. “Crumbs! Christ Almighty, look at these crumbs!” Ed would have said. He thought eating in bed was immoral. Also, if he could see the television sitting there on the chest of drawers, he’d have a fit. Ed believed that people who had televisions in their bedrooms were akin to cocaine addicts; weak, debauched types. The bedroom, according to Ed, was for a prayer on your knees next to the bed, your head resting on your fingertips, lips moving rapidly (very rapidly; he didn’t believe in wasting too much of the Big Guy’s time), followed by sex (preferably every night), followed by sleep.

            She picked up the remote and pointed it at the television, flicking through the channels.

            A documentary about the Berlin Wall.

            No. Too sad.

            One of those crime investigation shows.

            Never.