"How come you guys are up if it's nighttime?" Alba sniffs. "You're making coffee, so it's morning." "Oh, it's the old coffee-equals-morning fallacy," Henry says. "There's a hole in your logic, buddy." "What?" Alba asks. She hates to be wrong about anything.
"You are basing your conclusion on faulty data; that is, you are forgetting that your parents are coffee fiends of the first order, and that we just might have gotten out of bed in the middle of the night in order to drink MORE COFFEE." He's roaring like a monster, maybe a Coffee Fiend.
"I want coffee," says Alba. "I am a Coffee Fiend." She roars back at Henry. But he scoops her off of him and plops her down on her feet. Alba runs around the table to me and throws her arms around my shoulders. "Roar!" she yells in my ear. I get up and pick Alba up. She's so heavy now. "Roar, yourself." I carry her down the hall and throw her onto her bed, and she shrieks with laughter. The clock on her nightstand says 4:16 a.m. "See?" I show her. "It's too early for you to get up." After the obligatory amount of fuss Alba settles back into bed, and I walk back to the kitchen. Henry has managed to pour us both coffee. I sit down again. It's cold in here.
"Clare."
"Mmm?"
"When I'm dead—" Henry stops, looks away, takes a breath, begins again. "I've been getting everything organized, all the documents, you know, my will, and letters to people, and stuff for Alba, it's all in my desk." I can't say anything. Henry looks at me.
"When?" I ask. Henry shakes his head. "Months? Weeks? Days?" "I don't know, Clare." He does know, I know he knows.
"You looked up the obituary, didn't you?" I say. Henry hesitates, and then nods. I open my mouth to ask again, and then I am afraid.
HOURS, IF NOT DAYS
Friday, December 24, 2006 (Henry is 43, Clare is 35)
Henry: I wake up early, so early that the bedroom is blue in the almost-dawn light. I lie in bed, listening to Clare's deep breathing, listening to the sporadic noise of traffic on Lincoln Avenue, crows calling to each other, the furnace shutting off. My legs ache. I prop myself up on my pillows and find the bottle of Vicodin on my bedside table. I take two, wash them down with flat Coke. I slide back into the blankets and turn onto my side. Clare is sleeping face down, with her arms wrapped protectively around her head. Her hair is hidden under the covers. Clare seems smaller without her ambiance of hair. She reminds me of herself as a child, sleeping with the simplicity she had when she was little. I try to remember if I have ever seen Clare as a child, sleeping. I realize that I never have. It's Alba that I am thinking of. The light is changing. Clare stirs, turns toward me, onto her side. I study her face. There are a few faint lines, at the corners of her eyes and mouth, that are the merest suggestion of the beginnings of Clare's face in middle age. I will never see that face of hers, and I regret it bitterly, the face with which Clare will go on without me, which will never be kissed by me, which will belong to a world that I won't know, except as a memory of Clare's, relegated finally to a definite past. Today is the thirty-seventh anniversary of my mother's death. I have thought of her, longed for her, every day of those thirty-seven years, and my father has, I think, thought of her almost without stopping. If fervent memory could raise the dead, she would be our Eurydice, she would rise like Lady Lazarus from her stubborn death to solace us. But all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath. The only thing my need could do was bring me to her. What will Clare have when I am gone? How can I leave her? I hear Alba talking in her bed. "Hey," says Alba. "Hey, Teddy! Shh, go to sleep now." Silence. "Daddy?" I watch Clare, to see if she will wake up. She is still, asleep. "Daddy!" I gingerly turn, carefully extricate myself from the blankets, maneuver myself to the floor. I crawl out of our bedroom, down the hall and into Alba's room. She giggles when she sees me. I make a growling noise, and Alba pats my head as though I am a dog. She is sitting up in bed, in the midst of every stuffed animal she has. "Move over, Red Riding Hood." Alba scoots aside and I lift myself onto the bed. She fussily arranges some of the toys around me. I put my arm around her and lean back and she holds out Blue Teddy to me. "He wants to eat marshmallows."
"It's a little early for marshmallows, Blue Teddy. How about some poached eggs and toast?"
Alba makes a face. She does it by squinching together her mouth and eyebrows and nose. "Teddy doesn't like eggs," she announces.