Clark was asleep when Mira got home. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, but he lay on his back on their bed with his hands folded on his chest, so deeply asleep he never heard her come in the house or the twins’ deafening squealing upon her arrival—the usual tearful reunion, the clinging, the sobbing against her chest. By the time Mira had finally calmed them down enough to stand up from the floor and go looking for Clark, there were two spreading damp circles of their tears on her red silk blouse.
Ruined, she thought. Her mother used to have a trick for getting water stains off silk, but Mira hadn’t been paying attention then, and certainly didn’t remember now what the secret method might have been. Maybe, she thought, as she headed for the bedroom in search of Clark, she could research it on the Internet if she ever found the time—the Internet, which had become the mother lode of folk remedies and feminine advice for those without mothers to consult.
“Clark?”
Clark sputtered, blinked, coughed like a man surfacing in shallow water, and then he gasped and sat up fast. “What?”
“Are you okay?”
He rubbed his eyes, and then he scowled at her with half his face. Somehow, the other half of his face still looked familiar. She recognized the blank expression from a photo in their wedding album. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Of course I’m okay.”
“Well,” Mira said, “you’re in here dead asleep at two o’clock in the afternoon while the twins are hungry and sitting in dirty diapers on the kitchen floor. I thought maybe you were sick.”
“Fuck you, Mira,” he said, and lay back down, staring straight at the ceiling, folding his hands over his chest again, closing his eyes with such finality that Mira almost thought she could hear them click shut with the neat precision of Swiss pocket watches.
She turned around and pulled the bedroom door closed hard behind her.
The poop in the twins’ diapers seemed to have been there a long time. It was hard, and caked into their little butt cracks. Mira changed Matty first because he’d cried the hardest when she got home. He was still hiccupping with it, looking up at her with wide, glassy eyes. She sang the “five little duckies” song to distract him on the changing table, but he whimpered when she had to work too hard with the baby wipes to get the caked-on shit off his tender bottom. It looked red and sore when she was done, but it was clean, and he wasn’t crying. She dusted it with baby powder and tickled his belly before lifting him off the table and placing him back on the floor.
Andy was easier. He’d never much minded a dirty diaper, and as long as she was singing the duckies song, he didn’t seem to mind if she was being a bit rough with his behind. She looked into his eyes as she sang, and he never blinked, as if he were afraid she’d disappear again if he did. As she changed his brother, Matty held on to one of her ankles from his spot on the floor, humming wetly into her shin.
After Andy’s diaper was changed, Mira got back down on the floor and pulled them both to her, and unbuttoned her stained blouse, unclasped her bra, and let her breasts fall out into their mouths.
(“Good Lord, Mira, how long are you going to keep nursing those boys?” Clark’s sister had asked six months earlier, when she’d come to visit from Atlanta. The twins had only just turned two then, but Mira had felt chastised, and stammered something about the boys only nursing once or twice a day. It was more of a habit, she tried to explain, than anything else. A way to calm them, or to get them to sleep on hectic nights. They were eating solid foods, of course. Pretty much anything she and Clark ate, the twins ate, and they ate a lot of it, and since Mira was gone a good part of every day, they certainly did not depend on breast milk for food.
“Jesus,” Rebecca had said, “I quit nursing Ricky at six months when he got his front teeth. I thought he was going to bite my nipple off.”
But Rebecca was married to a packaging engineer. She’d stayed home with Ricky until he went to kindergarten, and even after that she worked only two mornings a week, at a children’s bookstore. She’d never, Mira felt certain, come home and found Ricky wearing a diaper stiff with shit while her husband slept like a dead man in another room.)
As the boys sucked harder, tears sprang into Mira’s eyes. She’d wasted a precious forty-five minutes in her office with Perry Edwards when she should have been home with her babies—and afterward she’d stopped in the doorway of Dean Fleming’s office just to smile and wave, and ended up wasting another half hour. She’d stopped there on purpose, knowing he would ask her how her “work” was going, and for the first time in a long time, she actually had something to say because she was working on something quite promising: a book-length consideration of the folklore of death on the American college campus.
Dean Fleming had raised his eyebrows as if he, too, saw the huge potential in her project. “Interesting,” he said, nodding, clearly pleased and impressed. “I knew you’d zero in on something great in time.” He wished her luck, offered his support. He said, “If you need travel funds or a book allowance, let me know. We’ll see what we can find.”
She left Godwin Hall feeling lighter than she had in a long time. She had a project. Because there’d been a rainstorm that morning, and Clark had grudgingly let her drive the car to campus, she decided to drive by the location of the accident, Nicole Werner’s accident, which she’d begun to think of as material.
Mira had driven by it hundreds of times since the accident because it was on the way to half the places she needed to be (grocery store, drugstore, gas station). Like everyone else in town, she had watched the accumulating expressions of sentimental grief, the mounding of more and more debris at the site. Girlish, and ghoulish.
It had begun with a white cross with the victim’s name on it, and then a few stuffed animals were added, along with some wreaths of pink and white flowers—and then, within a few weeks, it had grown to a full-scale folk monument: A wisteria was planted. A banner was wound around the branches of the tree at the site. Some ornaments were hung in the branches. (Angels? Fairies? Mira couldn’t tell from the road.) More stuffed animals and some baby dolls accumulated around the tree’s trunk, and a laminated blowup of that senior portrait of Nicole Werner leaned against it, staring at the place where she’d lost her life. There were mounds of fresh flowers, and an unfathomable number of silk and plastic bouquets, ever replenishing, although Mira had never actually seen anyone tending to these items or dropping them off. (Did they come under cover of darkness?) Floral wreaths stretched from the side of the road across the drainage ditch to the electric fence, beyond which there were always a few sheep looking dazed and doomed.
Mira slowed down as she drove past. The next sunny morning, she thought, she would bring her best camera out here, and take photos.
The twins had fallen asleep as they sucked, and when Clark came out of the bedroom, he looked down at Mira for a moment, at the two flushed and dreaming twins still clinging to her nipples by their teeth. He must have realized that she was crying—there were tears running down her neck and onto her bare chest—but the expression on his face was unreadable, and far above her.
“I’m going for a run,” he said, and was gone.