It was the day after your miscarriage when I was cleaning out our garage. A squirrel’s home. Enough nuts for a dozen scurries. They’d crammed them in every nook, piled them in boxes and drawers, stacked them on the scrap board atop the rafters. I almost felt bad until I remembered the old paint cans and college clothes that we’d just hauled to the dump, five years too late. I was doing them a favor, I told myself. Helping them move on.
I wanted to do more for you, but you assured me there was nothing to do. You worked to take your mind off it, boxing up the closets. I’d felt inadequate before: my hands like ornaments as I tried to soothe you for the twenty-six hours of our daughter’s birth. I’d praised your courage bedside during the C-section two years later, my hands petrified at our chests — they were liabilities in that sterile room, everyone covered, the barrier separating us as they delivered our son. But there was a decanting quiet this time. Something partitioning us that we couldn’t name.