hypnotic voice, that I fall asleep. The last thing I remember is hearing about the snarling paths and the sandstone walls of someplace known as the Great Wall.
When I wake up in the morning, Mom is dead.
I slept right through it.
May 16, 1996 Egg Harbor
Aaron showed me the house today. I’m in love with it already—a cornflower blue cottage perched on a forty-five-foot cliff that overlooks the bay. Pine floors and whitewashed walls. A screened-in porch. A long wooden staircase that leads down to the dock at the water’s edge where the Realtor promised majestic sunsets and fleets of sailboats floating by. Quaint, charming and serene. Those are the words the Realtor used. Aaron, as always, didn’t say much of anything, just stood on the balding lawn with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, staring out at the bay, thinking. He’s recently taken a job as a line cook at one of the restaurants in town, a chophouse in Ephraim. The cottage will more than cut his commute time in half. It’s also a steal compared to our current mortgage, and set on two acres of waterfront land that spans the heavily wooded backcountry to the rocky shores of Green Bay.
And there’s a garden. A ten-by-twenty-or thirty-foot space overrun with brambles and weeds. It’s in need of work, but already Aaron has promised raised beds. There is a greenhouse, a sorry sight if I’ve ever seen one, set in a sunnier patch of the yard where the grass still grows. Small, shedlike, with aged glass windows and some sort of clear, corrugated roof meant to attract the sun. The door hangs cockeyed, one of its hinges broken. Aaron took a look and said that he can fix it, which comes as no surprise to me. There isn’t a thing in this world that Aaron can’t fix. Cobwebs cling to the corners of the room like lace. Already I’m imagining rows and rows of peat pots of soil and seed soaking up the sun, waiting to be transported into the garden.
Nearby, a swing hangs from the mighty branch of a burr oak tree. It was the tree that cinched it for me. Or maybe not the tree itself, but the promise of the tree, the notion of children one day causing ruckus and mayhem on the tree’s swing, three feet of lumber fastened to the branch with a sturdy rope. I envision them climbing deep into the divots of the tree’s trunk and laughing. I can hear them already, Aaron’s and my unborn children. Laughing and screaming in delight.
Aaron asked if I loved it as much as him, and I didn’t know if he meant whether I loved the cottage as much as I love him, or if I loved the cottage as much as he loves the cottage, but either way I told him I did.
Aaron left the Realtor with our bid. It’s a buyer’s market, he said, trying to finagle the asking price down a good 10 percent. Me, I would have paid asking price, too afraid to lose the cottage otherwise. Tomorrow we’ll know if it’s ours.
Tonight I won’t sleep. How is it possible to love something so much, to want something so badly, when only hours ago I didn’t know it existed?
July 1, 1996 Egg Harbor
The boxes are plentiful. There is no end to the number of cardboard boxes the movers carry through the front door, delivering them to their marked rooms—living room, bedroom, master bath—stomping across our home in dusty work boots. Sixteen hundred square feet of space needing to be filled as Aaron and I divvied up our gender-appropriate tasks, he directing the movers with couches and beds while I unpacked and washed the dishes by hand and placed them in the cabinets. I watched the many laps they took, each man’s head beginning to glimmer with sweat. Aaron’s too, though he hardly carried a thing, and yet the authority in his voice, the obvious clout as grown men trailed him through our home, heeding his every word, was enough to catch my eye. I watched him round the home time and again, wondering how I was so lucky to have him all to my own.
It wasn’t like me to be lucky in love. Not until I met Aaron. The men who came before him were deadbeats and drifters, bottom-feeders. But not Aaron. We dated for a year before he proposed. Tomorrow we celebrate two years. Soon there will be kids, a whole gaggle of little ones spinning circles at our feet. As soon as we’re settled, Aaron always said, and now, as my eyes assess the new home, the sprawling landscape, the sixteen hundred square feet of space, three bedrooms—two vacant and left to fill—I realize the time has come and like clockwork, something inside me starts to tick.
When the movers’ backs were turned, Aaron kissed me in the kitchen, pinning me against the cabinets, hands gripping my hips. It was unasked for and yet very much wanted as he kissed with his eyes closed, whispering that all of our dreams were finally coming true. Aaron isn’t one to be sentimental or romantic, and yet it was true: the cottage, his job, leaving the city. We’d both wanted to get away from Green Bay since the day we were married, his hometown and my hometown, so that two sets of parents couldn’t show up at our door on any given day, unsolicited, waging a secret battle as to which in-law could occupy the most of our time. We hadn’t gone far, sixty-seven miles to be precise, but enough that visits would be preempted with a simple phone call.
Tonight we made love on the living room floor to the glow of candlelight. The electricity had yet to be turned on and so, other than the dance of candlelight on the whitewashed walls, the house was dark.
Aaron was the first to suggest it, discontinuing my birth control pill, as if he knew what I was thinking, as if he could read my mind. It was as we lay together on the wide wooden floorboards staring out the open windows at the stars, Aaron’s prowling hand moving across my thigh, contemplating a second go. That’s when he said it. I told him yes! that I am ready for a family. That we are ready. Aaron is twenty-nine. I am twenty-eight. His paycheck isn’t extravagant, and yet it’s enough. We aren’t spendthrifts; we’ve been saving for years.
And even though I knew it wasn’t possible yet, the pill in my system nipped any possibility of pregnancy in the bud, I still imagined a creature no bigger than a speck starting to take form as Aaron again let himself inside me.
July 9, 1996 Egg Harbor
Our days begin with coffee on the dock, bare feet dangling over the edge, downward toward the bay. The water is cold, and our feet don’t reach anyway. But as promised, there are sailboats. Aaron and I spend hours watching them pass by, as well as sandpipers and other shorebirds that come to call, their long legs wading through the shallow water for a meal. We stare at the birds and the sailboats, watching the sun rise higher into the sky, warming our skin, burning off the early-morning fog. Heaven on earth, Aaron says.
As we sit on the dock, Aaron tells me about his nights at the chophouse that steals him from me for ten hours at a time. About the heat of the kitchen, and the persistent noise. The rumble of voices calling out orders in sync. The sputter of boneless rib eye on the grill, the dicing and hashing of vegetables.
His voice is placid. He doesn’t complain because Aaron, ever easygoing Aaron, isn’t one to complain. Rather he tells me about it, describing it for me so that I can see in my mind’s eye what he’s doing when he’s away from me for half the day. He wears a white chef jacket and black chef pants and a cap, something along the lines of a beanie that is also white. Aaron’s been assigned the role of saucier, or sauce chef, one that’s new to him, but no doubt comes with ease. Because this is the way it is with Aaron. No matter what he tries his hand at, things always come with ease.
Our property is fringed by trees so that as we sit on the deck’s edge, Aaron and me, it feels as if we’re all alone, partitioned from society by the lake and the trees. If we have neighbors, we’ve never seen them. Never laid eyes on them. Never spied another home through the canopy of trees. Never are we disturbed by the sound of voices, but only the colloquy
