Betsy. Before this, before I knew the color of the sky at three A.M ., before I knew the sound of a child sleeping—before I knew the fear of being entirely alone as the world slept—there was Betsy. Her name found its way to my lips on those waking nights, and I practiced their syllables as if I were reciting a poem or a prayer. She was always there. Before this, I had not known the world without her in it.
I looked for Betsy in Shelly. And sometimes I found her there: in the lazy blinking of her eyes, in a sigh, in a blush. But more often than not, in searching for Betsy, I only found myself. Shelly had my awkward long limbs, my pale skin, the same squinty blue eyes. She was almost twelve now—the same age that Betsy was when I first fell in love with her. But no matter how hard I looked at Shelly’s face, Betsy simply wasn’t hiding there.
Twelve years.
My rooftop reveries inevitably ended with thoughts of Betsy. It didn’t matter if I tried to concentrate on other things (the house for sale on Finney Ridge, the Sox’s recent loss to the Yankees, the John Fowles novel I was reading), my mind always found its way—no matter how circuitous the route—back to her. And as Shelly’s birthday approached, the journey back to Betsy Parker became less and less oblique. I’d start out considering what the mortgage might be on that three-bedroom Cape and wind up thinking about something Betsy once said about wanting to own a home that had an orange tree out front. (I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that oranges almost never grow in northeastern Vermont.) If I started out with baseball, I saw Betsy yanking Ray’s old Sox cap off his head and putting it on her own. It had covered her eyes, and we all laughed. And when I thought about that novel, the one where a collector of butterflies falls in love with a stranger and decides to first kidnap and then keep her, I began to wonder if Betsy ever felt like that: like a captured butterfly.
And here she was again tonight, curling up next to me on the roof. Waiting with me until the sun rose, insistent, over Depot Street. I left her only when I sensed that Shelly was stirring, that the day I’d been dreading had arrived.
Shelly came out of her room as I was making coffee. She rubbed her eyes and then spied the cupcakes sitting on the counter.
“I hope they’re okay,” I said. “The middles might be kind of soft.”
She smiled at me in that sad way she had and picked one of them up. She licked the frosting off the top and said gently, “Thanks, Daddy, but I’m kinda too old to bring cupcakes to school now.” And then, because she probably thought she’d hurt my feelings, she peeled the paper cup off the cupcake and popped half of it in her mouth. “Mmm. It’s really, really good, Dad.”
In my pocket was the gift I’d bought for her: a pair of glittery barrettes. I had planned to give them to her at breakfast, but decided then to wait, suddenly certain that the gift was all wrong. I didn’t want to let her down again. I’d have to stop at Kinsey’s after work. Maybe a charm bracelet would be better. A pair of earrings. A watch.
I was grateful for the morning’s rituals (making coffee, getting myself dressed and Shelly fed, packing our lunches) as well as for the morning’s unexpected events (a lack of hot water, milk gone sour in the fridge and a missing sock). Sometimes I felt like the mundane details of our lives were the only things tethering me to the world. I could hold onto them—distractions necessitating action. They gave me a sense of purpose. If not for the leaky faucet, the sandwiches, the bills, I might not know what to do with my hands.
Shelly kissed my cheek and then walked down the hallway to our neighbor’s apartment as I watched her from our doorway. Mrs. Marigold, an elderly widow, took care of Shelly before and after school, while I was at work. Shelly insisted that I not use the word “sitter,” and especially not “ baby sitter” when referring to Mrs. Marigold. But, whatever her job title, she made sure Shelly got to the bus stop. That she had a place to go after school. In exchange, I ran errands for her: buying groceries, depositing her husband’s pension checks at the bank, that kind of thing. She used to be a nurse, probably a hundred years ago, but this made me feel somehow safe.
“Happy birthday!” I called after her.
“Thanks, Daddy,” she said over her shoulder, and skipped down the hall.
I had to leave for work earlier than I would have if I were driving, but as long as the weather permitted, I preferred to ride my bike. Most of the time, I left my car parked in the alley behind our building; I didn’t drive unless I had to anymore. After Betsy died, the world started to seem like a dangerous place. Every time I got behind the wheel, especially with Shelly in the car, I couldn’t help but envision every horrible thing that might happen. Every catastrophe. And so I’d opted instead for a bicycle, a J.C. Higgins three speed, which I knew had seen better days. I bought it at the Methodist Church rummage sale for five dollars and fifty cents. The spokes were rusted, and the seat was stuck at an elevation reserved for a taller man than I; even at 6 feet 4 inches, I had to stand on the pedals as I rode to avoid the unfortunate angle of the seat. But despite the inadequacy of the bike, there was something perfect about the two-mile journey to the railroad station each morning. In a month or so, when snow came and I had to negotiate my old VW Bug through the snow, I’d miss these mornings: the rushing air, the burning in my calves as I pedaled up the winding hill. The ride usually cleared my head, invigorated me, but today nothing could dispel the awful disquiet I was feeling.
By the time I got to work, I was antsy, like I’d had too much coffee. Too little sleep. I tried to look forward to the daily tasks, to losing myself in a stack of invoices, the bills of lading. I had been working at the freight office at the railroad station since I was twenty-two years old. I’d worked my way up, as much as you can in a place like this, and was now the freight traffic manager. It was hardly the job I’d thought I’d wind up with, but my ambition, like everything else, sort of flew out the window when Betsy died. I had never planned to make this job my career, but here I was. And I have to admit, there was a small but certain satisfaction when the numbers balanced out at the end of the day, the week, the month. At least there was order here. Predictability.
While I waited for the night shift to end, I sat at the grimy table in the break room thumbing through the previous Sunday’s Free Press and grabbed a doughnut from a box that somebody’s wife must have dropped off. It’s just another day , I thought. But just as I was about to take a bite of the doughnut and look in the sports section to see whether or not Boston had won Saturday’s game, Rene LaFevre, one of the French Canadian car knockers, came rushing through the door.
“Down by da river,” he said, breathless. “Dere’s people everywhere. Some’s drowned. And the ones that ain’t drowned are bleeding half to death. You gotta come wid me.”
Though it was almost October, the air was muggy and thick, not the normal crisp prelude to autumn. I could feel the hot, wet air in my lungs as I rode behind Rene on my bike, following the tracks out of the train yard toward the river. In the woods, the scent of apples was thick, nauseating. Apples had ripened with the first signs of fall and then rotted in the heat, their small suicides leaving only sad remains, pulp and empty brown skin littering the ground beneath our feet. I dodged them like land mines while Rene plodded and plundered through the rotten mess. Rene, who had to have weighed close to two hundred fifty pounds, had to stop several times to catch his breath. I waited as he bent at the waist, clutching his chest.
“You okay?” I asked.
Too winded to speak, he nodded. But despite Rene’s obvious exhaustion, we kept traveling further along the river’s edge, early morning sunlight struggling through the thick foliage.
Teacups. The first thing that I saw were about a dozen perfect china teacups floating along in the current,