Тэд Уильямс: The War of the Flowers

As he was trying to squeeze the last box onto the narrow shelf above the workbench it toppled over and caught him a good shot on the temple; when he reached up, he came away with a spot of blood on his finger. The children's books had spilled out onto the steps leading down from the kitchen. Theo's head hurt. He lowered himself onto the bottom of the short stairway like a geriatric case so he wouldn't have to bend as he picked them up from the floor — old, well-thumbed and clearly loved copies of the Pooh stories, of Dr. Seuss and Where the Wild Things Are , all bought secondhand to fall within Cat's exemption. He picked up his own contribution, one that he'd bought new in a store just because he couldn't imagine raising a baby without it, and because even though he never made it up early enough Saturday mornings for Cat's garage-sale runs, he had wanted to contribute.

Was I the one who jinxed it ? In his bleak state, he couldn't even laugh the thought away. He flicked the book open. The strange, flat images, crude and almost childish at first glance, caught him up as they always did. Had his mom really read this to him? It seemed impossible to believe now that he'd had a mother who held her child in her lap and read him Goodnight Moon , but the words were as familiar as a catechism, the little rabbit in his great green room saying goodnight to all the familiar nursery objects, to the mittens and kittens, the comb and the brush, and of course, strangest of all, to "nobody."

Goodnight nobody . He had never understood that — in one way it was the most magical part of the book, and in another, the most frightening. All the other pictures, the rabbit-child in pajamas, the fire, the old lady rabbit reading, all made sense. The catalog of items, chairs and cats and socks, goodnight, goodnight, then just that blank page and "goodnight nobody." But who was Nobody? It was childhood zen. Sometimes he had thought in his little-boy way that he might be the book's Nobody, Theo himself, an anonymous presence — that the book knew he was out there watching the bunny get ready for bed, looking into the warm, cozy room from outside, as through a window. His mother had contributed to that: whenever they reached that part of the book, she had always said, " Goodnight, nobody. Say goodnight ." And Theo had done so. Perhaps she had only meant for him to say goodnight to the little someone known as Nobody. But he had always believed she was calling him Nobody, telling him it was his turn to say goodnight now, and so he had dutifully obeyed.

In this last winter, since the pregnancy test had come back, Theo had sometimes imagined a little girl sitting on his lap — Cat had been certain from the first that it was a little girl, even though they hadn't had an ultrasound exam yet — her head against his chest as they leafed through the book together. In his offhand dreams he had never quite been able to imagine what she looked like, had pictured only a head of soft curly hair, a warm little body pressed against him. Nobody. She had looked like Nobody. And that was who she had turned out to be.

He flicked through the pages, the drawings with their strange, dreamlike perspective. Then at the end, the final little catechism, saying goodnight to the last things — the stars, the air, and to noises everywhere.

That should go on the baby's gravestone, except there would be no stone, no grave. Cat was going to have a D C, as the doctors so artlessly called it, to remove anything that hadn't already come out. Any thing. There would be nothing to bury. Polly, Rose, all the names they had played with, taking their time because after all there had been no hurry, months to wait, and now she wouldn't be any of them. She was Nobody.

Goodnight Nobody.

Sitting on the stairs with a box of books on his lap, he cried.

Her face was still pale, framed by the straight lines of her uncombed, unstyled, dark red hair. She had told him that the D C had been all right, not too bad — she had insisted he go back to his delivery job that day, that she didn't need any hand-holding — but it looked like something more than just now-useless flesh had been scraped out of her.

"How's the pain?"

She shrugged. Her skin seemed paper-dry, as though she had lost some essential vitality. Her mother handed her a cup of ice.

Laney was gone, but both of Cat's parents had arrived for a post-operative visit. Earlier her dad had made chitchat with Theo in the hall while the nurse helped Cat with the bedpan, Mr. Lillard doing his comradely best in the current air of circle-the-wagons emergency to obscure the fact that he had never been that thrilled with his semi-son-in-law. Theo appreciated the gesture, but Cat's dad and his yachting sweater had never been a real stumbling block, anyway: his wife and only daughter treated Tom Lillard as though he were a graceless but acceptably familiar sundial in the middle of a flower bed they were gardening. When Cat had wanted him to approve of Theo, or at least pretend to, she had enlisted her mother's help and there had been dinners, family outings. He was a figurehead — an aging CEO of his own family who only showed up for the board meetings and wondered how so much got done without him.

"Can I talk to Theo for a minute, Mom?"

Her mother rose and drew her father by the hand to the door. "We'll just go down and look at some magazines in the gift shop," she said. "I'll bring you back a People ."

"Thanks." When they had left, Cat closed her eyes for a long moment and let her head slump back against the pillow.

"I… I didn't think it would hurt so much," Theo said. He suddenly wanted her to know that he was grieving too, although other than the tears on the garage stairs, he wasn't completely certain that was true. "When you get home, we… did they say when we can try again?" Was that an insensitive thing to say? Maybe she would think he was talking about sex. "I mean, when you're ready inside, too. In your head, I mean."

Her eyes came open in her dry white face, slowly, like something in a horror movie. She took a deep breath. "I'm not coming home, Theo. Not like that. It's not going to be like… like that."

He stared, puzzled, but he could already feel the tide sucking away what he had thought was firm sand beneath his feet. "Not… ?"

"I'm going to stay with my parents for a few weeks. Mom wants to cook for me, you know, fuss over me."

"Well, that's… that's fine…"

"And when I come back…" She sighed, someone bravely picking up a heavy burden. "When I come back, I want to live by myself."

It felt like the time he had been hit in the back of the head with a pool cue, the innocent victim of a violent argument that he didn't even know had started behind him. For a long stupid moment after the world exploded he could only stare. "You mean… you want us to… to separate?"

Her mouth was firm, almost pinched shut, but her eyes were suddenly wet. "Yes. No. More than that. I think… it's time we went our own ways."

"Own ways? What kind of bullshit is that?"

She blinked, the sad resolve suddenly agitated by anger. "It's not bullshit, Theo. We lost the baby and it opened up my eyes. I can see now that the baby was the only reason I was staying with you — to give our child a fighting chance to have two parents who were together. But it wouldn't have fixed things between us. I can't believe how stupid I was — like I was under some kind of spell, believing that somehow we would have this rosy little family life. But in real life you would have been just the same, doing just enough to get by, a smile, a joke, oh yeah, lots of cute stuff but nothing real. Eventually we would have broken up, and then you'd have been a weekend dad, doing the bare minimum, no plan, no organization, no commitment, take the kid out and buy her an ice cream cone, drop her back off with me afterward."