Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

Thomas forgot three separate times, for instance, three different days in a row, that Danny had gone and died. Three mornings in a row he got up and said, “Do you think Danny will fix apple pancakes for breakfast?” The first day she could understand, because the news was still so fresh and neither one of them was used to it yet. So she just said, “No, did you forget? He went and died.” But the second day! And the third! And those were weekdays, too. Danny would never have fixed apple pancakes on a weekday. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked Thomas. “Can’t you get it into your head? He had a car crash and he died.” Thomas just took on a kind of closed look. He didn’t seem to miss Danny as much as he missed the pancakes. It made her furious. Why did she have to be the only one who remembered? She said, “He gave Ian a ride home and we had to stay by ourselves. Not answer the phone, not open the door—”

Thomas clamped his hands over his ears.

“So when the phone rang we didn’t pick it up,” Agatha said. “And when the door banged we didn’t unlock it.”

Thomas said, “Nee-nee-nee-nee-nee!” but she rode over it. “Mama had to crawl in a window,” she went on, “and she tore her sleeve and she was crying; she was worried we’d been murdered, and then the phone rang again and—”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

She just had these urges to be evil to him. She couldn’t say exactly why.

The water in the toilet was so yellow now she could hardly see the diaper, so she flushed once more. Then it felt like someone bossy and selfish reached up and grabbed the diaper away from her. She gave a little gasp and let it go. The water rose calmly higher and higher; it reached the rim. She had never guessed what a scary thing a toilet was. Thick yellow water slopped over the edge and spilled across the floor while she stood watching, horrified.

“Mama!” she shrieked finally.

Silence.

The water in the toilet slid down again.

Agatha stepped out into the hall, shaking, and went to her mother’s bedroom door. She gave a tiny tap with her knuckles and then placed her ear to the door and listened.

They used to go straight in without a thought. They used to play among her bedclothes till she woke. But lately they’d stopped doing that.

(You could almost think, sometimes, that their mother wasn’t there behind her face anymore.)

Agatha went on down the hall to the children’s room. As she walked in, she saw Daphne roll onto her stomach and drop like a stone out of the crib. Agatha flung herself forward in a silent rush and caught her — an armload of bare-bottomed, clammy baby. She sank weak-kneed to the floor. Still busily sucking her pacifier, Daphne crawled away to a jack-in-the-box. Thomas sang to his doll, “My aunt gave me a nickel, to buy a pickle …”

All of a sudden, Agatha seemed to see things so clearly. Daphne’s bottom was stained yellow. Thomas’s shirt was splotched with food. The floor was covered with toys and dirty clothes and a cantaloupe rind on a plate beneath a cloud of fruit flies. Milk was dripping down the wall behind the crib.

She stood up and collected Daphne and staggered over to the crib with her and plopped her down. She wrestled Daphne’s diaper around her, being very, very careful with the safety pins, and then she raised the railing and locked it. “Stay there,” she told Daphne. “Put on a different shirt,” she told Thomas.

“What shirt?”

“I don’t care. Just different.”

He laid Dulcimer aside, grumbling, and slid off his bed. While he was rummaging in bureau drawers, Agatha returned to the bathroom and stirred a towel through the puddle around the toilet. Then she hid the towel in the hamper. She went out to the kitchen and put the milk back into the fridge. “Chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chewing gum,” Thomas sang, while Agatha spread his coloring book on the windowsill to dry. One by one she plucked his crayons from the pool of milk on the table. They were beginning to dye the milk all different shades, lavender and pink and blue. She dumped them into the waste can under the sink.

“What are you doing! ” Thomas asked, coming up behind her. He was wearing a green shirt now that clashed with his blue shorts, and it was buttoned wrong besides.

“Button your buttons over from scratch,” Agatha told him. She unfolded a cloth and started wiping off the table.

“What did you do with my crayons?”

“They were all wet and runny.”

“You can’t just throw them away!”

He started rooting through the waste can. Agatha said, “Stop that! I just got everything nice again!”

“You better give me back my crayons, Agatha.”

Their mother said, “Is it still daytime?”

She was standing in the doorway in her slip. Her pillow had made a mark across one cheek and she didn’t have any makeup on. “I thought it was night,” she said. “Is that Daphne I hear?”

“Make Agatha give me back my crayons, Mama!”

But their mother was drifting down the hall, heading toward Daphne’s “Oho! Oho!”

“Stealer!” Thomas hissed at Agatha. “Crayon stealer!”

She put the wet cloth in the sink. “Sticks and stones will break my bones,” she said, “but names will never—”

“You can go to jail for stealing!”

“Is this my little Daphne?” their mother said, back again with Daphne in her arms. “Is this my sweetheart?”

She sat in a kitchen chair and settled Daphne on her lap. Daphne’s diaper was dry but it was so loose it pouched in front of her stomach. The table was clean but it was damp where Agatha had wiped it. Everything looked fine but just barely, like a room where you walk in and get the feeling something was rustling and whispering till half a second ago. But their mother didn’t seem to notice. She stared down at Daphne with her face bare-naked and erased and pale. “Is this my Daphne?” she kept saying, “Is this my baby Daphne?” so it began to sound as if she really did wonder. “Is this her?” she asked. “Is it her? Is it?” And she looked up at Thomas and Agatha and waited for them to answer.

When the hottest part of the day was over, they got ready for their walk to the typewriter store. This was something they’d started doing just in the past few weeks, but already there was a pattern to it. Agatha liked patterns. So did Thomas. Together they hauled Daphne’s stroller out of the coat closet and unfolded it. Daphne watched from the rug, flapping her arms up and down when she heard the wheels squeak. Maybe she liked patterns, too.

They went to see if their mother was ready, but she was shut up in her bathroom. When she came out, she wore her white blouse that wrapped and tied at the side and her watery flowing India skirt. She blotted her lipstick on a tissue and asked, “How do I look?”

“You look nice,” they both told her.

From the living room, Daphne made a fussy sound. Their mother sighed and picked up her bag. “Let’s go,” she said.

The air outdoors felt heavy and warm, but at least the sun wasn’t beating down so hard anymore. Their mother walked in front, wheeling Daphne in her stroller, and Thomas and Agatha followed. Thomas’s shirt was still buttoned wrong. Agatha’s playsuit bunched at the crotch. She thought she and Thomas should have been dressed up too, if they were trying to make friends with the typewriter man, but that didn’t seem to have crossed their mother’s mind. Sometimes lately there were these holes in the way she did things, places she just fell apart. Like last night, when she got lost in the middle of what she was saying and couldn’t find her way out again. “Do you believe this?” she had been saying. “That I’m back to … back to …” Then she’d just stared. It had frightened them. Thomas started crying and he flew at her with both fists. “Back to nothing,” she had said finally. She was like a record player you had to jostle when it hit a crack. Then she’d said, “I think I’ll go to bed,” although it wasn’t even dark outside and Daphne hadn’t been put down for the night yet.