Helen Phillips: Some Possible Solutions

“Turn that off,” Sarah says.

“It’s working!”

“No,” she says.

When I listen hard, I can still hear the movie raging upstairs, and maybe it’s almost worse, listening for that beneath the sound of the campfire. But I don’t pause the app.

“Please,” she says. “Seriously, it sucks. Don’t you think it sucks?”

“I think it’s good,” I say.

“That’s depressing,” she says, rolling away from me.

I pause the app. I consider and reject the possibility of proposing a nighttime stroll. We do that sometimes, when we both can’t sleep, use Google maps to take a walk on a Greek isle or through a Peruvian village. We hold hands while one of us scrolls.

Sarah rolls back toward me, apologetic.

“You know what I hate?” she says. “Those screen savers at work that show one gorgeous nature scene after another.”

A siren down the block launches its long wail. We lie there listening.

“Remember Lulu dancing naked in front of the mirror when she was two, wearing all your necklaces?” I say.

Sarah stiffens, surprised out of her crankiness.

“She’s experienced plenty of joy,” I say.

Our heads are so close together that I can feel her nodding.

“There’s something I haven’t told you,” Sarah says.

I get nervous.

“Sometimes when you take the recycling out and I hear you through the window clanging the metal bucket against the container,” she says, “it sounds like the opening drumbeat of this awesome and never-before-played rock song.”

* * *

By the timeI get home from work on Friday, Lulu’s plant is a quarter of an inch tall, a glittering globular dime-sized cluster oozing out of the concrete. She crouches down to drip a few drops of pre-boiled water on it. The contamination warning has been extended through the weekend.

“I’m sure contaminated water is just fine for it ,” Sarah said, sweating in the kitchen, where now there’s always water boiling on the stove.

But Lulu insisted.

“Do you love my crystal plant?” Lulu asks, looking up at me.

I steal another quick glance over her shoulder. The thing glints in the dusk. This is a good one, Steve Stanhope. Flowers for city kids. Magic for the contamination generation. Thank you, sir.

I’ve never seen Lulu this happy. Being happy, that’s how you thank your parents. That’s all you have to do.

All evening Lulu and I are like two mirrors, reflecting excitement back and forth at each other. She strokes my arm while I read Flora to her. Together we do an Internet search about cacti.

“You two,” Sarah says.

After Lulu goes to sleep, I head out back to examine the crystal plant in the orange moonlight. But en route I get waylaid by shouting coming from the Stanhopes’ lawn. I shouldn’t rush over to the peephole. I rush over to the peephole.

It’s been covered over. Thank goodness. Who wants to see that damn lawn anyway.

Well, me.

I put my ear up to the place where the hole used to be. In the great distance, Steve Stanhope is yelling a one-sided fight, presumably into a cell phone. “Beta? Beta!”

“What’s eating you?” Sarah says back inside.

“You should go and check out that thing back there,” I say. “Pretty cool stuff.”

* * *

Early Saturday morning,before Sarah and Lulu are up, I’m taking out the recycling yet again (I don’t know how three people can create so much waste), and there, in the bald humid light of day, I see the crystal plant for what it is.

I drop the recycling bucket and kneel down.

Five or so pebbles, rolled in glue and then glitter, stacked messily atop each other, drizzled with more glue, more glitter. The same old school glue they sell at the bodega. The glitter from tubes.

I am stupid.

I go back inside, shutting the door against the grind of the Stanhopes’ generator.

Sarah is sitting at the table with a cup of instant coffee. We switched to instant after they doubled the tax on imports. I’m touched by the sight of her.

“Thanks for doing that,” I say, ashamed. “It’s not totally convincing, but thank you.”

“Hm?” she says absently. She’s reading the news on her small screen. For her this is as good as it gets. Saturday morning, silence, coffee, screen.

“The ‘plant.’ That you made. For Lulu.”

“UN Considers Proposal to Construct International Landfills in North Pole,” she reads. “Is that good or bad?”

* * *

I open Lulu’sflimsy door and step into her room. I turn off the WaveMachine. She’s sleeping on her back, her arms flung above her head as they were whenever she slept as a baby. Her breathing sounds as good to me as water running in a creek.

Before I slide open the drawer beneath her bed, I already know what I will find hidden in the back corner: the glue, the glitter.

* * *

When Lulu wasnewborn we called her Muskrat, though neither of us really knows what a muskrat is. It was just that she seemed like a small, mysterious mammal. I remember the way she would arch her tiny eyebrows when I picked her up after she’d finished drinking as much as she could get from Sarah’s nipple. I’d hold her under her arms, in constant fear of dislocating them from her little shoulder sockets, and she’d raise those eyebrows, halfway a queen disapproving of something, halfway an animal startled out of its nest in its moment of deepest respite. I have no photograph of this face Lulu used to make, it was far too fleeting to ever catch, but that face of hers, those eyebrows peaked, imperious, disoriented, that is the face of my life.

How many times did I call Sarah from work to ask, “Is she still breathing?”

* * *

I don’t touchthe glue or the glitter. Lulu is awake now. I can feel it, can feel her pretending she’s still asleep. I shut the drawer and leave the room and (what’s this giddiness I feel?) wait for Lulu to come out, whenever she’s ready. The thing is, the organism survives no matter what; the organism even thrives.

HELEN PHILLIPS is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others. She is the author of the widely acclaimed novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (a New York Times Notable Book) and the collection And Yet They Were Happy (named a notable book by the Story Prize). Her work has appeared on Selected Shorts and in Tin House, Electric Literature, and The New York Times. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children. You can sign up for email updates here.