A Hope for Emily

“The same, really.” He hasn’t changed his position or his tone, but I sense his withdrawal. Or am I being paranoid? Fearful, because of Rachel’s visit? Because of everything that’s always been unsaid between us?

“The new place is working out okay?”

“It’s fine.”

I nod slowly, my mouth drying. I’m not going to leave it. Stupidly, I am not going to leave it. But why should this be such a big deal, anyway? It’s just a conversation between a husband and wife, a loving, concerned conversation about the daughter he loves.

And yet I know it is a big deal. I know it will be.

James’ gaze narrows as he stares at me; I must look nervous. “What is it?” he asks. “What’s going on, Eva?”

I lick my lips. My heart is hammering. It’s ridiculous and a little shaming that I’m so nervous. This is my husband, after all. We should be able to talk like this, battle it out even, if that’s what it comes to,which it shouldn’t.

We should be able to do that, but we don’t. We never do. Our relationship, I am realizing more and more, is based on a mutually agreed foundation of certain silences and implicit agreements. And I am about to break them all.

James is still staring at me, and I know I have to speak. I remind myself that I am tough, that I’ve had to be. I straighten, gazing back at him directly. “Something’s happened,” I say, and I know immediately that it sounds too melodramatic. “I need to talk to you about something,” I try instead, and James leans back into the sofa and folds his arms, not exactly a position of openness.

“All right,” he says. “So talk.”

9

Rachel

One Saturday morning, two weeks after Emily has been moved, I wake up to beautiful spring sunshine spilling through the windows and a dream of my daughter lingering in my mind like silken threads of gossamer.

I don’t often dream of Emily; the times when I do feel like a gift, but one that hurts. She lingers with me for a few moments after I wake up, so close I almost feel I can reach out and touch her, even as a leaden part of me knows I cannot.

Last night I dreamed of her as she used to be, although that’s not always the case. Sometimes in my dreams she is a baby or a toddler; sometimes she is four or five or even ten or eleven, the image of her older self one I can never quite recall once I am awake. Sometimes she is Emily, but she looks entirely different, the way it is so often in dreams. I was in my house, but it looked like a medieval castle. It’s Emily, but she has dark hair, or brown eyes, someone else’s child but I know, I know she is mine.

But today I dreamed of her when she was a toddler, before the symptoms came, one after another, like dark waves rolling towards the shore. In the dream she was running through the back yard, the grass long like in a meadow even though James always cut it regularly. I was sitting on the back steps, my face tilted to the sun, as she ran towards me, but then she never came. I looked back down at her, and she was still running, always running, and I held my arms out, longing to swing her up onto my hip, to press my cheek against her soft, plump one—I could feel it in the dream, the smooth roundness of it—but still she kept running, arms stretched out, face full of joy.

If she can’t come to me, I’ll go to her, I thought, but when I rose from the steps, my limbs felt heavy and uncoordinated, and when I tried to move it was as if my feet were stuck in concrete. I couldn’t take so much as a step.

Call out to me, I willed to Emily—my conscious self, drifting somewhere in the dream, knowing that she wouldn’t. Say my name.

But she didn’t, of course, and I realized as I stood there, helpless and stuck, that she wasn’t even aware of me; it was sun and trees and sky for her, not a mother waiting with open arms.

Awake, I lie flat on my back and try to hold onto the dream, because it feels like holding onto Emily. Of course, it doesn’t take a would-be Freud to figure it all out. Me, helpless. Emily, unable to reach me. Yes, that about sums things up right now.

I swing my legs out of bed, feeling tired even though I slept for ten hours last night—bed at nine, up at seven. I have a soul-deep exhaustion, a base layer of complete and utter spentness that I drag around with me like a fifty-pound weight.

Today is a Saturday full of possibility and promise—a bike ride? A trip to the park? Even a whiz around Trader Joe’s with Emily in the shopping cart would be fun on a day like today, where the dew sparkles and the sun is trying to outdo itself. I picture us meandering through an aisle of organic snack

s, Emily pointing to the ones she likes.

Rice cakes, Mama?

Part of me is tempted to take the morning off. I could jog to the Charles River Reservoir, feel that satisfying burn in my legs and lungs; it would be glorious on a morning like this one, the cherry trees almost aggressive with their complete covering of pink puffball blossoms. Or I could tidy up a bit, do a proper grocery shop instead of eating takeout or just toast. Since Emily has been sick, meals have tended to be an afterthought.

My life has been an afterthought; in the two years since she first started being hospitalized, I’ve done little more than go from home to hospital and back again, with a swing-by the grocery store for anything essential, a stop at my mother’s once or twice a week, a catchup on bills and laundry on Saturdays, when James is with Emily.

I’ve been living in this house for nearly eighteen months, but it looks like a low-end Airbnb; the only room that is properly decorated is Emily’s, all in pink, with a gauzy canopy over her bed. She hasn’t slept there in over six months, and even before that it was sporadic—a few days at home, a few more days in hospital. I wonder if she ever will sleep there again.

If this experimental treatment works… maybe she will. I could bring her home, if she didn’t need so much constant monitoring; perhaps she’d even start communicating, living again, if only a little. I’m trying to keep my expectations low, but they try to rise, like a child with a balloon, desperate to hold onto it and yet at the same time wanting to see it soar up in the sky. They just can’t resist seeing how high it will go.

I push aside any daydreams about a jog or a shop, knowing I won’t risk being late to the unit, the still-there possibility of missing something, anything. Every day, without fail, except when James is there or the few times I’ve had an infectious cold and can’t expose children to it, I have been with Emily from eight in the morning until seven at night.

I can’t stop now.