Objectively, she wasn’t angry with Greg; she knew she had no valid reason to be. It was no one’s fault. She knew this; it was into the fissure between that rational knowledge and her need for an explanation that this fury had seeped.
P.J. had died because of no one’s negligence, no one’s failure. It was unfathomable and unacceptable. Suddenly, at home, the obituary had read, as if to remind them that even the comforting shelter of home was not beyond the capricious reach of senseless death. More and more, lately, the phrase suddenly at home struck Amy as more like a title for a horror movie than a polite euphemism for newspapers.
It hadn’t been Greg’s fault that P.J. had died in her crib while they’d made love on a Sunday evening. She knew this, and yet her desperate, blinding need to hate someone had no use for what she knew. It had use only for its own skewed, righteous quest for clarity, for simple morality, for superheroes and bogeymen. For a guilty party. Greg, conveniently, was there. Sometimes, it seemed, he was there for that very reason.
They’d waited for over three years to adopt P.J. She was a humorous, robust little creature with spiky brown hair and the most prescient, dazzling brown eyes. These eyes, they locked onto you as if to say, oh, we are going to have some fun. So startlingly intelligent and expressive were these eyes that Amy sometimes had been pained by them, overwhelmed by the force of her love. Yet that pain, now, seemed like paradise, an embarrassment of riches. Its absence was like the dull throb of a phantom limb, occupying the space where pain had once been. In its place was only memory, which, in its gross, boundless inadequacy, turned out to be the worst ache of all.
P.J. had been eight months old on that Sunday evening. She’d been entering that phase where a child seems to undergo subtle changes literally every day: a little bit more hair, a slightly more defined face. She laughed constantly, she laughed at everything, as if laughter were an excess energy she needed to discharge, an energy that bubbled up in response to the pure absurdity of the world.
That night, P.J. had had her bath; it was a favorite time for all three of them. Amy and Greg cherished the soggy, baby shampoo-scented sleeves of their shirts after bath-time—inevitable, even with the sleeves rolled up. Amy sometimes said she wished they would never dry.
This bath had been usual. P.J. had scribbled all over the tub with the waterproof crayons Greg’s sister had bought for her. Her etchings were complete nonsense, really, except for one random shape Amy insisted was a heart.
“Now you’re really reading into things,” Greg had said, shaking his head with friendly mockery. “Next you’re going to find the Virgin Mary in there somewhere.”
“Wait, wait,” Amy said, “Look over there by the soap dish… there she is, the Mother of God! And she’s wielding an axe, my goodness! Look, P.J.! Call the news stations!” And P.J. laughed raucously at her mom’s silly voice.
Greg grabbed the purple crayon, which was worn down to a nub because it was her favorite, and wrote,
Mommy is silly, on one side of the soap dish, and
We love P.J., on the other side.
