Fingerprints on the Windowpane
I opened the door to the old bedroom. Gold light yawned inward in four great shafts through the window. Dust motes floated upward into the light. The room sounded hollow. It was certainly empty. But I knew of its emptiness before I had opened the door. That emptiness is what had kept my wife, Carol, and I out of the room for the past two weeks.
Beyond the single window, out in the wide green yard Carol stumbled around in her nightgown beneath the big oak tree with its swing. It was two in the afternoon. She hadn't changed out of it since we buried Billie. Her hair, tangled and greasy even from the distance of the room, snapped and twisted in the breeze. Carol stumbled with it all, lost and trying to pull up what the grave was keeping down.
I stepped into the bedroom and with a great care tried not to disturb the toys on the floor. The Tonka truck had gone from bright yellow to gold brown in the layer of dust that had fallen there. The blanket ("Blankie, my blankie daddy") stuffed in a wad in the corner had the same dust mottling its blue patchwork. Did she throw it there or had she been playing with it?
Each step that I took left a footprint in the dust, evidence of my existence. The bed was still against the wall, its sheets still undone since the morning we found her, found her blue, not breathing, silent, silent, silent. The walls still held that same tension we found then too. The bedroom was stuck in that single moment, like a mosquito frozen in amber.
I walked slowly, crying, and ran my finger along the edge of the bed. My ears heard her crying. They heard her laughing. My eyes saw her tiny fingers with their squared off nails dipping into orange paint and then running lines across the paper taped to the wooden easel I made for her.
“It's a tiger."
"A tiger? What's that baby?"
"Daddy, you know. It's a big animal and it has claws and it has teeth and it has stripes."
She didn't live long enough to learn that there were invisible living things out there with claws and teeth and stripes that scarred more deeply.
That lesson was for Carol and I.
I dropped to my knees and wept. How could I clean this room? I pulled my head up from my hands, I looked out over the yard, green, open, a single leaf blowing in circles across it, Carol dipping from one leg to the other, scratching herself, her head tilting downward to the ground then up to the sky, looking for Billie's tracks, looking for traces. The wind out there, the wind. I wiped the tears from my eyes with my right hand and they focused again, first on what was beyond the glass, then on the glass itself. There they were: five tiny ovals smudged on the glass above a square. Fingerprints and a palm.
I crawled forward, careful not to press my own hands to the glass and raised my head up so the fingerprints were in front of my eyes. I leaned forward and kissed the smudges, drawing them into my lips.
Look what I found Carol, look what I found.