“Who?” you snapped.
Helen did not answer immediately. She stepped deeper into the room instead, moving slowly between the two cribs as if she were entering a church after years away. Peter stared up at her without crying. Paul had one fist still clenched by his cheek, his mouth trembling around the ghost of a sob, but no sound came out. Both boys tracked her with the same fixed, eerie focus that had terrified everyone else.
Helen looked toward the rocking chair by the window.
Your wife’s rocking chair.
No one had sat in it since the night she died.
The room still held her in a thousand ways too small for guests to name and too large for you to ignore. The cream blanket draped over the chair was the one she had used during the last month of her pregnancy when her feet swelled and she still insisted on reading baby books aloud to twins who hadn’t been born yet. The perfume bottle on the dresser still carried the faint scent of white tea and gardenia because you had never let anyone move it. The framed photograph of her on the shelf, eight months pregnant and laughing with one hand on her belly, still watched the room like a witness who refused to leave.
Helen followed your eyes.
Then she looked back at you, and for the first time there was no softness in her face.
“You didn’t lose her,” she said. “You trapped her.”
The words hit like a slap.
