MIDDAY

People gather from the village. They’ve heard me screaming. Some dim part of me wonders whether I should feel embarrassed. Aside from my three-year-old, no one else has reacted the way I did, but nobody seems to judge me. They’re making allowances. This is my first time navigating the Day. And there are the children to consider.

Jesus Christ, my poor children.

I clutch them a little more gently, smooth my hand over their shoulders, heads, so small, breakable, tiny jutting hard bones under impossibly soft skin. When I open my eyes, I see Sally laying the picnic blanket over Avery. The little river of blood still drips down the steps.

I turn the kids away.

“What happen, what happen?” Emma drones. It’s the same phrase she says when she’s wondering anything, but it fills my brain in a mantra loop, the only thing I can think right now. “What happen?”

Charlie’s voice cuts through it, tight. “Avery went to heaven.”

That answer makes me physically seize, dreading the aftershock, but Emma has the exact opposite reaction. I feel her muscles soften against me as she gazes up at the sky, looking for Avery. I envy how literal she is. Even Charlie’s lost that level of innocence. Looking at him now, those sad, wide eyes, I wonder if he even believes what he just said.

Sometimes I think Charlie knows more than all of us here. Sometimes I worry that I only cling to that idea because it excuses me from adequately parenting him. Even so, he doesn’t need to bear witness to this, to scattered villagers wandering up, asking each other who it is, their quiet keening as they hear her name, and the next question, old Mr. Rivers in his too-loud drone, “How many accidents still to come?”

I nudge the children away and force myself to breathe until I can muster my mom-voice, brisk and solid. “Let’s go to the kitchen. Sally has those sandwiches waiting, and you need a change of clothes, sweetie.”

Charlie looks down at the wet patch on his trousers, face crumpling. After everything else, it’s shame that’s made him cry. Oh, my sweet boy.

“It’s okay.” I kiss the top of his head and breathe him in. “I’ve got you.”

We start away in search of lunch and clean, dry laundry. It feels like a war crime to carry on like nothing’s happened, to even consider eating at a time like this, but I have to make sure their day continues with minimal turbulence; it is well and truly the only job I have.

That and protecting them. Once I’m confident they’re safe in the kitchen—Sally reassuring me about every single pointed edge of every hard surface—I tour the house, trying to meter my urgency with calm, cautious movement, extending my breaths with a mantra of Fuck, fuck, fuck.