She brakes the stroller and leans into the front to fan the children. “Poor babies,” she says. “I thought there’d be more of a breeze. As soon as we’ve got the vegetables and the bread, we’ll get ice creams, Josh, okay?” She bends low and covers their silky little cheeks with kisses. “You’re so delicious, I could eat you,” she tells them. “Even your sweat smells good.”
Jessica sleeps on, oblivious. Joshua is drowsy but smiles at the kiss and the thought of ice cream.
“Chocolate,” he murmurs.
“Okay. Chocolate. It’ll be cooler when we get into town.”
There are spreading trees that make a green tunnel of Main Street. Outside Ryan’s Bakery, two strollers are parked in the shade. Melanie maneuvers to the head of the line so that Josh will have a clear view of the dogs. They are tethered by their leashes to the bike rack and they rub noses and sniff behind each other’s tails. She sets the stroller hard up against the plate-glass window, directly under the oversized decal of the R, and pushes the brake lever with her foot.
Of course she has never stopped replaying that moment. She has never stopped wishing, she has never stopped asking What if?
What if she had nestled her little ones behind the Nelson toddler, at the back of the line, beneath the final gold-leafed Y of Ryan’s Bakery, would the world have tilted a different way on its axis? Would the climate have changed? Would a different child have been taken?
“Mommy will just be inside a few minutes, Josh. If Jessica wakes, you can sing her the lollipop song, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Then chocolate ice cream,” Melanie promises. “After we get the baguettes.”
3. Joshua
There are three dogs and one of them is lifting its leg. Joshua watches the little river of sunlight spurt out and twist like string, then fall into a black puddle beside the curb. He tries to see exactly where the yellow turns dark. The puddle smells like Jessica when her diaper is wet.
Right now, Jessica has the sleep smell and the baby-powder smell. There is a little bubble of drool on her chin. Joshua leans over to wipe it but his leather harness won’t let him go. He fiddles with the buckle but it ignores him. He tugs. He manages almost to kiss Jessica on her cheek.
There is always plenty of kissing, Daddy kissing him, Mommy kissing him, everyone kissing everyone all over.
And then something arrives, a swooping thing like a black crow coming at him, the jab of its vicious beak. Abrupt change of weather, end of kissing time, but Josh can’t understand. There is a van that pulls up, dogs yapping, a knife, he knows knife, he sees a knife and his harness lets go. It’s like a fast fierce wind that flattens, that blows everything flat (the bakery smell, Jessica, the dogs), rush, crash, his body seizing up, he can’t breathe... He can’t even figure out who it is, but it’s someone he seems to know and there’s another smell he seems to recognize, not Jessica, not the dogs. Is it the man who watches?
Your mommy said...
This isn’t right. It doesn’t feel right. But he seems to know that face, he knows that smell.
You have to come with me, your mommy said...
“Mommy!” he screams in sudden terror, but a hand is clamped over his mouth.
And then the thunderstorm? The black sky? Black clouds over his head?
Joshua is always trying to remember what he remembers. There are opaque things that swirl around and around in fog like clothes in a washing machine. They are there, he knows they are there, but he can never quite see them clear. He catches glimpses of what he once knew, fragments that tantalize. He remembers Jessica. He remembers baby smell and sleep smell. He remembers car-seat smell and that other smell. He remembers Mama and chocolate. He remembers the dogs.
4. Melanie
The smell of a bakery is like the smell of babies, it’s like pregnancy, that yeasty rising. Tonight she is going to talk Simon into letting Joshua sleep in their bed, all four of them curled up together like fresh croissants. Simon thinks Joshua is too old for this, that it isn’t healthy for him, that it will turn him into something squishy and damageable. And yet when Joshua is in his own room, in his own bed with side rails, it is Simon who wakes every hour and gets up to check. Just in case.
“You’re the one who’s babying him,” Melanie accuses. “You’re drip-feeding him a steady diet of anxiety. You’re conditioning him to be a nervous wreck.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are. It’s in your genes, I guess.”
“Maybe it is in my genes, it probably is, which is exactly why I want to toughen him up. That doesn’t mean that I can stop worrying, but he doesn’t have to know I keep watching. He’s learning independence when he sleeps in his own room.”
“When we’re all cuddled up together in the same bed, he’s learning safety and happiness. What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s tempting fate. It’s creating an illusion. It makes me nervous.”
“You know,” Melanie says, “most of the time things turn out well.”
“You’re wrong. Most of the time things do not turn out well, and when they do, it’s dangerous to expect that to last.”
Of course it is precisely Simon’s obsessive and protective anxiety that Melanie finds so attractive, so much more appealing than the thuggish frat boys she dated in college. She loves his gentleness, his passion for music (classical and jazz), his scholarly mind, the sheer and vast volume of his knowledge about everything. She loves his city-boy’s awed attention to their pocket-handkerchief garden on Long Island and to the plants on their balcony in Manhattan. Simon is the grandson of immigrants, blue-collar urban. His grandfather was a cellist in the old country, a deliveryman on the Lower East Side.
Melanie comes from rural midwestern stock and has the small-town top-of-the-heap gift of self-confidence, possibly a little misplaced, but boundless. She won a scholarship to an Ivy League college and that is where she and Simon met. They despised the preppies, of course, but picked up the bohemian variation, which is why they have a summer place on Long Island and why Melanie is buying baguettes.
The bakery is such a small and intimate place that the five customers constitute a crowd.
“Doesn’t this place smell heavenly?” someone asks, and the general response is a murmuring so low and contented and prolonged that it sounds like a Bach chorale.
“Ryan, what do you call these little flaky-pastry things that look like butterfly wings?”
“Those are palmiers,” Ryan says, offering a sample. “Take, take,” he urges. “Irresistible, don’t you agree?”
The women love to ask questions and Ryan loves to expound: on whole grains, on sunflower seeds, on the requisite buttery nothingness of French croissants, on madeleines, on baguettes. Melanie browses the racks of loaves. She and Jenny Nelson exchange chitchat while they wait, and then it is Jenny’s turn. Jenny watches as Ryan wraps her fragrant loaves in a tissue scarf, then places them in brown paper bags. “Got to run,” she says. “Listen! That’s Jason’s mommy-siren. It’ll get louder by the second and we’ll see the stroller rocking like a ship in a storm if I’m not quick.”