"I know."
"I don't know how to be her mother, Galen. I think I forgot. I think I was so busy keeping him alive that I forgot how, and now I don't know where to start."
"Start with the stairs," I said, which was a dumb thing to say, and she looked at me like it was a dumb thing to say, and then, after a second, she almost laughed.
I'd like to tell you everything changed after that. Some things did. Most of it was smaller and slower and harder than I'd have guessed. Carly didn't go to the teacher appreciation lunch on Monday. She emailed the PTA president Sunday night and resigned as hospitality chair, and the president wrote back two lines, totally understandable, take care of yourself, and Carly read it at the table and said, "She's relieved," and I didn't argue. A patient at the dental office said, "Aren't you the cupcake mom?" while Carly was checking her in, and Carly went into the bathroom in the back and stayed there for twenty minutes, and the dentist, a decent old guy named Dr. Holm, told her to take the rest of the week. The PTA took the ceremony footage down after four days, because the comments had gotten out of hand, but by then everybody who was going to see it had seen it. For most of that summer, wherever Carly went, she wondered who was looking at her, and what they were thinking, and whether they'd been standing at the kindergarten table. I think it was the first time in her life she'd been seen that much. I don't think she liked it any better than Elsie would have.
Elsie got glasses. Round tortoiseshell ones that she picked out herself after trying on nineteen pairs, while I sat in the chair at the optometrist's and said, "That one's good too," every time. When she put them on in the parking lot she looked up at the trees across the street and stood very still and said, "Dad. You can see all the leaves." Like nobody had ever told her.
In the third week of June, Carly drove across the bridge to Superior, by herself, to see her mother. Marlys Sundberg lived alone in the same split-level on Tower Avenue she'd moved the family into in the fall of 1996, with Dagny's thirty-one medals still in the glass case in the living room. Carly was gone four hours. When she came home she went straight upstairs, and when I went up after her she was sitting on the edge of Elsie's bed while Elsie was at day camp, with Elsie's stuffed animals lined up along the pillow the way Elsie still lined them up every morning, and she was holding a rabbit with one ear.
"She doesn't remember," Carly said. "Any of it. Field Day, the cupcakes, the story, none of it. I read it to her, Galen. I read her the whole thing. And she said, well, you were always such an independent child. She said I never needed her. She said it like she was giving me a compliment." She turned the rabbit over in her hands. "And then she asked if I'd seen Dagny's new house in Edina."
I sat down next to her.