That was the year. If anybody had ever asked her, she could have told them: the year Josie was born was the worst year of her life, and the baby had nothing to do with it, and the baby had everything to do with it, because the baby was there for all of it, in her arms and in the room, the one thing she couldn't put down.
Danny left in the March. He didn't leave the way people leave in movies, with a suitcase and a door; he left by inches, which was worse. First he started working nights at the warehouse, then he started sleeping at his cousin's on the nights he worked, then on the nights he didn't. He said he needed to think. He said he wasn't ready. He said, once, standing in the doorway of the kitchen with his car keys in his hand and his head down so she could see the part in his curly black hair, *I don't think I'm any good for you, Tess*, and she had said *then be good*, and he had looked up at her with those wide brown eyes like she had asked him to fly. By June he had an apartment in Dayton. By August he had stopped answering the phone on the first ring, and then on the second.
Her mother's diagnosis came in April. Pancreatic. Theresa remembered sitting in the parking garage at the hospital with her hand on her belly and the other hand on the steering wheel, not starting the car, for forty-five minutes.
Josie was born in September, nine days late, after twenty hours. Theresa's mother came to the hospital in a wheelchair, gray in the face, wearing a scarf over her head, and held the baby for six minutes before she had to lie down. Theresa had counted. Six minutes. Her mother had looked down at the tiny furious face and said, "Oh, look at all that hair," and laughed, and then coughed, and the nurse had taken the baby back.
Ruth Haddon died three weeks later in the bedroom on Linden Street, in the bed she had slept in for thirty-eight years. Theresa was there, with Josie asleep in a car seat on the floor beside the bed, because there was nowhere else to put her. Her father was in the kitchen. He had been in the kitchen most of that last week, making coffee no one drank, washing cups that were already clean.
And then there was the winter. Theresa did not remember most of the winter. She remembered the baby crying at three in the morning, and four, and five. She remembered standing at the window of the apartment holding Josie against her shoulder and watching the snow come down under the streetlight and feeling nothing, not sadness, not anything, just a gray flat noise inside her like a television on a dead channel. She remembered that the baby would not latch and would not take the bottle and would not sleep unless she was being walked, and that Theresa walked her up and down the hall of that apartment so many times she wore a path in the carpet. She remembered looking down at that small face in the dark, at those wet brown eyes and the black curls, and seeing Danny looking back up at her, and feeling something she would never, ever say out loud to anyone.
She had loved the baby. She was almost sure she had loved the baby. She had fed her and changed her and bathed her and walked her. She had done every single thing. But there was no joy in it. There was no joy in anything that year, and the baby was the face of that year, and the face of the man who left, and somehow, in some place in Theresa that she couldn't reach to fix, the baby had become the face of her mother's dying too, because they had overlapped by three weeks and six minutes, and one had come in as the other went out.
Benji was different. Benji came six years later, in a different life, with a different man who was also gone now, but gone cleanly, with paperwork and a phone call every other Sunday. Benji came in a spring when the dental office had just hired her full-time and her father was speaking to her again and the sun came through the windows of the new house. Benji came out laughing, practically. Benji looked like her, round-faced and fair, and when he smiled, he smiled with his whole face, and people in the grocery store smiled back at him without meaning to. Benji was easy. Benji was joy. She had never once had to remind herself to love him.
With Josie she had to remind herself. Every day. And on the days she forgot, or was too tired to remember, or had driven her father to physical therapy on her lunch break and come back late and had Dr. Feld sigh at her, and had come home and seen those brown eyes waiting in the doorway, wanting something—on those days the something that was in her came out sideways, and it came out at the table, and it came out in words she had not chosen.
*Chicken is for kids who bring joy to this house.*
She had not chosen them. That was the thing she kept circling, sitting on the toilet lid with the cold cloth getting warm against her face. She had not thought of them. She had opened her mouth and they were there, ready-made, the rhythm of them already worn smooth, like a stair rail polished by hands. And when she heard them come out of her own mouth, standing behind Benji's chair with the tongs in her hand, a part of her had heard them in another voice. A lower one. From the head of another table, in another kitchen, on Linden Street, thirty-two years ago.
***
She had been nine.
Her brother Michael was four. Her mother had been in bed for most of a month after the baby that didn't come, the one nobody talked about, the one Theresa only understood years later when she found the hospital bracelet in her mother's jewelry box. That month the house was quiet in a way she had not known a house could be. Her mother's door was always closed. Her father came home from the plant and made dinner himself, badly, hot dogs and canned beans and once a chicken he had fried in too much oil so that the kitchen filled with smoke.
Michael made him laugh. Michael was four and fat-cheeked and did a dance in the living room in his underwear, and her father laughed, the first time in weeks, a big surprised bark of a laugh. And Theresa, who was nine, who had been the one taking her mother's trays in and out, who had been the one listening at the door to make sure she was still breathing, who did not dance, who had gotten quiet and serious and watchful that month, who sat at the table with her shoulders up near her ears—Theresa got the beans.