2.

2.

Derrick opened the door, and Vivian tried to rise so that as she explained herself she could have the slight benefit of being able to look him in the eye. At last she would have being upright going for her. Of course, several hours sitting on the cold concrete of the porch with her back against the cold doors of her kitchen had caused her entire bottom half to go numb, so she stumbled in through the doorway and braced herself on the edge of the counter as she shifted her weight from foot to foot, trying to work trough the pins and needles.

Derrick spoke first.

“Vivian? What the hell are you doing out there? I’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon.”

“Sorry. Sorry, sorry. I just forgot my damned keys and couldn’t get in the house,” she said, hunched over an tending to her lower extremities.

“Well why didn’t you call or…”

“I didn’t have my phone with me. I went to the Y and I didn’t bring it with me. Nor, it turns out, did I bring my house key.” She was vigorously rubbing the fronts of her thighs and noticed that her ass had gone completely numb, as if she’d been sitting on block of ice all day.

“So you just sat there all day,” Derrick asked her, looking at the porch. “You could’ve gone to the library or Starbucks or something.”

But he stopped his lecture when his wife finally straightened up and looked at him for the first time since he’d found her on the porch.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine now. I’m warming up. I’m really hungry…what should we have for dinner?” she said.

Derrick didn’t respond with a dinner suggestion. Instead he just looked at her face, realizing from the smeared make up and puffy eyes that she’d been crying.

“What? I haven’t eaten since this morning. I’m starved,” she said, and turned to walk into the pantry to survey the ingredients.

Derrick remained in the kitchen, trying to decide what to do. Unsure if he should follow his wife into the pantry and demand to know what had gone on that afternoon or, instead, look in the freezer and start tossing out dinner ideas, as if nothing unusual were happening. And the truth was, if Derrick were to be completely honest, coming home to find Vivian shivering and crying on the back porch wasn’t the sort of event that was becoming all that unusual in their household. In the wake of what was her third miscarriage in two years, Vivian’s behavior was becoming stranger and more erratic over the last few weeks, rather than improving as she healed. In fact, as more time passed since the pregnancy was lost, the worse she was becoming.

Last week, Derrick has returned to his home at lunchtime, bringing takeout sushi to Vivian as a surprise and, at first, thought she was not at home. The house was empty and quiet and when he called her name, no response was offered. He was about to stash the lunch in the refrigerator and return to his office, but he noticed that Vivian’s car keys and wallet were on the table in the foyer. It would not be unusual for Viv to do her errands on foot, as the downtown of their little city was just a few blocks from their home, but a wallet would be necessary for her to accomplish anything. The only other explanation would be that she went for a run and so Derrick decided to check the closet for her running shoes, to make sure they were missing.

He entered the bedroom and was startled by the scene he came upon. The thick white goose-down duvet, that usually hung loosely around the sides of the bed, skirting the floor, was tucked tightly around the perimeter of the bed. Protruding form beneath the tightly tucked covers was one larger lump. It was still and beside it were two smaller, squirming lumps. Derrick said his wife’s name, but the lump did not move. He repeated her name, the second time with about more urgency, but she was still not responding. When he approached the bed he was starting to shake, unsure of what he was about to find and still her saying her name. He gripped the top of the blanket, and tugged it, but found it had been tucked into the mattress so tightly that it was resisting him. Fed up with the situation and feel his concern turn to fear, Derrick gripped the feather-stuffed cotton in his fist and ripped the entire covering from the bed, revealing his startled wife, who in one swift movement went from a fetal position to sitting upright with her knees hugged to her chest. Derrick’s abrupt invasion also freed the smaller lumps, the cats, Franny and Zoey, whose fur coats stood out from their bodies, electrified by static as they skidded across the hard wood floors and out of the bedroom.

He wanted to be patient. He wanted to be calm, but the adrenaline zooming through his body as he anticipated finding the worst in his bed, made that impossible.

“What the hell is THIS?” he boomed.

Vivian was ashamed. She felt her face go red with embarrassment at being found. She also remained silent.

“Vivian? What? What is THIS?” Derrick repeated, this time not yelling, but by no means inquiring in a comforting or encouraging tone.

And his wife remained quiet, putting her face to her knees and hugging them to her chest so tightly he could see the strain in her forearms. She was dressed as she’d been when she’d gone to sleep – a pink camisole and white underwear. Her bare shoulders began to shake and her hair fell forward over her arms, veiling her face. He knew she was crying, but her vulnerable state did not ease his anger or compel him to scoop her up and soothe her. It instead further angered him and he grabbed her upper arm, trying to open her up. To see her eyes. But she resisted him.

“Vivian, look at me,” he said, as he tightened his grip on his growing hysterical wife’s arm, but still she refused to unroll from the protective ball she’d made of herself. “Vivian!” he was chastising her, then, as if she were a stubborn child and he dragged her off the bed by her arm, finally succeeding in pulling her apart, so that she ended up on the floor, looking up at him with her arm still gripped in his fist. Tears ran down her face, but she was silent. They were not accompanied by sobs or heaves. It was just a steady flow of waves of salty liquid brimming on her lower lids momentarily before, running down her cheeks and chin.

Derrick remained standing over her. “Are you going to tell me what this is? What I’m supposed to do here?”

Vivian sniffled, wiped snot from her nose and just looked at him. Her eyes were open wide and still leaking and three creases he’d never seen before ran across her forehead. Her lips were chapped and trembled, but no words came.
Her hair much like the cats’ stuck out around her head like a halo, but he saw her as anything but angelic.

He looked her up and down, taking in the sight: his beautiful wife on the floor, nearly naked and crying and blotchy-faced. A physical manifestation of the heartache she’d been enduring for the last few months. He shook his head at her and said, “For Christ’s sake Vivian, clean yourself up.” And then he left.

Once outside of the house, Derrick paused a moment in the driveway, looking up at the window of their bedroom, wondering what was going on in the wake of his departure. Vivian’s shape did not appear in the window to watch him drive away, nor did she emerge from the front door, begging him to stay or offering an explanation. From the outside, the house remained still and quiet and he suspected Vivian was just where he’d left her. He knew he should go back and check on her. He wanted to go to her, but he also wasn’t sure how he’d handle finding her still on the bedroom floor, unfazed by his outburst or unbothered by the unacceptable nature of her bizarre behavior.

When Derrick returned home later that evening, he was braced for a confrontation or, even worse, an icy cold reception, which he deserved he believed, for his own frigid response to his wife’s…breakdown? Is that what it was, he wondered? But he entered his home and into neither scenario. Instead, his wife was dolled up and cheery, setting the table with the good china and candles, playing soft music in the background and, upon seeing him enter the dining room, approached him cheerfully with a large hug and rather long and lingering kiss. They enjoyed a delicious dinner, a bottle of wine, and pleasant conversation Derrick’s co-workers and the recipe Vivian found for the roast they were enjoying, before blowing out the candles and climbing the stairs to their bedroom. They made love in their bed, where earlier that day, the encounter between the lovers found them, for the first time in their ten-year relationship, unable to connect.

Things in the Derrick and Vivian Troy household were business as usual for several days until Derrick came home again to a quiet house, and just as he began to dread that his wife was upstairs tightly tucked in bed with the cats he spied movement in the backyard from the kitchen window. Toward the back of their property, along the wooden fence his wife was on her hands and knees patting a mound of dirt around the base of a sapling that stood about four feet tall. Next to the baby tree his wife was tending, stood two others of similar size, already snug in the moist ground of his recently rain-soaked backyard. Derrick went outside and walked across the yard to where Vivian was working.

“Trading poetry for gardening, Viv?” he asked her, referring to the poetry course she’d enrolled in at a local university. Vivian looked at him and smiled.

“Unlikely. I can’t even keep a cactus alive, remember?” she said. “Though, my poetry sucks, too.” She turned her attention back to the tree, putting her weight behind the her hands to ensure that her tree was secure in the ground.

“So, what’s with the trees?” Derrick asked her.

Vivian finished what she was doing, and still on her knees looked up at her husband as she removed the gardening gloves from her hand and wiped the hair that had escaped her ponytail and fallen into her eyes. It wasn’t lost on Derrick that this was the second time that week he found himself standing over his wife as she displayed unusual behavior.

She looked at him for a few minutes, trying to gauge what his reaction would be to her explanation. Taking a deep breath, she said, “They’re for the babies. One for each.”

Derrick wasn’t following what she was telling him.

“Whose babies, Viv?”

“Ours,” she said, quietly. “Our babies. They were our babies, Derrick. Our children and we never did anything for them, so I thought the trees would be a nice tribute,” she explained calmly and then getting up from the ground continued.

“I think about them a lot. So I thought I could plant these trees and maybe put a bench or maybe some Adirondack chairs out here, and…I don’t know. When I’m thinking of them, maybe I could just come out here as a way of visiting them.”

Derrick was quiet and looking at the trees. “They’re nice trees,” was all he said.

“Am I weird?” she asked him. “Is this weird,” gesturing at the trees.

Yes, he thought. Yes, this is weird, planting trees for babies who were never born. They weren’t their children - they were miscarriages. Derrick thought about one of his colleagues whose 3-year-old had died of a rare type of cancer. You plant trees for children whose lives are documented by toys and bedrooms left behind, and little outfits no longer worn, and photographs in frames. You don’t plant trees for fetuses who leave behind ultrasound images—medical documents holding about the same sentimental value as a healthy cholesterol reading.

“What are they?” he asked.

She looked at him, cocking her head to the side, “Trees. Well, baby trees.”

He laughed and clarified. “I mean what kind of tree?”

“Oh. Duh. Yeah…they’re called Weeping Cherry,” Vivian informed him. His eyebrows arched comically and his eyes widened in alarm.
“No, no…I didn’t pick them because of the weeping part. Jeez…You don’t think I’m that crazy do you? I picked them because they flower in late winter or early spring, which is the time of year I hate the most. It’s always so depressing, you know? After putting up with gray skies and dead everything for so many months and then by March your really waiting for the weather to warm up and the grass to start getting a little green. I thought it would be nice to have this little burst of color visit us during a dark time of the year.”

Derrick still said nothing, so she asked again: “Is this weird?”

“No,” he said, this time, drawing her near for a hug, looking at the cemetery that had suddenly sprung up in his back yard over the top of his wife’s head. He could feel her relax into his chest. “Not weird,” he told her. “But, wow. A lot of work Viv, to bring three trees home from the nursery by yourself and drag them back here to plant. Why didn’t you ask me to help?”

“I thought you’d be mad,” she said, her voice muffled as she spoke into his chest. At her confession he pulled her tighter and wondered, for the first time, how his wife would get through this.