Phoenix

On Monday night, Rachel calls long-distance from a motel in Orlando. Listening to the phone ring on the other end of the line, she picks up the remote control and clicks through television stations with the sound muted. She counts fifteen rings. Sixteen. Ted answers on the twenty-sixth ring, out of breath, and she asks him to pass the receiver to their daughter.

“I’ll go get her,” Ted says, “but I can’t promise any miracles.”

There’s a clunk as he sets the phone on the kitchen counter, and over the line Rachel can hear his voice get louder and fainter as he roves around the house, shouting, “April, honey? Come talk to Mommy!” She hears the squeak of the spring on the screen door. Ted’s footsteps appear and disappear as he moves from the wooden floor of the hallway to the carpeted stairs.

Rachel waits. She sits on the bed. The room’s rug and drapes smell vaguely like a vintage clothing store: a lot of mildewed fabric, a little stale sweat and cigarette smoke. It’s rare that she has to travel with her job; this is the first such trip since April was born three years ago. She clicks through silent football games and music videos without music.

* * *

The house where they live now isn’t their first. Where they lived before, it had burned to the ground, but the fire was nobody’s fault. That much was proven in a court of law. It had been a fabulous freak accident, written up in the annals of homeowners insurance history. They’d lost everything they owned, and then their daughter had been born blind. April was blind, but things could’ve turned out worse. That first house had been Ted’s before they’d even met. Glass block had filled a wall of the dining room, casting a grid like a net over the black-lacquered table and chairs. When you flipped a switch, gas flames danced magically on a bed of crushed granite in the living room fireplace. The bathtubs, toilets, and sinks were black porcelain. Vertical blinds dangled in the windows. Nothing was earth-toned or wood-grained.

But it’d suited Ted, the house had. He owned a cat he’d named Belinda Carlisle and let drink from the black bidets. It was a long-haired sable Burmese, like a bubble of black hair. Ted loved Belinda Carlisle, but he knew enough not to let her get too close. The cat looked clean until you touched her; after that you’d both be covered in greasy dander. To deal with Belinda’s shedding, Ted had one of those robot vacuum cleaners that scoured the floors all day. At least that was the idea. More than once the two had joined forces: The cat had diarrhea, and the robot scooted through it, crossing and crisscrossing the puddle all day, spreading it to every square inch of the black carpet.

When they’d been married almost a year, Rachel had announced that they needed to move. She was pregnant and didn’t want to bring a newborn into this world of filthy rugs and open flames. They’d have to sell the house and give up Belinda Carlisle. Even Ted had to admit the place stunk like a cat box, no matter how often they changed the litter or cleaned the rugs, and you couldn’t be pregnant around a cat box. Over dinner, she explained toxoplasmosis. It was caused by the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii and lived in the intestines of cats. It spread by laying its eggs in cat feces and could kill or blind infants.

She was used to explaining the issues to Ted. She knew he’d never be brilliant. That was his chief charm. He was loyal and even-tempered, and Ted was a hard worker if you stayed on top of him and told him what to do. She’d married him for all the reasons she might hire a long-term employee.

She’d spoken slowly, between bites of spaghetti. The only way to mask the smell of cat was to add cilantro to everything. After her speech, Ted sat across the table, the shadows from the glass blocks making a contour map of his face and white shirt. She could hear the bubbles in his mineral water. It didn’t matter what Ted cooked; nothing looked appetizing against his black-glazed china. He blinked. He asked, “What are you saying?”

Slower this time, Rachel said, “We have to find a new house.”

“No,” said Ted, drawing out the word as if playing for time. “Before that.”

Rachel wasn’t annoyed. She’d rehearsed this for days. She could’ve paced it better. It was a lot to spring on him all at once. “I said we need to list this house.”

Ted closed his eyes and shook his head. His brow furrowed, he prompted, “Before that.”

“The part about Belinda Carlisle?” Rachel asked.

“Before that,” Ted coaxed.

It worried Rachel to think that Ted wasn’t stupid—that, instead, he just never listened to anything she said. She rewound their conversation in her mind. “Do you mean the part about being pregnant?”

“You’re pregnant?” Ted asked. He put his black napkin to his lips. To wipe them or hide them, Rachel couldn’t tell.

* * *

It’s still Monday night in Orlando, Rachel is still waiting on the phone. She peels the bedspread down and stretches out to watch the Home Shopping Channel. What she loves most about HSC is that it doesn’t have commercials. Diamond cocktail rings rotate in slow motion, glittering under halogen lights and magnified to one hundred times their actual size. The pitchman always speaks with a down-home drawl and always sounds so excited when he says, “You’d better hurry’n order, folks, we don’t got more’n a couple thousand of these ruby tiaras left …” Emerald solitaires sell for the same price as a jar of cashews from the minibar.

With the TV on mute, over the phone she can hear the neighbor’s dog barking. The barking disappears as if muffled by something. As if April’s put the receiver to her ear. Holding her breath to hear better, Rachel says, “Sweetheart? Boo-Boo? How are you and Daddy getting along without Mommy?” She talks until she feels like an idiot babbling to herself in an empty motel room.

This silence, Rachel suspects, is retribution. The night before her flight, she’d noticed her teeth looked yellow. Too much coffee. After dinner she’d prepared the bleaching trays and let April examine them. Rachel had explained how tightly they fit: Mommy couldn’t answer any questions for at least an hour once the trays were on her teeth. Mommy couldn’t talk at all. If April needed something, she’d need to ask her father. No sooner than Rachel had squirted the expensive bleaching gel into each tray and snapped it into her mouth, April was already tugging at her and asking for a bedtime story.

Ted wasn’t any help. April went to bed in tears, and Rachel’s teeth still looked like hell.

From the sounds that come through the wall, the guests in the next motel room are full-fledged screwing. Rachel cups one hand around the receiver and hopes her daughter won’t overhear. She worries that the line has been disconnected, and keeps asking, “April? Sweetheart, can you hear Mommy?” Resigned, Rachel asks the girl to hand the telephone back to her father. Ted’s voice comes on.

“Don’t stew about it,” he says. “She’s just giving you the silent treatment.” His voice muffled, his mouth pointed somewhere else, he says, “You’re just upset that Mommy’s gone, aren’t you?” A measure of dead air follows. Rachel can hear the carnival music and silly voices of a cartoon playing in the living room. It’s not lost on her that she mostly listens to television with no sound while her daughter watches without visuals.

Still directed elsewhere, Ted’s voice asks, “You still love Mommy, don’t you?”

Another beat of silence follows. Rachel hears nothing until Ted begins to placate: “No, Mommy doesn’t love her job more than she loves you.” He doesn’t sound very convincing. After a pause, he scolds, “Don’t say that, missy! Never say that!” From the tone of his voice, Rachel braces herself for the sound of a slap. She wants to hear a slap. It doesn’t come. Clear, speaking directly into the receiver, Ted says, “What can I say? Our kid can really hold a grudge.”

Rachel’s thrilled. The last thing she wants her daughter to be is a sop like Ted, but she keeps those words in her mouth. That’s Monday’s phone call, done.

* * *

Belinda Carlisle had been Ted’s cat since she was a kitten. She was an old cat when they’d listed her on various websites for adoption. Old and gassy. Only medical researchers might bother. When euthanasia had loomed as their best option, Ted called Rachel into the kitchen and showed her the cat’s fifty-pound bag of kibble. It was still over half full. He said, “Just give me this long to find her a new family.”

To Rachel this had seemed like a good compromise. Every day meant two scoops out of the kibble. The bag became an hourglass counting down their final days with Belinda. After two weeks, Rachel was no longer so sure. The food bag was still half full. In fact, it seemed a little heavier than it had been when she’d first made her bargain. She suspected Ted was smuggling kibble from another source. Perhaps he kept a secret bag stashed in his car or somewhere in the garage and he was using scoops of that to replenish the kitchen bag. To test her theory, she began to dole out double helpings for the cat’s meals. Rachel told herself she was giving the cat a treat, indulging it instead of hurrying it toward its grave.

The increased rations had barely fit in the cat’s bowl, but Belinda ate it all. She was getting fat, but she wasn’t getting any closer to being gone. Like the parable of the loaves and fishes or that lamp in the Temple of David, the big bag of kibble was always half full.

* * *

Tuesday’s call from Orlando doesn’t go any better. Each night, she and Ted make small accountings to each other. He’s raked the first fall of leaves. She’s implemented the initial on-site catalysts for satellite microwave transmission. He’s found a grocer that carries the cheese she likes so much. Rachel reports that she’s re-sequenced the protocol script for the pre-systems recharge matrix. She says Orlando is a terrible place to find oneself without children.

When she stops speaking, there’s a stretch of silence, as if Ted’s paying attention to something else. She listens for the sound of him keyboarding, doing e-mails while she talks. Finally Ted speaks. He says, “What’s going on there?”

He means the sounds. The guests in the next room are screwing, again. Actually, they’ve never stopped, and their constant moaning and shrill cries have disappeared to Rachel’s ears. The sounds have droned on so long, they must be a pornographic film. No one was ever that much in love. It makes her furious to imagine Ted has been listening to strangers humping instead of the progress she’s made.

While a sapphire hovers on television, Ted’s voice says, “Take the phone, April. Tell Mommy goodnight.”

To hear more, Rachel tries to subtract the sound of the freeway outside. She tunes out the hum of the minibar and the endearments grunted from beyond the wall. She hasn’t taken a drink since some Christmas eggnog three years ago, but now Rachel goes to the minibar and surveys the racks of little glass bottles, each priced higher than the diamond pendant on television. A dwindling countdown shows that there are fewer than five thousand of these pendants left. For the price of pearl earrings, Rachel mixes herself a gin and tonic and chugs it down.

Over the phone Rachel hears Ted’s voice. Muffled in the background, he whines, begging, “Tell Mommy about the turtles you liked at the zoo.” Nothing follows. Rachel feels a respect for her daughter that she’s never felt for her husband. For dinner, she tears open a minibar bag of plain M&M’s that costs more than a shopping-channel engagement set. For every bag of potato chips or candy bar she eats, another will appear to replace it as if by magic.

* * *

Rachel had confronted Ted about the bag of cat food, but he’d denied any cheating. Rachel didn’t cop to overfeeding, but she did point out that five weeks had gone by and Belinda Carlisle looked like a watermelon wearing a fur coat. Anymore, Rachel wasn’t much of a skinny Minnie, either. “Are you saying,” she’d asked, pointing to the food bag, “that this is a miracle?”

It didn’t help that the realtor who’d listed the house told them the living room smelled bad. The realtor said their asking price was two hundred grand too high for the current market. Rachel’s hormones didn’t help, either.

Ted and Rachel had argued. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, they bickered almost every day. During that time, the level in the food bag rose until kibble was spilling out on the kitchen floor. The cat was so bloated she could hardly drag herself around the living room carpet. That was when their overpriced house caught fire.

* * *

On Wednesday evening, as usual, Rachel calls from Orlando. She half-hopes April won’t speak. That might prove that the girl’s inherited some of Rachel’s own gumption. As a test, Rachel asks, “Don’t you love Mommy?” Under her breath she prays the girl won’t take such obvious bait.

The world is a horrible place. The last thing Rachel wants to create is a kid who bruises like a ripe banana.

As if April needs further testing, Rachel says, “Let Mommy sing you a bedtime song,” and she begins to croon a lullaby she knows will melt her daughter’s resolve. Backing her up are the moans and groans from next door, those sounds without language that weak people make against their will. Rachel intends to sing all of the verses, but she loses her nerve when she hears Ted’s laugh. It sounds too clear. She guesses April has set down the receiver and walked away. That means Rachel has been singing to an empty kitchen. She ends by warning, “If you don’t say goodnight, you’ll make Mommy cry.” If no one is listening, it doesn’t matter what she says. She pretends to cry. She escalates her pretend sobs to wailing. It’s easier than she imagined, and when she finds she can’t stop, Rachel hangs up.

* * *

Rachel hadn’t invented the dangers of toxoplasmosis; she’d gone online and built an airtight case. This wasn’t crazy talk. Neurobiologists had linked T. gondii to suicide and the onset of schizophrenia. All caused by exposure to cat poop. Some studies even suggested that the toxo brain parasites chemically coerced people to adopt more cats. Those crazy cat ladies were actually being controlled by an infection of single-cell invaders.

The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people. As far as the cat was concerned, Ted was both.

On the last night in their first house, as Rachel had later explained it to the police, they’d gone to a Christmas party in the neighborhood. The two of them were coming home. They’d been drinking eggnog, and as they trudged through the snow, she’d explained to Ted that he didn’t need to be such a softie. She spoke carefully, waiting for her words to stick. The footprints she left were splayed wide apart to balance her new weight.

Rachel was still working as a Level I corporate interface consultant, but simply entering her second trimester felt like a full-time job. She worried that with a new baby the situation wouldn’t get much better. You might be able to divide a man’s love in half, but not in three ways.

The way Rachel told it to the police, she had walked into the darkened house first. She hadn’t even taken off her coat. She’d said, “It’s freezing in here.” The Christmas tree filled the living room’s front window, blocking any light from the street. In fact, everyone’s first assumption was that the Christmas tree was the culprit. The usual suspects were always scented candles, faulty twinkle lights, an overloaded outlet. Ted pegged the roving robotic vacuum cleaner. His fingers were crossed that it had overheated. Some circuit had shorted out, and it had raced around filled with flammable cat hair and set fire to everything.

* * *

Thursday night in Orlando, it’s the age-old paradox: the more Rachel tries to hurry the installation process, the longer things take. She phones herself and leaves messages. “Memo to self: Finalize nomenclature for graphics inventory.”

She takes her phone off the bedside table and begins to scroll through her photos. She has only one of April. Somehow it seems wrong to photograph a blind person. It’s like stealing something valuable they don’t even know they own. In this same spirit, Rachel self-edits to never say, “What a lovely sunset” or “Eyes this way, honey.” Around April, to exclaim, “What a beautiful flower!” would seem cruel.

She and Ted had met on a blind date, another phrase Rachel rigorously avoids.

Recently her daughter has begun to call out, “Look at me, Mom! Look at me! Are you watching?” April obviously had no idea what she was saying. That was simply the universal chorus of children, sighted or blind. The essence of being a parent was the shift from being the person who is watched to being the person who does the watching.

Again, Thursday, the girl refuses to utter a sound. Rachel scrutinizes with her ears. Rachel wheedles and promises until Ted takes the phone and says, “Sorry.” She can hear the helpless shrug in his voice as he says, “I can’t make her talk.”

To that Rachel says, “Try.” Ted has a real talent for giving up. She suggests he poke April in the ribs to make her laugh. She asks, “Isn’t she ticklish?”

In response Ted laughs, but mostly from disbelief. “You’re asking if she’s ticklish?” He snorts, “Where have you been the past three years?”

* * *

After the night of the fire, all that Rachel would ever accept the blame for was throwing the switch. Before turning on the living room lights, Rachel said she’d gone to the thermostat and dialed up the heat. She’d switched on the gas fireplace at the same moment the screams had started. A wild banshee wail had filled the dark rooms. Like some wintry demon, an unearthly screeching sounded, and then the entire household seemed to catch fire. The Christmas tree flared. The black throw pillows flared. The black area rugs blazed. Ted rushed to embrace Rachel even as bedspreads and bath towels burst into raging orange flame. The air stank with smoke and scorched hair. The smoke detectors added to the head-splitting racket. They didn’t have time to back their black car down the driveway and save it before flames were flapping like bright flags from every upstairs window. They were standing on the snowy front lawn when the fire trucks came sirening out of nowhere. The house was fully involved.

In Orlando, Rachel has begun to speculate. It would be exactly like Ted to keep some awful truth from her, at least until she gets home. If April were in the hospital, if she’d been stung by a bee and had a severe reaction, or worse, Ted would think he was doing Rachel a kindness by not telling her over the phone. She goes online and searches for accidents in Seattle involving three-year-old girls in the past week. To her dismay, she finds one. According to the news item, a girl has been attacked by a neighbor’s dog. Currently she is in the hospital, in critical condition. Her name is being withheld pending notification of the victim’s extended family.

That night, Rachel listens to her new messages. They are all from herself. “Memo to self: Repercussions!” Just that one word, shrill and bullying. She has no idea to what she’d been referring at the time. She has to check the caller ID to even recognize herself. Was that how her voice really sounds?

All night the idea weighs on her: How many toddlers choke to death on rubber balls and never make the CNN scroll? She keeps hitting REFRESH, hoping for updates on the Seattle Times story. What kind of mother is she if she can’t sense whether or not her child is dead or alive?

* * *

The fire marshal hadn’t thought it was arson, not at first. The episode had made them celebrities, and not in a good way. They’d become living proof of something people didn’t want to believe could really happen.

The fire marshal had picked through the charred rooms, charting the path of the blaze’s ignition. It had started at the minimalist fireplace and traced a circle around the perimeter of the living room. Next, the perimeter of the dining room had kindled. He’d sketched a rough floor plan on a sheet of graph paper clipped to a clipboard. Using a mechanical pencil, he drew a line from the dining room up the stairs and around the perimeter of the master bedroom and bathroom.

Tucked under his arm, he was carrying something wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag. “Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” he told Ted and Rachel in the driveway. He’d held the bag open and let them peer inside. It smelled horrific, a combination of burnt hair and chemicals. Ted took one look and began to shake.

* * *

Friday night in Orlando, Rachel briefly entertains the idea of calling the police, but what could she say? She checks for an update about the three-year-old girl in critical condition. She calls a neighbor back home, JoAnne. They’ve had a passing acquaintance based on a mutual hatred of the local garbage collectors. JoAnne picks up on the nineteenth ring. Rachel asks if Ted has gotten their garbage can out to the curb this week. She doesn’t want to tip her hand.

She listens, switching the phone from one ear to the other, but hears nothing. Most of what she doesn’t hear is JoAnne’s Rottweiler mix barking. It’s always barking and clawing at their fence.

At last JoAnne says, “Garbage pickup is next week, Rachel.” She sounds guarded. She says Rachel’s name as if she’s signaling to other people within earshot. She asks how Orlando is, and Rachel racks her brains trying to remember if she’d mentioned the trip beforehand. Testing, Rachel says, “I hope Ted’s not spoiling April while I’m gone.” The pause that follows lasts too long.

“April?” Rachel prods. “My daughter?”

JoAnne says, “I know who April is.” Now she sounds irritated.

Rachel can’t help herself. “Did Cesar bite my baby?”

The line goes dead.

* * *

At least the fire marshal had solved the mystery of why their old house stank every winter. Belinda Carlisle, the marshal conjectured, had been using the crushed granite of the fireplace as a litter box. Any time they’d switched on the gas jets, Ted and Rachel had been barbecuing untold pounds of buried cat waste. The insurance adjuster told them that what had occurred was without precedent. Rachel noticed he could hardly contain his laughter as he explained how the cat must’ve been voiding her bowels at the same moment Rachel flipped the fireplace switch.

One moment, Belinda was taking a secret late-night crap in the dark little cave of the firebox. In the cold house, maybe she savored the gentle warmth of the pilot light. She would’ve heard the cricket click-click-click of the electronic spark igniter. Instantly, jets of blue flame would’ve shot at her from every direction.

It had been this furry, flaming demon that had exploded, screaming, and raced around the house, setting fire to every cloth item before falling dead in an upstairs closet beneath Rachel’s dry cleaning, stored in flammable plastic.

* * *

Saturday, Rachel phones home three times and gets the voice mail. She pictures the house empty. It’s too easy to picture Ted weeping beside a hospital bed. When he finally picks up, she asks for April. “If that’s how you want it, young lady,” she threatens, “no Christmas, no merry-go-round, no pizza, unless you speak up.” She waits, not wanting to be hurtful. She blames her mood on a rum-and-cola, a double, that cost more than a turquoise belt buckle from TV. “I had a little girl who was blind,” she taunts, trying to provoke a response. “What are you, now, Helen Keller?”

It’s the rum talking. On television, an enlarged topaz sparkles hypnotically, rotating slowly with the sound turned down.

In the depth of the quiet, Rachel can hear breathing. It’s not her imagination. April is breathing, sounding stubborn, huffing angry little snorts as if her chubby arms are crossed over her chest and her cherub cheeks are flushed red with anger.

Taking a gamble, Rachel asks, “What do you want Mommy to bring you when she comes home?” A bribe will help everyone save face. “A Mickey Mouse?” she offers. “Or a Donald Duck?”

She hears a faint gasp. The breathing stops for an instant before the distant, high-pitched voice squeals, “Oh, Daddy.” Delighted, it says, “Pull my hair, Daddy! Fuck me up the ass!”

It’s not April. It’s the guests next door, a voice filtering through the wall.

“How about we use a solid-gold, thousand-pound bar of chocolate-covered Rocky Road ice cream?” Rachel deadpans. Pressing the receiver against her chest, she pounds a fist against the wall and yells, “How about a pretty pony fucks you?”

Over the phone she hears the little robot vacuum humming around—a replacement—cleaning the floor and bumping into walls, like (what else?) a sightless animal. Ted sits on his ass half the day, but he still wants his labor-saving Sharper Image gadgets. It scares Rachel, the idea that April might accidentally stumble over the vacuum, but Ted insists she’s smarter than a cheap machine.

In a flash, Rachel knows. Even if she’s a little tipsy, it all makes sense. Ted blames her for what happened to Belinda Carlisle. He’s not brilliant, but he’s not stupid. Holding a grudge is something April inherited from her father. He’s bided his time, and now he’s getting his revenge.

A thin crack opens up in her voice, and now all of her panic rushes to escape. She asks, “April, baby, is your daddy hurting you?” She tries to not ask, to stop asking, but the effort is like trying to un-pop a balloon.

* * *

By the time April had been born, they were settled in a cookie-cutter ranch house a few blocks away. Ted had wanted to bury the cat in the new backyard, but the fire marshal never surrendered the remains. The ranch house was less dramatic. It had no open fireplace and no bidet, but with a blind child, that was just as well. How could Rachel not be affected, living pregnant for six months with smoldering cat turds? As the obstetrician put it, the toxo parasite attacks the optic nerve, but Rachel knew there was more to it than that. It was retribution. Of course, Rachel swore she hadn’t seen Belinda Carlisle before she’d flipped the switch. And Ted had accepted Rachel’s statement at face value.

There were lies that married two people more effectively than any wedding vows.

* * *

On Sunday, Rachel phones and insists that Ted listen. “The next call I make is to the police,” she swears. Unless April says something to change her mind, she’s going to call Child Protective Services and request an intervention.

Her husband, Mr. Passive-Aggressive, laughs a confused laugh. “What do you want me to do, pinch her?”

Pinch her, yes, Rachel says. Spank her. Pull her hair. Anything.

He asks, “Just to clarify … if I don’t smack my kid, you’ll report me for child abuse?”

Nodding, Rachel tells the phone, “Yes.” She pictures him drinking coffee out of the black-glazed mug he salvaged from the fire’s wreckage. The color and finish are so ugly, the mug looks as good as new.

“How about I burn her with a cigarette?” he asks, his voice warped with sarcasm. “Would that make you happy?”

“Use a needle from my sewing box,” Rachel instructs. “But sterilize it with some rubbing alcohol first. She’s never had a tetanus shot.”

Ted says, “I can’t believe that you’re serious.”

“This has gone on long enough,” she says. She knows she sounds crazy. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe this was the toxoplasmosis, an infection in her brain talking, but she knows she’s serious.

* * *

When their insurance settlement for the fire had failed to come through in a speedy fashion, by then the fire marshal was calling it arson. Their lab tests had found a residue in the cat’s fur. Some incendiary chemical agent had kept Belinda Carlisle aflame during her panicked, agonizing final flight. It looked fishier yet that a few weeks before the fire Rachel had doubled their homeowners coverage. Even with a baby clamped to one breast, she hadn’t hesitated to lawyer up.

* * *

On the phone Sunday night, Rachel says she’s not bluffing. Either Ted makes their daughter emit some words, some sound, or they’ll have this battle in family court. It seems like a long time, but Ted responds.

His voice pointed elsewhere, he says, “April, honey. Do you remember what a flu shot is?” He says, “Do you remember when you had to get a shot so you could go play at Easter camp?” Silence answers. Rachel shuts her eyes in order to hear more. All she can detect is the hum of the fluorescent bulb in the bedside lamp. She stands up from the bed to shut off the air conditioner, but before she takes a step, Ted’s voice is back.

“Can you get Daddy the sewing basket?” Nothing seems to happen, but now his voice comes full into Rachel’s ear. “Are you happy? Does this make you happy?” His footsteps sound in the hallway. “I’m going to the bathroom.” His delivery is singsong, like a lullaby. “I’m getting the rubbing alcohol to torture our daughter.” He sings, “Rach, you can stop this at any time.”

But Rachel knows this isn’t true. Nobody can stop anything. The people will always be humping next door. The burning cat will always be rocketing like a comet around every house in which they ever live. Nothing will ever be resolved. Again, it crosses her mind that Ted might be tormenting her. April is upstairs in her room or playing in the backyard, and he’s only pretending she’s there. That’s easier to swallow than the idea that her own child despises her.

“You don’t understand,” Rachel tells the phone. “I need you to hurt her to prove she’s alive.” She demands, “Hurt her as proof of how much you don’t hate me.”

Before the TV can sell another thousand diamond wristwatches, April screams.

Not a beat later, Ted asks, “Rach?” Breathless. The scream echoing in her head. It would echo in her head forever. A caterwauling. The shriek of Belinda Carlisle. It’s the same squeal April had made when she was born.

“You did it,” she says.

Ted replies, “You screamed.”

It wasn’t Rachel’s scream or April’s. It was still another sex noise from the next room. It’s another stalemate. The bag will always be half full. Ted will always be cheating.

Rachel asks him to put April on the phone. “Make sure she’s got the phone to her ear,” Rachel says, “and then I want you to leave the room.”

* * *

“Your father doesn’t understand.” Into the phone, Rachel says, “He owed more on that house than it was worth. Someone had to make the ugly choices.”

She explains to her daughter how the only problem with marrying a spineless, lazy, stupid man is that you could be stuck with him for the rest of your life. “I had to do something,” Rachel says. “I didn’t want you born dead and blind.”

It doesn’t matter who’s listening, Ted or April. It’s another mess that Rachel needs to clean up. She describes how she’d combed hairspray into the cat’s fur, simple cheap hairspray, every day for weeks. She knew it was using the fireplace as a toilet, and she hoped the pilot light would be enough. Rachel overfed the cat so it would need to defecate more often. She crossed her fingers that an increase in intestinal gas might do the trick. She was no sadist. On the contrary, she didn’t want Belinda Carlisle to suffer. Rachel had made certain the smoke detectors had fresh batteries, and she’d waited.

“Your father,” she begins. “He thinks that if the dishes and the toilet are black to begin with, they never get dirty.”

Their last night in Ted’s house, Rachel had stepped into the living room. She’d rushed inside from the cold. She’d intentionally turned down the thermostat, hoping to make the pilot light more attractive. To set her trap, she’d buried tuna fish in the crushed gravel. That night, she’d walked into the dark room, into the shadow cast by the Christmas tree, and seen two yellow eyes blinking at her from the fireplace. A little drunk, she’d said, “I’m sorry.”

On the phone in Orlando, very drunk, she says, “I wasn’t sorry.”

Rachel had told the cat goodbye, and she’d flipped the switch. The click-click-click, like the tapping of a white cane. The banshee scream. Flames raced up the living room curtains. Flames raced up the stairs. In the end, the insurance company couldn’t prove definitively that any chemical residue wasn’t the scorched remains of dry-cleaning plastic.

Saying this, she senses that April has become a stranger. Someone separate who must be respected and deserves to know the truth. April has split away to become another person. “Your daddy stalling is the reason why you’ll never see a sunset.”

The silence could’ve been anyone or no one. If it’s April, she won’t understand, not until she’s older.

Rachel says, “I only chose your father because he’s weak. I married him because I knew I could push him around.” She says that the problem with passive people is that they force you to take action. After that, they hate you for it. They never forgive you. Only then, over the phone, clear and unmistakable, does Rachel hear Ted begin to weep. It’s nothing she hasn’t heard before, but this time his sobs build until, like blasts from a whistle, a child screams. Like a smoke alarm, a high-pitched frantic child’s shriek erupts, sirening from the telephone.

Rachel’s goading has worked. He coerced, controlled, and steered her into hurting something innocent; now they’re even.

With her child’s screams and her husband’s weeping still loud in her ears, Rachel gazes at a gigantic revolving diamond, entranced, trying to divine the new future as she whispers, “Goodnight.”