The women are in the kitchen in the morning when Mark wakes. Reggie’s hair is wet, and Maya sits very quietly at the table, with the baby again in her arms. The baby examines a small apple that Reggie has given her. She doesn’t yet have the teeth to bite it. She keeps bringing it to her mouth. “Are you hungry?” says Reggie. She gives him a cup of coffee.
“Yes,” he says. Maya has dressed herself in a yellow sweater that was once Chariya’s, and a soft blue skirt. Reggie is in jeans.
“You were sleeping so deeply we thought you were dead,” says Maya.
Mark sits down at the table, facing Maya. Her bottom teeth are crooked. She has never had braces, like her older sister did.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“You’ve got a real wasp problem,” says Reggie. She points to the window.
“I thought I got them all.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
“The cold will get them.”
“The cold won’t do anything. I’ll call someone.” Reggie is examining his face. He sees himself sitting barefoot in his shorts in his kitchen with these women, and feels ridiculous.
“No, I’ll do it,” he says. “I’ll do it.”
It is a task for later, for dusk. Reggie makes eggs. They sit at the table to eat. The baby has set down the apple and is pulling unhappily at her ear. She wears an austere white jumper, and with her dark cap of hair looks a like a tiny monk. Mark has seen a child’s skull once, in a medical museum, with all the adult teeth poised under the milk. The skull he saw was older, a four- or five-year-old child. But Mark sees there the skull of his daughter. Quiet bone, and growing, the teeth expanding, creaking like swollen wood as they push outward, slicing the gums. The double grin that lasts in death, while the eyes and nose and ears fall away, become dark holes. He lifts his eyes to Maya, whose chin rests on the baby’s head. As she turns her face to glance out the window, he catches his breath. For a simple, brilliant moment, she is Chariya, the cocoa-brown curve of jaw, her fierce eyes, with their curly lashes. He stays very still and looks at her.
“Stop it,” she says, feeling him, facing him, and starts to cry. “Can you please stop it?”
Will it rain? Rain trembles in the clouds, but the clouds never break. Mark is tired, Maya is tired, Reggie is tired, tireless. She is mending a burst seam of a coat, Chariya’s. Reggie squinting by the lamplight to thread the needle. Why bother?
But she must bother. She has seen Chariya wear the coat again and again. It is the seam that holds together the chest to the arm, under the left armpit, her waving arm. Chariya stands at the gate and waves, the sweater underneath showing yellow at the opening. Chariya’s dark face at the gate as Reggie reverses the car and backs down the drive. And Reggie called, “Careful, you’ll tear the whole sleeve off.” But Chariya had no time to fix her coat—why else did she cut her hair so short? Chariya had no time to comb her hair. Chariya had no time to read a book she loved. Chariya had no time to go to Paris. Chariya had no time to take a nap.
The house is old and shifts on its haunches, settling. Reggie is not startled by the house’s noises, she lives just down the road in an old house of her own, but has slept here since death came. Not slept, but laid unsleeping in the room between her cousin’s and the baby’s, alert always for the mewling cries of the baby as she, hungry, wakes, and alert for Mark, moaning in his sleep, never words, only snuffles and grunts. She can see in his waking eyes the dazed confusion of a very young child. His cheeks dry and sallow as paper, the same cheeks upon which she had kissed her blessings on his wedding day, and kissed blessings against the soft cheeks of his bride.
Reggie drags the thread through the fabric. She is doing her work by sense not sight, following the fabric’s curve by instinct. What a violence mending does, the needle piercing and piercing. It is a good coat, a fine coat, one that held Chariya’s body for years, even when the belly was swollen with baby and the button could not reach its hole. Finished, she breaks the thread with her teeth and drapes the coat around her own shoulders.
When evening comes Mark ties a scarf around his mouth and takes the poison out. The sky is beautiful, hanging very low down, thick with cloud, and all the trees darken into large shapes in the yard, the apple and lemon trees and the oak. He follows the channel of wasps to its source. Even in the dim light, he can see the nest resting in the space between the roof and the wall of the house. It seems to radiate light, pale as it is, like a moon. Wasps should be killed at dusk, after they have finished their day’s work and they are returning home. But last time he hadn’t been ruthless. The smell of the chemical sickened him. The wasps were soundless, drugged on fumes. They were dizzy and frightened and didn’t try to sting. He felt sorry for them, and had gone back inside.
Now, he watches the last of the wasps fly in. It is fully dark, but his eyes have adjusted. His hands are cold. Before the chemicals coat the nest and dry, a few emerge, flying weirdly, almost drunkenly, then dropping. He sprays and sprays. The rest are trapped in that house of theirs. They die quietly. The bitter smell is all around him, though he tries not to breathe it in.
Mark walks away from the nest and takes a mouthful of evening, gulping it. The air is sweet and cool, and the stars are coming out. It is only five-thirty. Inside, they have turned the lights on. The house looks cheerful. He has never stood outside his house, just like this, in the dark, alone, looking in. It feels pleasant and comfortable to be cold outside, peering in like a robber, or a child looking into a neighbor’s house. He can see Reggie moving around in the kitchen, but not Maya. He removes the scarf, and the cold air enters his lungs. He can feel it in his chest. For a moment he is awake with it, he has finally woken up. He holds his breath. He is so close to it, to feeling joy, the joy of the body. But it is moving away from him. He cannot reach it. The poison in his hand, the dead are dead. The held breath bursts out of him, and is gone.
The top of a tiny white tooth appears in the baby’s lower jaw, like the tip of the moon trying the horizon. It is not centered but set slightly to the right. The baby touches the tooth with her fingers. A familiar taste, almost ugly, taste of red. At first there is the pure surprise of newness, where there is no fear. But fear comes. She was once soft, all of her soft. Now there is some hardness stuck in her, pushing out from her. She can feel voice building up in her lungs like heat, voice building and building until it spurts from her mouth. Her sound is a comfort around her, the yellow-orange glow she builds. The tooth in the mouth, and where has mother gone? Mother and not-mother. Mother came when she called, and lifted. Mother tickled and wept. Mother laughed. And father used to kiss gently but with scratch. Now he doesn’t kiss her. She reaches and he turns away. Her voice builds and builds and then a coolness comes in her throat, and she quiets. She bats up her fists and feet and kicks, feeling the limbs working below. There is silence at the center. It is courage, the baby. It is the courage to live in an expanding body, with limbs lifting outward, with teeth pushing up, with hands and mind growing finer, with eyes settling on color, with body unbending from the earth and standing upright, balancing perilously on two legs, and then moving forward, walking, running forward, teeth loosing, filling, knees scraped and healing, voice gaining depth and sureness, hips and breasts accruing, skin darkening, stretching, blood slipping out from the thighs, and death always, always, at the back.