I squat down to Jane’s height. “Sadie isn’t here.”
Jane puts her finger to my lips. “Uh-uh. Sadie is coming back!”
I collect her hand. “Not anytime soon, honey.” I don’t understand her loss. I can’t comprehend it, no matter how hard I try or how many ways I explain to her logically why Sadie can’t return. My cat nearly scratched Jane’s face, too unpredictable and aggressive. What if she scratched her eye?
I won’t take that risk.
I raised Sadie as a kitten, but my attachment to her is severely less than my attachment to these people in this very room. Call me callous. Call me unfeeling. Call me inhuman, but I raised her to be independent, to survive on her own. And I’ve given her a home with my therapist—this shouldn’t even be an argument anymore.
Jane refuses to hear me. “She’s coming back. That’s her seat.” She jabs her little finger at the seat. She even goes further to place her Kitty Cats coloring book on top, so I can’t sit there. I hear her mutter, she’s coming back once more.
I stand and wonder when a toddler will forget about a cat. If she ever will. I look to Rose, and her eyes have significantly softened. She mouths, play along.
I nod in agreement. We’re still hoping she’ll drop all talk about Sadie.
Jane tugs the heavy chair, trying to pull mine out. I help her and then sit down. All six chairs are now occupied, so I ask Jane, “Where are you sitting?”
“Imsevin!” she slurs together. I take it to mean I’m serving. She picks up her teapot and pours milk to the very brim of my teacup.
I don’t feel silly or awkward. I never have.
I’m entertained by my daughter’s delight.
When she finishes pouring, I say, “Merci.” Thank you. I take a sip. “Mmmm. Délicieux.” Delicious.
She smiles wider, understanding French since Rose and I make an effort to use it around our children. Then she serves her brothers. We both study Jane. We wait for her to be immersed in something else, and then—at perfect, equal timing—we train our gazes to one another.
Rose scoots her chair closer to the table, nearer to me, before whispering, “Sadie was her first friend.”
I try to empathize, but I’m empty. “Who was your first friend? Besides your sisters.”
Rose pretends to sip tea from an empty cup. “In preschool,” she whispers, “I had a friend named Amy. She moved to Maryland just before first grade. I was devastated.” She emphasizes the word, as though losing a friend at six is synonymous with an Armageddon.
“Hmm,” I muse.
“Hmm?” Rose snaps. “What is hmm?”
“It’s an onomatopoeia.”
Rose sets her teacup down so hard, it nearly cracks.
“Careful, darling.”
“No one invited your smartass comments to the tea party. And hmm isn’t an onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeias have to symbolize something. Like oink is referencing a cow. Hmm means nothing.”
“If it annoys you this much, it clearly means something.”
Rose growls. “You’re infuriating.”
“Because I’m right, and you hate when I’m right.”
Leaning even further forward, she whispers heatedly, “Because you twist things until you’re right, which is not so much a gift as it is a character ink blot.” She flicks invisible dust particles at me.
I adore Rose, so much so that I lean nearer too. “I think the word you’re looking for is stain.”
Jane gasps, and our heads quickly turn to our daughter. She fumbles with her teapot. Rose, sitting closer, catches the lid before it thuds to the carpet.
“Gently,” Rose coaches. Her tone is still icy, but Jane doesn’t regard her mother as intimidating or harsh.
Most mornings, Jane will crawl onto Rose’s lap and rest her head against her mother’s collar. Rose will stroke Jane’s hair, and they’ll flip through a Vogue magazine together. Jane likes picking out her favorite editorial pictures, and Rose will later cut them out and paste them in a scrapbook.
When Rose focuses back on me, I say quietly, “She should be over Sadie by now.”
Rose narrows her eyes. “Have you ever lost something you’ve loved?”
I’ve lost my mother, but I didn’t love Katarina Cobalt the conventional way that a son loves a mother. I’ve never loved anything as a child except my own successes. I was told not to. Rose knows this.
All I say is, “We can’t bring back Sadie because a toddler demands it.”
“I know,” Rose agrees, “but we can’t be callous about it either.”
I tilt my head. “What you call callous I call realistic.”
“Children aren’t realistic.”
“I was.”
Rose asks pointedly, “And how did that work out for you?”
I set my elbow on the table. “Seeing as how I’m smarter than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the population, I’d say it went well.”
Rose raises her hand at my face. “Sideline your ego, Richard.” Her gaze flits to our sons and then Jane, all three distracted by the tea party. Jane mutters softly while serving her stuffed lion. She pats his head.
“You don’t sideline the most valuable player, Rose.”
“You do when they award themselves the title of MVP.”
“It’s not my fault I’m the most adept at determining who should be awarded what.” Before she starts referencing guillotines again, I add, “You could’ve been saved from feeling devastated. It wasn’t necessary, and it only hurt you.”
Rose eyes me head-to-waist since I’m partially blocked by the table. “What’s the tradeoff, Connor? Not having a friend?”
“You still could’ve had Amy as a friend. What I’m saying is that there wasn’t a need to be that invested in someone who you knew might leave.”
“I was a child. I thought she’d stay around forever.”
“Then that was your first mistake.” I pick up my empty teacup and pretend to take a sip.
She pretends to take another one out of hers, eyes drilling into me. Rose presses her lips together like she’s smoothing out her lipstick, and then she says, “You can’t bubble wrap her emotions, Connor.”
I’m not advocating to strip away their childhood the way that my mother did to me. They can fantasize about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I’m even willing to play tea party with an imaginary cat and a stuffed animal.
“It’s not bubble wrap,” I reply. “It’s just self-appreciation to the highest degree. To feel so important that no one comes before you, not a friendship, not a thing, nothing that could make you feel pity, rejection, remorse or devastation.”
“No.” Rose places her elbows on the table, combating me. “She will feel those things because she will love more than just herself. And she’ll be better than you were.”
I was well off, but Rose values love above all else. I never did until I fell in love with her. I know why I want to save Jane from this.
Selfishly, I don’t want to see our daughter dig through these emotions, not ones that I could’ve helped her avoid. “You want me to watch a trainwreck?” I ask Rose.
“Multiple trainwrecks,” Rose says strongly. “And when she needs you to pull her out of the wreckage—”
“I’ll be there.” Remember love? I have to remind myself of this feeling that overcomes me, swelling my entire chest. I watch Jane kiss her lion on the cheek.
I have to remind myself that they need love as much as I do.
Remember love.
Charlie accidentally smacks his saucer of Cheerios, flipping it over. The cereal scatters the rug, and Charlie bursts into tears, crying at the top of his lungs.
Rose and I are about to stand to console our son, but we stop almost instantly. Beckett has dropped off his chair to help collect the dry cereal. And Jane sets down her teapot in haste.
“Charlie?” Her face is full of worry. “Don’t cry, Charlie.” She wipes her brother’s tears with her hand and then joins Beckett in picking up the Cheerios.
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Rose and I pull our gazes off our young children and onto each other, face-to-face, across the tiny table. I extend my hand and tenderly clasp hers, my thumb skimming her knuckles back-and-forth. I see their love for one another, and I wouldn’t want anything less.
She nods to me, reading my gaze well enough, and then she drifts into deep thought. I wish I could hear the chatter inside her head.
After a long moment, I whisper, “What are you thinking?”
“That I’d love to have another little monster with you.” She rolls her eyes at herself, but my chest has already risen. “I’m insane for wanting more stress.”
“More happiness,” I amend.
“More children screaming.”
“More children laughing.”
She thinks for another second. “How can I love it all equally?” she wonders. “The vomit and the dirty diapers and the ridiculous things they do that end up being endearing and cute.” She watches Charlie wipe away his tears with a tiny fist while Beckett and Jane fill his saucer with cereal. “I don’t even think I’d want only the good moments without the horrible ones. I’d ask for it all again.” Rose says again like pregnancy is tantamount to torture.
If she truly believed this—if she truly felt this—I’d never want her to go through it again. Rose’s health and happiness might as well be mine.