Yolo County

53 CAROLINE ARDEN YOLO COUNTY O n a hot, dry afternoon in May, Miriam didn’t bother to double-check her calendar and was half an hour early to a baby shower. Although she was friends with the woman for whom the shower was being thrown, she’d only once met the host, Christy, a tall, efficient redhead. But Christy told Miriam it was good timing, because would she mind watching her daughter—a one-year-old, almost a toddler but still a baby really—while she went upstairs to change? Not a mother herself, Miriam felt anxious, but the baby drummed small plastic buckets with a wooden spoon while Miriam sat on the couch, browsed through a catalog, and sipped lemonade. She saw the baby toddle toward the coffee table and reach into the cup, but Miriam looked back to the catalog. For years afterward, she would replay the timing: maybe five seconds before the baby fell, two until Miriam looked up, and another five before she pressed a finger down the baby ’s throat and felt ice too jammed to pull out, too big to push down. Christy ran downstairs and pounded the baby’s back, pumped her chest, and held her upside down. Three, four more minutes and the baby stopped moving, but Christy bounced her as if she were still alive as she pulled back the curtains to look for the ambulance. Miriam had been studying a velvet skirt, mauve with opalescent buttons along the hem, not her style but still quite charming . She told no one about the skirt or seeing the baby reach for the cup because the lie that she’d turned to move a balloon from the heating vent came so easily. Christy asked Miriam not to come to the hospital. Alone in the house, she thought of cleaning up the buckets and wooden spoon, the balloons and streamers—and the cupcakes, bruschetta , daffodils, and duck-shaped confetti—but the prospect was too grotesque. She thought of calling the guests to explain but couldn’t bear doing it, and so she turned off the lights, drew colorado review 54 the shades, and lay on the couch while guests rang the doorbell, understanding that she was outside society now and might as well grow hard. A week later, Orin, the man whom Miriam had been dating for almost a year, met with Christy’s and her husband’s lawyer —no charges; Christy blamed herself—and express-mailed Miriam the dvd box set of Middlemarch. When she didn’t pick up his calls for three days, he brought the dvds into her house himself along with her junk mail and bills. He said all she had to do was sign the checks, which she did, and then they ordered Mexican food. Life went on like this: she stayed inside, and he provided food and film adaptations of elaborate British novels . After two weeks, she returned to her job reporting on arts and culture for the San Francisco Chronicle and began seeing friends only enough to convince them she was “doing fine.” But the only person Miriam really wanted to see was Orin because he didn’t demand happiness or even alertness. She was thirty-seven, and he was fifty-two. He was divorced and had retired a few years earlier from a lucrative career as a tax lawyer-turnedinvestor and now devoted himself to refinishing antique wood furniture and selling it to high-end San Francisco boutiques. That was how they’d met, at a furniture expo she was covering for the paper. His ancestry was Finnish, and he looked like a cross between a wolf and golden retriever. Pink cheeks, silver hair, white poofs at the temples, and an optimistic , devoted smile. After the accident, time moved slowly, but eventually summer came; in August, an artist couple, Ted and Ellie, asked Orin to take care of their farm because he’d been there before and knew how to water the orchard and pick the peaches. “Come,” Orin said. It was a Sunday night, Indian food and The Hound of the Baskervilles. He studied Miriam’s sink full of dishes and lifted Even seeing...