"The Princess pillow doesn"t go in the attic," he said. "It has to stay out."
He put the silky pillow that he had once bought as a gift for Emma against his own scruffy cheek, and tears filled his eyes.
I looked away. "Okay," I said. "The pillow stays."
We packed together that whole night.
The next day, Desi called to ask if I wanted the bed back, and I felt a bit of relief when I told her she should keep it.
Now that I had gone off all my medications for the sake of the pregnancy, I felt scared-I had taken them for so long. I believed in the drugs, and whether it was a placebo effect or real chemical action, I worried about being without them, so I continued to take Ambien to help me sleep. Instructions for a drug like Ambien are very specific: take the pill and then lie down and let it work. If I stayed awake on Ambien, I ended up crazy and hyper. Once I found myself furiously sweeping the garage in the middle of the night. Another time, I raced around frantically, sorting through all the girls" pictures and tossing them all over the floor.
Now that I was pregnant, I often got up to go to the bathroom during the night, and once I was awake, with drugs in my system, my mind roared a million miles an hour and my adrenaline felt out of control. One night at 4 a.m., I got an urge to make homemade brownies. I pulled out half the pans in the kitchen and dragged out every bit of chocolate and flour I could find. Instead of making batter, I made a mess.
The next morning, I decided to stop taking sleeping pills-partly to protect the baby, and partly to protect me.
Warren"s experiences with sleeping pills seemed even worse.
"You have to let it work," I reminded him when he took a pill, then went off to do something other than curl up in bed.
But he hadn"t learned the lesson. One night when he took an Ambien and didn"t sleep, he went downstairs and completely destroyed the bas.e.m.e.nt. I don"t know what he thought he was doing, but he pulled every picture off the wall and every sports trophy off the shelves, and threw all the girls" toys and puzzles and games into a giant pile. He never mentioned it in the morning. Maybe he didn"t even remember. When he went off to work, I saw the disaster downstairs and knew exactly what had happened in the middle of the night. I called my friend Denine to come help me clean up the mess, and we spent the whole day filling three huge garbage bags with broken remnants of the girls" playthings.
Were we really all just bubbling cauldrons of hormones and chemicals and neurotransmitters? For once, I couldn"t really be angry with Warren, because I didn"t think what he"d done had anything to do with the real him. And, come to think of it, had either of us been "the real Warren" or "the real Jackie" since the accident? It was as if our essential core as good, happy, and reasonable human beings had been wiped out by the accident. Neither of us quite understood ourselves anymore.
"All finished," Denine said as she closed the last garbage bag.
"Thanks," I said. "But can we keep this between us? I don"t want to make Warren feel any worse."
"Sure," she said. "That"s nice of you."
But how could I keep from discussing it with Warren when the overflowing garbage bags on the driveway would be indisputable evidence? I didn"t want to rub his face in actions that had been undertaken by some alternate pod-Warren.
"I can take the garbage bags to my house," Denine offered. "The garbagemen can pick them up there."
"Ooh, would you? Thanks."
I helped her load the garbage into her trunk. It"s funny how much I wanted to protect Warren this time. I felt my heart soften toward my husband as I thought about all that he was struggling with, too. He must already have been suffering a psychic hangover from his rampage the night before, and he didn"t need to suffer more.
After the debacle of moving Katie"s bed, I decided to take control of the situation a few weeks later, when we were ready to move Emma"s bed out to make room for the crib. Another set of neighbors, Gina and Sal, wanted the bed for their guest room and I quickly agreed.
"I"d be happy to know you have it," I said.
Their then-preteen daughter Erica used to babysit the girls. I"d call her during the day if I had an errand to do, and she"d always run over on short notice. She had a sweet relationship with the girls, but she"d been away at summer camp when the accident happened. Coming home to find the girls gone and the funeral done and over, she was very upset. For a long time, she couldn"t even look me in the eye. I liked the idea of having Emma"s bed in her house. Erica could watch over it with the same gentle kindness she had shown the girls.
Moving the bed wouldn"t be easy. Emma had a captain"s bed with drawers underneath for storage, and it was oversize, so it wouldn"t go around the corner of the staircase in our house. To get it into her room, we"d had to arrange a rope-and-pulley system outside the house, hoist it to the second floor, then squeeze it in through her window. Now we planned the reverse. I made arrangements with our neighbors Sal and Jonathan to come over to help Warren. They"d take the bed out the window and onto the roof, then shimmy it down the side of the house.
I took off the sheets. I folded up the covers. I lay on the bed for the last time. I wouldn"t let this move be as awful as the last. The guys were coming over on Sunday to undertake the project, and I"d just quietly leave the house until they were finished.
"I"m prepared," I told Warren.
But I wasn"t prepared for what happened on Tuesday night, five days before the bed was to be moved.
At about 2 a.m., I woke up from a sound sleep, hearing strange noises above me. I lay very still, trying to imagine what could be happening. I didn"t think burglars were trying to get in, and if they were, I didn"t care. (Take anything you want. Everything I care about is gone.) But the sounds were too rhythmic and persistent for a burglary. Finally realizing where the racket was coming from, I got up and went into the girls" room.
In the moonlight, I saw Warren, his back to me, panting and moaning as he shoved Emma"s bed out the window and onto the roof.
"What are you doing?" I asked, flicking on the light. "You can"t move the bed alone."
"Why not?" He looked at me, his eyes wild, as he continued ramming the bed through the open window with superhuman effort.
"Stop, Warren. You can"t get the bed off the roof in the middle of the night."
"I"ll do it in the morning."
"So you"re going to leave Emma"s bed outside all night?" I asked, feeling my own panic rising.
"I checked the weather. It will be fine," he said.
"Oh my G.o.d." I covered my face with my hands. "You can"t be doing this."
"What"s wrong? Why are you upset?" he asked, as if not aware that his bizarre behavior was answer enough to the question.
"You"re supposed to be doing this on Sunday with the guys," I said.
"I couldn"t wait until Sunday," Warren said, talking too fast, his voice on the edge of frantic. "I"m feeling too anxious. I might as well take care of it myself."
I went back into bed and lay there, my eyes wide open. Warren had sounded crazy, but it had to be his medication talking. Why else would he be wound up, overwrought, and bursting with energy at 2 a.m.? Given his other postsleeping pill rampage, I guess hoisting a bed out a window wasn"t that strange.
But understanding what had happened didn"t make it any better. I lay under my own covers, staring at the ceiling, feeling the emotional weight of Emma"s bed pressing down on me from the roof. Emma"s bed, perched precariously outside, defenseless against the night air. An innocent object-like an innocent child-left exposed and vulnerable. The image of the solid wood frame teetering on the roof seemed a metaphor for my deepest, darkest sense of shame. I hadn"t protected the girls. Hadn"t kept them safe.
Perhaps the connection seemed remote, but as the hours ticked away-3 a.m., 4 a.m.-I could think of nothing else. In his agitated state, Warren thought the night air wouldn"t harm Emma"s bed. But in my mind, the least we could do now was protect everything connected to the girls-to their memory, to their lives.
I didn"t sleep for one moment. At about 4:30, I texted my running friends:
"Can"t go this morning. Warren had a bad night."
I got up anyway, done with lying there sleeplessly. Too tired to run, I could at least take our dog Jake for a walk. An hour later, I was outside strolling in front of our house with Jake when Una came by-a one-woman running group this morning.
"Hey, you"re up," she said, slowing down. "What"s going on?"
"Look," I said, pointing up. "There"s a bed on my roof."
Una c.o.c.ked her head upward and came to a dead stop. "Oh, wow. Do you need Doug to come over?"
"No. It was so stupid of Warren. But he"s going to have to figure out how to get it down today himself."