When he was a baby, she tied his ankle to the crib. She told me that she had to because he would fly away. I wouldn't let him sleep with us and she never forgave me. Every morning she left our bed and went into the nursery. She closed the door, she closed the closet, she closed the drapes on the dawning sun. She would hover above his fat pink face before removing the tether.
Then she'd hold him for hours. They sat in the brown lounger, staring at each other. The baby—Jacob—smiled, squirmed and fussed. She hugged, hummed and cooed. I stood in the kitchen and watched.
Once, I tried to be with them, asked to hold him and stroked her hair. She jumped at my touch, clutching him to her breast and darting away like a trapped hummingbird. She sobbed and pointed, "You! You! You!"
I told her I missed our son. I missed holding her too. I told her I didn't drive too fast or cross the center line or run the red light. But she didn't see my mouth moving in the blur of her grief.
Jacob cried, his tears soaking into her blouse. She blamed me for upsetting him, for filling the air with ugly words. It was all going to be different now. She would keep this one safe.
It didn't take long for her to push me out the door. I had gone to the store to get him diapers, to buy her flowers, to clear my head. She had stuffed my shirts into an old suitcase and thrown it out the back door.
When I got home, she refused to speak to me. I went to the kitchen for some distance and a cup of coffee. I looked out the patio door and saw the suitcase in the middle of the yard, lifeless shirtsleeves hanging over the sides. My shoes were adrift in the sandbox by the garden. I went out to collect them. Hiding underneath my brown loafer was the small imprint of a bump-toed tennis shoe. Peek-a-boo. My first born son once stood right there. He scooped up white sand in his little orange bucket and poured it out again just to watch it fall.
My memories exhaled. I remembered the little blue t-shirt he wore, the smell of his hair as he sat against me shoving the sand away with his hands.
I tilted my head back, trying to get enough air for the pain in me. I caught sight of them through the back patio door—my wife and my new son. She was gravity, white-knuckled, working so hard to hold him, but somehow never really having him where she wanted him most. He looked over her shoulder, watching me as I sat in the sandbox. The sand separated under my feet—a trillion individual grains.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and concentrated on the tips of my shoes. I drifted past the back door, without looking, on my way out.