Part Seven: Sarah’s Spare Room
Emma’s room at Sarah’s house had yellow curtains, as promised, and a view of the back garden where the birds came in the morning to investigate the feeder, and Geoffrey, who had initially received Emma’s attentions with his characteristic dignified resistance and had within four days been observed sleeping at the foot of her bed.
“I told you,” Emma said, with the satisfaction of someone who had correctly predicted an outcome.
“Geoffrey contains multitudes,” Sarah said.
Emma had found this phrase very funny and had used it approximately forty times in the following week, applied to various subjects. Geoffrey contains multitudes. This soup contains multitudes. Dad contains multitudes.
She had nightmares, in those first weeks. Not every night, but enough — the kind that woke her in the small hours, and Daniel had asked Sarah for the room closest to Emma’s for exactly this reason. He heard her on the nights it happened and he went in and sat in the chair by her bed, and sometimes she woke fully and sometimes she didn’t, and either way he stayed until the breathing evened out.
The therapist’s name was Dr. Kwan, and she worked with children three days a week out of an office with a low table and art supplies and a sand tray that Emma had initially regarded with suspicion and now used without self-consciousness. Dr. Kwan had given Daniel a brief explanation of what they worked on and what to expect, and had told him, practically and without sentiment, that seven-year-olds were more resilient than adults often believed, and that the most important factor in recovery was a consistent, present, safe adult, which he was, and which was what Emma needed more than anything else.
He had taken this seriously, which was the way he took most things.
He also, on a Thursday afternoon six weeks after coming home, sat at Sarah’s kitchen table with a cup of tea and realized that he had not thought, in the last three days, about the crate in the garden. He had thought about it every day since he’d seen it, and then — not. He had thought about Emma trying to use Geoffrey’s water bowl as a hat, and about the particular way she laughed at Dr. Kwan’s cat drawings, and about the conversation they’d had on Tuesday about whether birds had surnames.
“They do,” Emma had said. “They just don’t use them officially.”
He had thought about those things instead, which was not the same as forgetting what had happened, but was perhaps what recovery looked like from the outside — not erasure, but addition, more things coming in, the difficult things having to share space.
He sat with his tea and he looked at the garden through the window and he allowed himself to feel, quietly and without ceremony, the lightness of it.
