PART 2: The Life We Didn’t Get
Rubber bands held together a substantial collection of handwritten pages, thick as a small novel and softened at the corners from years of being pressed inside the dark belly of that couch. A letter lay on top, bearing the date June 14: Maisie’s birthday. Our first child would have been thirty-three that year, but she had survived only eight months.
Arthur’s opening words made me sit down, my knees suddenly unwilling to hold me.
“I couldn’t tell you this while I was alive.”
“Arthur, what have you done?”
A title followed: The Life We Didn’t Get. Its opening chapter was called Maisie’s Fifth Birthday.
Arthur portrayed a little girl stubbornly refusing to wear matching socks.
“Nobody can see them inside my shoes,” Maisie argued.
“They’ll know,” her mother replied.
“Then they shouldn’t be looking.”
I laughed despite myself, the sound startling in my silent kitchen. He’d given Maisie my stubbornness, every last ounce of it. In the story, she demanded chocolate cake, but Arthur mistakenly bought one decorated with raspberries. She refused a single bite until he removed every berry.
Then I read his description of me watching our daughter blow out five candles, finally free from wondering what that imagined birthday might have been like.
The words made me stop. We’d spent years grieving the birthdays our little girl never reached, counting them silently every June. All that time, Arthur had quietly been inventing them.
At eight, Maisie learned cycling. By twelve, she dreamed of becoming a veterinarian. At sixteen, she introduced a boyfriend who called Arthur “buddy,” a word he couldn’t stand.
The manuscript continued through school dances, disagreements, vacations, her first apartment, and even her wedding. Page after page, the daughter we had lost grew taller and louder and more real. My laughter faded into bewilderment. How long had Arthur been writing these scenes? Why had he never shown me?
I carried the pages upstairs to his desk near our bedroom window. Since his death, I’d hardly touched it, as though the wood itself might still be warm from his hands.
“All right, mister. Let’s see what else you’ve been keeping.”
The upper drawer contained old batteries. In another were three notebooks, including one covering twelve years of notes: Maisie learning to swim, receiving a disastrous haircut, and being taught to drive by me.
Near the end, Arthur had recorded that he’d hidden the manuscript in the couch and needed courage to show Monica. Another instruction was underlined: Don’t make her perfect.
He had deliberately imagined an imperfect daughter who made mistakes and argued. I returned to the wedding scene, where I fastened Maisie’s dress before a mirror.
“Mom, you’re making that face.”
“What face?”
“The one you make when you’re trying not to cry.”
Arthur had remembered that expression. Through all those evenings sitting beside me on that dreadful couch, he’d pictured the child we’d lost growing older, and he had watched my face and stored away even that.
But another thought troubled me: Aurora had actually grown up with us. Why was our living daughter absent from these pages? I took the manuscript and drove to her apartment, gripping the wheel the whole way.
Aurora opened her door, alarmed.
“Mom? What’s wrong?”
“Your father wrote something I never knew about.”
She invited me inside and offered coffee, already steering me toward the kitchen with a hand at my elbow.
“Come in. I’ll make coffee.”
“Please don’t make that expensive stuff you bought me last time.”
“It’s regular coffee, Mom.”
“It tasted like burnt toast.”
She laughed as she headed for the kitchen, and for a moment the ordinary teasing steadied me. I placed the pages on her table, and she noticed their title.
“Dad wrote this?”
“He did.”
She leafed through them, her fingers careful, her eyes moving quickly down the lines.
“About Maisie?”
“About what her life might have been.”
After reading several passages, she looked at me. Her expression was not what I had expected, and I felt something in my chest brace itself.
“I wish he’d shown me.”
“Why?”
“Because I would’ve liked to know more about her.”
I reached for Aurora’s hand, wanting to comfort her the way I always had.
“Honey, Maisie was gone before you were born. We didn’t get to know enough about her either.”
“I wasn’t asking you to change that.”
“Then what are you asking?”
She closed the book, slowly, as if she needed the quiet it made.
“Why was it so hard to talk about her?”
I insisted that we had discussed Maisie, but Aurora disagreed, her voice gentle and unmoving.
“We talked about Maisie.”
“Not really, Mom.”
“That’s not true.”
“When I was six, I found her photograph in Dad’s drawer. Remember?”
I remembered the yellow duck-patterned onesie and Maisie’s tiny hand gripping Arthur’s finger. I remembered how quickly my heart had raced when I saw it in my young daughter’s hands.
“You told me she was my sister,” Aurora continued. “Then you put the photograph away.”
“I didn’t want to upset you.”
“I was six, Mom. I just wanted to know whether she looked like me.”
“Your father and I did our best.”
“I know. But I’m trying to tell you what it felt like, and you keep telling me why you did it.”
Unable to bear her words, I got up, my chair scraping hard against her kitchen floor.
“I should go.”
“Mom, please don’t leave because we disagree.”
Nevertheless, I took my purse and left. The door clicked shut behind me, and the hallway had never seemed so long.
