The years that followed were not a montage of bliss and not a warning label. They were Tuesdays. Claire got a job managing children's programs at the library and came home with glitter in her cuffs. David got a promotion and a habit of answering email at dinner until Claire began reading his messages aloud in a news-anchor voice until he put the phone in a bowl by the door. They argued about money in the way people argue when there is enough and not enough, about his mother who lived two states away and called only with instructions, about whether a dishwasher was a moral issue. They made up in the ordinary ways, with bad jokes and the slow unclenching of a day. On Sundays they sometimes went to church and sometimes went to the river. Claire believed in God the way she believed in libraries: as a public good that failed people and still mattered. David believed in load-bearing calculations and, gradually, in her.
Emma arrived on a March morning after a labor that Claire later described as "rude." David cut the cord with a shaking competence. The baby had a face like a clenched opinion and then, hours later, a face like a person. They named her Emma because Claire had loved a novel in which an Emma was allowed to be wrong and still get a life. In the hospital window the light was the color of skim milk. David held his daughter and felt a fear so clean it was almost joy: the knowledge that he could now be ruined by a fever.
They were good parents in the ways that photograph well and uneven in the ways that do not. Claire was patient with mess and impatient with whining. David was patient with night wakings and impatient with chaos on the floor, as if toys were structural failures. Emma learned to read early and to worry early. She followed her mother through the library like a small deputy. She followed her father through the hardware store asking what things were for. On her sixth birthday Claire let her wear a gray hoodie that had been Claire's in college, enormous, the sleeves rolled three times. Grape juice found the cuff. Claire rubbed it with bleach and made a small pale map, then kissed the spot and said, "Now it's starred. Now it's yours even when you give it back."
Emma never gave it back. By the time it fit her, Claire was sick, and the hoodie had become a kind of country.
The sickness did not arrive as a thunderclap. It arrived as a tiredness Claire blamed on the winter, then as a pain she blamed on lifting a box of picture books, then as a doctor's face that did the professional thing of not changing too fast. Ovarian, they said, and other words that meant the calendar had become a negotiator. David sat in a room with a box of tissues placed closer to his chair than to Claire's and hated the tissues for their confidence. Claire asked the first questions. She asked about time in a voice that wanted numbers, not poetry. The doctor gave ranges. Ranges are a kind of cruelty that wears a lab coat.