Five years is an awfully long time to hold your breath. In the eighteen hundred days since then, I had been living in a house that was no longer home but a museum devoted to someone not there anymore. The hallway had become silent to me and the noonday shadows on the door of Jennifer’s bedroom seemed familiar. I knew, without question, that my life would end just as it had begun, in this cold and ghostly old house where unresolved rows lingered.
Until Tuesday, that was.
It was around 6:00 in the morning, that strange time when everything feels slightly unreal in the pale light. I was still trying to make my way to the kitchen for a quick cup of coffee, but my brain wasn’t fully awake yet. When the doorbell rang, I barely registered it. Visitors don’t come that early in our house. They rarely come late, either. It was a sharp ring, the kind that suggested whoever pressed it didn’t plan to wait.
I opened the door, pulling my robe tighter against the cold. I remember feeling annoyed that someone would ring at that hour. It had to be a mischievous neighborhood kid or a delivery gone to the wrong address.
The porch was empty. The street was quiet. But when I looked down, the whole world seemed to turn upside-down.
There was a basket sitting on the mat. Inside the basket there was a swaddled baby girl, perhaps three or four months old. Her hair was dark and she had her eyes open, looking up at the porch light. However, it wasn’t the baby who made me drop to my knees. It was the garment the baby was wrapped up in.
