45

45

M ichael met Jodi when they were both twenty-seven years old. He had just secured his first "real" job as an electronics engineer at an aerospace technology company.

"I only know what half those words mean," Jodi said. They were at a bar not far from Michael's apartment, one he frequented often with friends. But he had never seen Jodi there before.

Michael laughed. "Basically, I play with circuit boards and stuff."

"I have a feeling it's slightly more complicated than that." Jodi smiled and sipped her drink, a vodka soda with two limes.

"Only slightly." Michael winked. He bought her next drink. And every drink thereafter; the two were inseparable after that night.

They were married at the courthouse. Jodi wore a simple but elegant white linen-blend dress with her favorite pair of Converse. Her nails were painted bright blue. Michael could only imagine what his prim mother would have said; he was quite certain she'd have been horrified by the whole affair. But she had died of lung cancer when Michael was seventeen, so she wasn't around to voice an opinion. Michael's father had been distant in more ways than one—he sent his regards from Singapore, where he had relocated years prior.

Jodi's mother was very much alive, but Jodi had not invited her. Michael had only met her twice, neither occasion being one he cherished. Jodi's mother was a textbook narcissist who would never be honest enough with a therapist to get any real help. And Jodi's father died tragically young in a helicopter crash.

So there they were, just the two of them. They could have invited a few friends, of course, but they decided this was more romantic. An "elopement." They paid for a random witness at the courthouse—an elderly woman with the kindest smile Michael had ever seen—and took their vows in front of a large stained-glass window that painted the incoming sunlight blue and purple.

After the ceremony, they walked the grounds of the courthouse together, slowly taking in the lush greenery and perfectly landscaped flowers. Bumblebees and ladybugs danced around them.

They spent the first years of their marriage enjoying each other's company. Neither was in a rush to have children, though they both were adamant that they did, eventually, want to be parents. Those early years were spent reading to one another, traveling to both exotic and not-so-exotic locations, working hours that only a twentysomething would agree to work, and drinking beers on the roof of their apartment building in the sweltering days of summer.

They had trouble getting pregnant. They tried for three years before each checking with doctors. But they were both handed clean bills of health.

"You're too focused on it," one doctor had said. "Try to relax and forget about it."

Jodi had, admittedly, blown up at him, telling him that was the worst medical advice she had ever received.

But finally, a year and a half later, she got pregnant.

And that's when the real trouble began.

Michael didn't know how to help her. It wasn't that Jodi was overly miserable throughout pregnancy; it was just that she got every symptom in the book. Each trimester brought a new smorgasbord of side effects. Fatigue, migraines, leg cramps, insomnia, night sweats, carpal tunnel in both wrists, heartburn, swelling, nausea. Michael couldn't keep track of all her ailments. He just knew at any given time at least three parts of her body were probably hurting.

Still, they were both overjoyed. Even at that first ultrasound, when they discovered they were having twins, Michael was tingly with excitement. A small part of his brain acknowledged that this would make things doubly hard, but the bigger part, the louder part, said things would be doubly wonderful.

Jodi spent most evenings sewing baby clothes like hats and mittens. One night, she gasped excitedly with an internal epiphany.

"The names!" she said. "I've got them!"

Michael joined her on the couch, fiddling her soft craft yarn with his fingertips. "Lay 'em on me," he said.

"In college I took this art history class and, God, I remember nothing. Except —we learned about a painting called Flora and the Zephyrs. I always thought it'd be a cool band name. Don't you think?"

He shrugged. "Sure…"

"Well, unless we're going to start a band in this lifetime, I think we should commandeer the names for the girls. Flora and Zephyr."

"Zephyr? That's not weird?"

"It's a little weird, but it could be cute. Zephie. " She smiled. "I love it. It's unique."

Michael wasn't sold, but he saw the joy in his wife's eyes. Her excitement was infectious. And soon, he loved the names as much as she did.

"Flora and Zephie," he agreed, trying them out on his tongue.

Jodi was scheduled to be induced, but she naturally went into labor the day before. Michael was grateful that, unlike the pregnancy, the labor went smoothly, with no complications. Even so, it was difficult for him to watch. Not because he was queasy, but because he wished, with every pained moan that Jodi emitted, he could take her place. He wanted a button that would transfer the pain to him. It was too difficult to watch the person he loved struggle to that degree.

"Not as difficult as giving birth," Jodi had retorted when he later shared this feeling with her. And, well, he couldn't argue with that.

Flora and Zephie had a way of finding one another. Even in the womb, at every ultrasound, the techs commented on how the twins were intertwined, always holding each other. Out in the world, if one cried, the other cried in response. It felt more natural to say they were two pieces of the same person rather than two separate entities. Michael didn't know if that would change as they got older, but he found comfort and delight in their intense connection.

At first, Jodi said she was sad to no longer be pregnant, which made absolutely no sense to Michael, who knew how hard those months had been for her. But she insisted: she missed feeling the babies kick and wrestle within her; she missed knowing that when she took a bite of food it was nourishing them as well; she missed the incessant hiccups, even if they kept her up at night.

Michael had to return to work soon after the birth. He had quickly climbed the ranks at the aerospace company and was now responsible for a group of eight engineers. The team couldn't afford for him to be away. And so, just a week and a half after the twins arrived, he went back to work full-time.

In the hours that he was home, Jodi holed herself up in bed. Michael figured she was tired; the girls needed to eat every few hours at night, and they struggled to fall back asleep once awake. But as the weeks progressed, he saw less and less of his wife. She was there, of course, going through the motions, but she wasn't really there. He was watching her slip away.

One night, he came home from work to find Jodi in the kitchen. She was staring into the refrigerator, the harsh light yellowing her skin, and speaking just under her breath.

"Who are you talking to?" Michael asked.

Jodi looked at him with a blank expression. He wasn't sure if she even saw him or if she was looking through to the wall behind.

"I was talking to you," she said. "Do you want something to eat?"

But Jodi had not been talking to Michael. He knew that.

Two days later, Jodi and Michael were getting into bed at the same time—a rare occurrence those days—and she confided in him.

"I think there's something wrong with the girls," she said.

Michael sat up, concerned. "What do you mean? Are they sick?"

"No, I mean…" Her eyes looked faraway, that same emptiness he had seen in the kitchen. "I think there's something in them. I think they may not be good. "

"They're babies," he said. "They're only six weeks old. What could possibly be bad about them?"

He knew right then he had made a mistake. Jodi rolled over and mumbled something about getting thirty minutes of sleep before needing to feed. He wanted to touch her softly, to pull her shoulder and bring her face to his, to comfort her and assure her that their babies were the most perfect creatures he had ever seen in his life.

But he didn't say any of those things. Instead, he rolled over, too, his back now almost touching hers, and he went to sleep.

The next morning, Michael woke to an empty bed. That was not unusual; Jodi was typically up with the twins, nursing them in their room or making herself a small breakfast while they lay in the bassinets downstairs.

But as he rose and wiped the crust from his eyes, he heard a strange noise. It sounded like a foghorn. The more he brought his mind to the present moment, and the further he got from sleep, the louder the sound grew. And finally, he placed it. Jodi was crying.

Not just crying. Howling.

He flew out of their room, still in boxers and a light tee, and ran down the hall.

"Jodi?" he called out. "Jodi, where are you?"

The carpet squished beneath his feet as he approached the bathroom. This doesn't feel right, he thought. Why is the carpet so wet? Michael looked down to see that the carpet was soaked near the door.

Jodi's moans were loud, so impossibly loud. And primal. Michael had never heard anything like it. He was reminded of a video he saw once of a mother elephant standing over her dead baby, her trunk braying to the sky, her cries desperate and fierce. There was something like that in Jodi's voice now. Something born of instinct.

Michael was terrified.

He beat on the door, begging Jodi to unlock it. She didn't respond, and he wondered if she even noticed he was there. Finally, he kicked hard enough right by the doorknob that the door gave in, swinging open to reveal the flooded bathroom.

Jodi was holding one of the twins—Michael couldn't see which one—and rocking her body back and forth. The tub was overflowing, water still pouring from the spigot and escaping quickly over the edge.

"Jodi," he said, "give her to me! Give her to me!"

It was Zephie. He held her in his arms and knew instantly that she was gone.

Before he could process it, his brain went into high alert. "Flora," he yelled. "Where is Flora?"

Jodi didn't answer, and Michael ran out of the room, toward the nursery, convinced that Flora must be gone, too.

He found her in the crib, hidden in the loose folds of a blanket— didn't Jodi say to never put this in the crib? —and fumbled one-handed with the fabric to find Flora's face. Her eyes were open. She was alive.

He held both of his girls, one here and the other very far away, and wept. The weeping turned to sobs turned to convulsions turned to dry heaving.

It was an accident.

That was the official determination. After all, even toddlers can drown in only an inch of water. Sure, there were judgments. Jodi should have been bathing her in the sink, not the tub. She shouldn't have turned her back for even a second. She should have tried baby CPR. She should have done any one thing differently that morning so that they could still have two baby girls instead of only one.

Michael helped steer the story with investigators. He knew his wife couldn't have done this on purpose. And he also knew that his remaining daughter would not benefit from a mother in prison.

So he backed up her version of events and edited out some of the less convenient parts: Jodi feeling sad, losing sleep, hearing voices, talking to thin air. The picture he painted for the police was much more traditional. Yes, they were both tired, but that was normal with a new baby—and especially normal with twins. But in general, they were managing well. Spirits were high. Until, of course, this horrible, tragic accident.

Michael always wondered, though. Of course he wondered. He was plagued by dreams for years. In them, Jodi was dressed as a nun and baptizing Zephie, trying to get the bad out. But she was never satisfied, never felt Zephie had been fully cleaned, and was too earnest in her attempt so that she eventually drowned her. Sometimes, Zephie died very quickly. Other times, in the worst dreams, it took many dunks in the holy water. And all the while, Michael was stuck on the other side of a large piece of never-ending glass. No matter how far he ran, there was never an opening. It was like he was stuck in a parallel dimension.

And he felt like this in his real life sometimes, too. He wanted to be there for Jodi in her grief, but he couldn't even process his own.

One morning shortly after, Michael found Jodi staring at her hands. She admitted her vision was blurring. She mumbled to herself, slightly slurring her words. Afraid she was having some kind of stroke, he drove her to the hospital. The routine checks returned nothing; still, they were concerned enough to suggest she check in to the psych ward. She stayed for ten days, and for ten days Michael worried that he might have to walk down the rest of his parenthood path alone. He feared his wife was gone for good.

But her time in the hospital proved to be a reset. She had either begun to heal or had learned to construct a lifelike mask that carried her sadness through the world undetected. In any case, she slowly returned.

But Michael felt further from himself than he ever had. And as hard as it was to admit, he didn't know if he loved his wife anymore.

He didn't know if he, in fact, hated her.

Did Jodi kill Zephie intentionally?

That was the question always at the center of Michael's existence. It was behind everything he did. He spent hours replaying those memories from before Zephie's death, the moments in the kitchen and in bed when Jodi had not been herself.

He wondered about Flora, too. The blanket in her crib. Had Jodi started with Flora, then moved on to Zephie? Maybe she thought she had finished the job, thought she had suffocated the first baby—but, mercifully, she had been wrong.

He didn't let himself venture down this rabbit hole often. What difference would it make? Flora was alive.

Michael knew that this was, at least in part, his fault as well. Because he had done nothing, had said nothing. If he had only talked to Jodi, asked her questions, called the hospital. If he had insisted she get more sleep, had hired a nanny to help, had reached out to her mom even if Jodi would have hated it. If, if, if. The ifs absolutely consumed him. They crawled within his veins and slid in and out of his heart like a knife.

Each of them was slowly dying in their own way. And yet—they still had a child to raise. Still had one perfect daughter who needed her parents.

And who needed protecting.

He took Flora with him to Pennsylvania. He had a two-day work conference and arranged for childcare in the city through his company. Jodi was grateful for the break. Neither of them said the truth out loud: that Michael was taking Flora with him because he could not trust Jodi with her at home alone.

Michael was leaving the last team event—a museum visit—when he saw the woman selling trinkets. She locked eyes with him and held up the birth tusk.

"You need this," she said. "For the little flower."

The little flower. Flora.

The woman told him about the birth tusk. She told him to wrap a single strand of Jodi's hair around the tooth to connect it to her. She told him to attach it to the underside of Flora's crib. And in a world that now felt so out of Michael's control, he was happy to oblige. He was happy to have some direction. He was happy to do something, anything.

He kept the birth tusk safely in his pocket until he arrived back home. That same night, he plucked a fresh hair from Jodi's scalp as she slept, wrapped the tooth, and said a little prayer. He didn't know if any of it would work. But he knew it couldn't hurt.

It was easier for both of them if they never talked about it. They moved to New Jersey, where no one knew they'd ever had another daughter. And eventually, they believed this narrative, too. It was astonishingly simple, actually, to erase the six short weeks of Zephie's existence.

Michael was, of course, in charge of bath time moving forward. This wasn't something they ever needed to discuss; it was a routine they fell into naturally. He did it for years, until Flora was old enough to shower on her own, at which point Jodi felt comfortable lending a hand when needed. The rushing, moving water did not hold the threat of still water that unraveled her every time.

He worried he should have been honest with the investigators. Even after Jodi's mood improved with the medication, he avoided leaving her alone with Flora. And perhaps this, too, was a mistake; perhaps he was sending his wife the very message that she needed to dispel—the message that she could not be trusted.

He was wary for years. But then his own wariness was overshadowed by Jodi's. It became clear that no matter how much time passed or how many pills she swallowed, she would never fully allow herself to connect with Flora. A fear lived inside her. A fear of herself. And Michael could see the tragedy in this. Jodi had an opportunity to form a bond with her remaining daughter, but she ended up losing Flora, too, because she prohibited herself from getting too close. Maybe she worried she would hurt Flora. Maybe she worried she couldn't withstand the death of another child, no matter how that death occurred, so it was easier to keep her distance. Whatever the reason, she self-sabotaged, missing all the best parts of motherhood.

Every year they'd go to the Outer Banks for a weeklong vacation. It often felt more like a father-daughter getaway than a family one. Jodi would disappear for hours at a time, communing with the sea. Flora grew up thinking her mother loved the water. The truth was, Jodi couldn't trust herself to be around it and her only living daughter at the same time. Michael tried to convince her this was rubbish; enough time had passed; she needed to live in the present and stop punishing herself. And stop punishing her daughter, who spent those vacations wondering why she wasn't good enough, why her mother didn't like her.

He could never convince Jodi, though. He could never make a compelling enough argument to encourage her to open up to her little girl. And so, eventually, he stopped trying. He became the referee for the two female opposing teams in his home and counted the years until he could leave.

Because Michael and Jodi never spoke about Zephie, he assumed his wife's heart had hardened against the past. He assumed she got through by going numb, being cold, not caring.

It wasn't until decades later, when Jodi died, and Michael was cleaning out her condo, that he discovered the dresses that his wife had so lovingly handcrafted over the years in remembrance of their baby. And the sadness crept back in, not so much for him losing a daughter, but for the fact that losing a daughter had meant losing his wife, too. All those years together, but each of them was suffering alone. All those years together, and, by the end, they barely knew each other at all.