What Nobody Told Her - Darcy Vebber

Down the stairs in the morning, trailing her bathrobe, Frannie reminded Lisa every morning of Winnie-the-Pooh who was dragged, bump, bump bump, to the landing, thinking there must be another way to come down stairs. Frannie came down looking both eager and cautious. Fitting, Lisa thought, for a small child greeting the strange new day.

For Lisa it was different. The house was small but sunny most days, in the back, where they lived looking out at the green-space between the rows of buildings. Watching her child emerge into the sunlight where the stairs opened on to the narrow kitchen made her happy but also, filled with the awareness of everything that could happen, desperate to stop time. Here, right here. It would be good to stay. William, reading the paper, at the table on the other side of the divider. Bowls of cereal, a pitcher of milk, glasses of orange juice catching the light. Here.

How not to swoop the baby up into her arms and cry? Here. We are safe. Every morning, the relief of it took her by surprise again. She made pancakes or lost herself in the smell of clothes pulled at the last minute from the drier they’d sacked into the pantry space. I am in Brooklyn she would think. Two thousand miles from where I began, surrounded now by people instead of empty desert, cloudless sky.

Frannie would climb in to a chair next to her dad, unwilling anymore to sit on a booster seat. Her chin was just above the table top. Sometimes she sat up on her knees, her legs folded under her, in order to see what she was eating, although she ate the same thing every day. One pancake, sprinkled with white sugar, no butter, one small glass of cold milk. Her mother’s daughter, she seemed to have inherited a wariness Lisa would have sworn was learned.