Everything Changes

dream.” She looks at me with a self-deprecating smile even as her eyes grow misty at the thought. “Even in my dreams I’m a bad mother.”
    “Those dreams represent your fear of being a bad mother,” I say. “And bad mothers aren’t afraid of being bad mothers. So you see, it actually proves that you’re a good mother.”
    Tamara smiles warmly at me. “Where would I be without you, Zack?”
    “I honestly don’t know,” I say, but I’m thinking,
Happily married to a living husband?
Because without me, maybe Rael never would have gone to Atlantic City, or maybe if I’d said no he would have prevailed upon Jed, who would have driven the Lexus, or a million other ever-so-slightly divergent scenarios that would have had nothing in common other than they didn’t end in a fatal car wreck. Tamara seems to read my thoughts, and looks away sadly for a moment to leave me with them.
    There’s nothing cleaner than a two-year-old in the bathtub. Sophie sits up on her knees, pulling herself up to peer over the edge of the tub at my hand and, in doing so, sends a mild spray of water cascading onto the floor, getting Tamara’s shorts wet. “Zap have a boo-boo?” she says.
    “Yes,” Tamara says. “Zap has a big boo-boo.”
    “I kiss it.”
    I hate the thought of my ragged hand, now deformed with purple swelling and caked with dried blood around the stitches, coming into contact with Sophie’s perfect pink, embryonic mouth, but Tamara’s grin urges me on, so I extend my hand, angling it to keep the most ravaged sections away from her. Sophie takes my hand in both of her little wet ones, and peers intently at the damage. “Oh,” she says with admiration. “Zap have big boo-boo.” I’m sitting on the wet floor, knee to knee with Tamara, and when Sophie leans over and starts purposefully kissing my hand, it’s all I can do to keep from bursting into tears. There’s a wholeness here, a perfection, in Tamara’s face and posture, in Sophie’s dimpled flesh and innocent eyes. Their entire universe is contained in this little bathroom, and I want more than anything to join it, to be a part of the uncomplicated solitude of their life here. I can love Tamara and raise Sophie with her, move in with them and leave my old, middling life behind. At this moment, it seems so eminently possible, so within my grasp, and I feel like if I could just stay here indefinitely and never leave, everything else would sort itself out.
    “Zack?”
    Tamara is looking concernedly at me, and I realize that my face might be revealing more than I thought. I attempt a smile that I know comes out looking like an attempted smile, and retrieve my hand from Sophie. I lean back against the wall, and into Tamara, who wraps her arm around me. “I’m having a rough day,” I say.
    “Mommy kiss it,” Sophie says.
    Tamara smiles as she lifts my hand to her mouth. “There,” she whispers, pressing her lips against my knuckles. “All better.”

    Sophie stands in the crib in the corner of her blue room, directing me in all the proper protocols for putting her to bed. When Tamara was pregnant, she didn’t want to know if it was a boy or a girl. She was very superstitious about exposing the baby to the evil eye of fate. She adamantly refused to shop for supplies or to outfit the nursery until the baby had been safely delivered, feeling that any premature acknowledgment was opening the door to certain doom. But Rael couldn’t be contained. The sonogram seemed to indicate a boy, and so Rael, in typical fashion, had the bedroom carpeted in a deep blue, with matching shades and baseball-themed crib bumpers. When Sophie was born, Tamara shrugged and said it served him right, hoping that his errant decorating would be appeasement enough to the evil eye. Consequently, Sophie’s bedroom is missing the softer, pink hues of a little girl’s room, which Tamara has ameliorated with pastel crib linens and quilted balloons on the walls.
    “Sippy cup,” Sophie demands, sticking her hand out. I hand her the cup, and she takes a pro forma drink before placing it carefully against the bumper of her crib. “My peppy,” she says, and I hand her the pacifier, which she pops into her mouth before dropping easily onto her pillow. “Pooh banket.” I pull the Winnie-the-Pooh quilt over her and tuck her into it. She rolls onto her side, her tiny, plump arm stretched out in a proprietary fashion across her pillow. “Zap rub my back?” she says. I rub