Free These Things Hidden by Heather Gudenkauf

up?”
    “No, you didn’t,” Claire says, shivering at the memory, and pulls him onto her lap.
    “Why not?” he asks while he twists her wedding ring off her finger and places it on his own thumb, moving it back and forth so that the diamond casts a mottled rainbow on the wall.
    “Dad turned on the light in your room and you were in your crib and it looked like you were sleeping, but you weren’t. You weren’t breathing.” Joshua’s hands still, but he doesn’t say anything. “Dad snatched you up out of the bed so quickly he must have scared the breath right back into you because you started crying immediately.”
    “Whew,” Joshua says with relief, and begins rotating the ring again.
    “Whew
is right,” Claire says emphatically. “Truman saved the day. So he might not know how to skateboard, but he’s pretty special.”
    “I guess so,” Joshua murmurs. “I’ll go say sorry.” He slides the ring back onto his mother’s finger, springs from her lap and runs off to find Truman. What she doesn’t tell Joshua is how, during the endless seconds between when Claire and Jonathan saw him lying in his crib, blue and still, to when they heard his angry cries, her own breath escaped her.
How could I lose him already?
she had wondered.
Did God change His mind?
It wasn’t until air filled his tiny lungs that she breathed again, too.
    Claire slowly gets to her feet, mindful that she is every bit of her forty-five years. When Joshua celebrates his tenth birthday she will be fifty. When he is forty she will be eighty. Motherhood is the hardest, most terrifying, most wonderful thing she will ever do. Perhaps the greatest joy she’s gotten from having Joshua coming into her life, besides hearing him call her Mom, is watching Jonathan and Joshua together. Together they pore over home restoration magazines and, entranced, watch old episodes of
This Old House.
Claire has to laugh when Joshua, asked what he wants to be when he grows up, answers Bob Villa or his dad. As they scrape, sand and varnish together, refurbishing fireplace mantels, armoires, banisters, when she watches as Jonathanteaches Joshua how to hammer a nail or twist a screw, her heart swells with pride.
    Even though Joshua is their only child, Claire knows that he isn’t quite like other children. For the longest time she thought of him simply as a dreamer. His head is so full of creative, imaginative ideas, she can almost ignore the fact that he often doesn’t appear to hear them when they speak to him. They can tell him to do something many times and Joshua will seem to understand, but he rarely follows through. There are times when he seems to leave their world completely, can stare into space fully absorbed by she doesn’t know what, and he’s gone until they bring him gently back to them. It’s as if there is a buffer that surrounds him, keeping the harshness of the world away. Without it, she believes, he would be left exposed and vulnerable. Claire doesn’t know if it had to do with those moments when he was deprived of oxygen or if something traumatic happened before he came to them. Sometimes she fears their love hasn’t been quite enough to renew Joshua’s trust in the world around him.
    Claire runs a finger along the row of photos that line the sofa table. The pictures capture the day they brought Joshua home, the day he was legally theirs, the first time he ate pureed squash, his first Christmas. Every single day Claire says a little prayer of thanks for the girl who left Joshua at the fire station five years ago. Becauseof her, she and Jonathan have their son. Sometimes she wonders about her, the woman who gave birth to Joshua. Was she from Linden Falls or did she come from far away? Was she young, a teenager who just didn’t know what to do? Was she an adult who already had several children and couldn’t take care of one more? Maybe Joshua has brothers and sisters out there somewhere who are just like him. Maybe his mother is a drug