Free Entering Normal by Anne Leclaire Page A

was swallowing stuck in her chest. For the rest of the night it stayed there, lodged and burning beneath her breastbone. Finally, sometime after midnight, she had to get out of bed and take two of his Tums.
    More and more he has been talking about a time in the near future—three to five years is his plan—when they will sell the house and the station, take the profits, and head south. Buy a place in Florida. He painted the picture for her. No more winter blizzards, or state taxes, or days spent repairing busted transmissions. When he talks this way, Rose’s heart congeals with something close to hatred. Like the time three years ago when they repainted the kitchen and he wanted to brush right over the pencil marks on the framework of the doorway going into the hall, lines demarcating Todd’s growth from toddler to teen. Rose wouldn’t hear of it. These are the visual marks that their son existed, that he stood precisely two feet eight inches at two years and five feet three at twelve. Why would Ned want to forget?
    â€œLet’s make a move while we’re still young enough to enjoy life,” he said through a mouthful of pork, as if Rose could ever again enjoy life. “It makes a lot of sense,” he said.
    Not to Rose. Nothing on earth could make her move from this house. Just the thought of someone else moving in makes her physically ill. The first thing the new owners would do is paint over those lines on the kitchen doorjamb, erasing the yardstick of their son’s growth. Doesn’t Ned understand? This house is Todd’s house. If Ned wants to get rid of the station, that is his business, but she isn’t selling the house.
    Lord knows, since Todd’s death she has no illusion that she can control one single thing in this universe, but she can’t help but cling to the nearly superstitious belief that if she can just freeze things, keep them the same, she and Ned will escape further harm and she will get a sign from Todd. In spite of all contrary evidence she clings to this last belief.
    Lately, in spite of her efforts, things are changing. Her balance is precarious, as if deep inside she is undergoing a tectonic plate shift, like the one she heard about on a
Nova
show Ned watched. When the narrator explained that imperceptible and subtle movements occur within the earth’s crust and that these alterations precede earthquakes, she felt a jolt of recognition. Since the accident this feeling has been growing, and she has especially felt it this fall, as if her interior world were oscillating in minute and dangerous movements. Danger hangs invisible in the air. Threatening.
    She turns out the kitchen light and heads up the hall stairs, guided by the faint glow of the night-light Ned has left on for her. The world outside is silent save for the distant barking of the McDonalds’ collie.
    She undresses in the dark, slides into bed, careful not to disturb Ned. He is a good man. Honest and hard working. She is lucky to have him. She repeats these words like a prayer.
    He moans slightly in his sleep. She wonders if he is sick—those worrisome headaches—and she feels the unpleasant sting of guilt for turning him away earlier. What if he has a tumor? An aneurysm? Could she stand to lose him too? Could she stand to lose another member?
    After Todd died, Reverend Wills gave them a book written for couples who experienced the loss of a child. “A lost member,” the author wrote. Like a leg lopped off, Rose thought as she read the words. Or an arm. The book said that the death of a child could bring a couple closer or drive them apart, that couples either turned to each other for comfort, tried to make sense out of the tragedy and discover spiritual support, or they divorced, the assault of a child’s death too much for their marriage to withstand.
    Neither has happened to her and Ned. They just float, suspended in time, waiting for a life raft to find