Free One Small Thing by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

fingers began to cramp, but she kept at it, even as the light began to fade. Her father’s face dissolved into the background, everything a smooth, pale gray.
     
     
     
    She woke up, her body rigid, her eyes looking into the dark room that could have been any room, any place, perhaps her bedroom back in 1987. Breathing in and out, inhale, exhale, she slowed her thoughts, saw the shadow of her dresser, the fluid swathes of curtain, the ridge of Dan’s body on the other side of the bed. Avery grabbed at her chest, trying to stop her heart’s wild beating. She couldn’t fix her father, even in a dream.
     
    Dan turned, his arm falling between them. Avery looked at the ceiling, knowing that she couldn’t fix this either. There was no way to keep what she had wanted alive.
     
     
     
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    The next morning, Dan still asleep, Avery slipped out of bed, into the hall, and then pushed open the door to the room they called the nursery, or at least, she did, saying, “Oh, I had the bassinet delivered. Could you put it in the nursery, Dan?” For him, the word (not to mention the purchases) was presumptuous or simply bad luck, she could tell, but to Avery, it meant that it could happen, just as easily as when she said, “I’m a Cal graduate” months before graduation,” or, “I’m Mrs. Avery Tacconi,” long before she and Dan were engaged. If you said something and meant it, it could come true.
     
    The air was still and smelled of plastic wrapping, cotton, and wood. In the corner of the room, she’d stacked paint cans. Martha Stewart colors, viburnum , the palest off-pink white, and linen for the trim. She and Valerie had decided that with these colors, she could add any color of wallpaper trim, blue or pink. As they stood at the cash register at Sears with brushes and tape and paint trays, Valerie had rushed to the back wall and picked up wallpaper samples. “You never know. We might need these tomorrow!” That shopping trip had been a day before a visit with Dr. Browne but then, as usual, the results were negative. No baby that month. She hadn’t gone back to Sears since.
     
    Even though Dan shook his head slightly when she read the advertisements in the Chronicle , she went to the sales at I Bambini , Macy’s, Nordstrom, Toys R Us, Mervyns, Target, Emporium. In the past two years, she’d found the bassinet, a crib, a complete layette, diaper genie, bathtub, stroller, car seat, baby shoes, playpen, changing table, dresser, a baby name book. She’d kept some of the stuff in boxes, tucked neatly away in the closet, but she’d made Dan put the crib together and she’d filled the baby’s dresser with clothes and supplies, the top covered with ointments and lotions. And only a week ago, Valerie had handed her a bag full of tiny newborn T-shirts and sleepers, things that Tomás at only three months had already outgrown. “I want you to have them,” she’d said. “I want your baby to be the one we hand-down to.” With each purchase or gift, Avery crossed off an item on the list she kept in the bottom drawer.
     
    She’d also picked out the baby names she liked best. Of course, there were the inevitable but unlikely and slightly ridiculous family combinations: Isabel Marian, Marian Isabel or Walter William, William Walter. She would touch the crib and imagine Sophie, Ana, Mackenzie, Keegan, Connor, Brandon, Julia, Jordan, or Ashley.
     
    Now, she walked over and rubbed her hand on the sheet that she’d put on the mattress, the bumper that softened the edges of the wood, its ruffles between her fingers, the wool blanket with its soft pastel threads. How stupid. How presumptuous, as Dan would have said if he’d dared to say anything about the baby to her. What was she thinking? What was this room anyway? She looked around at all her purchases, some of it two years old, maybe out-of-date, out-of-style, useless, replaced with other, cleverer baby gear. Here it was: Avery’s sad museum of