...one of the last good days

This was is one of my favorite scenes. I love re-reading it, and remembering that sunny day. I wrote it fairly early in the four years or so of working on the book. I finally cut it because it seemed to slow the pace of that chapter, where a faster pace was needed. But because it had been in the book so long, the shadow of it remained. In the published book, I have myself remembering it in a scene as I go downstairs for “the house meeting from hell.” I'll include that published scene after this cut one.


One of the last good days . . . we are in the backyard on a warm summer day. A rug of artificial grass covers the uneven pavement stones and a gold-colored curtain draped over the clothesline’s three ropes makes a beamy enclave of shade beneath. The triplets play on the plastic jungle-gym their mom struggled down the stairs with from the nursery. They crawl in turn through its paired yellow circles, slide down the short slide, craw back up it. Tahija and I sit about six feet apart, reaching often to steady or catch one as he falls.

Damear, still the most sure-footed (with Lamarr catching up fast and soon to pass him) negotiates the uneven slope between us. He starts with his mother and walks to me, losing his balance and falling forward into my lap. I laugh and hug him, then set him up facing his mother. Off he goes, falling toward her with as much trust, and joy. He goes back and forth this way for awhile, as if to tell us, teach us: I need both this face that mirrors my own, as familiar as the beating of my heart, and this one that unconditional love has come from from earliest memory.

I thought of the boy I’d babysat years before, how once when his mother was in her last year of residency, working the longest hours she would ever work in her life, he held her picture over my face, tried to move it with my head. He needed her to be what I was: Present.

No one fell that day, bonked his head or scraped his knee. No one got chastised or punished. No one was asked to do more than they could do. No one felt hurt, anger or guilt. There was only sunlight pocked through the cloth like stylized stars, and three healthy toddlers stacking minutes into a tower on an afternoon I will always remember.


And here is the remnant of that scene as it appeared in the published book:

I went to the window, from which I could see the nursery’s side windows — where Damear’s crib was. I couldn’t see it though through them; what I could see was the back yard, or part of it, and through the window of my mind a day not so long before, a day in June, bright, when Tahija and I had made a sort of hut by hanging an old gold-colored drape over the clothesline’s ropes. We played there with the triplets in a cove of filtered light. Damear made a game of running back and forth between us, falling in turn into each of our laps. Trying to teach us something.

Did I, going down the stairs that day, actually remember the earlier sparkly day in the back yard? Probably not. I may have, but my memory is not so good that I can remember what I was remembering at a certain time years ago. The scene, the moment, the memory, the harmony Tahija and I felt that day wanted, needed to be in Chapter 24. In a sense, the light of that moment was always there, as the backyard was always there — to be looked out on at any time, from any window — , and so I feel I have not unduly fictionalized by putting it in where I did. But I do miss the longer, present-tense scene. Tahija and I have had other times like that since — where we’re together with the boys, sharing the care of them. For me, and for them too, I sense, and for Tahija — our joint care has a rightness to it. Perhaps we all will always remember that day.