Her room was dark but for a low hump in the center where a weak light seemed to glow. Looking closer I could see she had taken a blanket and made a kind of square tent out of it, propping the sides up with the back of her chair and three pillars of stacked books. She was whispering to herself inside. A light danced through the loose weave of the blanket. She poked her head out, hair damp and ruffled.

“Pellet,” she said reverently. “Look.” I crouched to my knees and crawled cautiously into the fragile enclosure. The space smelled strongly of her, of her biscuity scalp and damp concentration. She took the carrot from me with her small hand as I flipped onto my back. I could hear the bright tock of a carrot snapping in her newly permanent front teeth, the frosty steps of her chewing. She held up a flashlight, one I had been missing for months, with a wide lens and strong beam. Over the lens she had taped a charcoal colored piece of construction paper, pierced with several pin sized holes. She turned on the light and directed it to the square patch of blanket suspended over us. 

She was craving more wonder.

 Her nose wrinkled. All she had managed was a weak smudge of luminescence, a mash of unsatisfying starlight.

“Light’s not strong enough,” I said, feeling the hot closeness begin to rise.

“Fix it.”

“And you need a lighter background. Like a movie screen.”

“Can you fix it Pellet?”

“Right now? It’s late.”

“Don’t say that.”

“But it is. You have to be in bed.”

“What for?” I had no answer for that one. Nothing seemed as important as what we were doing.

“Well, in that case let me get a sheet.” 

Like a Vegas maid, I had her sheet off in an instant. With a soft buckle of thunder I floated it over the uprights of the stacked books. It was expansive in there now, the light soft and diffused through the pink of the fabric. Embryos in soft shell. This was a place where we could start over. This could be our little Lascaux. And when we stepped out of it to get more carrots or to pee or something, it would be the beginning of time.

“The stars aren’t very good,” she said flat on her back.

“We need one of my work lights.”

“Or like a slide or something. A clear plastic thing with drawing on it.”

“But then it wouldn’t be stars.”

“It doesn’t need to be.” She sat up and dropped the flashlight in my lap and scurried out of the tent. I checked my watch. I regretted it as soon as my eyes landed on the dial. Parents were always doing this. Checking the time. Setting limits. Shunting trajectories. Weren’t we pilgrims now? Wasn’t every vapor of our belief necessary to keep seeing this new way? It was twelve-thirty six in the morning. Witching hour all around. I yawned. Felt myself falling. Cool trickle of guilt. She should be in bed. Didn’t she have school in the morning? Or was she still on leave. I should study these things. I should know these answers. 

She entered the tent with a compromised squirm, three legged on two knees and one elbow, a folder in her other arm. I knew what it was the second I lay eyes on it. Officious blue. Dr. Marfi’s name was typed onto a white strip bordered with bands of red. My wife’s full name, last name first, wholly her own, under his. ONCOLOGY skewed, slapped on like discount sticker.

“Where did you get that?”

“Your underwear drawer,” she answered. 

“Do you know what these are?”

“They’re Mom,” she said flashing me her mother’s pale blue eyes. She slipped out the long celluloid sheet of an x-ray. It clapped as she shook it into position in front of the flashlight’s beam. The light pierced it and gathered it up and smeared it wide and clear over our heads. The milky cloudbank of her sternum. Two angry dark cumuli in the ghostly bowls of her breasts. 

A sky of her above us. 

Chloe seemed to delight at this. She shined the light through various morphologies, through the pocket union of the distal humerus and the lazy “S” of the clavicle, down to the neat repetitive furrows of the thoracic ribs. 

“She looks like the sky. Like clouds,” she croaked, the lateness of the hour roughening her voice. Her eyes began to slow their march over the image above her. She scooted toward me and put her head on my chest.

“Here,” she said handing me the flashlight and the x-ray. “If Mom came back as a baby would you take care of her?”

“What?”

“If someone left us a baby, like outside by the door. And you knew it was Mom would you take care of it?”

“If Mom was a baby?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever raised a baby?”

“No. Only fish.”

“Well, a fish is a lot like a baby if a fish cried all the time and pooped everywhere and got sour milk stuck under it’s neck. Do fish get gassy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Cause babies get gassy. And they cry. And no matter what you do they keep crying. You hold them and you dip them and you spin them around and they keep crying. You want that? All that crying and poop?”  

“But it would be mom.”

“Then we would keep her. In your room. I’d build a little side car type thing for next to your bed and you could keep her in there.”

“I want her in a basket. Like Moses.” 

“How about an old orange crate with straw? Then she could be Jesus.”

“I want Moses.” It was the last thing she said. Moments later her long black lashes lowered and her breathing got deep. I clicked off the flashlight and the darkness was thin, diluted by the ambience of a Los Angles night that never let the city grow completely dark. She grew heavier on me, pressing softly on my own rising and lowering chest like a small stone falling through dark water. So I stayed beneath her and closed my own eyes.

I woke up in the dark. Chloe was gone but I could hear her rummaging around in her room. I rubbed my face. My body sang like a three second bull rider. I struggled to roll on my front and army-crawled out of the tent. Broad sheets of construction paper were taped over all her windows creating the false night. She sat on her bed, her big box of felt tipped pens dumped all around her in a thousand colors. 

“You hungry?” I managed to get out.

“Nope”. She colored by the light on her night stand. I couldn’t see what.

My phone rang in my pocket. I shuffled off into the hall. The rest of the house was bright with morning light, unwelcome as it was. I pulled out my phone. The screen told me it was Chloe’s school calling.

“Hello?”

“Mr Taggert? This is Dora over at Chloe’s school,” a female voice spoke cautiously. “We were wondering if we could expect Chloe today.”

“I thought she had couple of weeks off because of her mom.”

“ We really only allow for one week and that ended this morning. We were just wondering is she coming in today? Is everything all right?” In my mind there was clean open highway between those two questions, although they could have both been answered at once. “Is she sick?” the female voice asked.

“She’s...um...I don’t know. She seems fine but I can’t really be sure.”

“Does she have a fever?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Does she need to see someone?”

“Hard to say.” 

“Is she going to be absent again?” the voice asked with a creeping impatience.

“Yeah. She is. Thank you for calling.” I clicked off the phone. I needed a nap. 

“Crumb!” I called out. “I’m going to lay down for a while.”

“But I’m starving,” she called back.

“Since when?” I said poking my head into her room. “I just asked if you were hungry five seconds ago.”

“I wasn’t then.” 

I sighed 

“Are you mad?” she asked.

“No, sweetie. What do you want?”

“I want to go have pancakes.”

“No, we have to watch that.”

“What about the 2.99 percent?”

“We can’t go nuts, baby.”

“But there’s nothing here.”

“We have carrots. I can cut you up some kale.”

“I want pancakes.”

“Please! Chloe. Crumb. Whatever. Have something here.” A cloud moved over her little face. Sucker punch of guilt. I stood there, swaying from exhaustion, oozing bad dad stink. “How  do you think we can work this out?” I asked.

“Obviously I’m going to starve,” she said in her tiny voice, her fingers stained in muti-colors.

“Obviously.” I shambled into her room and hoisted myself up onto her bed. “What is this?” I picked up what she had been coloring. It was her mother’s x-ray, now completely prism saturated. Pinks and oranges and Van Gogh greens shot through the ghostly outlines of her bones.

“This is really cool,” I said.

“Hold it up to the window.” I pressed it up against the one uncovered pane of glass in her room. The light leapt on the image, sucking out the familiar landscape of my wife’s body and replacing it with soft pools of color that merged and mixed into one another like seamless stained glass, or how stained glass had to have been originally imagined. It was hallucinatory. Beautiful. 

“We should frame this,” I said.

“No,” she said slowly. “It won’t be framed. It’s for my machine.”

Next Chapter: The Mommy Machine