In the months that followed, Katie avoided the formal living room as much as she could. She hired a Puerto Rican to clean the house once a week for fifty dollars, just so she wouldn’t have to enter that room. Sometimes, she would refer to it as the “tea room,” but in her head, she was thinking “the dead baby room.”
When Jackson’s parents came over for Easter, she watched as his mother settled herself on the center cushion of the ‘majestic grace’ couch. Katie imagined the remains of her baby getting squashed beneath her mother-in-law’s bony weight. She threw up in the kitchen sink and then washed it down the garbage disposal before Jackson’s mother could come in with the dirty plates.
Katie decided to exorcise the miscarriage blood from the house altogether. She called the fabric store about buying more ‘majestic grace’ to recover the center cushion. ‘Majestic grace’ had been discontinued. Katie tried again to remove the stain, but with little success.
That night, Jackson took the entire couch out to the curb for trash pick-up. Katie watched him from the upstairs window, the long lean shape of him pushing and pulling.
No matter where she was in the house, she could sense the presence of “the dead baby room.” Always avoided, and yet unavoidable. In the library, sometimes she thought that she could hear a baby’s cry coming through the wall from the living room. As soon as she pressed her ear to the wall to try and hear it, the sound disappeared.
The pattern swam in her head. Purple and gold and magenta. In her dreams it spun and swirled inside of her belly like a potent toxin, an unwanted contraceptive.
After a particularly sleepless night, Katie waited until Jackson had left for work before forcing herself to go into the living room. She stood surrounded by her fear, by her misery, by her failure. The quiet heartbeat of the room growing until it was a loud pounding in her head.
The more she stared at the pattern, the more she saw the miscarriage stain become a part of it. The stain itself was long gone from her home, but the memory still insinuated itself into every moment.
It was surprisingly easy to rip down the curtains. Down they came, into a large heap on top of the love seat. At first, Katie only intended to remove the curtains, the love seat, and the throw pillows. She would just drag them out the front door and onto the curb by herself. But the ‘majestic grace’ wallpaper border would still be there, circling the room like a wreath of dead babies.
Katie stood on top of the tallest chair she could find, and started to scrape off the border. She pulled with her fingers, tore and scratched until they were raw. But she couldn’t get enough of it down.
It felt like her heart might explode in her chest. Her whole life was for nothing. Her whole house was still blank and empty. Hatred filled her up.
Katie pulled a bottle of vodka from the liquor cabinet with a violence that cracked the glass panel. She soaked the curtains on top of the love seat in the flammable alcohol, then stood back, and lit a match. It took a moment for the fire to start, but as the “dead baby room” went up in licking flames, Katie felt as if a cool balm had soothed her chest. She watched the fire slowly build until the smoke forced her out of her house and onto the front lawn. When the firemen arrived, they moved her to the other side of the street. Katie sat on the curb and watched them scurry like ants as they tried to save her home.
It was almost dark out when Katie looked up and saw Jackson. He stood in front of her in the street in his expensive black suit, looking at her directly. He looked bewildered, more than angry.
“Why did you do it, Katie?”
Katie didn’t have an answer. Maybe she shouldn’t have lit the fire. Maybe it would have been enough to just throw away the curtains and the pillows and the horrible loveseat.
Jackson kept looking at her, as if maybe he had never known her until that moment, as if maybe he had never even seen her before. The flames and smoke seemed to come out of his back as he stood in front of Katie looking down at her.
And then he moved and sat beside her on the curb, a gentle hand coming to touch the back of her head, stroking down her soft hair. She turned her body into the space left between his arms and legs, and let herself cry.
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