The sky is blue and clear through my apartment window this morning. I know today is the day; I have felt it coming for weeks, and the bright cloudless blue of the morning sky is so like that day, so exactly like it, that I know the time has come.

I’ve have been afraid of today. I was afraid of it long before I knew what today was. I’m still afraid, but also glad. In so many ways, I have longed for this day more than any in my life—the day I turned sixteen and could finally drive, the day I got married, the day Melanie was born, the day the divorce papers were signed. I knew they were all coming, and had looked towards them with both anticipation and dread; a mixture of desire and fear. But there has been no day in my life that I have faced with such a strong sense of hope and hunger, and yet feared so completely. Today is the day.

I set the table for breakfast. A red plastic plate and a blue sippy cup with smiling turtles for Melanie, one black coffee cup for me. I put a blueberry Pop Tart with butter on her plate. Melanie loves Pop Tarts. I turn on the TV, and it’s Sponge Bob Squarepants, just like it was then. I sip my coffee. Black, no sugar, the way I’ve had it since college.

“Melanie, breakfast, come on, we’re going to be late,” I call, just as I did that day. I know she isn’t coming, but I know I have to say the words. I call again—Melanie never did come the first time. She always liked to push it, just to see how much it would take before I would come up after her.

I yell for her the third time. She doesn’t come, but I almost see her, anyway—coming down the hall, the brown hair I had so carefully combed just a few minutes ago already a mess (she had been trying on hats), brown eyes sparkling, round cheeks red and dimpled as she laughs at my foolishness. “I was trying on hats,” I can hear her say. “I have beautiful hats.” Then, very seriously, she puts her little hand on mine. “I’m sorry I didn’t come out when you were calling, but I had to try on my hats.” She nods her head thoughtfully, and I smile.

“I understand,” I say to the empty chair. “Now eat your breakfast, we’re going to be late,” and then I go to find a hair brush.

I come back, holding her hair brush, some of her hair still in it. But Melanie isn’t there.

---

It was three years ago that I had the accident. I was driving Melanie to school across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It was a journey we had made a hundred times together. I remember that morning, as I started to pull out of the driveway, Melanie screaming: “No! No! I don’t have my seatbelt buckled! Do you want me to get killed? Do you want me to die?”

Andrew had done a very good job of teaching Melanie to always remember her seatbelt. “No,” I said, laughing, and reached over and buckled her seatbelt for her. “Never ever. I’d miss you too much.”

“You’ve always got to buckle my seatbelt, momma,” she said seriously. “Don’t ever forget again.”

I smiled. “I won’t,” I said.

We were halfway across the Narrows Bridge when it happened. It was a clear day—it was September, and the air was cool and dry and the sky was a cloudless blue. Traffic was light and I was making excellent time. I don’t think I could count the number of times I had crossed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in terrible weather, with snarled traffic and apparently retarded or suicidal drivers swerving in and out of lanes. This day, there was none of that. It was a beautiful day.

Then, the right tire blew out. It sounded as if it had exploded, and, not thinking about what I was doing and with no time to react, I turned into it. I was doing nearly sixty miles an hour, turning onto the tire that had just blown. I ended up turning a lot more, a lot faster, than I had intended, and plowed into a support beam.

The next thing I remember was the blood on the steering wheel. The airbag had not deployed, and—although I had buckled Melanie in—I hadn’t buckled myself in, and it had apparently thrown me into the steering wheel. My neck, jaw and chest ached. Red was smeared across the steering wheel and splashed on the rear view mirror. Two of my teeth were in the ashtray, although it felt like I was missing four or five. Half of the windshield lay across the crumpled hood of the car, a spiderweb of cracks. The other half had disappeared.

Immediately, I turned to look for Melanie. She had been, thanks to her reminder, securely buckled in and looked startled but none the worse for wear. "Thank God," I said. "Thank God."

By now, cars were stopping and people were getting out to offer assistance. Traffic was backing up as all the lanes slowed and then stopped. I opened my door and stepped out, waving my hand. "It's okay, it's okay, we're fine," I said. "I'm just going to report the accident then call my insurance company." I felt woozy and cold. My neck hurt, and I was having trouble breathing. I could taste blood. I wasn't so sure I was fine, but Melanie was, and in my dazed and confused state I think I would have preferred to die from internal bleeding or head trauma than the embarrassment of having brought four lanes of traffic to a dead stop for miles, on a beautiful day, because I had almost run my car off the bridge.

And I could have easily run the car off the bridge. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge had plenty of gaps in the super-structure I could have driven the Volvo through. Instead, I had driven directly into a foot thick steel girder, crumpling the front of the car around it like my car had been made out of tin foil. I had hit it so hard that the two flat tires were less than two feet apart from each other, nearly three feet past the other side of the beam.

One tire was just flat, ruptured by being dragged across the concrete and then the guardrail, or by the impact. The other--the one that blew out on me--wasn't much more than a few shreds of black, smoking rubber melted to the rims. Both tires were angled inwards, reaching towards each other like hands, the grill of the Volvo folded around the thick steel girder in its destructive, high-speed impact embrace. The hood was crumpled, no more than a foot long accordion now at the center, where the beam stood two feet from the windshield. The windows were all either blown out or spider webs of fractured glass, held on in place by two-ply plastic laminate, the modern form of safety glass.

The Volvo was ruined. But Mel was okay and I was out of it but alive. A few more feet and we would have almost certainly plunged eighty feet into the icy water below. Had it been the left tire instead of the right, or if I had just turned differently, we could have flipped over the concrete divider and into oncoming traffic. Had we hit the beam a little differently, the car could have become a fireball.

Of course, you can play that game the other way, and I sure did for the next three years. If the tire had blown a minute later or a minute sooner, everything would have been different. If I had purchased my tires on a different day or from a different store, I'd be driving Melanie to second grade in that stupid Volvo. If I had been wearing my seatbelt, Melanie would still be alive.

I was dazed. Nothing felt broken, but even then I knew I had to have suffered some sort of head trauma. My neck hurt, but more significantly, it felt wrong. Like something was in the wrong place. Like something was going to hurt, and really bad, once the numbness wore off.

Breathing was hard, too, like I had coils of rope wound around my chest and someone really strong was pulling them very, very tight. My vision was distorted, as if I were looking at everything through warped glass. The sounds of horns honking and people shouting sounded very far away, as if I was listening to everything around me through a long metal pipe.

"It's fine, we're fine, I just need to call the police," I said, fumbling for my cell phone. "Don't stop in the middle of the bridge--"

"There's a little kid," a man in a brown tweed coat was saying. Another man with a shock of white hair and a red flannel shirt was coming up behind him. An overweight fellow in black horn-rimmed glasses and a stained white dress shirt was approaching from the left. "Ma'am?" he was asking.

I waved my arms vigorously, trying to tell them all to just back off. "It's okay," I was saying. "I know it looks bad, but we're all right--"

"Smell gasoline," the old man in the red flannel shirt said. "Gonna catch a fire, might blow."

I felt a chill run down my back. Melanie was still in the car.

Only she wasn't in the car anymore. "The kid," a guy wearing a black turtleneck was saying. "She's gonna fall!"

I turned with a jerk. Melanie had undone her seatbelt--an ability she had refined even before we had stopped using the car seat--and had climbed through the passenger side window.

"Melanie!" I screamed, but there was no sound. I felt my mouth forming the words, my throat straining, but heard nothing, not even a strangled hiss of air. I heard the wind, the honking of horns, the shouting around me, but my own words were frozen in my throat.

Melanie had dropped from the car window down to a catwalk that ran alongside and below the actual pedestrian walkway, and was climbing the short barrier between that little catwalk and the vast open emptiness beyond, looking for all the world like she was just climbing out of her playpen at home.

There was shouting all around me. "Little girl!" the man in the brown tweed coat was shouting. "No! Stop! Don't move, we'll get you!"

I was running for her, but it was like my legs were frozen. Like I was trying to run through glue. I wanted to move, desperately, and couldn't. I was trying to yell as the goateed young man in the black turtleneck raced past me. The fat man in the stained white shirt and dark blue tie was closing in, too, leaping like a gymnast over the crumpled hood of the Volvo. I was paralyzed.

"No, stop," the man with the goatee was yelling. "That's the wrong way--"

He lunged as the fat man reached out from the left, trying to grab my daughter. But they were too late. "Momma!" she shouted, little legs already thrown across the rail, dangling over the black waters below. And, just like that, she was gone.

She had disappeared. The young man in the black turtleneck lay across the catwalk, arms stretched out, hands clutching at nothing. The fat man stood above and beside him, mouth open. "Holy mother of Christ," he said, and signed himself.

Melanie. My dear sweet Melanie. The world swam and shimmered. I felt nauseous, and began to fall backwards. Arms grabbed me as I fell, but I still felt like I was falling. And the world went black.

I woke up in the hospital. "My daughter," I said, sitting up. There was pain, and I was disoriented. I felt woozy and drugged. I only half-remembered what had happened. I didn't know if it was really true. I didn't want it to be true. "My daughter," I croaked again. “Melanie. Where's Melanie?"

The woman beside my bed--I wasn't sure if she was a doctor or a nurse, but she looked more like a doctor--looked down at her clipboard. "They found her in the water--she got caught on one of the pilings under the bridge," she said, matter-of-factly. "Multiple contusions and abrasions, we assume from the initial impact--"

She kept talking, but her voice recede into the distance. I couldn't breathe. I felt the thick coils of rope around my chest again, tightening. Constricting, cutting off all breath, all thought. Again, the world swam before me and I plunged into darkness.

---

Melanie adored magic. Her daycare took her class to see a magician a few days after her fourth birthday, and she absolutely fell in love. It was all she could talk about that night. Such mundane tricks: rabbit out of a hat, a chain of colored scarves from the sleeves, a wand that turned into flowers. With wide-eyed excitement, she had relayed all the details. She got out her crayons and drew stick figures with loops of color shooting from their arms, very dog-looking rabbits on top of stove-pipe hats. And then she drew one that was just a box.

"What's that?" Andrew asked her. "A magical square?"

"No-o!" Melanie had replied indignantly. "I told you, he had a magic box. This is the magic box. He's already made the girl disappear in the magic box, so now it's empty."

"Uh-huh," Andrew said. "And where's the magician? Is he already gone home?"

"No-o!" Melanie said again. "He disappearded into the box, too, so he could be with the girl."

"So he could be alone with the girl in the box, eh?" he said, and chuckled. "Just what sort of magic shows are they taking you to at that daycare?"

"Shows with rabbits and birds," Melanie explained.

Andrew started bringing home magic tricks, to Melanie's utter delight. Our marriage was already fraying at the seams and splitting down the middle, so Andrew, rather than find some way to deal with that, started putting all his family time and energy towards Melanie.

It was ironic, really, that the thing caused so much friction those first years after Melanie was born was how little attention he paid to her at first. It was my job to feed her, my job to get her dressed, my job to take her to daycare--and then go to work so I could pay half the bills on top of that. He changed five of Melanie's diapers, over the course of thousands. And he complained about those. As she grew older, he kept on ignoring her, too busy to draw or play or go swimming. After awhile, I just couldn't take it anymore. I had it out with him. Several times. He wouldn't change; he didn't see that there was a problem. But there was definitely a problem. Giving up and getting out wasn't my first or second or third choice. I could've lived with Andrew's self-involvement and disinterest had it just been me. I wouldn't have liked it, but if staying with Andrew had been good for Melanie, even though I was unhappy, I would have stayed. But Andrew neglected her just like he neglected me. Andrew thought that he paid his half of the bills, and that was that. I was supposed to cook, clean, shop, raise Melanie, and drop everything--my pants included--if he happened to feel a little frisky that night. It got old fast.

I thought things might get better with Andrew once we had a baby, but Melanie just made our relationship that much worse. The baby was one more thing, one thing that was a million things, for me to worry about. For Andrew, Melanie was just something else to neglect, to make entirely my responsibility.

"You always wanted a baby," he responded once, when I had just asked him to help me with Melanie. She was crying, dinner was burning, I had worked all day and my head was pounding and I had just wanted him to do something, anything, to lighten the load.

So, seeing I was clearly overwhelmed and perhaps just moments from a nervous breakdown, what does my perfect husband do? He frowns seriously at me and tells me: "You always wanted a baby."

Then he went upstairs to putter around, having established that the crying child and burning dinner were clearly my fault and thus my responsibility, so there was nothing he could or would do to help me.

Those last three years of marriage were very long.

By the time we were sleeping in separate beds, fixing separate meals, and largely leading separate lives except for our common bond in Melanie, the divorce was inevitable. It was just a matter of timing.

Like I said, it was ironic, though, that once our marriage was finally damaged beyond repair, Andrew actually became a pretty good father. He had become a non-entity as a spouse, but as a dad he actually started to shape up.

It was after the argument about Houdini's box that I knew the sooner we made the divorce official, the better. It wasn't doing anybody any good, us staying together--if anything, it was making things worse. For everybody. I wasn't happy, Andrew wasn't happy--although the good Lord knows I thought he should have been, given that he had, in effect, a full-time maid and nanny that also paid half the bills. But he wasn't happy, I wasn't happy, and it was taking its toll on Melanie, too.

Another bit of irony: as Andrew started paying more real attention to Melanie, and started really being her dad, not just the other person who lived in the house that Mom had to pick up after, I resented it. Where the hell had he been for the last three years? It pissed me off, which was really why we fought about the stupid box--because he thought he could just waltz in a be super dad after being a no-show for four years. To me, it proved that Andrew would be a better parent if we were doing our parenting in separate homes. After we fought about the box, I started to think he wasn't the only one who would be better at parenting if we weren't doing it together.

The box was just a big cardboard box. Andrew and Melanie had watched a special on Houdini a few nights earlier, and Andrew had engaged her throughout the entire show, answering her questions and explaining bits that he thought would be tough for a five year old to grasp. After the show, Melanie dumped her toys out of her toy box and dubbed it her Houdini box. While there wasn't any way for her to disappear, both Andrew and I took turns delighting her as we closed the lid on her toy box, counted to three, and then pulled it open dramatically, pretending she had disappeared. Then, we closed the lid again, counted to three, and pretended she had magically reappeared. I think we all had fun. That was actually a pretty good night.

But the next night, Andrew brought home the box. He just didn't think things through, you know? Sometimes he just didn't think, and this was one of those times. It was huge--it wasn't really marked, but it could easily have held a TV or half of a refrigerator. It was beaten up. It was stained and damp on the sides. The bottom of it was streaked and moldy. It smelled bad. He had just pulled some old, smelly box out of some dumpster or from behind some seedy liquor store somewhere . . . for our daughter to play in. I was incredulous.

"Cool!" Melanie had exclaimed, as soon as she saw it. "What's that, Daddy? Is that for me?"

"No, sweety--" I started. But it was too late.

Melanie looked seriously at Andrew, and whispered: "Is it magic?"

"It's a Houdini Box," Andrew said. "You can do even better magic with it than your toy chest."

She clapped her hands together. "Yay!" she shouted.

I was glaring at Andrew, while he was careful not to look at me. Call me uptight or paranoid, but I didn't like having dirty, smelly things that were probably crawling with disease--that, for all I knew, some wino had pissed in--brought into my nice clean house for my precious little girl to play in. I know I shouldn't have made such a big deal about it, or at least should have timed it better, but I had had a long day. The phone hadn't stopped ringing, my boss was apoplectic about missing reports that I had had nothing to do with, but was still the one who got yelled at, and traffic was a bitch. And grocery shopping had been a nightmare, not that I expected Andrew to understand how bad the stores were after work on weeknights, because Andrew never went to the grocery store, on weeknights or weekends. No, while I was stuck behind a woman arguing about the price of a can of tuna--one can of tuna that was a nickel more than she thought it should be-- Andrew was busy pulling filthy boxes out of dumpsters in order to give our child some sort of disease. Or maybe to make me think that way, so he could be the victim of his emotionally unstable, unreasonable, argumentative wife again.

Whatever was in Andrew's head when he brought home the box, I was already not in the best frame of mind. On top of that, Andrew was practicing his traditional solution to every disagreement: he was ignoring me. As I glared at him, he avoided looking at me. He turned so he didn't even have to look in my direction. Then, he held one dirty, damp flap of the box open and Melanie enthusiastically started crawling inside. That did it for me. There was an end to my rope, and I had reached it.

"Stop!" I shouted. Melanie froze. Andrew let go of the flap, but did not turn around. "Melanie, you are not going to be playing in a dirty, old, nasty, stinking, moldy box!"

Melanie stood up, looking at me, eyes wide and tragically dismayed. "But why, Momma?"

"And you," I hissed, pointing at Andrew, who still just stood there, not facing me, not turning around. "How could you bring this thing into my house? My nice, clean house? And expect that I would let our child play in it. Are you insane?"

"But, Momma!" Melanie pleaded, lower lip trembling, eyes welling up with tears. "Why?"

Andrew still wouldn't turn around. He just stood there, fiddling with the cardboard flap.

"God, Andrew!" I screamed. I knew I was screaming, I knew I was upsetting Melanie, but I couldn't stop. The rage, the utter fury, the complete frustration had taken over. "Do you ever think about what you're doing? Did it ever occur to you to ask me what I thought about you bringing some dirty, smelly box home for our child to play in?"

"Momma!" Melanie screamed, the faucets open wide, tears streaming down her face. "You're always yelling at daddy!"

"I am not always yelling at Daddy!" I yelled at Melanie. "And I wouldn't always yell at Daddy if Daddy wasn't always doing such incredibly stupid things!"

"Okay, okay," Andrew started, apparently finally facing the fact that this wasn't all going to just go away just because he was looking in the other direction. But he still wouldn't look in my direction. Instead, he looked at red-faced, sobbing Melanie. "You're momma doesn't like the box, sweety. We'll find another one sometime."

"My box is nuh-nuh-nuh-not st-st-stupid," Melanie stuttered, her face bright red and tears pouring down her cheeks. "It's a magic box! Daddy said so."

I glared at Andrew, but he didn't look at me. I wanted him to look at me, so he could see my face. So he could see what my expression was saying: this is your fault, you stupid asshole, do something about it. Something intelligent. But he wouldn't give me the satisfaction of looking up. So, I yelled at Melanie, whose attention I could get.

"It is not a magic box, it is a dirty, moldy, nasty cardboard box your stupid father got out of the stupid trash! Some bum probably peed in it--"

Melanie looked shocked through her tears. "Nobody peed on my magic box!"

Andrew shook his head sadly, as if I was the most pathetic, most unbalanced human being on the planet. But he still wouldn't look up at me. "I stopped by Ray's warehouse, Caroline," he said regretfully, as if I had just made some foolish mistake. "I pulled it from the back. It's a little wet--the compressor is back there, it's just--"

"You brought home a box that's been soaking in freon--" I started incredulously. I admit, at this point I probably was not thinking all that clearly.

"Water, Care. A little condensation on the floor. It's not moldy--" He said that, although I clearly remember there being mold. "Just a little damp."

"Momma, don't throw away my magic box," Melanie said, chin quivering. "Please don't, it means so much to me."

Means so much to me. Sometimes I wondered where she picked that stuff up. I wondered, sometimes, if Andrew maybe coached her a little bit. But it didn't matter that night. I was pissed.

"I'm not throwing it away," I said plainly. "Daddy is. And he's going to tell you why."

"Noooo!" Melanie howled. "Don't through away my magic box! You gave it to me! It's a present for me!"

"You're mother is half-right," Andrew said, looking at Melanie. "She's not going to throw your box away. And neither am I. What I am going to do is set it outside in the garage and point a heater at it, so it dries, and dries quick. How does that sound?"

A million reasons why that was stupid--typically stupid--and dangerous and inconsiderate filled my head. It was not enough he was dragging infected trash into the house, next he was going to stick a heater on it and burn the house down. In the name of holding onto a moldy cardboard box! And it would still be old and gross and diseased, it would just be drier. But I was getting tired of arguing, and of the effect the argument was having on Melanie. One of us had to give in and, this time, it was going to be me. So instead of expressing my objections--of which I had many, fully formed and ready to launch--at his latest strategy for keeping a dirty old box for our daughter to play in, I just said: "Fine. Whatever." And turned to go upstairs.

I took a shower and put up the laundry, then I got into bed. Andrew ran Melanie's bath, dried her off, and dressed her in her pajamas. He had been doing that a lot recently. Practice, I guess, for when he would be doing it by himself Monday through Wednesday and every other Sunday.

He stayed up for an hour after putting Melanie in bed, then finally came in and settled on his side without a sound. I knew what was coming and Andrew did, too. It was just that, like everything else in our marriage, I was going to have to take responsibility for making it happen.

So, two months later, I filed for divorce. Andrew pleaded no contest and, after a week of dickering over who got what and child support and alimony, papers were signed and I was a free woman and Andrew was a free man. We sold the house and split what was left, after the loan payoff, down the middle. We both moved into apartments, neither exactly the best place to be raising a child, but we did what we could. It just hadn't been working out between us.

It’s amazing how quickly things change. One day, you're a wife in suburban house with a distant husband and something empty in the middle of your life, but all the outward appearances of the happy family. Then one morning you wake up in a small apartment in an empty bed and nobody has made coffee or used all the hot water and nobody has brought in any moldy boxes or is trying fondle your breasts while you've still got sleep in your eyes and what feels like a coat of paint in your mouth and his breath smells like he was chewing on a dead squirrel all night . . . one day, that's all gone, and you're alone and your free and the empty space is still there, and the distance that you used to worry about between you and your husband is now somehow growing between you and the rest of your life. Then one day it's a beautiful bright day with a brilliant blue sky and things are finally beginning to feel normal and you lose control driving over a bridge you've driven over a thousand times before and the distance between you and your little girl grows a thousand-fold. A million-fold. Because she's gone forever and there's no picking up the phone and calling and saying you're sorry, no changing your mind, no reconciling or re-marrying or making it all better because she's dead and you're not and it's your fault and you can't change it.

---

“Harry Houdini did the best magic in the world, he did all these dangerous tricks,” Andrew told Melanie one day. “But you know how he died?”

Melanie was wide-eyed with wonder. “How?” she asked.

“A kid from a local college—a local school—punched him in the stomach,” Andrew said. “Houdini was famous for being able to take any kind of hit to the stomach—but the kid didn’t give him time to prepare himself. He just came up and punched Houdini in the gut, out of nowhere, and it killed him. “

“Wow,” Melanie had said. “Did he get in his box? Did if fix him?”

Andrew shook his head sadly. I didn’t like these kinds of conversations, but I didn’t interrupt. Andrew had to be in charge of his own relationship with Melanie, if we weren’t going to be living together for much longer, I thought at the time. “No, there weren’t any magic boxes to fix Houdini. Though I guess you could say they put him in a magic box, after.”

“Andrew, really,” I said. He didn’t need to be talking like that around Melanie, even if she didn’t understand what he was saying, exactly.

He just shrugged, but didn’t answer me, and then turned away. Performing his own little magic trick. With nothing up his sleeve, he disappeared into his own, invisible, magic box.

That sort of thing was always happening. But then, that’s why we got divorced.

---

Andrew was really good, after. Melanie dying, it broke him in a way I never could have imagined. It destroyed me; Melanie was my life. In the years since the accident, I haven't had a life. There has been nothing but the hole where Melanie used to be. Nothing but her empty bed. Her empty plate. Her coloring book and crayons in front of the TV in the living room, the half-colored picture of Winnie the Pooh she was never going to finish. I couldn't move them. They are there right now. The video tape in the VCR is Dumbo; it was Melanie's favorite movie. She had been watching it the night before the accident. After a week or two, I had meant to clean up. To start putting things away. To accept that she was gone. But I couldn't. I couldn't punch the button on the VCR, I couldn't put away her crayons, I couldn't pick up her coloring book off the floor. Sometimes I would turn on the TV, and then just turn it off. It was on the cartoon channel. I couldn't change it. I had hated the cartoons, I had hated the cartoon channel. I had always waited for her to be distracted, or go to sleep, so that I could watch something reasonably adult. And now I couldn’t even change the channel on the television. Melanie was everything to me.

I never thought Melanie was like that to Andrew. Even when he started being more responsive, even when he finally started paying real attention to her, I never thought she was the center of his world the way she was of mine. I never thought his life would have been over, if something happened to Melanie or me, even when we were still married, I had never seen that in him. I had never seen that sort of attachment in Andrew towards anything.

But when Melanie died, it broke him. He ended up losing his job, losing his apartment, moving back to Indianapolis to stay with his widowed father. Andrew had always been into electronics and stereoes and computers, and ended up selling them all. At first, I think, to pay bills. But then because he didn't want them. Didn't want anything. Because with Melanie, none of it meant anything to him.

The last time I talked to him, just a few days ago, he was alone in his room at his father's house. There were pictures of Melanie, of course, on his bureau, but I was surprised to see he had added pictures of me, and of us all together. I was surprised, and touched, and I didn’t understand. He had never wanted to do things together, really, as a family unit. Maybe he had liked the idea of having a family, but the reality was always him puttering around upstairs or out in the garage, while Melanie and I baked cookies or I got Melanie bathed and to bed. Yet it was clear that if he hadn’t realized what he had been missing after the divorce, he realized it after Melanie died.

I knew he blamed me. How could he not? I blamed me. Any rational personal would have blamed me. Because there was something else I could have done. Something different. Something that would have saved Melanie’s life. And I hadn’t done it. Whatever it was. But he never said it. Not after the accident, not in the years since, not just a few days ago, the last time I talked to him.

“It’s not your fault,” he told me. “It’s mine. Oh, god, Care, I’m so sorry. Mel, I’m so sorry. I—“ And he broke down into tears. It has been three years, and Andrew is skinny, pale, and unhealthy. Most of the time when I talk to him, he’s on the verge of tears or sobbing like a baby. I can’t blame him; I can’t say that I’m better. Because I’m not. The cocky, arrogant Andrew who was so busy, with too many important things to do with his life is gone. He died with Melanie. The Andrew that replaced him is empty and miserable, and I don’t care much for him. But I thought then, and I think now, that this day—that what I have to do today—maybe that will help. I know it will help me—it will end my pain. It will complete me. And maybe it will help Andrew, too. Perhaps when I am gone for good, Andrew will finally be able to move on.

He has told me that he wishes things had been different. That he is sure Melanie wouldn’t have died, if we had stayed together, and that we would have stayed together, if he had been there for us. If he had been the husband and father he should have been. I try and tell him that he’s wrong, that it wasn’t his fault, that we had just grown apart. But he doesn’t really hear me. As difficult as Andrew had been during the marriage, it is terrible for me to see him suffer now. But I can’t console him. But I remember now what I saw in Andrew. What I fell in love with. What had made me think that, together, we’d make a wonderful child—which was something that, no matter what else was wrong with our marriage, we certainly did. I am sorry that what I saw, that man I saw and fell in love with, was absent for most of our marriage. And so is he. But it is too late to change what has happened. You can’t go back.

At the end of my day with Andrew, I kissed him goodbye. He barely noticed—and I believe, maybe, it made him sad. He knew, I think, this was the last time I would see him. That it had been too long, and there was nothing here for me at all, and I had to go. I didn’t say it like that; I couldn’t. But I think he understood.

---

So I’m standing on the pedestrian walkway, right there. At the beam where it happened. Looking down into the deep, brackish water, and I know she’s there. I feel her there. Waiting for her Mommy. I can almost see her there, swimming slowly, still holding her breath after all this time—Like Houdini, she’s in her magic box, deep under the water, waiting for me to come and clap and tell her how good it was. So the trick will be over, and she can magically reappear. Or I can magically disappear. Or both.

I feel dizzy, looking down at the water. I feel sick. The traffic is light and the sky is cloudless. I know today is the day, and I know what I have to do. I know why. I’ve felt Melanie waiting for me, looking for me in that cold, dark water, since the day she died. And even though I know why, I still doubt it. Even now, I’m not sure. Do they see me, this crazy woman, climbing over the railing, lowering herself to the insubstantial catwalk below? Are they going to try and stop me, come running after me, begging me not to jump?

No, they won’t. I know they won’t. This is what I have to do. This is what I’m supposed to do. It’s what I was supposed to do the day it happened. I just didn’t. I was still doubting up until a few moments ago, the thing that was only clear to me a few days ago, when I saw this day coming. When I saw it driving down the road, on a beautiful, cool September day, cool and clear and peaceful. But I can’t doubt it now.

I see it clearly in my mind today. I remember waking up in the hospital. When I asked, so desperate, so terrified, about my precious Melanie. And the doctor told me she was dead. So callous. So cold. She looked down at me—poking me, prodding me, even resting her clipboard on my stomach. “They found her in the water--she got caught on one of the pilings under the bridge," she said, matter-of-factly. "Multiple contusions and abrasions, we assume from the initial impact—she went through the windshield, but I’m sure she broke her neck and sustained these skull fractures here—" And she pointed at me with a pen, and then moved it slightly. “—and here, either immediately after being ejected from the car, or during her fall.”

A studious looking Indian man came around the other side, looking at me thoughtfully. “With such head trauma, there must have been significant hemorrhaging,” he said. “Most of the blood must have been washed away?”

The doctor pulled at my eyelid. Though I couldn’t feel it, I knew she was not being gentle. “Plenty of blood to go around,” she said. And then something was thrown over me, and it was dark.

And I was talking to Andrew, but he didn’t answer. He never answered, he never talked much, but he didn’t even acknowledge me now. Because he couldn’t. He didn’t hear me. Because I’m dead.

And I remember being in the car, seeing two of my teeth in the ashtray, seeing the blood on the steering wheel. And I got out, I know I did. But I don’t remember opening the door. Maybe I didn’t. And I remember the cars stopping, the traffic backing up on the bridge, the people getting out of their cars. Coming towards me.

“I don’t see anybody,” the fat man with the black horn-rims said.

"There's a little kid," a man in a brown tweed coat was said.

There’s somebody else—an older woman, in jeans and a t-shirt. I had forgotten her. “She went sailing, hit that up there—went down like a rock.”

“Ma’am?” the man in the glasses asked her.

“It was a woman, driving the car—she went right out the windshield. I saw it and I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s dead.”

"Smell gasoline," the old man in the red flannel shirt said. "Gonna catch a fire, might blow."

"Little girl!" the man in the brown tweed coat was shouting. "No! Stop! Don't move, we'll get you!"

“Momma!” Melanie shouted.

And I remember sitting in my apartment, looking at the small but wonderful life Melanie and I had been making together. Simple, but good. But now, even though I wanted to, I couldn't punch the button on the VCR, I couldn't put away her crayons, I couldn't pick up her coloring book off the floor. I couldn’t change the channel on the TV. Because I wasn’t there.

And I remember, now, Melanie’s funeral. Sitting there with Andrew and his family, as Andrew sat, stone faced, staring the coffins. The two coffins. One of them was empty. They had not found Melanie’s body after the accident. But of course they hadn’t. She had disappeared—it was a magic trick. She couldn’t be found; she could only reappear. Reappear one day, so I could laugh and clap. And I remember hearing Andrew say how wonderful Melanie was, and how much he loved her, and how much he’ll miss her, and I wanted to cry, but somehow I just couldn’t do it. And then he surprised me and broke my heart and made me love and hate him all over again—he told them all what a good mother I was. He told them what a good wife I was. How missed we will be. The both of us. Caroline and Melanie Trimble. Together in Heaven.

Only he’s wrong. I’m not with Melanie. Melanie is far away from me. She got in her magic box and hid so well, they couldn’t find her. Even I couldn’t find her, for a long time. But now I think I know. I know where she’s hiding. Now Mommy can find her baby. Mommy can find Melanie.

Which is why I’m standing here, peering over the side, able to see the cars even though, from this low catwalk I really shouldn’t, and I see the car I’ve been waiting for. The black Volvo, driving forward safely, under the speed limit, across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. I wait, now. The time is so close. I know it’s coming. One heartbeat. Two heartbeats.

The tire explodes. The Volvo veers into the steel beam—and I see her, I see myself, Caroline Trimble shoot out through the windshield like a rocket, folded over and twisted by the speed of the impact . I hit a strut sticking out from the beam, and I hit it hard. There is blood, and my head is at an impossible angle as my body descends down, towards me and now I grab onto it. I grab onto it, holding on tighter than I ever have to anything in my life, and I plunge into the dark, cold water. And I feel it—the coldness. The pain. The numbness. The tight, steel cables looped around my chest and squeezing the air out of my lungs. I can’t move, although I’m trying. I can’t see anything, and all I hear is water. I try to open my eyes, I try to kick or punch or swim or shout—I try to do something, anything, but nothing is cooperating, nothing is moving. It’s so dark, it’s so cold, it’s so terrible and alone, I want to cry out. I want to take it all back. I want to do it all over again.

But then I feel a small hand on my shoulder. And there’s a soft light—blue and green, flickering through the water. And it gets brighter, as the hand turns me around. I knew the hand when it touched me, and, finally, I see her. And it’s really her. My Melanie, in her pretty dress, her chestnut-colored hair swirling around her head in the water, her round cheeks and big, dimpled smile. My sweet Melanie.

And now I can cry. And I do. I cry, and I sob, and I can move my arms and I throw them around my sweet Melanie and I hug her so hard.

“You took so long, momma,” Melanie tells me. “I was lonely.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” I am crying. There is water all around, and I know there is, but I can feel the tears on my cheeks.

“It’s okay, momma,” she says, nodding. “You’re here now.”

I squeeze her again, and she squeezes me back. “I love you so much, Melanie. So much. I can’t tell you how much—how much you mean to me. I missed you so bad.”

“I followed you,” she said. “I saw you go and I just wanted to go, too. But I couldn’t find you.”

“I know you did, Mel. I’m so sorry. Mommy is so sorry.”

“It’s okay, Momma,” she says, smiling. “I was just waiting in my magic box. Waiting for you to reappear me. And you came. I knew you would.”

“I did, sweetie, I did,” I say, and she kisses my cheek and I kiss hers. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I’m late. So sorry for everything.”

“I know, Mommy,” and she hugs me, and I hug her, and we’re floating upwards. It’s getting lighter, and lighter, and soon we’ll break the surface. The distance—the terrible distance, the only one that ever mattered—is gone. Whatever else happens, whatever happens next, I know that this is how it will be. It will be us together, forever, in Houdini’s box.