Sing You Home Read Free

you?”
    Mr. Docker doesn’t respond.
    The maraca has landed on the pillow of his bed. “I’m just going to reach behind you, here, and get the instrument,” I say carefully, and as I do, he takes another swing at me. This time I stumble, crashing into the table and overturning his breakfast tray.
    “What is going on in here?” Wanda cries, bursting through the door. She looks at me, at the mess on the floor, and then at Mr. Docker.
    “We’re okay,” I tell her. “Everything’s okay.”
    Wanda takes a long, pointed look at my belly. “You sure?”
    I nod, and she backs out of the room. This time, I sit gingerly on the edge of the radiator in front of the window. “Mr. Docker,” I ask softly, “what’s wrong?”
    When he faces me, his eyes are bright with tears and lucidity. He lets his gaze roam the room—from its institutional curtains to the emergency medical equipment in the cabinet behind the bed to the plastic pitcher of water on the nightstand. “Everything,” he says tightly.
    I think about this man, who once was written up in Money and Fortune. Who used to command thousands of employees and whose days were spent in a richly paneled corner office with a plush carpet and a leather swivel chair. For a moment, I want to apologize for taking out my guitar, for unlocking his blocked mind with music.
    Because there are some things we’d rather forget.
    The doll that I buried at a neighbor’s house on the day my father died was called Sweet Cindy. I had begged for her the previous Christmas, completely suckered by the television ads that ran on Saturday mornings between cartoons. Sweet Cindy could eat and drink and poop and tell you that she loved you. “Can she fix a carburetor?” my father had joked, when I showed him my Christmas list. “Can she clean the bathroom?”
    I had a history of treating dolls badly. I cut off my Barbie dolls’ hair with fingernail scissors. I decapitated Ken, although in my defense that had been an accident involving a fall from a bicycle basket. But Sweet Cindy I treated like my own baby. I tucked her each night into a crib that was set beside my own bed. I bathed her every day. I pushed her up and down the driveway in a stroller we’d bought at a garage sale.
    On the day of my father’s death, he’d wanted to go for a bike ride. It was beautiful out; I had just gotten my training wheels removed. But I’d told my father that I was playing with Cindy, and maybe we could go later. “Sounds like a plan, Zo,” he had said, and he’d started to mow the back lawn, and of course there was no later.
    If I had never gotten Sweet Cindy for Christmas.
    If I’d said yes to my father when he asked.
    If I’d been watching him, instead of playing with the doll.
    There were a thousand permutations of behavior that, in my mind, could have saved my father’s life—and so, although it was too late, I told myself I’d never wanted that stupid doll in the first place, that she was the reason my father wasn’t here anymore.
    The first time it snowed after my father died, I had a dream that Sweet Cindy was sitting on my bed. Crows had pecked out her blue-marble eyes. She was shivering.
    The next day I took a garden spade from the garage and walked to the neighbor’s house where I’d buried her. I dug up the snow and the mulch from half of the hedgerow, but the doll was gone. Carried away by a dog, maybe, or a little girl who knew better.
    I know it’s stupid for a forty-year-old woman to connect a foolish act of grief with four unsuccessful cycles of IVF, two miscarriages, and enough infertility issues to bring down a civilization—but I cannot tell you how many times I’ve wondered if this is some kind of karmic punishment.
    If I hadn’t so recklessly abandoned the first baby I ever loved, would I have a real one by now?
    By the time my session with Mr. Docker ends, his daughter Mim has rushed from her ladies’ auxiliary meeting to Shady Acres. “Are you sure you didn’t