The Museum of Ordinary Time

I was at the church rummage sale to photograph the bake-off my editor sent me to cover, because the city will always prefer a picture of a toddler with frosting on her nose when a council meeting looms. Heat clung to the parking lot, bees buzzed around big jars of peach preserves, and the hem of my jeans soaked up rainwater from last night's storm.

On a table of broken things sat the camera. A Rolleiflex. Cracked leatherette. Dust in its seams. The kind of object that feels like a keyhole into someone else's life.

"Fifty," the church lady said. "Does not work. Beautiful, though."

That was true.

When you hold a Rolleiflex at your waist and open the hood, it feels like lifting a lid on another world. The glass square inside becomes a small, silent doorway. Whatever is in front of you rises into it, left and right reversed. I expected frosting, bees, Father Miguel judging pies.

Instead, the light inside the square changed.

The bees stilled. The voices softened. The parking lot slid away like a photograph peeled from wet paper.

A new room appeared.

Light from a winter window cut the scene into a kaleidoscope of geometric light. A kettle breathed its first whisper on a stove I’d never owned. A pot of something orange, soup, maybe – steamed gently. There was a bookshelf built into the wall, neat as a mouth with even teeth. On the smallest shelf, a ceramic figure of a dog leaned like it had something to say.

And there was Leo.

Sitting on the floor. Cradling a baby.

He had a sweater I’d never seen before, oatmeal cable-knit, sleeves pushed to his elbows, and he was making a face I had seen: that strange, reverent panic of someone who knows they’re holding a detonator, except the bomb is swaddled and sighing. He touched his nose to the baby’s forehead and smiled the kind of smile you only make when you think no one is watching you from 1977.

"Hey, bean," he said.

His voice lived in the glass, not in the air around me.

My hands went cold.

The kettle in that other room began to boil. Steam fogged the edges of the frame.

The bake-off slammed back into my eyes: bees, sun, kids with dissolving frosting, Father Miguel raising a thumb caked in blue to tell me the pie was fine. The glass in the camera was dull again.

I bought the Rolleiflex for fifty.

Of course I did.

By the time I got back to the apartment, the sun had decided it was tired of us. Leo was on the balcony, coaxing basil to grow out of a too small pot. He waved with the hand that didn’t hold a beer.

"Did you get the prizewinning tart?" he asked.

"I got a camera."

"I hope you did not pay more than five dollars."

"Fifty."

He grinned. "You owe me dessert."

"It is important," I said. "Come inside."

He followed me without asking questions because Leo had always been brave that way. I set the camera on the kitchen table between the avocado with a bruise and an unopened bill from the electric company. I flipped open the hood and pointed the lens toward him. He did finger guns at it.

"Do not move," I said.

I looked.

Light rose. The same winter room bloomed inside the frame. The same kettle. The same bookshelf. The ceramic dog. And Leo, again, on the floor, holding a baby.

Leo beside me asked quietly, "What do you see?"

"You are in another kitchen," I said. "There is a bookshelf. You are sitting on the floor. You are holding a baby."

He gave me that careful look people save for those who believe in conspiracies.

"Whose baby?" he asked.

The room in the glass fogged with steam. Gone.

"Whose?" he asked again, in our kitchen, with basil wilting and the electric bill glaring in bold font.

I did not have the right answer.

The next week, everything divided itself into before and after. That is how it always goes. The revelation does not sit with you. It stands, taps its watch, and waits for you to follow it through a door you did not know you had been pacing in front of.

I do not recommend visions for people who like to sleep. I carried the camera into every room like it was a relic, and I am not even the religious one. Our apartment never appeared in the glass. Neither did the church parking lot. The view through the Rolleiflex was always the same winter-bright room, always the same corner with the built-in bookshelf, the ceramic dog, and the kettle. Sometimes the camera offered the room without people. Sometimes it set the stage, a blanket on the floor, a bottle rinsed in the sink, the kettle cooling its temper. Sometimes Leo's hands appeared first, then the rest of him, crouching carefully as if not to wake something.

The baby was new every time.

New in the way newborns are new, and also in the way snowfalls are new. One had a scratch on the cheek. One was dark-haired. One worked at a fist with the solemnity of a philosopher. The baby always wore a small knit cap with ears. The ears were gray once, yellow another time, then a green that hurt my feelings on a Tuesday.

I started making a list of things I could see beyond the people, the way you write everything down after a car accident. There was a lemon tree outside the window, leaves so glossy they looked fake. The ceramic dog was a spaniel with its head cocked. A corkboard speckled with receipts and scraps of paper held a ticket stub that read, in tiny print, SALT LAKE CITY to DENVER. The kettle was old and dented, the kind of thing you inherit from someone who believes you will inherit their life.

That week, I received a free sample of cinnamon-flavored dental floss in the mail. That has nothing to do with anything except to say the ordinary kept insisting, the way the ordinary does. I covered an overnight warehouse fire and photographed a ladder propped against smoke. I interviewed a man whose business, apparently, had always been flammable. Leo came with me to the grocery store and tried to sneak a bunch of radishes into the cart.

"They are not contraband," he said. "They can be legally enjoyed by consenting adults."

There is a saying that jealousy enters like a thief with a crowbar. Mine arrived politely. It rang the bell and folded its hands. It waited in the hall while I tried to be normal. It nodded when I spilled sugar on the counter. At night, jealousy sat on the edge of the bed and watched the ceiling with me.

I did not ask Leo if he wanted children. We asked each other that years ago. We said maybe. We said perhaps when we can afford takeout more than once a month. We said someday, the way people say someday about Iceland.

I did ask if he knew anyone with a lemon tree. He shrugged.

"We could have a lemon tree if I did not live under the tyrannical drought conditions of your watering schedule."

"Do you own a cable-knit sweater?" I asked.

"I own one sweater. The blue one you keep borrowing. Are you having an affair with a winter catalog?"

By Wednesday, my list included a dent in the baseboard and a crack in the paint near the door that looked like a map of Albania. Grief makes you practical in strange ways. I told Leo I had to go shoot a night market. He kissed my forehead like I was something breakable and went back to repairing the toaster with a butter knife, which is a way of flirting with death.

I took the Rolleiflex and the list and drove toward the part of town where lemon trees could be that glossy and bookshelves were custom, not IKEA. I do not know what I thought I was doing. There is no GPS for an impossible room. But if you have ever fallen in love and mistaken it for an address, you understand.

I did not find the room.

I found other rooms. Real estate showings with staged bowls of lemons. Television screens flickering blue over strangers' lives. People behind curtains whispering to dogs and not calling them ceramic. I stood in a neighborhood with an evangelical love of cul-de-sacs and imagined all the kettles.

My phone buzzed. A message from my mother: It is Claire. Call me.

I called.

Her voice sounded like a glass held under running water, too full to steady.

"There was an accident," she said. "It is not good. We are at St. Joseph's."

By the time I reached the hospital, I had nothing to offer the universe but my legs. The elevator considered mercy, then decided against it. On the third floor, I found my mother sitting next to Claire, who was unconscious, her chest rising with the machines. A cup of Jell-O sat untouched on the table.

"The baby came early."

She looked like someone trying not to drown, trying to stay noble and still.

"They are doing everything. Claire... she... she..."

The sentence slipped beneath the surface and never came back.

I had no words. I held my mother with clumsy arms and tried to be a life preserver.

Leo came into the hospital like a burst of light. He listened with his whole body. When he covered my hand with his, that touch was the only dam holding back the flood. If I let go in front of my mother, I would take her under too.

We waited until waiting became the protagonist. In the soft hum of machines that spoke in beeps and breaths. My mother cupped a mug of tea and forgot to drink. When we finally convinced her to rest, I walked to the window and held the camera to my chest.

I opened the hood.

Light filled the glass.

I did not see the winter room.

I saw Claire.

She was sitting beside a bassinet with walls like a tiny aquarium. Inside was the baby.

Too small.

Then the room wavered and the winter light fell back into the square.

Leo and I took turns sleeping on the couch in the NICU waiting room while the other sat with my sister. We learned the nurses' names and the politics of the monitors. The baby did not have a name yet. In my head I called her Bean. She was strong in ways that had nothing to do with size. She gripped my finger like she trusted the world. And when Claire was finally well enough to go home, she could not take her baby with her.

We returned daily. The ups and downs of babies in the NICU do not honor office hours. Claire cried standing up, sitting down, mid-sentence, mid-laugh.

We took turns holding hope up to the light, watching how it fractured.

"I did not know you could be this tired and still be made of love," she told me.

I mentioned our mother and her favorite warning, "You will see." We laughed the way people do when the alternative is somewhere you cannot stay for long.

On the sixtieth day in the NICU, the monitor’s beeps were no longer a source of anxiety. A nurse showed my sister how to swaddle a baby properly, like wrapping a burrito you truly did not want your soul to spill out of. The doctor said words like discharge planning, home, and checkups, and I watched them settle into my sister like a song.

I was alone when the kettle began to breathe.

Not my kettle. Ours. The cheap electric one with an auto-off so strict it never forgot its job. It sounded like my name in my mother's mouth, back when I could not yet say it myself.

I drifted to the kitchen table. The camera was waiting. I lifted the hood.

There it was again.

The room.

Not redesigned. Just lived in. Softened by love.

The corkboard had grown more memories. The lemon tree's leaves reflected the light. The ceramic spaniel now wore a scarf.

And the baby, gray hat, little ears, small sounds, gurgled in a nest of blankets on the floor, as if she had always been there.

Leo, in the oatmeal sweater, sat beside her. He looked up before I could say his name, and in that precise, impossible second, he saw me the way he sometimes sees me in a crowded street.

"Iris," he said. Not to the air, not dreamlike or distant, but to me, as if I were in the room.

He set a hand on the baby and leaned forward. The glass was small. He became larger within it, careful, like approaching a bird you did not want to startle.

"If you are there," he said softly, "we are okay."

Something happened then that I have written and erased twenty times because the words kept trying to be special and the moment refused to be anything but specific. On the table in the room that was not here, a library book lay open beneath a coffee mug. The jacket was blue. The title was The Museum of Ordinary Time. The author's name was my mother's maiden name. I was certain of that, even though I did not remember ever reading it. Behind Leo, a bruise-colored storm cloud gathered outside the window. The kettle did not whistle so much as confess. The baby made a noise like a new hinge.

"Her name is Lucia," Leo said. He rubbed two fingers over his mouth the way he does when thinking. He was not looking at me. He was looking at Lucia. "We ended up with two sweaters somehow, but do not worry. She will spit up on both."

"Where is this?" I asked. My throat was raw.

He paused. He tilted his head like the ceramic dog and did something that broke me. He looked off to the side as though recalling a script he had promised someone he would speak, then ignored it.

"Home," he said. "A different home. The kind with a lemon tree I will absolutely kill by accident."

"I did not know," I said to the glass. "I thought..." I stopped. I had thought he was loving someone else. That is the gentlest way to say something not gentle.

"I know what you thought," he said. "It is all right. It is hard to see through a keyhole. You catch a piece, and it looks like the whole story. We just keep doing the next right thing. Even when we cannot see the door."

Lucia sneezed. It sounded like a mouse exploding confetti. Leo laughed, the sound bending in the camera like light in water.

"Bless you, Bear," he said.

Later that week, Claire asked if Leo and I could take Lucia for a few hours. She was exhausted in a way that makes saints kneel. We said yes. We had always said yes to Claire. Rides, loans, nights on the green couch. This yes felt different. Like a cable locking into place on a suspension bridge. Something engineered. Something inevitable.

Lucia came home with us in a car seat. She slept the whole drive. Her cheek rested against her fist like a question.

I carried her upstairs and realized the apartment had never, until that moment, had texture. The basil plant lifted its leaves as if to greet her.

In the living room, Leo spread a blanket on the floor. I made tea because I did not know what else to do and because the kettle clearly wanted to be part of the story now. Lucia woke and stared at me with the solemn curiosity of someone new to the concept of faces.

"We could name a dog after you," I told her. "We are not ready for a lemon tree."

Leo snorted. He lay on his side next to Lucia and watched her the way you watch fire.

People love the part of the story where everything unravels. Not enough attention is given to what comes after. The braided cord. The slow reweaving.

We moved three months later, when a rental found us. It had a bookshelf built into the wall. The lemon tree appeared from a man wearing a hat who called it she. The ceramic spaniel appeared at a yard sale, because the world is sneaky and generous.

When winter came, the light in the kitchen made geometry. The kettle found its voice again. I opened the camera because I could not help myself.

The square filled with our room, and, inside it, a version of our room with slightly less clutter, fewer bills on the counter, more quiet.

Sometimes I saw us. Sometimes I saw only the room, reminding me we had survived the first unraveling and would survive the next. Sometimes the glass was only a dim square.

That was all right too.