Warmth

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. Waves of green light, like brisk streams in the air, flowed steadily. Someone from a long time ago told him that these soothing Northern Lights were actually the result of a quite violent atmospheric phenomenon: particles from the sun slamming into the atmosphere, sinking into its cracks at the Earth's poles, drowning into an endless sky. He didn't want to remember. He would've seen them if he had looked up before walking into the liquor store—but he stopped looking up a while ago.

The man pulled his six-pack from the counter, pushed past the door onto the dimly-lit sidewalk, and started back towards his apartment. Snow scratched at his face as he walked past a small pink boot that lay forgotten on the curb. He shivered, pulling up his scarf with shaking fingers as he crossed the street.

He wished he could have gone to the craft store instead. He missed the well-stocked aisles, so tall they blocked some of the light from the fixtures on the ceiling. When he first started building ships in bottles—a miniature desk hobby turned ardent apprenticeship—he would buy jugs and craft wood there. He would go once every two months or so, investing in eccentric bottles and stained oak. When he was in his thirties, it would take him several weeks to complete a ship, each different from the last. For one, he strung up as many masts as he could fit into the jug. Another time, he painted white waves on the hull.

At fifty-one, he completed three ships per evening. Beer bottles were the obvious choice since he no longer could afford designer glass, so this meant a six-pack could last him two nights. He stole toothpicks from the office supply store he’d been working at for the past twenty years. Now, instead of carefully crafting beautiful ships in bottles, he frantically produced them—manufactured them, the bottles always green, the vessels always with one tall mast. Sloppy. Ugly. They flooded the floor of his single-bedroom apartment. As he rode the elevator up to the third story of his complex, facing away from the fingerprint grease-smeared mirrors on the back wall of the cab, he flipped open his Swiss Army knife and opened a beer. The bottle was half-empty by the time he reached the door of his residence. He fumbled with his set of keys for a few minutes, hand shaking as he raised it to meet the lock. He opened the door.

It took him a long time to notice the fox on the couch. He first had to sidestep the bottles that lapped at his feet, almost tripping over them as he entered. With two fingers he flicked on the lights, which were dim at first, but slowly grew brighter with each breath he took. His coat—a disgusting, grey length of fabric—found its way onto the hook to the left of the door, right above a chartreuse raincoat. He shivered as the back of his hand grazed the green plastic. His shoes stayed on, wet charcoal footprints following him as he walked past the kitchenette. Then, he set the six-pack of beer next to the brown leather La-Z-Boy in the center of the living room.

It was only when he let himself smack into the seat of his recliner and lifted the lever that he finally spotted the white silhouette against the yellowing wallpaper in his peripheral vision. His surprise jolted him into the backrest of the recliner, tipping it backwards. He scrambled to his feet.

The man, a Chicago native, had only seen a fox once before. When he was seven, his dad took him to the Buffalo Zoo and he spent the whole day in the arctic exhibit—he watched the polar bears, arctic foxes, penguins, and seals sleep for hours. But he had never come across one that was awake, let alone believed that he could find one in his own apartment. So the man sprinted into the kitchen to find some sort of weapon he could use, just in case the fox decided to attack, though he wasn’t sure if it would. He had to open a few drawers before he remembered that he lacked a silverware set. After ruffling through another couple of drawers—finding nothing but toothpicks and plastic cutlery—the man settled for the saucepan on the stovetop. With King Arthur-like ease, he lifted the pan, flung the leftover Chinese food it cradled into the sink, and ran back into the living room. A single noodle stubbornly clung to the handle.

By the time he had returned to the living room, saucepan in hand, the fox was already gone. After checking the closet and underneath the recliner, he figured the fox may have wandered into the dust-coated bathtub by accident. So he tiptoed the fifteen-foot walk to the bathroom. He quietly turned the doorknob. A deep breath in. Then, he flung the door open.

The bathroom was empty. He didn’t even have his own reflection to accompany him—the bathroom was mirrorless. Surrounded by chilled tiles, the man picked up a blue monogrammed towel from the frozen floor. He fingered the initials: E.J.C.

The man used to be named Elias. Just like his wife used to be named Katherine. But all that had changed on a Friday in December, snow cracking under the man’s mismatched socks as he hurled himself up the driveway to a pregnant, irritated Katherine waiting in the doorframe of their small suburban Chicago home.

“You’re late again, Eli.” This he knew. He also knew that the apology speech he needed to deliver would last another five minutes—five minutes they didn’t have. Which is why, instead of acknowledging his lateness in that particular moment, he instead kissed her on the cheek, flung the purse she had been holding over his shoulder, and gingerly yet hurriedly ushered her into the humming Toyota Camry stationed at the end of the driveway. He began the soliloquy as he put the car in drive:

“I’m sorry I’m late. Adam asked if I could take on extra performance reports this quarter, since Aisha quit and Jake racked enough days up for his paid vacation. You know if I get promoted from brainless analyst to less brainless exec it won’t just help the two of us out—”

“—but the three of us, yes, I’m familiar with your catchphrase, Eli.” She rolled her mossy eyes so far back into her head that they almost disappeared. “You can’t keep using the baby as an excuse for taking on more hours at work. He? She? They? Can’t grow up without you.”

“I know. And I’ll be there—they’re only making me spend more time in the office to prove that I can handle the job. If I do land the promotion, they’ll let me work from home more. So by the time he? she? they? is born, that won’t be a problem anymore.”

This was a half-truth. Though the firm would let him work off-site more often, Adam said he’d have to come in to personally manage the analysts as they wrapped up their reports each month. You’d be surprised how many of the newbies mess up the numbers, Adam once told him. Nobody can go home until their stupid mistakes are fixed. Apparently college debt still can’t get you skills in Microsoft Excel. Which is why, after Adam told him that he was the top choice for the position, he added a flannel-lined sleeping bag into his Amazon shopping cart.

“I don’t care where you work, as long as we both work less. I emailed the lab earlier today to tell them I’m dropping one of the Chemistry Lab class sections. They were pissed, but they need me. I’m sure Ipreo would feel the same about your hours.”

“You’re right. I’ll ask Adam tomorrow.” This was a lie.

As they turned into the sparsely-populated parking lot, he caught himself wondering again if it would be so bad if the baby grew up without him. There would be less of a chance that he, uncoordinated, would accidentally drop the baby on his or her head. Or that he would stub his toe and screech, “FUCK!” with the baby looking up from a stuffed elephant just long enough to see the word on his lips. He would love the baby—but maybe it would be safer for everybody if he just did it from afar.

He was still entertaining this idea even by the time the receptionist had called out their names, phrased like a question, “Katherine and Elias?” And he only stopped seeing the mishaps unfold in his head when the shaky doctor traced the wand over Katherine’s stomach.

“Well, she’s beautiful, alright.”

“She?” Katherine’s face lit up the way he loved: slowly at first, then all the Christmas lights shined at once in her eyes. He saw her designing the baby’s room while she lay on the table—she painted it a soft pink and stuck butterfly decals on the walls, filling it with Barbies and Kens and a short plastic stovetop. As she reached for his hand and squeezed it, he tried not to lose himself in his visions of the baby choking on a pink Lego.

He remembered the drive home that evening being filled with names—

“Well, my grandmother’s name was Marie, and I’ve always loved that name! It’s so classic. Or, we could go for something more modern. Auden? Cleo? Shit, I knew I should’ve checked out that book on baby names from the library last week. I think some part of me knew she was going to be a girl. Is that weird? Oh! I know! What about…”

—and then, every drive to and from the doctor after that was filled with names—

“I finally remembered to check out that book. Hmm… I like how Lena sounds, but not how it looks. I guess you can spell it L-I-N-A, too, but for some reason that’s giving me bad vibes. Never mind, she’s definitely not a Lina. I’ll just keep this in your glove compartment…”

—until the last drive to the hospital. Then they forgot how the shapes of their embroidered letters felt on terrycloth.

At last, the man placed the towel back onto its hook, deciding he must have imagined the fox into existence, and returned to the living room. He unbuttoned his blue shirt cuffs, rolled them up past his elbows, and pushed the La-Z-Boy up off of the floor. Sprawling onto it, he let the saucepan lay in his lap, his head offset to pacify the whiplash and the bombarding questions about the origins of the white fox. Mindlessly, his fingers found the noodle on the handle of the pan and carefully untangled it. As he slowly lowered the noodle into his mouth, he found the black speck of paint on the blank stucco ceiling that he often stared at when in full recline.

This was where he liked to remember. He liked to lose himself in the infinite space between the dot and his nose, where it was snowy but still warm enough for the brave to wear chartreuse raincoats. He liked to reopen the poorly-wrapped gift box that cradled the raincoat over and over in his mind. Each time, he watched as a younger version of himself sat on a tall, backless stool—“Daddy’s chair,” his daughter had called it. The wicker-backed high top chair with the armrests was called “Mommy’s chair,” and the height-adjusting bar stool was “Baby’s chair” because she was too light to force the seat down, so pulling the lever was the ignition that skyrocketed her into the air. They all sat along the kitchen counter with a funfetti cake as he blew out thirty-one mismatched candles. And even though it was January—far too cold, especially by Chicago’s standards, to be wearing a raincoat in place of a properly glorified sleeping bag—he saw it fitting to wear the product of the four-year-old’s taste to the ice fishing excursion his wife had organized for his birthday.

The man let the black speck of paint come back into focus. He never let the memory go much further than this, preferring to preserve the sepia images of his family in this eternal darkroom. Each time he opened the door to them, they got a little more textured—a little more wrong. Which is why, as of late, he had tried to remember less and less. If the sepia got any fuzzier, he wouldn’t be able to remember at all.

Restoring the recliner to its original position, the man rested his blue shirt cuffs on his thighs and framed his hairline with his furled hands. The man sat like this, at the gate of eternity, for about half a minute before he finally moved his knuckles from his eyes to his temples. He was tired, but anxiously animated—something he hadn’t felt since the first week of Baby’s existence.

He remembered how, during the first few days, he kept track of the number of Red Bull energy drinks he consumed—he’d heard from Adam, whose wife had just given birth, that Red Bull intake and parental effectiveness resembled somewhat of a bell curve when plotted on an X-Y axis. “Peak parental effectiveness,” Adam explained, could be achieved somewhere between Red Bull number five and six, but anything past seven would make even the most steady hands unable to successfully put keys in a door lock.

By day four, he was clocking in at eight Red Bulls per day. At that point, it was as if his eyes had been replaced by tennis balls. It felt fuzzy in his eye sockets but he could never fully satisfy the itch. He tried picking up a pencil, once, but forgot how to even hold it. When he tried to write down a note for himself to help him remember the grocery list, he lost his train of thought halfway through it, and ended up with a string of jumbled letters he didn’t recognize.

“Maybe you should start drinking sugar-free?” Katherine teased, sitting down on the edge of the bed closest to the door. She glanced at the empty cans on his bedside table with equal parts admiration and concern.

“Still better than aspartame.”

“You know that stuff doesn’t actually cause cancer, right?” She chuckled.

“Really?”

“Yeah. A couple of kids from the lab proved it a few months ago. They asked me to double-check their numbers.”

“Oh.” Preferring to be safe than sorry, he figured he’d stick with the full-sugar version. He rubbed his eyes. “How’s it going in there?”

She looked confused for a second. He couldn’t understand why. The light in her eyes had almost imperceptibly dimmed. But he noticed.

“How’s it going in there? Aurora is a living, breathing baby, Eli! Who you’ve barely even touched since we’ve been back home. You can’t just keep running to fetch the diapers and toys and pretend like that’s going to be enough for her. She needs to know you.” Katherine was blinking more slowly now, her eyes heavy with fatigue. She took a few deep breaths, inhaling for three, exhaling for five. After a few cycles, she let out a whisper. “Sometimes I feel like I’m doing this alone.” She wasn’t looking at him.

He felt his chest tighten. A chill sped along his back.

“No, I…” He sighed. Eli took her hands out of her lap to hold them between his, resting his elbows on his knees. He looked up past her chin into her eyes and drew a shaky breath. “Did I ever tell you about this one time when I was seven, when my parents took me to the zoo?”

And he told her the story of the Arctic Edge exhibit at the Buffalo Zoo—how he stood in front of the arctic fox enclosure for an hour even though there were only two foxes, and both were asleep. How his eyes noticed movement in the reflection of the glass barrier, how he turned to watch a man reach for his daughter seconds too late after she tipped over the guardrail to the polar bear enclosure. How he hadn’t heard a scream like that man’s since.

They sat in silence for a few minutes before she spoke again. “You don’t think I’m scared, too? That I don’t worry that one day, she’ll run across the street without holding my hand? That I’ll go to pick her up from school but they’ll tell me that they didn’t know she had peanut allergies? I’m terrified, Eli, just like you. But she’s our baby. We’re the only ones who can save her.”

A tear slipped down his cheek. “I know. I’m sorry.” He recognized the tired in her eyes, and now noticed something he’d never seen in them before: hesitance. Fear. He kissed her hands and placed them back into her lap. “I think you should get some sleep. I’ve got it from here.”

“You sure?” She asked, while slowly falling backwards onto the mattress. By the time he responded, she was already cocooned under the comforter.

“I’m sure.”

They exchanged goodnights. He gently squeezed her foot, and then stood. On his way out, he turned off the lights, grabbed his briefcase and a vinyl record, and pulled the door shut behind him. His fuzzy socks tiptoed along the short hardwood hallway to the nursery. When he reached it, he paused for a second. He quietly turned the doorknob. A deep breath in. Then, he slowly pushed it open.

Aurora was sleeping in the crib on the right side of the room. Had Eli not been uncoordinated, he might’ve been able to maintain her state of sleeping, but instead he tripped on the toe slack of his fuzzy sock and fell to the floor. The room erupted. He felt himself sinking back into his anxiety. She would’ve been safer if you left her alone. But he wasn’t about to lose.

Instead, he picked himself up off of the floor and coaxed the vinyl record out of its sleeve. He clicked open his briefcase, plugging its cord into the outlet nearest the crib. As he placed the record onto the peg of his portable Crosley, he smirked—nobody at work knew his secret, because he was never actually required to use anything that a briefcase might hold. Pens and pencils were supplied, and he was given his own desktop computer in his cubicle. He'd figured if he bought himself a briefcase, it might help with the promotion, but he couldn’t stand the idea of the leather becoming a useless trophy that he’d have to drag around at his side. So he'd bought a turntable instead.

As an intro riff sounded, the room stood still. He glided to the crib and saw Aurora—her green eyes, cheekbones high. Her hands were so, so tiny. He gently picked her up and walked over to the leather La-Z-Boy they had bought per Adam’s suggestion. The footrest slowly swung into place, father and baby admiring one another through sleepy eyes.

When he fully opened his eyes, the white fox emerged from behind the La-Z-Boy, interrupting his memory by dropping something at his feet. With his thumb and index finger, he picked up the single-masted wooden sailboat from the stained carpet. He turned it over in his hands, squinting at its lacquered masts.

He didn’t want to remember the boat. But it came back, sharp as a spear, and tore through him anyway. His chartreuse raincoat was layered on top of two flannels, a T-shirt, and a long sleeved thermal. He and Katherine had two pairs of pants on—Baby had three. She didn’t like it when her small fingers got hot, preferring to draw them along the smooth wood finish of the sailboat he built her, so he periodically had to help her back into the mittens she impatiently tossed onto the ice. He had to do this while also focusing on the fishing rod so it didn’t get tugged under and away, drilling another hole for Katherine, and, realizing “shit, Adam’s calling, I’ll just be a minute and then I’ll turn it off, I promise.”

In the three seconds it took for him to find his phone, the fishing rod began to inch closer to the first hole in the ice, Katherine had screamed, and as he whipped his head to figure out what from, he saw ten tiny fingers disappear into a white eternity.

The man lurched forward in the recliner, nausea bubbling to the surface of his stomach. He crossed his arms to stifle a dry heave as he gripped the sailboat in his left hand. He felt a tightness—the beginning of a chill—in the small of his back. Whatever this fox was, he decided it was time for it to leave.

After pulling himself off of the La-Z-Boy, he strode past the fox and across the near-bare living room, fist gripping glossed wood. He intended to throw the sailboat down the corridor outside his apartment, imagining that the fox might run after it so he could lock it out. As he turned back to find the fox before throwing the sailboat down the hallway, he felt her weight connect with his chest as she jumped on him. When he looked into her eyes, all he saw was ice. He didn’t want to remember.

By the time he hit the floor, he had already shattered. The pieces of him flew outwards in sharp porcelain shards, scraping the floor, erupting in clouds of dust where the two dimensions intersected.

Daddy was running along the ice, holding a flashlight, breathless. “Baby!”

Wrinkled fingers grazed the walls in a struggle for balance.

Daddy slipped and fell, his leg twisting underneath him to meet the ice.

The small of the man’s back crashed onto the thin carpeting.

Daddy tried, I promise, Baby, but all he could do was slam his bloodied hands into the ice over and over again.

Cold.

The man heard something scrape the floor next to his ear, but he didn’t care to turn his head to see what it was. He remained preoccupied by the ceiling. He tried to control his breathing—inhale for three seconds, out for five—but the shivers overtook him and then he was rushing the air in and out of his lungs, fists curling around the tears at his temples. From his place on the floor the man could see his wife closing the door to the nursery, his Crosley ‘briefcase’ and La-Z-Boy with it. She started spending most of her time at the lab and began teaching two more classes. When she slept, it was in random bursts of five-minute rests at her desk. She never noticed that the bed was always made, the door to the nursery sometimes ajar, the leather on the recliner becoming more malleable. She never noticed the ships in bottles that littered the floor of the room she always sped past.

“We have to plan the funeral.” Her speech was waterlogged. He took note of her through the curved reflection of the green glass bottle as his hands wildly constructed the stern of sailboat number fifty-two.

“I know you’re not religious, and you don’t really care about these kinds of things, but we have to do something, and my parents said they’d be here in a few hours to help us figure out logistics, because I don’t know what kind of flowers we need, or the service—” He snorted in disbelief as he glued the mast onto the body of the ship. “Are you even listening to me?”

He lifted his hands from his work. Once he realized they were shaking, he quickly moved them to rest on the armrests of the La-Z-Boy.

“... fucking… logistics, Katherine? Are you kidding me? Our Baby is gone, and all you can think about is logistics?”

He stood, legs buckling for a second underneath his weight. “I’m not going to get to hold her again, get called ‘Dad’ again, read her bedtime stories, and all you’re concerned with is logistics?”

He was shaking now, so cold and all he was wearing was a T-shirt. “There isn’t even a fucking body, Katherine. How can you have a funeral without a body?”

He fell on his knees. He whispered, “we can’t have a funeral without her body, Katherine.”

When her parents came he tried—really, truly tried—to focus on the logistics of the funeral. And he made it through floral arrangements, seating arrangements, right up to the beginning of the casket discussion before he excused himself to go to the bathroom. He ran his hands under hot water for a few minutes, trying to calm his breathing—in three, out five—but when he looked back up at himself in the mirror after he settled, all he saw was her. Baby’s green eyes were staring back at him. He shivered.

He went back to Katherine and her parents, nodding silently along through the rest of the logistics, until her parents went home—then he started to run. He ran away from the mismatched Chicago chairs and his promotion. With each new ship in a bottle—vessel in a vessel, he'd once thought, after finishing the whole six-pack in one night on the first anniversary of Baby not coming back—he ran farther and farther away, deeper into his mind, believing that one winter, she would have to resurface, and she would call him ‘Dad’ again and he could give her all the ships he had been saving just for her, just for Baby. At year ten, he was particularly frantic, almost fired at the office supply store for stealing a jug, and by then he was slowing down, but it wasn’t until year fourteen when he threw his paintbrush up at the stucco ceiling that he felt the exhaustion. And now, twenty years later, he was breathless. Cold.

He realized this now, smoothing the sticky residue the tears had left behind. He glanced towards his shoulder where the fox had placed the sailboat, which must’ve flown out of his hands as he fell. Gazing past his feet, he saw the fox peacefully in its place in front of the recliner. He groaned.

As the man picked up the ship, he closed his eyes and heard the warm, speckled music he used to play on his cheap Crosley in Chicago. He was back on the La-Z-Boy in the nursery, holding his baby in his arms. He watched as something resembling a smirk spread across her small features as she listened to the improvised strumming of the lead guitar, the only instrument audible. He admired her taste in music. Gently rocking her in his arms, he placed his finger in the palm of her tiny hand.

She’s our Baby.

Baby held back, and he knew he could never drop her.

The man opened his eyes and slowly rose from the floor and looked back at the white fox, who was now curled up in a ball in the corner of the living room. She perked her ears up at him when she noticed his gaze. Then her head followed, and then her whole body, and then she was slowly walking across the living room past the recliner and towards the front door. And then she was gone. He let his head hang over his shoulder, eyes resting on the shadow of the short hallway she disappeared into. A chill crept from between his shoulder blades along the back of his neck. He sighed into it. For a while, all he heard was the snow sweeping against the living room windows in short, ragged breaths.

But then he heard fabric fall onto the floor. And he heard the scratching of paws against the raincoat. A warm wind sent the sound of plastic against carpet through the hallway to his La-Z-Boy in the living room. It gently gripped his index fingers.

He wouldn’t drop her.

With a ferocity he’d never felt before, the man whipped around to face the front door and started running. He grabbed the chartreuse raincoat from the floor with one hand, sailboat held steady in the other, and sprinted into the corridor of his apartment complex. By the time his front door had slammed shut, he was already in the elevator and passing the second floor, facing the mirror-lined back wall that he always avoided.

When, at last, he met Baby’s stare—her green eyes, her lips that seemed as though they were pulled in a perpetual smirk—he didn’t crumple to the floor like he thought he would. Instead, he reached out to touch her image in the mirror. The elevator was bathed in light.

He’d seen the phenomenon once before. Aurora borealis, his wife had whispered to him then, on the small bed they had shared in the hotel in Iceland, the hotel paid for by her lab to attend a conference on violent atmospheric reactions. Northern dawn. Even though it was a cramped room with a tiny window, the swaying purple light still managed to cast a brilliant glow onto the woman’s belly. He traced his fingers along her jawline and met her eyes.

Aurora, he whispered back.

He placed his hand on the purple light.

He watched his overworked shoulders settle in the mirror, his chest rise and fall more slowly, more deeply, as the warmth traveled his fingers to his arms to his lungs.

And as soon as the elevator doors opened, Eli was running again. The edges of Lake Michigan remained unfrozen that year. Short, staccato waves lapped quietly against the shore at six in the morning. A trail of boot prints led to the water, the outlines of the soles few and far in between. The waves slowly inched up, erasing two prints etched deep into the sand.

A few meters away, a small wooden sailboat was held softly by the current, bathed in a purple glow.