Better

Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku.

There had been little anxiety when she’d dropped him off for kindergarten. Only if he cried, keened, howled until he threw up. That had happened the first couple days. Then followed a period of relative calm, then national events, then the shelter-in-place drill. Their public school did not tell the children why. After school, he reported that they had filed into Miss Brown’s closet, and that Jo-Lisa and Soraya had won star stickers for being quietest. She nodded, offered a snack, ignored the chill branching from her spine through her shoulders and arms.

Now he was in third grade. Anxiety whispered past her ear each morning. As she walked away from his increasingly perfunctory goodbye hug, she detailed for herself what he’d been wearing: which soft pants, with or without big pockets, which t-shirt. Had he worn a sweatshirt, a windbreaker, some kind of a hat. How long his hair. How dirty. Loose or tied back. He had a red string tied around his wrist. She tucked that information, a snapshot, away in her memory. She had it. The information had multiple potential uses. In case the school called to say one had been lost on a field trip, could she provide a description. In case the police called to say shooting, evacuation, in case they summoned her to identify. Remains, parts, not whole children. She could piece together the parts.

The rest of the day, she did not think of herself as a worrier. She did work of this kind and that. She sold comfortable, affordable clothes to other mothers. Her business had a Facebook page and in-home parties. She made some money. Her husband made more money. She also did the work of the house: laundry, shopping, the invisible, at times satisfying labor of making the house a place in which people could live. Feeding them, clothing them, protecting them from want, disease, and extremes of weather. She wasn’t a worrier. An occasional disaster thought flashed across her mind (car crash, hurricane, fleeing to Canada, car crash with different plot trajectory), giving her a chance to pre-think how she might respond in an emergency. She had thought through shooter situations, armed insurrection, nuclear strike on the West Coast. Other than that, she was calm. She considered herself a calm person. Other parents referred to her as easygoing. None of those parents was her close friend.

But as her watch ticked past 2:45 to 2:50—a nice-sized slice of pie still left in the hour, in her day as not a mother—her pulse began to throb in her throat. Her breath hitched at her collarbones and wouldn’t push past to her lungs. In through the nose, out through her pursed mouth as she’d done in labor, she told herself as she gathered her phone and keys, put on her jacket, and began walking down the street. The anxiety had no rational basis. Repeating this to herself, in an increasingly stern internal