The Wall Behind My Baby’s Crib

I want to start with the night my dog broke through drywall with his own paws, because that is the night everything before it finally made sense, but to understand why it mattered I have to back up eleven months, to the week my husband Andy and I signed our names on a little blue house on Sycamore Street in Caldwell, Ohio, and shook hands with a widower named Gene Porter in his own kitchen.

Caldwell is the kind of town where the feed store, the volunteer fire hall, and the Methodist church share the same three blocks of Main Street, where everybody’s grandmother sat on some committee with everybody else’s grandmother, and where a man like Gene Porter, who had run the county fair board for a decade and sung bass in the church choir for twice that, was simply known. Not loved exactly. Known. Respected the way a load-bearing wall is respected, without anyone stopping to ask what it was holding up.

We were twenty nine years old that spring, newlyweds with a baby on the way, competing against two other offers on a three bedroom ranch that needed paint and not much else, or so the listing said. Our agent told us the sellers wanted a fast close and were nervous about a full structural inspection dragging things out, that Gene was moving into assisted living to be closer to his daughter and just wanted it done. We were tired of renting, tired of losing bidding wars, and so we waived what we probably should not have waived, and eleven weeks later we carried boxes into a house that smelled like fresh paint in every room, especially the smallest bedroom at the end of the hall, the one Gene’s agent called a nursery even though nothing in the house history mentioned children ever living there.

Lily was born that August, and we moved her crib into that freshly painted room the week we brought her home, right up against the back wall, the one that shared a stud line with the old bathroom on the other side.

Here is what I did not know standing in that room with a diaper bag on my shoulder and a newborn against my chest. I did not know that Gene Porter’s wife, Eleanor, had spent the last two years of her life sleeping in a hospital bed set up in that exact room, because by the end she could not manage the stairs. I did not know that Eleanor had complained for months about a smell she could not place, a headache that would not lift, a cough that got worse every night and better every morning she spent out on the porch. I did not know any of that, because Gene never mentioned his wife at all during the sale, not once, and small towns are good at some things and terrible at others, and one of the things they are terrible at is telling a newcomer what everybody already knows and has simply decided is not their business to repeat.