I laugh. I say: It is.
How old is she?
Two, I say.
And the other one? she says. She knows her name, I think, and I wonder why she doesn’t name her.
She’s four.
What’s four like? she says.
Magic, I say, without thinking. So much language. She’s such a person, I say.
I think both our brains think briefly about the baby who would now be ten.
Yeah, she says. Eyes still on the baby’s feet.
I want to shift the conversation to her. I want to make sure, while knowing there’s no way that this is possible, that she’s okay.
Your … I start. “Baby,” “marriage,” “life” are all the words that flit through my head as awful stand-ins for the part of her right now that I am most concerned about. Did you …
Can we just sit a while? she says.
* * *
My husband comes home and makes all of us dinner.
He hugs her and I’m so grateful for him, this man who’s good and kind and sees clearly she’s been crying.
How are you? she says to him, more earnest than I would have thought.
I’m fine, he says, gesturing toward the squealing children and the mess of our apartment. Chaos.
She laughs and I love him in a million different ways from how I did when he hugged her, in a million different ways from how I loved him when she met him that first time, years ago.
* * *
At dinner, the four-year-old gives us a ten-minute tutorial on chinchillas and then performs, with her sister, how high they jump in the Andes Mountains, where, she says, they live. The two-year-old tells Sasha about playing on the swings at recess with her friends. My husband talks about the house he’s working on that has a cave and waterfall attached to the backyard pool. She stays mostly quiet, asking the girls questions, smiling at me as I cut their food, clean up spilled water, share my seltzer with the baby when she asks.
I watch her watch them and think how obscenely lucky I am. I am touching, the whole time, the baby, then her sister, then my husband, as I walk past him to get the four-year-old more food.
My husband bathes them and she and I sit together on the couch and she asks more questions about our lives now. I tell her, briefly, about work.
* * *
I make up a bed for her on the couch in the back room close to the girls’ room. I have nowhere else, I start to say, but think it might be worse, apologizing for putting her so close to our kids. I wonder if I should call her husband. I think I have her sister’s number. I could send him a message on Instagram, or post a picture of her, tag her in it, let him know she’s safe.
I climb up into our bed, where my husband reads.
Is she okay? he says.
I’m not sure.
He kisses me and I kiss him back in the way that tells him I’m not just saying good night. I lean toward him. We have sex with me on top for the first time in months and he falls asleep and I stare up at the ceiling, trying to listen for her breathing, until I finally drift off. At 2:00 am I wake him up and we have sex again. I run my hands up his back and chest and reposition myself and tell him to slow down and crawl off of him and push my back into his chest until he slips inside of me again. He holds his hands against my stomach and I rock into him and he comes and I do too. He kisses my forehead, and I laugh a minute later when I come back from the bathroom and he’s already passed out.
HOURS LATER, MY husband’s still asleep, sheets twisted at his feet, his boxers on, his shirt still off. I’ve wrapped myself in the duvet, burrowed in against the wall.
I think then that I’ll go to her. Talk to her. I want to wake her up and sit with her, the children breathing so close by that we can hear.
I want to tell her that I’m sorry. That what I thought was friendship then was only needing from her, that the moment that she needed me I disappeared. I want to tell her that I left her by herself and that I shouldn’t have; I left her twice. I should have gone back with her when she left that day in Asia, should have called her every day until she was all better, been there with her the whole time.
I want to go to her and tell her that I’m scared I’ll never feel again the way I used to feel just standing next to her. I want to tell her that I’m scared I’m too wore out, worn down, that this constant anxious ache that I have now isn’t about my job or kids or all the ways life isn’t what it should be, that maybe it’s just me, it’s most of who I am. That I loved so much believing that there was such a thing as fixing, getting better. That knowing that’s not true, that it’s all just more of the same, exhausts me more than all those nights that I can’t sleep, the miles that I run.
I want to throw all the words inside my head out into the room, and then to sit and listen to her. I want to sit, the two of us, and stitch them all together, into a string that makes not just sense but something better, bigger, surer than whatever they were, we were, before.
I want to tell her all of this, but in different words, or maybe somehow better, but when I hear the whir of the pump and climb down out of bed and it’s still dark out, she’s crying quietly, and I know there isn’t space, not now, to say any of what I want.
I know there is this other thing I didn’t know about a long time, the whole time that I knew her, this thing that feels both less and more than all that talk and want. It’s what my children taught me, maybe, feeding, cleaning, changing, holding in the middle of the night when they can’t sleep: love but less like saving, talking, more like doing, love where there’s no other side and that’s the part that’s worst but also best.
I sit very close to her and I’m quiet and she starts to cry and I don’t try to stop her. I hear the children breathe. The small plastic bottles fill, the drip drip of the milk goes on and we sit still. I take the bottles from her and I cap them. She wipes herself, pulls down her shirt. I take the plastic horns to wash in one hand, the bottles to put in the fridge. I stand up and she lies down and I go to put the bottles away, wash the horns and set them to dry on a towel on the counter. I climb back up to bed and lie still and do not sleep but listen to them—her, our girls, my husband; they turn and stir and I wait for them to wake up so the day can start.
SHE DRINKS COFFEE in the kitchen as we get ready. We pack lunches, make breakfast. The four-year-old says she has to get the sleep out of my eyes and lies in bed with the lights off and moans until I pick her up, blanket over her head, and carry her to the table to eat her oatmeal with cut-up fruit.
I have to pee, says the baby, two bites into her breakfast.
Okay, I say.
She looks at Sasha. Will you come with me?
She has a hard time climbing onto the toilet, I say.
Sasha smiles at her, clutches her coffee. Sure, she says.
* * *
She comes with me to drop the girls at school. I’m done already, but they have another couple of weeks. She holds the baby’s hand and the baby asks Sasha if she has any children.
I do, she says.
The two-year-old looks at her, waiting.
A baby girl, says Sasha.
Can we play with her? asks the four-year-old.
Sure, Sasha says.
When?
Soon? she says.
We walk as if this hasn’t happened. The four-year-old holds her hand and the two-year-old holds mine.
I ask questions about their sleep and their school day so they’ll stop asking her things. I ask them their plans for the day, what they think they’ll have for lunch.
Can you pick us up? the four-year-old asks Sasha.
She looks overtop both of them at me.
Maybe, I say. We walk them into their classrooms; I hug them, kiss them. They hug her and she seems unsure where to put her limbs; her ears turn red.
* * *
I went to the hospital when they were really little, I say. Right after the baby was born.
We’ve been walking fifteen minutes. She wears the same clothe
s she wore the night before. Her hair’s pulled back.
I was light-headed and fell over and it was scary. I put my symptoms in the computer and some big red box popped up that said, GO TO THE HOSPITAL.
She doesn’t talk so I keep talking.
I’d gone running, then was nursing. The baby was eating every hour and she never slept.
We cross a busy street and I grab hold of her elbow without thinking. I think I feel her settle into me. Neither of us talks until we’re on a quieter block.
I sat in a hospital bed and no one wanted or needed from me for eight whole hours and it was the calmest that I felt in months.
Were you okay? she asks me.
Fine, I say. I mean, there was nothing diagnosably wrong.
I wanted it for so long, she says.
It’s scary, I say.
I finally have her and she’s mine, but then—I kept thinking I didn’t have a right to her, that I wasn’t good for her, that I shouldn’t be allowed …
None of us should be allowed, I say.
I think about her, she says. The baby, she says. The other baby. All the time, I think about her. I think maybe I got to think that that’s what being a mother is.
It’s part, I start to say.
I started to think that maybe all I could do was care about her, about both of them, from far away, that up close, I was a danger to them, that I would kill her also. That I would hurt her too somehow.
I know all the ways I’m supposed to stop her, but I don’t.
I didn’t really want her, she says. I didn’t know what I wanted, she says. I thought for years she died because I didn’t want her like I should have wanted her.
She looks over at me; her face grown-up, tired. Sasha, I think, I am so sorry.
You were so young, I say.
A fluke, she says. A freak thing, she says. Cells and chromosomes misfiring. The sort of thing that could happen again.
I stay quiet and I lean toward her. This baby is perfect, healthy. The first miscarriage was a freak thing. Her body was deemed, after, perfect. It doesn’t make the fear feel any less.
I wouldn’t survive it, she says.
I’m not sure I would either.
I can’t, she says. Again.
We pass a basketball pavilion, a major street and a large crosswalk. A bus pulls up close to her and I grab her arm again and she starts and I let go and we walk so our shoulders almost touch.
* * *
The third week of our first baby’s life, my mother came to see her. Nursing wasn’t working. I was tired all the time. My breasts squirted milk too hard, too much, and the baby sputtered and choked as she was eating. She clamped down to stop the flow from coming and it hurt and I tensed up and she tensed up and both of us cried all day and night. I’m waterboarding her, I said to my husband. He would fall asleep, as if we should not, every second, be up and making sure that she was safe and happy. How dare you, I would think, and I’d feel far away and by myself. I broke out in hives and began to run a fever. I scratched the hives and they bled and I wore long sleeves in summer for the short periods of the day I was outside. I walked back and forth and up and down the halls of our apartment and I refused to give her anything but my breasts because the books I read and the internet said otherwise, I would have failed her, otherwise, I might not be good enough to have her after all. I kept gushing milk and she kept crying. I felt certain some higher authority would come take her. Instead, my mother: with enough clothes to clothe all of Brooklyn’s babies, with blankets and garish plastic toys that lit up and made noise.
She’s not okay, she whispered to my husband.
Is she seeing someone? she asked. She, who had never believed in seeing someone up till now.
I had been seeing someone, but I’d stopped when she was born.
Maybe she shouldn’t be alone with her, she said, while I stood outside the kitchen and listened. I had not taken leave from school because then I would have lost my health insurance. I strapped her to me and nursed her in an office between classes as I continued to try to read and write and think.
My mother said, She has a history.
She’s fine, my husband said. She’s tired.
She needs to just give her a bottle, she said.
I cannot, he said, tell her what to do.
I walked out of the apartment, shaking. I left the baby. My breasts ached all of the time and leaked through my shirt. I had my keys and phone and I called Sasha and she answered though we hadn’t spoken, then, in years. I think maybe I figured that she wouldn’t answer but she answered.
It’s so much, I said to her without preamble. She knew we had a baby. She’d been on the mass email announcement. I hadn’t known how to tell her about it besides that.
I don’t, I said. Sash.
I knew as soon as she picked up I had no right to ask.
Breathe, she said.
My mom’s here, I said.
Oof.
We laughed.
What if she takes her? I said.
She’s yours, she said. She can’t take her.
Both of us were quiet a long time then. I thought about the baby still not with her, the baby that she birthed but never had.
How did you … I started.
You’re fine, she said. She would not, had never talked about it to me. You are going to be fine, she said.
I said her name and she said mine and I stood on the street with cars passing and people looking at me. I had no bra on and milk fell down into my waistband and my belly button and the skin below my abdomen still smarted from where they’d cut me open, just like they’d cut her open, days before.
Go home, she said.
I did.
* * *
You ever heard of the dive reflex? she says.
I shake my head. We’re close now to our apartment and we pass the bar where I sat with Ifeoma, our laundromat.
It’s biological, she says. She makes a face and I smile at her. There was a point when she’d bring up biology, when we were in high school and she loved biology and I loved books, and I’d yell at her to stop because I thought science made no sense.
It’s a physiological response to immersion, she says. Do you know what the homeostatic reflexes are?
I shake my head.
It’s the body’s basic impulse to maintain homeostasis in response to stimuli, she says.
I only half know what she’s saying, but I love the look and sound of her now, confident all of a sudden. I try not to bring my face too close to hers.
The body understands it’s underwater, and it responds by redistributing oxygen to the most vital organs, the heart and brain, until it’s able to come up for air again. There are sensory receptors in the nose that initiate the reflex when they fill with water, so then the body can stay under for longer than it should were we immersed without this.
She’s broken free of my arm now and we’re standing on a corner by our apartment and cars and people pass and I listen and she talks.
After, she says. In med school. I was so mad at you then. But when I learned about this, I thought about you, about both of us. We were underwater. There was only so much oxygen.
* * *
When we get back to the apartment, I ask her to show me pictures of the baby, and she shows me.
She takes her phone out.
I scroll through all the various squished-faced candids.
She watches me.
I smile at the tiny, shriveled thing.
She’s beautiful, I say, which is not right, but close enough, and she nods and stares at her over my shoulder.
She starts crying and I pull her head onto my lap like she used to do a thousand years ago for me.
Go home, Sash, I say.
Her hair falls across my legs and I watch her a long time and we stay quiet.
She sits up and goes to wash her face and I give her my computer and we call her husband and we find her a flight.
THE DAY SHE leaves, m
y husband goes uptown to a new job and it rains, so we stay inside and the girls watch TV and draw and paint. They get in a fight over who gets to use the purple paintbrush and both of them start crying, but then the four-year-old finds another purple paintbrush and starts painting again but the two-year-old still can’t stop.
Just breathe, baby, I say to her.
I try to nurse her but she pushes me away and just keeps crying, her body hot, her face bright red.
Sometimes, I say, it helps to put your feelings other places. I tell her that her sister puts her feelings into drawing, that I put them into running miles and miles.
She looks at me. She’s hardly formed at all and trying to comprehend this thing that I just made up to calm her down. She holds her hand up to her head, then looks back at me, still crying. But Mommy, she says, revving up again and sounding desperate, I can’t reach my hand into my head to get the feelings out.
8
THE WEEK AFTER school ends, my husband’s parents drive down to take the children for a week and I am weightless. Our apartment’s still and quiet, empty. They take them nine hours up to northern Maine and I stand in their room every night and think about how I might drive up and bring them back.
* * *
My husband’s uptown job has been extended through the week, and my friend who is quadrilingual gifts me with a week of unlimited yoga while the children are away. I go to my first class after my run early in the morning. I’ve installed a free-trial running app on my phone, and each morning a woman’s voice tells me how many miles to run and how fast and I take comfort in her deciding all this for me in advance. The rest of the day I wander around the city. At a restaurant, I go to use the bathroom. I went yesterday and the waiters were so nice and the space so clean—the soap smelled like lemons in a way that had me touching my hands up to my face all day—and so I decide today to go again. A man sitting at the bar reading the paper, who was also, yesterday, sitting at the bar reading the paper, stops me as I walk through the main room.
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