by Emily Adrian
Carrie leans against the counter, holding her empty juice glass. “Where does Gabe think you are?”
“Here,” I say, wishing she hadn’t thought to ask.
“Here in my house?”
“Here in Deerling.”
She waits.
“I’m sure he assumes I’m staying with my mom,” I say.
“But you’re leaving him to assume?”
I search her expression for signs of triumph or satisfaction. She looks only concerned. “I’ll fill him in,” I say.
“When?”
“Soon.”
“Amanda.” Carrie drops her chin, looking at me like she means business. “What happened?”
Nothing happened, except that Gabe and I were nice to each other for thirteen years. His weekday alarm was set to ring ten minutes before mine, allowing him to make coffee and eggs while I negotiated myself out of bed. On a Friday night a friend would text him after dark, hoping Gabe was up for grabbing a drink at the Deep End, and Gabe would frown at his phone and say to me, puzzled, “But I’m hanging out with you.” Throughout my pregnancy we exchanged handwritten notes, compiled playlists for each other, and made out on the couch like teenagers. And then came the baby, with his ceaseless hunger, his cries so hot the windows fogged over. And suddenly I couldn’t look at Gabe without seeing yet another creature wanting something.
When I don’t answer her, Carrie says, “Did you guys get a second car?”
“No.”
“So Gabe’s stuck in New York.”
“He’s flying out after the last day of school. We’ll drive home together and everything. We had a fight, but we’re still . . . We’ll be fine.”
“Okay.” She accepts my claim. And I guess it doesn’t matter to her whether Gabe and I break up or stay together. What she wants is to know what I’m doing in her kitchen.
“I need some help,” I say. “Gabe’s at work until six every day. Taking care of the baby by myself is impossible. It’s a two-
person job.”
She lifts her eyebrows and waits for me to realize what I’ve said. Hot-cheeked, I try to take it back. “I mean, it’s either a job for two incompetent people or one extraordinarily competent person. Gabe and I fall into the first category, whereas you—”
“Right.” Carrie turns her back to me, placing the glass in the sink. “So, are you pumping?”
I shake my head. “I rented an electric pump for the first few weeks, but I hated it. The sound it made was like a bullfrog dying.”
Facing me again, Carrie watches Jack’s hand as he reaches toward my neck, searching for jewelry or a lock of hair, anything he can grab and pull. “If you start pumping, I can give him a bottle sometimes while you catch up on sleep.”
I lock eyes with Carrie. Her gaze is so neutral, so steady, I’m forced to look away.
“Okay,” I say. “That would be good.”
She nods, and it’s settled.
We’re staying.
* * *
Last night, back in New York, Jack wouldn’t sleep. All of us collapsed into bed around ten. Jack woke up at 10:45, 11:51, and 12:38. Then, around 2:00 a.m., he woke up mad and stayed that way, refusing my breast, refusing his pacifier, refusing “Hotline Bling” and any other song with a bass line like a heartbeat. He didn’t care to be swaddled, shushed, or swung. Instead he cried—his face scrunched and tomato red, his lung capacity limitless. I seethed with a kind of as-seen-on-TV anger, the kind that inspires aggrieved male characters to heave chairs across rooms. Last night, I did not feel like anyone’s mother; I felt like a victim. My baby, who did not sleep and did not appear to love anything, was the perpetrator. But because Jack was tiny and I knew, in a purely theoretical way, that he was innocent, I took out my anger on Gabe.
“Wake up,” I said to his offensively prone body. Gabe groaned and rolled over. Balancing Jack on one forearm, I pulled the covers from Gabe’s shoulders and yelled at him. This time, he sat up straight and rubbed his eyes. “Is the baby okay?”
“He is. I’m not. I need you to take him. I need to sleep.”
“Amanda . . .” Now that Gabe could see no one was on fire or unresponsive, he performed his annoyance, squinting at the time on his phone. “I have to be at work in four hours.”
Before the baby was born, Gabe had decided he wouldn’t use up all his sick days right away. We agreed he would cash them in one at a time, opting to stay home with me after especially challenging nights. We believed this plan bespoke foresight and restraint—back when we still believed some nights would be challenging and others would only be nights.
“And I have to take care of this baby all day, every day, forever. If I could go teach Faulkner to a bunch of teenagers instead, believe me, I would.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about. You don’t even have to get dressed.”
“Can’t. Can’t get dressed.”
We went on like this for a while. The more I cursed, the harder Jack cried. Eventually Gabe told me to calm down. I told him to take his fucking baby. He said to me, “You’re the one who wanted this.”
I would have strangled him if my hands had been free.
In fact, we both counted the days of my cycles. We both spontaneously and independently brought home presents for a baby who didn’t yet exist, not even in embryonic form. Gabe’s pick was a New York Public Library onesie, which Jack, with his phobia of long sleeves, wore exactly once. I indulged in a pair of charcoal-gray booties—thirty-four dollars from a boutique in Bushwick. I could have invoked Gabe’s own anticipation, his own longing, but I didn’t. It was easier to dismiss the evidence and believe this 3:00 a.m. version of Gabe, whose voice was shot and unfamiliar. I believed what he’d said and also what he wasn’t saying: I was the one who wanted this; he was the one who didn’t.
It’s been my fear all along—even before we had Jack—that I tricked Gabe into making a life with me.
I took the baby into the living room. I lay with him on the couch while he screamed into my ear. Gabe sank promptly into a deep sleep; he was snoring by the time Jack released his last rattled sob. When I could safely transfer the baby to the vibrating chair on the coffee table, I located my phone and crept into the kitchen to call my mother.
She answered on the second ring, her voice clear and uncompromised by sleep. It used to take my mother days, sometimes weeks, to call me back. She was slow to acclimate to contemporary cell phone usage, didn’t understand that the point was to be available at all times. But Jack’s arrival did the trick. Now she requests photos of her grandson daily, is always prepared with heart-eyes and kissy-face emoji and, apparently, for a nocturnal emergency.
“Is he okay?” she asked.
I started to cry.
“Oh, honey.” My mother’s name is Jaclyn. We named the baby after her, my consolation prize for letting Gabe pass Feldman onto Jack. Minutes after he was born, when a nurse automatically labeled the plastic bassinet “Baby Flood,” Gabe said with a lilt of panic, “That’s not his name!” The nurse told him to relax; the sticker was not a legally binding document.
“Gabe is an asshole, it turns out.”
She went quiet. Gabe would be a sore subject between us if we ever talked about him. Mom has never been able to forget, or forgive, the circumstances under which we first got together.
“What’s going on?”
“He expects me to do this by myself. I don’t think he even realizes he expects it, but since he’s been back at work, I’ve become the default parent. When Gabe wants to take a shower he goes and takes one. If I want to take a shower—like, for instance, after days of Jack vomiting my own breast milk into my hair—I have to ask Gabe if it’s okay. And sometimes, Mom, he has the nerve to say it’s not.”
“Well, honey, Gabe has a job.”
Until recently I, too, had a job. I wore imitati
on silk blouses from H&M and skirts that were either too loose around my waist or too tight around my hips. Working as an office manager for a branding agency didn’t typically impress people, but secretly, I was sometimes impressed with myself. Riding the subway to West Fifty-Eighth Street, depositing my coat in a break room with a view of Columbus Circle—these were elements of a routine that, to anyone from Deerling, Ohio, would have looked like success.
For years Gabe encouraged me to apply for a better position within the company, which hired new designers all the time. The candidates were mostly boys with skinny ties and large glasses. My task was to show them to the conference room and offer them coffee, which they invariably accepted, though it was past noon and they must have understood I would have to make a fresh pot. Gabe—who maintains an endearing belief that I am an artist, sticking my doodles to our refrigerator as if to encourage a small child—always wanted me to throw my own portfolio into the pool, but portfolio was a generous term for my life’s work. My bosses didn’t want to see faded sketches of my childhood best friend or the view from our bedroom window in Queens (air shaft, puddle, pigeon). All the company wanted was to hire a twenty-three-year-old with a degree in graphic design.
When I was pregnant with Jack but still hiding my bump beneath blazers and sweaters, a position opened up in project management. The job paid twice as much as I was making. The money meant more to me than having a career vaguely related to art, and I applied. During the interview, I sat in my boss’s office—where I often sat, computer open on my lap, as he dictated his correspondence through wet mouthfuls of Caesar salad—and claimed I could do the job in my sleep. No training necessary. For years I had been booking travel and arranging meetings for the guys who already did the job. I knew everything about our company, our diverse roster of clients.
“And I’ll still pick up your dry cleaning,” I added desperately, inappropriately. “And I’ll keep watering the plants. That ficus won’t die on my watch!”
The following Monday, an email informed me that “after discussing the matter at length,” the firm’s partners had chosen someone with more experience—and also, when I had a free moment, could I call Connor and let him know he got the job?
Jack, by then, had started punching and kicking and turning somersaults in utero. Even through the thick material of my sweaters, his acrobatics were discernible to anyone who stared hard at my midsection. My intention had been to take three months of unpaid leave, but now I thought, Why? Daycare would nearly negate my salary. Gabe’s job came with health insurance. The men for whom I worked defined me by the college degree I didn’t have. One option was to quit right then and never come back. So I did.
Over the phone, I told my mom, “Staying home with a baby is harder than a job. You know it is.”
“But Gabe has to show up on time. You’re already where you need to be.”
“I want him to share the responsibility. He shouldn’t be squeezing the occasional hour of babysitting into his life; he should be scheduling the rest of his life around his son’s never-ending needs and demands.”
“Men don’t usually do that,” she said, placating but firm. My mother, normally a little bit scared of me, wielded more authority with each of these late-night phone calls. “May I make a suggestion?”
She was smoking. I could hear her lips opening and closing around the cigarette. I wished she would quit. I wished she would eat something besides Stove Top stuffing, coleslaw kits, and Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches.
I wished she would use moisturizer and vote Democrat.
“You may,” I said.
“Try loving Gabe less.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you love him less, you’ll lower your expectations of him, and then Gabe won’t be able to disappoint you anymore.”
Momentarily, Jaclyn’s reasoning struck me as genius. I could accept that Gabe was not who I thought he was; I could subscribe to the belief that men are good for breadwinning and mowing the lawn and not much else.
Except that we don’t have a lawn, and my relationship with Gabe has been the only consistently satisfying venture of my adult life.
“I can’t love him less than I already do.”
“Are you sure?” Jaclyn asked. “After you were born, I made a deliberate choice to love your father less. I remember the exact moment. I was trying to breastfeed you, but you were never any good at it. You kept arching your back, squirming and fussing. Your father stayed in the other room, not even offering to bring me a glass of water or an extra pillow. And I thought, You know, I should really just love him less.”
I took a moment to resent my dad, an activity that brought automatic pleasure—as it aligned me with my mother—but an equal amount of guilt. Distracted by the dichotomy, I was slow to identify the flaw in Jaclyn’s advice.
“You and Dad got divorced,” I said.
“And he hasn’t disappointed me in many years.”
“Loving Gabe less won’t solve the problem of this baby needing to be attached to my body at every fucking moment.”
“That’s not a problem, Amanda. That’s motherhood.”
As soon as we hung up, Jack realized I’d forsaken him and began to wail. Watch, I told my mother in my head, Watch what happens next, and I waited for Gabe to rise from our bed, scoop Jack into his arms and—with remorse in his averted eyes—tell me to go lie down. My plan was to forgive him instantly. Gabe was exhausted, overwhelmed. He’ didn’t have the option of spontaneously quitting his job or the kind of mother he could call, hysterical, in the earliest hours of the morning.
Jack cried, and Gabe stayed in the bedroom. I changed my mind; I would not forgive him. I was the one who had given birth. I had done enough. By the time Gabe’s alarm went off at six thirty, the diaper bag was packed. All I had left to do was throw some clothes into a suitcase and gas up our mostly sedentary car.
He begged me not to go. Over and over he said he was sorry. He touched my face. He reached for Jack. He offered to call in sick and spend the day on baby duty. We already had plans to drive out to Ohio after his last day of teaching. We would see my mom then. There was no reason for me to go alone. Plus, Gabe claimed, he didn’t want to miss a moment of his son’s infancy, let alone a full two weeks.
“Really?” I asked. “Because you seemed perfectly happy to miss last night.”
I was proud of my cruelty. My tendency is to be passive, to end fights with an earnest apology almost as soon as they start, Gabe’s hand in mine. Of course I’ve fantasized about winning, but my desire to prove him wrong rarely outmeasures my need to be in Gabe’s good graces.
Yesterday morning he thought I was bluffing, but I wasn’t. As he pleaded with me, I was already calculating how many times I would have to stop the car to nurse Jack, whether we would need to stay the night somewhere in rural Pennsylvania.
“Don’t do this, Amanda. Give me the baby and go get some sleep.”
I didn’t give him the baby, and I still haven’t slept. I told Gabe I would see him in July. The sound of our padlocked door clanking shut filled me with an exhilarating sense of power, which was almost immediately consumed by regret.
Once a decade, often enough to constitute a pattern, I do something unforgivable to the person I love most. My transgressions fold into one another, so that as I was leaving him, I was leaving her all over again.
CHAPTER THREE
The fraught animal sound of Jack wailing drives me to bite my own arm. Afterward, teeth marks linger on my purpling flesh. That’s how Carrie finds me: hissing obscenities in my baby’s direction and bruising fast.
Somehow, it’s 3:00 a.m. again.
“Sorry,” I say, teetering between shame and indifference. It’s not the first time Carrie has caught me in a compromising act.
She shakes her head, dismissing my apology, and takes Jack. I love her for the confidence with which she
seizes him, never offering or asking permission. What I’ve learned since giving birth is that few people are truly helpful. Unwilling to risk fucking up, most people want to help but require clear instructions, live tutorials—which is the opposite of helpful. Carrie does what needs doing. In her sturdy arms, Jack has already calmed down.
Passing him to Gabe sometimes has the same effect. Maybe it’s because neither of them smells like breast milk, that drug the baby craves always but can only stomach at two-hour intervals.
I grab the kettle from the stove and fill it with tap water. “I guess he’ll figure out I’m an asshole pretty soon.”
Carrie looks amused. “What?”
“The swearing. The insults.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. You won’t always feel like saying terrible things to your baby.”
“When will I stop?”
“In, like, another two months.”
“I don’t remember you ever saying terrible things to Nina.”
“Oh, god.” Carrie grimaces. Her memories appear to cause her physical pain. “Let’s not even go there.”
I can’t come up with anything lucid to say. We stand in silence. The cuffs of Carrie’s sweatpants hit below her knees, showing off webs of tattoos covering both her calves. Some are sharp and saturated, while others have already begun to fade. Her hair is wrapped in silk for the night. Staring at the scarf, teal and gold, my first thought is I’ve never seen it before.
My second thought is I’m losing my mind.
Carrie nods at the kettle. “Grab it before it whistles?”
She cups a hand over Jack’s ear. My baby eyes me reproachfully as I slide the kettle to the back burner. The moment he’s attached to someone else, I remember how lovely he is. With his curled fists and velvet cheeks, his scalp that inexplicably smells like cream and cinnamon. My need for him is physical, the way I once needed to cling to my own mother’s leg or how, as a teenager, I couldn’t keep my hands away from my hair. If I could, I would exist exclusively in those rare moments when Jack is returned to my arms.