I'll Be You(19)

I knew, with a sickening pit in my stomach, that they’d locked it against me. Even now, I wasn’t to be trusted.

I wondered if they were right.



* * *



—

I spent the next two days ferrying Charlotte to the beach, to the park, to the ice cream shop. I changed diapers, cut avocados into cubes, read and reread Llama Llama Red Pajama until I could recite the book by heart. Llama llama red pajama, in the dark without his mama. Eyes wide open, covers drawn…What if Mama Llama’s GONE? It was all a little morbid for a kid’s book, and perhaps a bit too on point, considering.

My mother made herself scarce. She was attending a multiday chakra-balancing workshop and she came home every night greasy with essential oils and smelling like sandalwood. She’d kiss Charlotte on the head and then sink into a bath with a glass of wine, tunelessly humming Tori Amos songs.

As my first babysitting charge, Charlotte wasn’t so bad. She encountered each new scenario—the tall slide on the playground, the lizard that crawled across her toe, the little boy who grabbed the shovel from her hand—with a wrinkled brow and an assessing silence. She was, in general, not a shrieker or a crier, except when she was really upset and then all hell would break loose.

Things that made her smile: strawberry ice cream, digging up objects that she’d just buried, anything that was the color of a banana (“Lello!” she would scream with delight), when I did a handstand or a cartwheel and then pretended to get dizzy and fall down.

She did not like vegetables of any kind. She was wary of dogs. She hated being tickled. She was begrudging about hugs, unless she was sleepy or upset.

Her entire life was a primal binary of yes and no, with no maybes or sortas or it’s-complicateds, and something about this was soothing to me. The simplicity of it was a balm after so many years of living in the gray areas, in which every decision I had ever made seemed to require hours of explanation and analysis.

But childcare, it turned out, was exhausting. Mind-numbingly dull and repetitive, and yet requiring a heightened consciousness at all times. I wasn’t used to being so alert. Charlotte’s plump little legs were remarkably fast—she could cover a football field before I’d registered that she was gone—and I spent most of my time with her worried that she might accidentally get washed away by a wave or fall off a concrete ledge or get run over by a car.

At the end of each day I’d hit up an AA meeting and then collapse into bed with a low-grade stress headache and nerves that still jangled. No wonder my mother needed her chakras realigned after a week of this, I thought; no wonder my sister had run off to Ojai and didn’t want to come home.

I took photos of Charlotte and texted the most charming ones—Charlotte digging in the sand, Charlotte eating a cupcake—to my sister. If Elli was going to run off to a dubious retreat, there was no point in tiptoeing around the fact that I was now taking care of Charlotte. Sometimes I’d add a message: When should I tell her you’re coming home? Or If you’re not home by Friday I’m going to let Charlotte watch Breaking Bad with me. And Are you at a GenFem retreat? What the hell have you gotten yourself involved with? The blue check marks let me know that Elli had read my texts, but she never answered them. I took this as a mildly promising sign: If she didn’t think I was trustworthy enough to watch her daughter, surely she would be racing home by now.

Maybe it even meant she’d forgiven me.

Then again, maybe there was a decidedly more upsetting reason that she hadn’t come back to save Charlotte from me.

Maybe she wasn’t allowed to leave.



* * *



—

On my fourth morning home, another day looming bright and endless before us, I decided to give Caleb a call. I hadn’t seen him at an AA meeting since that first night; each evening I’d scanned the heads, looking for badly chopped curls, and felt a twinge of disappointment when I realized he hadn’t come.

That morning, I left Charlotte eating toast in her high chair while I stood on my parents’ stoop and called the number that he’d typed into my phone. His voice on the other end of the line was still thick with sleep when he answered.

“Not that I’m not happy to hear from you, but it’s a bit early, don’t you think?”

I glanced at the time. It was 7:30 a.m. “I’ve been up for two hours. Isn’t this when parents usually get up?”

“Not me. My daughter is a night owl. I can barely drag her out of bed before lunch.”

“Sorry. I’ll call back later.”

“No, no. It’s OK, I was just getting up anyway.” I heard him rustling around, water running in a sink. “You need childcare advice? Suggestions of things to do with a two-year-old?”

Through the window I could see my father enter the kitchen, already dressed for work in his suit. He sat down next to Charlotte and peeled a banana with one hand as he read the newspaper, placing the fruit on the tray of her high chair. She proceeded to drop the banana on the ground, then soberly peered over the edge of her chair at the mess she’d made. Her tiny mouth formed a word I could read from here: Lello.

“I need adult company,” I said. “Someone I’m not related to. Someone who speaks in complete sentences. Maybe we could meet somewhere? A playground, maybe? Assuming you don’t have work today. Actually I have no idea what you do for a living.” I realized that I was the one babbling this time.