The Break(12)

“To apologize?” Sean asks, thin eyebrows up again. “For what?”

I bounce Lila, wanting out of here so very badly. “There was this one day when I was overtired and I snapped on her,” I say. An understatement. “Again, I’m really sorry, Sean,” I say. I try to make my voice brighter when I add, “I’m sure I’ll see you around,” and then I inch toward the door.

Sean laughs, taking me by surprise. “Probably not,” he says.

I force a smile. I turn and walk across the tiny apartment with Sean on my heels, the tiny hairs on the back of my neck standing at attention.

Sean slams the door behind me. Relief washes over me as I disappear into the stairwell.





FIVE


Rowan. Monday night. November 7th.


Back home, I open the door to my apartment as softly as I can, but all the lights are on and right away I know I’m caught.

“Rowan?” Gabe’s voice. “Rowan?” He’s coming closer.

“Hi, sweetie,” I say before I can see him.

“Where were you?” he snarls, barreling into the foyer. His gaze goes to Lila. “Are you okay?”

I yank off my puffy coat, barely able to get out of it but not wanting to ask him for help. He steps toward me like he needs a closer look at Lila, like he wants to make sure she’s all right. Is that really what he’s doing? “Do you seriously think I can’t take care of our daughter?” I ask.

His eyes dart back to mine. “I asked if you were okay.”

“But you’re staring at Lila like you’re trying to figure out if she’s still breathing,” I say. Anger prickles my limbs, burns through my abdomen.

“You aren’t supposed to be alone right now,” he says. He’s scared of me, of what I could do. I can see it all over his face.

“Really?” I ask. Sirens blare outside, one of the few sounds that make it through our windows. For a fleeting moment I worry I’ve done it—that I’ve lit us all up with whatever this feeling is inside me. “Says who?” I ask.



“Says every doctor who’s treated you in the past three weeks,” Gabe says.

I do everything I can to hold my tears back. “Lila and I needed fresh air,” I say.

The sirens come louder now, gathering fury, vibrating through my bones. And then I get my first swell of confidence that I do know what I’m doing with Lila. But it flickers away as soon as it comes, and I’m stuck again in purgatory with Gabe’s accusing stare. I haven’t seen him look at me like this since that first hairline fracture in our marriage when I had my dark spell. We’d been married only a few months then, and there were all those therapy appointments I could barely get myself to because I was so depressed and panicky, so Gabe had to come. At the first few appointments, we used to hold hands in the waiting room, hip bones glued together. And then months later I held brainless magazines instead, and the inches of puffy blue waiting-room cushions became increasingly visible between our bodies. When I started going by myself, I could tell how relieved Gabe was, not just because I was getting better but also because he didn’t have to take off time from writing to bring me there.

Even when I got better, it wasn’t the same between us. Everything frayed in a morbid, drawn-out unraveling: the quiet bed, the lack of letters, the cocktail party at a friend’s loft when Gabe got too drunk and cut into me too nastily, shouting something about how I should go home, something about how I wasn’t needed there, which made no sense in the context of a cocktail party (who’s truly needed besides a bartender) and that’s how I knew he was wasted; because he was never imprecise with words. Neither am I. Words are our currency; our trade. Words are our whole world, or at least the keys to it; the entire way we make sense of things.

Gabe runs his fingers through his inky hair. I can see things happening on his face: how fear is morphing into relief that we’re okay.



“I left you a note,” I say to smooth it over, to nudge everything in the direction it’s already going.

He nods, taking this in. “Your phone’s going straight to voice mail,” he says, but his words have gone soft.

“It was low on battery, so I turned it off in case I needed it. But I left you a note,” I say again, smiling like it’s all okay, like it’s maybe even his fault for not checking the note. “Lila loved the cold air,” I go on, as if we’re a normal married couple having a normal conversation about our newborn. “She slept so soundly in it, like they always say winter babies do.” Who says this?

Gabe’s hands are in his hair again, a gentle pat to his scalp like he always does when he needs to think. “Come sit?” he finally asks me.

“Let me wash my hands first,” I say. I go to the sink and pump the soap, the scent of cucumber too strong as I scrub. When I was pregnant with Lila, I threw up the first eighteen weeks each time I smelled anything pungent. I kept waiting for it to stop when I hit the first trimester mark, but it just kept going, until finally the nurses stopped trying to convince me I probably only had a few more days of it. Other friends with kids would tell me, Eat crackers when you first wake up. Leave them on your bedside table, so you won’t even have to lift your head.

All that wisdom other women have for you when you’re pregnant—they’re bursting to share it. Will I be like that, too, when this postpartum part is over? Will I be practically glowing as I bend my head toward a pregnant woman in the park and tell a story about Lila and me? That picture looks so idyllic, but I feel so far away from anything like it, because here I am in my kitchen with a suspicious husband, my left boob killing me because I need to nurse from it, and blood probably spotting my underwear like it did the last time I tried to take a long walk.