The Break(2)

The baby’s gone!

What have you done?

I remember pushing June toward the window as she struggled against me. I didn’t want to hurt her, but we got way too close to the sixth-floor window, which was open because I kept worrying Lila would overheat. I can still feel the warning snap of cold from the wind; it was one of the first freezing days of November, the air charged with impending winter, already dark at five, making people like me want to cry for the lack of daylight. And if I hadn’t looked down right then to see Lila sleeping soundly in her bassinet, if I hadn’t snapped out of it . . .

“The window,” I say to Sylvie, needing to fill the silence with words. “The bay window in our living room was open, and I was pushing June toward it because I was so upset, I didn’t want to hurt her or anything like that, I was just trying so hard to figure out what had happened to Lila. I remember how Gabe rushed into the room when he heard me shouting, and how he stopped dead when he saw us. June was sobbing, snot everywhere,” I say. I’m not sure why I mention the snot detail. Maybe because it was the first I’d ever seen June not look beautiful. “And Gabe asked us what happened, and then June started for the door and Gabe tried to stop her, but she slipped by him.”

And then she opened our apartment door, where two neighbors had already gathered in the hallway because of the noise.

She accused me of hurting your baby, Gabe, June had said, and I cringe to remember it. I know Sylvie sees it.



“I remember my thoughts felt disjointed,” I say. “It was like I couldn’t get ahold of them. And then I looked down, and I saw Lila, and she was okay.”

My throat squeezes. Lila stirs in my arms, letting out a sleepy cry that pulls me out of the bloodied past and into the moment. She opens and closes her mouth like a fish, and I know she wants to eat. I’m still too new at nursing to be comfortable doing it in front of Sylvie, but I can’t let her go hungry, so I unbutton my shirt and put her on my breast. The latch isn’t quite right, and I wince with pain. Heat flames through my limbs.

Mercifully Sylvie doesn’t say anything. Neither does Gabe, though I know he notices. I wish he would come to me, rub my back, or maybe get me a glass of water.

“What made you think June had tried to harm your baby, Rowan?” Sylvie asks, her voice so quiet I can barely hear it.

I look down at Lila, at her rosebud mouth moving against my chest, born knowing how to nurse somewhere deep inside her brain, all instinct. I stare at her perfect face. I write for a living, and I still have no words other than clichés to describe my daughter:

Perfect.

Everything.

Heavenly.

Mine.

“I have no idea,” I say softly.

Sylvie shifts her weight on the pouf. She doesn’t look comfortable. The furniture is gorgeous, but not exactly a great place to set down your body and rest. Sometimes when I glance around everything feels wrong, like I accidentally chose the wrong life—the wrong man?—and now I can’t claw my way back to everything that was meant to be.

But that can’t be right: I love Gabe, and I certainly love Lila. Everything is as it’s supposed to be. And I’ll get better, I will. I have to believe that.





TWO


Rowan. Monday evening. November 7th.


Gabe ushers Sylvie out of Lila’s nursery.

“Goodbye, Dr. Alvarez,” I say to the back of her cream cashmere sweater, and she turns. Her eyes look sunken beneath the overhead lights.

“Goodbye, Rowan,” she says.

She doesn’t say goodbye to Lila. I stand in the doorway, watching Gabe and Sylvie retreat down the hallway, their shadows lingering, slipping down the walls and over the oak floor before disappearing. I sway with Lila. Even with everything that’s happened in the past three weeks since she entered this world, her open-eyed gaze makes me smile: my lips curve when she locks on me, a private grin that means something different than it ever has before.

Gabe’s mom appears when Sylvie is gone. She tucks a tight curl behind her ear and studies my face.

“Elena, hi,” I say, a little stupidly. I don’t know how to talk to her after what I’ve done to June. I know she thinks I’ve gone insane, that I’m not well enough to take care of the baby. I can feel it. I hold Lila tightly, not wanting to pass her over.

“Can I hold her?” Elena asks.



I bite my lip. “No,” I say. I clear my throat. “I’m sorry,” I add, but I don’t pass her over, and I don’t say anything else.

Elena flushes. “I should go,” she says, looking down at Lila like she means the very opposite.

“Thank you for making us dinner,” I say guiltily.

Once Elena told me Gabe likes his sandwiches cut diagonally, and I regretted admitting to her that I’d never made him one. I always thought I took care of him in other ways, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe Elena sensed something lacking in me.

“How did therapy go?” Elena asks, her voice a little shaky. I’d like to think she has no right to the answer, but every time I want to dislike Elena I think about her friendship with my mother, how she dutifully visits my mother twice a week, bringing her crossword puzzles. And if my mother’s feeling up to it, Elena checks her out of the care facility and brings her to a weekly bingo game in a church basement in our neighborhood, and then they come see us afterward for tea. My mother’s only lucid half the time, but she likes visitors, and I’m grateful for it. It washes over me now—that warm feeling of being thankful to someone.