The Break(4)

And maybe it’s not about the way I look—maybe I should give Gabe more credit. Maybe marriage hardens things for every couple, makes the edges sharper and dulls the surface so it isn’t a shiny, perfect thing anymore. Or maybe he’s looking at me like this because he’s scared. Either way, it’s too hard to look at him dead-on, so I glance away, my eyes finding someone more forgiving. “Lila Gray,” I say to my little girl, and I can feel Gabe stiffen in the doorway when he thinks I can’t see him. “Li-la-aah Gr-a-ay,” I say again, adding syllables, letting the words lengthen like yarn unspooled, my voice verging on a coo I didn’t think I’d ever get quite right. But I guess it must come with the territory.

“Rowan,” Gabe says again, the smallest tremble there this time. I don’t look up.

Gray is my maiden name. Gabe and I always said we’d use it for a baby, even back when we were in our early twenties and hunting through lower Manhattan in ripped jeans and T-shirts and Converse, dipping into coffee shops and bars when we felt like it, back when we were writing in the morning, sleeping in the afternoon, and bartending at night.

I fell into a dark spell when we got engaged. I’ve had them before, when I was little, and as a teenager and in college, too. They’re imprinted onto my life like ink stains, and sometimes Gabe uses them against me when he needs to. Once he said he worried about having children with me, because what if I had our baby and then fell again into that deep pit of despair and couldn’t climb back out? When I told my mom about his concern, she said, You’ve always climbed back out, Rowan. But now it’s hard for my mom to always be cogent enough to remind me of the things I need her to. Her dementia came on quickly—she was mine and then she wasn’t.

I used to think Gabe hurled my mental state back at me because deep down he was scared to have children, but maybe he was scared of me, and maybe he was partly right; look at the mess we’re in now. But aren’t we all vulnerable to a mental break? We’re all walking around with these big brains that can misfire and split and repress and obsess or hurtle into insanity at any second.

“Do you like her?” Gabe asks. For some ridiculous reason I think about Lila first, instead of the psychologist.

“Sylvie?” I ask, and Gabe nods.

“I do,” I say. My fingers touch the translucent skin on Lila’s legs. I trace the lacy patterns the blood makes beneath the surface, imagining the vessels and all the perfect systems at play in her tiny body. “Though she’s maybe a little too calm,” I add about Sylvie.

“Probably part of her job,” Gabe says with a shrug. “But yeah. She’s preternaturally calm, especially for a New Yorker.”

It makes me smile—him understanding me, agreeing. “Do you blame me for what happened with June?” I ask, the words out of my mouth before I realize what I’m saying.

“No,” Gabe says right away, like he has to convince both of us of this one thing. “You haven’t been right since the birth. It’s not your fault. It’s been too much—you lost so much blood,” he says, “and it was so bad.” Tears fill his dark eyes, surprising me. Gabe has cried only once in front of me during our entire relationship, and that was just a few weeks ago in the hospital when I woke up and saw him holding Lila at my bedside. “You just have to get your mind back on track,” he says, and then the tears stop and he’s steel again, like always. “Integrated,” he says. “Isn’t that the word Sylvie used? It was a trauma, what happened to you, just like the doctors said. You went somewhere else,” he says. “It’s almost like you were someone else, like you forgot who we all were. It was . . .”

He breaks off. He’s said too much and he knows it. Guilt floods me. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I’ll get stronger. I will.”

“It’s not your fault,” he says again. “You almost died giving birth to Lila.” It sounds like a line he’s written in a screenplay, or for the various TV shows he wrote for before writing the film that changed his career. It doesn’t sound like something I ever thought would happen to us.

We’re quiet for a moment. And then I say, softly, “It was a trauma for you, too,” because it only seems fair. I pat the empty spot in the bed because I want him to come to us. I want to feel what it’s like to let him into my and Lila’s secret world, and I want him to belong inside it, because I know deep down he has to or else we won’t make it out of this. “Come,” I say. I try to sound warm and inviting, but it comes out a little desperate. I look down at Lila. Her toes are like Tic Tacs, and I marvel at how tiny her toenails are, and then I imagine how I’ll start painting them when she’s three. Maybe earlier.

“What are you smiling about?” Gabe asks, still standing in the doorway.

“Her,” I say when he doesn’t get it. “I’m smiling about Lila.” His face is so still. “Come lie down with us,” I say, a shake in my voice that I don’t like, the one I get sometimes in meetings with my publisher when we sit down with the marketing and sales teams and I try to be more animated, smarter, lovelier. “Gabe, please,” I say, but it’s hard to look at him for a meaningful amount of time, not with Lila pulling my gaze like a magnet.

“Rowan,” Gabe says. His phone buzzes, and I think Lila and I have lost his attention, but then he shoves his phone deep into the pocket of his sweats and lowers himself into our bed. I see the lines in his olive skin, his dark hair rumpled and sticking up in places it shouldn’t. If Lila weren’t here, I would reach my hand out to touch his shoulder, his stomach, other places. But Lila’s six pounds and may as well be a boulder for all she puts between us.