The Perfect Child(45)

TWENTY-FIVE

CHRISTOPHER BAUER

It’d been so long since Hannah and I had been alone at night, and we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We’d been on a handful of dates, but it was the first time we’d been alone together in the house since bringing Janie home. It was Janie’s first night sleeping in her room alone. We’d sleep trained Janie through the SnoozeEasy program that Dr. Chandler had recommended. It was a series of small steps toward sleeping independently that started with me putting a chair next to her bed and getting rid of the pallet on the floor. I sat in the chair while she fell asleep. Gradually, I inched the chair across the room until eventually I was out of her room completely. It wasn’t as hard as I had expected. Maybe it was because we took our time doing it or because she was finally ready. Either way, it worked. Tonight, I’d kissed her good night and walked out. Hannah had checked on her ten minutes ago, and she was fast asleep.

We sat on the couch in silence. Part of what I loved about Hannah was how easy things were between us. It was always so natural. I had always thought it was odd how you could go from not knowing someone at all to wondering how you’d ever lived without them, but that’s how it was with Hannah. We were two separate people who balanced each other out like a teeter-totter without even trying. But everything felt strange, and I didn’t know how to act.

She felt it, too, because she always twirled her hair when she was nervous, and she’d been twisting a chunk around her fingers since I’d sat down. She was afraid to make eye contact; her eyes kept darting around the living room, never still.

“I think we did the right thing keeping Janie out of school for a while longer,” she said. “School was clearly too much for her too fast.”

I nodded, but I didn’t want to talk about Janie tonight. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d spent the evening discussing something other than her. Even when we tried, she invariably found her way back into our discussions. “You want a drink?”

She nodded, looking relieved.

I jumped up and headed into the kitchen, grateful for the distraction. I reached for our bottles in the liquor cabinet above the refrigerator. The last time we’d shared a drink in the house was during Janie’s welcome-home party. It seemed like ages ago; so much had changed since then. I poured Hannah a glass of her favorite red wine and myself some bourbon. I took a swig from the bottle before screwing the cap back on and returning it to its spot.

Hannah’s eyes lit up when she saw me coming back into the living room with drinks. I handed hers to her, and she tried to look nonchalant as she tilted it back, but there wasn’t anything casual about her sip. I took a seat next to her. The silence stretched out between us.

“This is nice,” she said, her body relaxing as she finally settled back into the couch.

“It is. It feels strange, though, huh?”

“It does.” She glanced at me shyly.

I scooted down the couch so I was next to her and put my arm around her shoulder. She nestled up to me like she used to.

“I’ve missed you,” I said, breathing in the smell of her.

“I’ve missed you too,” she said. She rubbed her hand on my leg.

I brought her close and kissed her tenderly. I ran my fingers through her hair, all the way down her back. She kissed me back. I drank in the taste of her before pulling back and gazing into her eyes. She returned my stare with that look—the one reserved only for me. I brushed my hand against her cheek.

“I couldn’t imagine doing any of this without you,” I said.

Her eyes burned with longing and love. She took off her shirt and tossed it to the ground. “You don’t have to.”

We fell back onto the couch, groping and clawing at each other like teenagers. When it was time to go to our bedroom, we tiptoed in as quietly as we could so that we didn’t wake Janie, our hands over our mouths to keep from giggling. We took our time making love, savoring each moment, remembering what it felt like to be close to each other.

It felt so good that we put Janie to sleep early the next night and tumbled into bed with each other as soon as we were sure she was asleep. We lay curled up next to each other after it was over.

“Two nights in a row? When’s the last time we did that?” she asked, drawing a design on my chest with her fingers.

I let out a deep laugh. So much of the frustration and resentment between us was gone, evaporated by taking the time to connect with each other. I couldn’t forget how important she was to me too.

Our experience wasn’t that different than other first-time parents’. We had thought we were giving up on the traditional kind of parenthood by adopting Janie, but we were baptized into parenthood in the same way every first-time parent was. It was all-encompassing. Everything else was pushed aside, and we went into the baby bubble. It didn’t matter that our baby was six. It was the same thing, but we were finally coming up for air.

And just like for other new parents, having a child had taken its toll on our marriage. We’d snapped at each other more than we had in our entire decade together. So many of the things that had been the fun intimacy building blocks of our relationship, like binge-watching trashy TV, putting together jigsaw puzzles on the coffee table, and reading books in bed, had fallen by the wayside.

But there was a certain amount of pride in having survived it together. There were a lot of things that still needed to be said, and some things were still too confusing to put into words, but there would be time to do all that. For now, we were just happy to spend time alone together again and to get to know the new versions of ourselves.