When Ghosts Come Home(76)
Instead, Colleen offered an affirming nod at what Janelle had said, and her face slid into an apologetic smile as she asked Janelle if she could use the restroom.
“Of course,” Janelle said. She turned in her seat and pointed at the hallway behind her. “It’s the first door on the right, just down the hallway there.”
Colleen stood and excused herself.
She heard Winston resume his questions as she closed the bathroom door. When she flipped the switch, the light over the sink came on, as did the exhaust fan, drowning out the sound of her father’s voice.
Colleen ran a trickle of water in the sink and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. She put her elbows on her knees, dropped her head into her hands. How did she get here? How had her life taken this turn? She heard something coming through the wall to her right, something low and muffled moving just beneath the purr of the exhaust fan in the ceiling above her. It was music.
She stood and turned off the water, and then she flushed the toilet and flipped the light switch so that the room was quiet and lit only by the glow of sunlight that came in through the closed blinds on the window behind the toilet. She recognized the song coming through the wall, although she couldn’t place it. She wondered if Janelle had left the music on or if someone else was in the house.
She opened the door into the hallway, expecting to find the source of the music, but instead, directly across the hall, she saw a powder-blue wall peeking out from behind a cracked door. And then she heard the soft and unmistakable coo of a baby. She shuffled the three or so feet across the hallway, opened the cracked door a little farther, and peeked inside.
She found what she’d both wanted to find and feared finding. Pale blue walls; an old, weathered rocking chair in the corner; and a white, spindled crib with a swaddled baby boy inside. He was lying on his back with one hand worked free and a tiny fist inserted into his mouth, where his gums worked vigorously against his knuckles. Like all babies, his cheeks were full, and his eyes, even though they were dark, were glimmering with light. Black hair had begun to fill out across his small head, and his skin, which was the same tone as Janelle’s, was smooth and crying out to be touched. Aside from her own son, who, strangely, had not crossed her mind in this moment yet was always on her mind, this child was the most beautiful thing Colleen had ever seen.
She found herself pulled across the room as if she were floating, until she stood by the crib in such proximity to the baby that she couldn’t help but reach a finger down into the crib and allow his wet, warm fingers to wrap around it. It was as if she’d taken a hit of some powerful drug; her body felt alive and awake, perfectly attuned to life and all its attendant hopes and limitless possibilities. Which is why, later, when she would look back on this moment, Colleen would be shocked to realize that she had not heard her father open the front door to step outside to talk to Mr. Bellamy. Nor had she heard Janelle stand from her chair and walk down the hallway and into her son’s room, where she would find a woman, a stranger she’d only just met, standing in the middle of the room and reaching down into the crib and taking her child’s hand without permission.
Who did I think I was? Colleen would ask herself later. That question must have been similar to the one Janelle asked herself in that moment, but the words she chose—“Is he awake?”—were not a direct indictment of Colleen’s trespass, but the tone Janelle wrapped around those words certainly was, and Colleen flinched when she heard the woman’s voice.
She pulled her finger out of the baby’s grip, her hand recoiling back toward her body as if the crib were a tank of murky water and an alligator had just emerged from its depths and snapped at her. The sudden movement scared the baby, and he began to cry. Colleen’s body spun toward Janelle where she stood in the doorway, and Colleen saw that she had already set out across the room, her eyes locked on her baby. Colleen stepped away from the crib, and Janelle leaned over the side and scooped the baby from the mattress.
“I’m so sorry,” Colleen said. For all of it, she wanted to add. For sneaking into the room, for touching Janelle’s child, for making him cry.
“It’s okay,” Janelle whispered, but Colleen didn’t know if Janelle was talking to her or the baby.
“I didn’t mean to scare him,” Colleen said. “I shouldn’t even have come in here.”
“It’s okay,” Janelle said again, this time clearly speaking to Colleen. Janelle bounced the baby in her arms and made her way toward the rocking chair, where she sat down and lowered the straps on her dress and bra and then raised the baby to her breast. He began to nurse.
The intimacy of the scene pained Colleen, and her own breasts began to ache as if remembering a sensation she had never experienced. She thought her heart was going to explode with grief. She was embarrassed to know that she had made the baby cry, and even more embarrassed to witness—aside from birth itself—the most private and maternal moment a woman can share with her child. She turned toward the door.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ll give you some privacy.”
“Wait,” Janelle said. “Stay. Your dad’s talking to my father-in-law. It may be a while.”
Colleen turned around, and Janelle gestured toward the matching wooden ottoman that sat in front of the rocker. It had a tan cushion resting on top of it. Colleen slid the ottoman away from the rocker to give herself more space to sit, and then she settled herself on it, her knees close together, her fingers interlocked in the middle of her thighs.