Before I Let You Go(104)

“That’s enough.” Sam stands and leaves the room abruptly, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table alone and all of the nonsense that’s just spewed from my mouth circles back through my mind and I want to suck it all back in. The house is suddenly full of my regret, and it feels immense—the distance to go to Sam and apologize is too large for me to cross.

He doesn’t sleep in the study this time. He goes all the way out to the guesthouse.

I have a case of confusion-induced insomnia. I pace the halls, thinking about Sam. I reflect on our early days dating, and the giddy heights of our relationship as it progressed—I think about the night he proposed, and how I’d never been so happy or so confident about my future.

Then I think about how wrong it feels that he’s not in our house tonight, and how bewildered I am that I have allowed things to get this bad. It’s entirely my fault that he’s out there. Even I’m not sure why I don’t just march across the yard and drag him back to bed.

I am here, living the dream—and apparently somehow, messing it up.

But I don’t want to rely on Sam. What if I let him take care of me, and what if I get too used to it, and then he decides he can’t deal with this situation and he leaves? What if I grew to really need him, and then something happened to him? Would I sink into a depression like Mom? What would that mean for Daisy?

In the past, whenever things were chaotic, I stepped into a well-worn groove of being the stable one. I’m the person in any situation who keeps a calm head, who copes and who fixes things. Other people need me; I don’t need other people. Why can’t Sam respect that? Isn’t that the woman he fell in love with? Sam thinks he wants me to rely on him now, but he really doesn’t. If I was weak, like Annie . . . like Mom . . . God, he’d hate it. It’s a burden to be around people like that. I know that all too well. I don’t ever want to be a burden to Sam.

Maybe that’s why I couldn’t tell him the truth today about why I fired Jayne. I don’t want him to know how weak I really feel right now.

I make coffee, and I turn the laptop on and I start to research long-term studies for NAS children. It’s better to do something useful than to ruminate on the situation with Sam, even if the studies all say what I already know. There’s a slightly increased chance that Daisy will suffer from a hyperactivity disorder, but statistically, the likelihood is that her in utero exposure to narcotics will have little long-term effect on her health, as long as I can provide her with a stable home environment.

Family environment is everything to Daisy now. And her only father figure is sleeping in the guesthouse because her mother figure keeps pushing him away. My thoughts circle right on back to Sam. I slam the laptop shut and go back to my pacing.

Daisy wakes for an early-morning feed before I’ve even gone to bed myself, and I prepare the bottle and sit with her. I stare down at her in the darkness of my room, and she is perfect. She drinks greedily at the formula, and the physician in me notes the strength of her sucking reflex now, and the excellent color in her face, and the increased interaction she has with us—her eyes light up when she sees me. She is becoming well again. Daisy is now thirteen weeks old, and has already undergone a detox from a physiological narcotic dependency.

It’s extraordinary to consider the physical suffering she’s endured, and how quickly she seems to have left that behind. The worst of her health issues are probably in the past but . . . then I think about the psychological hurdles ahead of her, and I’m scared again.

Every tear she is going to shed—every time she’s going to wonder why she wasn’t enough for Annie to be well—I’m going to have to walk her through that. Me: the same woman who sobbed all the way home from work today and who can’t even admit to her fiancé that she’s struggling.

I crumple around my newborn niece, and I breathe in her scent—she smells of innocence, an innocence that will not last long. How will I ever know what to tell her about Annie? How will I know when she’s ready to hear the truth? What do I ask her to call me? If I ask her to call me Aunt Lexie, as soon as she goes to kindergarten, she’s going to ask me why she doesn’t call me “Mom.” If she calls me “Mom,” am I denying my sister’s existence? I can’t do that. I can’t ask that of Daisy. It would be unfair—and I can’t ask that of Annie. It would betray her memory.

I try to think of a solution, right here, right now—I can fix this. Perhaps I acknowledge Annie’s existence from the very first moments of Daisy’s life. Perhaps I put photos of Annie everywhere, old photos—before she started to look so tired. Come to think of it, those are the only photos I have of her, except that one where she’s holding Daisy in the hospital.

After a while I move her into my bed. I cuddle her in my elbow, and I keep her at my side, and I stare at her as she sleeps. The responsibility—the complexity, the grief—they are all overwhelming, and they bundle together to create a hard lump in my chest. And I’m facing this alone, because Sam is in the guesthouse and I pushed him away.

I’m at the kitchen table the next morning when Sam comes in through the door. He offers me a neutral sort of hello before he goes about preparing his breakfast. He arranges his usual morning meal of toast with eggs, and then he sits beside me. Daisy is in her baby seat, sitting on the table while I push my oatmeal around the bowl.