She loved to sleep on Joel’s chest. Within minutes, his eyes would close too, and their chests would rise and fall together as if synchronized. Sleep seemed contagious in those moments, and I would lie down next to them, my head on Joel’s arm, so that we were all touching, all connected. And maybe I did sleep in five or ten-minute snatches, but it was junk sleep, the kind of sleep that makes you even more tired.
Together, the two of them would wake, yawning and blinking, dewy-eyed and rosy. In the beginning, I thought it was adorable. My little family! I would think. I am so lucky, lucky, lucky!
I kept waiting for her features to change, to start to look like one of us, but it never happened. She didn’t resemble anyone in the family, either.
“Such pale skin, and these starfish hands,” I said to Joel. “Where did she get such long fingers?” She was chest-deep in a plastic bathing tub filled with warm water. Her first real bath after the hard, blackened end of the umbilical cord fell off, the last bit of evidence that we’d once been connected. Joel kept one hand on her shoulder to keep her from slipping while I lathered a washcloth.
He shrugged. “Who knows how genetics work?”
“Where did this white hair come from?” I poured a cup of water over her head. She blinked in surprise. “And her eyes are so far apart, she looks like a praying mantis. Maybe there was a mixup at the hospital.”
Joel scowled, taking the washcloth from me and swiping behind her ears, her neck, her chin. “Of course she’s ours. I watched her slide out of you.”
Slide, what a word. She’d scraped me raw: as if when passing through me, she’d dug her nails into my insides, trying to hold on.
He stiffened when I touched his arm. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” I said.
“Don’t ever talk like that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s the insomnia—I’m not thinking properly.”
He kissed my forehead. “I know. I didn’t mean to snap.” Then he wrapped her in the hooded towel with the bear ears that we’d gotten at the baby shower. “My little cub,” he said. “Take our picture.”
I still have that picture. He’s grinning so wide you wouldn’t know he’d been annoyed. She’s tucked in one arm, her little face poking out. One pink foot, toes splayed, has escaped the towel.
When she was two weeks old, Joel went back to work. We couldn’t afford for him to take more time off now that he was the sole provider. I hated that phrase, sole provider; it made me feel useless. My mother stayed another few days and then got on a plane to go home. In the doorway, she hugged me for a long time. She cupped the sides of my face, kissed my cheeks, but her brow was furrowed. I said I would be fine, we would be fine. “Of course you will,” she said. “Just remember—when the baby sleeps, you sleep.”
Then it was just the two of us. Me and her, her and me, all day long. When I was pregnant, I’d imagined myself with an older child, five or six years old, one I could take on bike rides or to swim class. I’d imagined teaching her to read—“One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.” We’d read the same books over and over, and I’d be so patient. But what do you do all day with a baby? Apparently, you are supposed to be so happy that you walk around stupidly grinning, the baby hanging from a sling like the pictures in the parent magazines I was now supposed to read, if only they weren’t so boring. But the sling chafed my neck, and I had to put her down. I would put her on the bed and stare at her. She had these tiny white freckles across her nose that were supposed to disappear after a few weeks, though none of them had.
The magazines said I should talk to her, but about what? I was so tired I didn’t feel capable of even a one-sided conversation. I could tell her about books I’d read, famous lines from literature. What was it Kurtz whispered at the end of that boring story? “The horror! The horror!” Or what about that other story that I hadn’t really understood, the one with the young man who kept saying “I would prefer not to” any time he was asked to do something.
I would prefer not to, I would prefer not to. Suddenly that line was on a loop in my head. Every time I had to breastfeed her—I would prefer not to. When I changed her diaper—I would prefer not to. I didn’t even realize I sometimes said these lines out loud until one night Joel said, “What did you just say?”
“Nothing.” I flushed red. What else had I said? What other private thoughts had I revealed in my haze? I felt as if I’d left my diary, open to a damning page, on the kitchen table.