Baby Blues

Dess

On the fourteenth day, at ten past three in the morning, she put her son down in his cradle and sat on the bathroom floor and, with great deliberation, shut the door.

She would have told you, at any point in the preceding twenty minutes, that this was a thing a bad mother did. She had read the books. She had read them in the third trimester with a highlighter, on the sofa, in the afternoon light, and she knew what the books said. Never leave your baby unattended. Always keep him within arm's reach. She knew the numbers. She could have recited them. And she knew the other thing too, the quiet footnoted thing printed in six-point type at the bottom of page 212 of What To Expect, which Joelle had underlined in red pen and handed to her at the baby shower with a look: If you feel you are about to lose control, it is safe to put your baby down in a safe place and step away for a few minutes.

Safe place, she thought. Cradle. Check. Flat on his back, nothing in it, rails up.

Step away. Check.

A few minutes.

She sat on the cold white tile with her back against the tub and her knees drawn up and her arms around them, in her stained nightgown, in the dark, with the fan whirring overhead, and listened to the baby scream through the door.

It was not a loud scream. It was worse than that. It was a thin, cracked, rhythmic, mechanical sound, like a saw working through wet wood, and it had been going for fifty-one minutes. She knew it was fifty-one because the clock on the stove had said so, red numerals in the dark, as she had walked the floor of the kitchen with him on her shoulder, pacing, patting, shushing, swaying, singing, bouncing, offering the bottle, the breast, the pacifier, the swaddle, the bath, the car-seat-on-the-washing-machine, and every other thing in the long grim compendium of infantile appeasement. None of it had worked. He had screamed on. His face had gone the color of a plum. His fists had beaten against her collarbone. And somewhere in the forty-sixth minute she had thought, quite calmly, in a clear small voice:

I do not like you.

She had stopped.

She had stood in the middle of the kitchen with the screaming bundle against her chest and the thought hanging in the air like a smell. I do not like you. It was the most terrible thing she had ever said, even silently, even in the privacy of her own skull. It had come out of her with a sort of chill precision, as a stone comes out of a fruit, and she had stood there, appalled, listening to the echo, and had seen, with perfect clarity, a woman at a kitchen table in Fall River in 1999, with a cigarette burning down in her fingers and a daughter at her elbow, looking at her with exactly that face.

She'd laid him in the cradle. She'd walked out of the room. She'd shut the bathroom door.

Now she sat on the floor and counted.

One. Two. Three.

It was a thing the therapist in the pamphlet had said. Count to a hundred. Breathe. Come back. She counted. She breathed, in for four and out for six. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw colored stars. Through the door the saw went on, rising, falling, rising, with the awful stamina of the very young.

Forty-one. Forty-two.

I am not going to hurt him, she thought. It was an old reflex now, a ritual: she said it every night, to herself, like a prayer. I would never hurt him. I would walk into the sea. I would put myself between him and a train. That's not what this is.

What is it, then?

It is that I am so tired I can't see.

It's that I don't know who I am.

Sixty. Sixty-one.

It's that I can hear her. In my head. Saying: You made this bed.

She dropped her forehead onto her knees.

…

Joelle came at six.

She came in scrubs, straight from a night shift, with her bag over her shoulder and a paper tray of coffee and a face like a sudden dawn. She did not knock. She had a key. She let herself in the way she had let herself in a hundred times, with a bang and a call and a rustle of purple nylon, and said, "Mama? Where's my guy?" and stopped in the kitchen doorway.

Dess was sitting at the table in the dark with the baby asleep in the crook of her arm and a bottle of formula standing untouched at her elbow. She had not put on the lamp. The window was a gray square. Beside her, on the oilcloth, lay the blue ledger, closed, with a pen across it.

"Hey," said Joelle, softly.

"Hey."

"How long have you been up?"

"I don't know. Since three."

"Is he okay?"

"He's fine. He's asleep. He screamed for an hour and then he stopped." Dess's voice was flat. "He just stopped. Like someone turned off a tap."

"That's what they do."

"Yeah."

"It's not about you."

"I know."

"Do you?" Joelle set down the tray. She came across the room and crouched beside the chair, so that her face was level with Dess's, and took her free hand. Her fingers were warm and dry. "Dessie. Tell me."

"There's nothing to tell."

"Then tell me nothing for a little while." She smiled. "I'll sit."

She sat.

The kitchen lightened by degrees. The window went from slate to pewter to the faintest pearl, and in the maple a robin began to sing, loud and sweet and perfectly oblivious. A garbage truck went by on Ives Street. Upstairs, in the Okafors' flat, a toilet flushed. Joelle sat on the floor with her back against the cabinet, drinking coffee, saying nothing, and Dess watched the light come up on the pine table and the yellow wall and the little green lemon on the sill, which had grown, in a fortnight, to the size of a plum, and which she had watered every morning with a sort of fervent religious regularity, as though Gerald's fruit were the only thing in the apartment she was in a position to keep alive.

"I said something to myself," said Dess.

"Okay."

"At about quarter past two. When he was screaming. I said it in my head."

"What did you say?"

"I said: I don't like you." The words tore out of her, small and hoarse. "I looked at my own baby and I thought it. In words. I don't like you. And then I put him in his crib and I went into the bathroom and I shut the door."

Joelle did not flinch.

She sat there with her cup in her hand and her dark eyes steady, and the expression on her face was one that Dess had seen once before, in a delivery suite, on the night of a stat section, when the monitor had gone flat and a roomful of people had gone absolutely still. It was not horror. It was not pity. It was the focused, measured calm of someone who has seen a thing many times and is now going to tell you, plainly, what it is.

"How long were you in there?"

"I don't know. Ten minutes."

"Did he stay in the crib?"

"Yes."

"On his back?"

"Yes."

"Okay." Joelle set down her cup. "Dess. Look at me. I'm going to ask you some questions, and they're going to sound scary, and I want you to answer them honestly. Is that okay?"

"Yes."

"Have you had thoughts of hurting yourself?"

"No."

"Have you had thoughts of hurting him?"

"No."

"Not even for a second? Not even a flash? Not even an image, like a bad dream, that comes in and goes out?"

"No." She heard her voice crack. "God, Joelle. No. I'd die. I'd die before I..."

"I know. I know. I have to ask." Joelle's hand tightened. "Have you thought about running away? Not hurting anyone. Just... leaving. Walking out and not coming back?"

Dess stared at the oilcloth.

"Yes," she whispered.

"How often?"

"Every night."

"Okay. Good. Thank you for telling me." Joelle took a breath. "Dess, that's normal. I need you to hear me. It is incredibly normal. About one in seven women gets what you've got, and it looks like this. You're not sleeping. You're crying. You're anxious. You've got these horrible thoughts that come out of nowhere. You feel like a fraud. You feel like everyone else knows what they're doing and you're the only one who's faking." Her voice was low and steady. "The 'baby blues' are supposed to be over by day ten. You're on day fourteen. That tells me it might be something a little more, and that's okay, because it's treatable, and I know a woman who's really good, and she's going to see you this week. But you are not a bad mother. You are a tired, sick, scared one. And those aren't the same."

"You can't know that."

"I've delivered nine hundred babies."

"That's not—"

"I've held nine hundred mothers who said exactly what you just said." Joelle's eyes glittered. "Dess. Do you know what I do, when a mother says that? When she says she doesn't like her baby? I tell her what I'm telling you. And then I tell her what I tell all of them. I say: the fact that you're horrified by it is the proof that you love him."

Dess shut her eyes.

"If you didn't care," said Joelle, "you wouldn't have gone into the bathroom. You'd have shaken the crib, or turned up the TV, or poured a drink. You went and sat on the floor and counted. You did the right thing. You did the exact thing the pamphlet says." Her thumb stroked Dess's knuckles. "You're a good mom, Dessie. You're a good mom having a terrible night."

For a while neither of them said anything.

The robin sang. The light had gone from pearl to gold. The baby, in the crook of her arm, gave a small sleeping grunt and flexed one tiny, perfect, bluish foot, and she looked down at it, and at the tiny pearl toenails, and thought, with a swimming clarity: he's so small.

I called him a bill.

I looked at him and thought of a bill.

"Where's Theron?" said Joelle.

Dess's eyes opened.

"What?"

"He's been here every night for a week. Colleen told me. He comes at nine and he takes the late shift and he leaves at six, and the neighbors have a pool." Joelle's mouth twitched. "Where was he at three a.m.?"

"I didn't call him."

"Why not?"

"Because I..." She stopped.

It was a good question. It was the kind that opens a door in a wall one has been leaning on. She sat at the table with the baby against her ribs and the gray light on the oilcloth and tried, honestly, to find the answer, and what she found, to her dismay, was that there were two.

Because it was three in the morning, and he's got a company to run, and he'd been up till two the night before.

And the other.

Because I knew that if I called, he'd come. And I'd let him. And I'd feel better. And I'd go on feeling better, every night, for as long as he was willing, until I couldn't tell the difference between being well and being rescued.

"Joelle," she said.

"Mm?"

"Can I ask you something and you won't judge?"

"I'm a labor nurse. I've seen your cervix."

Dess laughed. It came out in a crack, a gulp, a half-sob.

"I think I'm leaning on him," she said. "Too much. I think I've been leaning for two weeks. And I'm so grateful, and I love how it feels, and I'm so scared of how it feels, because I don't know..." She drew breath. "I don't know if what I feel is him. Or if it's just that he's the first person in my whole life who ever came when I called."

Joelle was quiet.

"That's a real question," she said at last.

"I know."

"It's a good one."

"It's terrible."

"It's honest." She pushed herself to her feet and went to the sink and ran a glass of water. She stood with her back to the room, looking out at the yard. "Dess. I'm going to say something, and then I'm going to drop it, and it's your business. Okay?"

"Okay."

"You've spent your whole life being the one who's fine. You were fine at seven. You were fine at fifteen. You were fine at twenty, when your mom's boyfriend lost the rent, and you were fine at twenty-five, when you bought a car with your own money. You have never, once, in the whole time I've known you, let anybody carry you. Not even me." She turned. "And now, for the first time, you're being carried. And it's terrifying. Because the second you let somebody do it, you find out how heavy you've been."

Dess said nothing.

"So I think you're right," said Joelle gently. "I think you should find out. I think you need to know what it's like to put your feet on the ground by yourself. Not because the carrying's wrong. Because you can't decide whether you want to be held until you know you can stand."

She came and sat down again.

"That's all," she said. "Drop it. Drink your coffee."

"It's cold."

"It's terrible coffee," said Joelle. "I stole it from the nurses' station. Drink it."

…

Dr. Pratt gave her a slip of paper.

It was the afternoon, and it was her two-week check; a small, bright, antiseptic room, with the same poster of a smiling cartoon fetus, and the same paper sheet, and the same beaded chain on the doctor's glasses. Her pressure was one-twenty-six over eighty. Her incision was healing. The baby, who had been undressed and weighed on the clinic scale and had expressed himself on the matter at the top of his voice, had gained a full eleven ounces and was, according to a nurse with a lanyard and a Garfield pin, "a champ."

"And you?" said Pratt.

She was sitting on the stool with a clipboard on her knee. She was looking at Dess over the tops of her half-moon glasses with a gaze that had, over thirty years, been trained to detect lies at forty paces.

"I'm okay."

"Dess."

"I'm... tired."

"Better."

"I'm very tired. And I'm sad. And I think I'm kind of... flat." The word came out strangely. "Like somebody let the air out. I look at him and I know I love him. I can tell I love him, the way I can tell a number's right. But I can't feel it. It's like seeing a picture of a fire."

Pratt wrote something down.

"Have you had any thoughts of harming yourself or the baby?"

"No. Joelle asked."

"I'm going to ask again."

"No."

"All right." The pen moved. "I'd like you to fill in this form. It's ten questions. It takes two minutes. I'll step out." She handed it across: a single sheet, with a column of check-boxes. "It's called the Edinburgh scale. We give it to everybody. You're not being singled out."

"What does it do?"

"It tells me how you're doing," said Pratt, "in the part of you that doesn't have stitches."

Dess took the pen.

She sat on the edge of the table with the paper on her knee and read the first line. In the past seven days: I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. There were four boxes. As much as I always could. Not quite so much now. Definitely not so much now. Not at all.

She looked at it for a long moment.

She had laughed three days ago. She'd laughed at Chidi's submarine, which had sunk in the bathtub with a spectacular glug. She'd laughed at Mrs. Ferreira, who had announced to a visiting priest that the baby had "the face of a Portuguese admiral." She had laughed at Theron, who had tried to swaddle the child in a bath towel and produced a result that resembled a burrito.

She had laughed.

And the laugh had gone out of her, each time, like a bubble from a bottle, leaving nothing behind.

She checked the second box.

She checked the rest. She did it honestly, one after another, with a firm small tick, the way she had once checked a thousand claim forms: Yes, quite often. Yes, sometimes. Not very often. No, not at all. There was a question about blaming herself. There was a question about being anxious for no reason. There was one, the last, that she looked at for a long time before she answered. It said: The thought of harming myself has occurred to me. She ticked Never. She was glad that she could.

She handed it to Pratt.

The doctor read it. It took her perhaps ninety seconds. She added a column of numbers in the margin, with the stub of a pencil, and underlined the total.

"Eleven," she said.

"Is that bad?"

"It's not an emergency. It's a flag." Pratt laid the form on the clipboard. "Ten or above means I'd like you to talk to someone. It doesn't mean you're sick. It means you're carrying a lot, and you've got a body that's doing something extraordinary, and a brain that's trying to keep up." She smiled. "I'm going to give you a name. Her name is Dr. Imani Walsh. She's a postpartum specialist. She's twelve minutes from your house. She's wonderful. She sees people on a sliding scale, and she's got a Thursday opening, and I'd like you to take it."

"I don't have time."

"You have a baby, a mother, a neighbor, a nurse, and a man in a loft who's apparently been sleeping on your sofa." Pratt arched a brow. "I'd say you're short of many things, Dess. Time isn't one."

"I don't want to be a person who needs—"

"A therapist?"

"Help."

"Ah." Pratt took off her glasses. She polished them on the hem of her white coat, without hurry, and put them on again. She regarded her patient with an expression that was, for the first time since the day Dess had met her, entirely unclinical. "Dess. May I tell you something I've told about two hundred women?"

"Sure."

"There's no such thing as too much help. There's only help that you haven't learned to take." She tore off a slip of paper from her pad and wrote a name and a phone number on it. "I've seen women break themselves trying to do it alone. I've seen women who were so proud they let a six-week fever go until it was pneumonia. I've also seen what happens to the ones who say yes. They do better. They do so much better." She held out the slip. "You've spent thirty years being strong. You can spend six months being cared for. You won't lose the muscle."

Dess took the paper.

It was a very small slip. It was white, and torn along one edge, and the writing on it was spidery and quick. She turned it over. She looked at the name. Dr. Imani Walsh. She looked at the number.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"I'll call."

"Today."

"Today."

"Good girl." Pratt rose, and, with the unselfconsciousness of a woman who had held a great many hands, laid her palm for a moment on the top of Dess's head. "And Dess?"

"Yes?"

"Go easy on the gentleman. He's trying very hard."

"How did you..."

"He sent me a letter," said Pratt, deadpan. "Eleven pages. With footnotes. It asked me about the incision, and the dosage, and the optimal temperature for a nursery. I answered every question. It was the best correspondence I've had in years." She opened the door. "I only mention it because I think he's about to run out of ink."

…

She called him that evening.

She did not text. She did not send a note by Mrs. Ferreira. She sat on the sofa at half past six with the baby asleep on the nursing pillow and the phone on her knee, and she dialed, and held it to her ear, and heard it ring. Once. Twice. She had expected the second ring. He always answered on the second.

"Dess."

"Hi."

"Is it Cal? Is he all right?"

"He's fine. He's perfect. He's asleep." She took a breath. "Can you come over? Not to stay. Just for ten minutes. I want to talk to you."

A pause.

"Of course."

"You don't have to—"

"I am on the stair," said Theron.

She laughed, helplessly, through her nose. She heard it before she heard the step: the quick, light, careful tread on the third flight, the pause on the landing, the soft knock on the frame. She looked down at the baby. She looked at the door. And she said, in a voice that surprised her by being steady:

"It's open."

He came in.

He had changed. She saw it at once. He stood in the doorway in a gray sweater with the sleeves pushed to the elbow, and his hair was damp from a shower, and he had a stain of baby spit on one shoulder like an epaulette. He looked exhausted, and relaxed, and extraordinarily at home. He'd shaved. He'd put on a pair of jeans she had not known he owned. He looked like a man who lived here.

That's it, she thought. That's the problem.

"May I sit?"

"Yes."

He sat. He chose, as always, the hard chair by the window, the one with the cracked seat. He folded his hands between his knees. He did not look at the baby. He looked at her, with that grave, courteous, searching expression, and waited.

"I want to ask you for something," said Dess.

"Anything."

"Don't say that."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Anything. Don't say it before you know what it is." She picked up the napkin. It was on the arm of the sofa, folded in four, a little soft from handling. She smoothed it across her knee. "It's a term. Number fifteen. I'm adding it. I need you to hear it before you answer."

"I am listening."

"For two weeks," said Dess, "I want you not to come."

The room was quite silent.

She looked at his face. She had been looking at it for eight months. She knew its weather by now: the small tightening of the jaw, the faint widening of the eyes, the stillness that came over it like ice over a pond. She watched it happen. She watched the color go out of his lips. She watched his hands, between his knees, close very slowly into one another.

"Not at all?" he said.

"Not at the door. Not in the yard. Not at the window. Not with soup, or a nurse, or a message by Mrs. F." Her voice was calm and clear. "I want to be on my own. With him. And Mom, and Joelle, if I need them. But not you."

"May I..." He stopped. "May I ask why?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I can't tell."

"Tell what?"

"Whether I want you here, or whether I need you here." She said it quickly, before her courage went. "You've been wonderful. You've been so, so wonderful. I don't think I'd be sitting here if it weren't for you. But I've been leaning on you for two weeks, and I'm starting to feel like I'm... like a thing that's been propped up. And I don't know what happens to me when you take the prop away. I don't know if I can do this. And I want to find out."

"I see."

"It's not a punishment."

"I know."

"It's not because you did anything wrong."

"I know."

"It's the opposite." Her throat closed. "It's because you did everything right. And I want to be able to say 'come back' and mean it. Not because I'm drowning. Because I'm standing."

He was looking at her.

He sat quite still in the cracked chair, with his hands between his knees and his eyes steady, and for a long moment she could not read his face at all. It was blank. It was the face of a man receiving a verdict. She thought: he's going to argue. She thought: he's going to say, 'are you sure.' She thought: he's going to look at the floor.

He did not.

"All right," said Theron.

It was very quiet.

"All right?"

"Yes." He lifted his chin. His voice was low, even, quite steady. "It is a reasonable request, and an honest one, and I would not wish to be the sort of man who could not grant it. I shall not come. I shall not telephone. I shall not write, or send, or leave anything on the stair." A flicker of something crossed his mouth. "I shall not look at your window. I shall, as you say, be on my own."

"Okay."

"Fourteen days."

"Fourteen nights."

"Until?"

"The sixth of July. A Tuesday." She swallowed. "You can knock at nine. If you want."

"I shall want."

"I know." She tried to smile, and it wobbled. "Theron. You're not looking at the floor."

"I was told not to."

"You're really not."

"I find that I am looking at you," he said, "because I should like to have a good picture of you before I go. For the next fourteen days. I shall need it."

She could not speak.

"May I hold him?" he said. "Before I leave. I will not ask again."

She nodded.

He rose and crossed the room. He knelt by the sofa, in the lamplight, and slid his hands under the small warm body in its blanket, and lifted him, as he had lifted him forty times in the last fortnight, with that exact, reverent, unhurried economy of motion. The baby stirred. He did not wake. Theron held him against his chest for perhaps half a minute. His eyes were closed. His lips moved. She did not hear what he said.

Then he laid him back on the pillow, and straightened the blanket, and touched, once, with two fingers, the soft dark cap of hair.

"Goodnight, Calder," he said.

He turned to her.

"Goodnight, Dess."

"Goodnight."

"I shall keep the key," said Theron. "Mrs. Ferreira insists. But I shall not use it."

"I know."

"If it is an emergency..."

"I'll say the word."

"Yes." He smiled, very faintly, and it broke her heart. "Chicken."

He went.

He closed the door behind him, softly, with the care of a man closing a book in a library. She heard his steps on the stair, slow and measured, descending. She heard the vestibule door. She heard the creak of the gate, and the crunch of gravel, and the long quiet of a summer dusk.

She sat on the sofa with the baby asleep beside her and the napkin in her lap, and the room, which had been so full of him, rang like a struck bell.

Fourteen nights, she thought.

What have I done?

…

On the third day, she discovered that the house had a sound.

It was a low, patient, domestic hum, a murmur of refrigerator and radiator and clock, and she had never before heard it, because there had always been something louder. There had been Theron, in the next room, murmuring there, there. There had been Theron on the stair. Theron in the kitchen, scrubbing a bottle, whistling, tunelessly and happily, "Shenandoah." Now the silence lay in the rooms like a heavy cloth. She heard her own footsteps. She heard her own breath. She heard the baby, at four in the morning, begin to stir in the cradle, and knew with a drop of her stomach that there was no one on the sofa to say I have him.

She got up.

She did it by herself.

She did it on the third night, and the fourth, and the fifth. She fed him at two, and four, and six. She changed him on the pad, with the lamp turned low, singing under her breath a half-remembered tune she had not known she knew. She swaddled him, badly, in the striped flannel, and he wriggled out of it, indignant, and she swaddled him again. She walked him up and down. She sat in the rocking chair, on a short left leg, in a gray light, with her feet on the cold boards, and discovered, somewhere around the sixth night, that she was no longer afraid of the dark.

It was the oddest thing.

She thought it would be worse. She had braced for it. She had told herself that she would crack, that it would be the end of her, that she'd be on the phone by Thursday, begging. And instead there was a sort of strange flat clarity. She was exhausted, and her stitches ached, and her body smelled of sour milk, and she was alone. And she was managing. She was doing it. She was putting one foot in front of the other, as she had done at nine, and fifteen, and twenty-five, and the baby was fed and the baby was dry and the baby slept.

It's not magic, she thought. It's just a job.

I can do the job.

She told Dr. Walsh so on Thursday.

Dr. Walsh was a tall slim woman of fifty with silver locs, a voice like warm honey, and a small office filled with plants. She sat in a green armchair with a mug of tea on the arm and listened to Dess for fifty minutes without once looking at the clock. At the end, she smiled.

"You know what I'm hearing?" she said.

"No."

"I'm hearing a woman who's been performing competence her whole life, and who's suddenly in a situation where it can't be performed." The smile deepened. "That's not a failure. It's a transition. You're not breaking. You're molting."

"That's disgusting."

"It's biology." She tipped her head. "The sadness is real. The flatness is real. We're going to treat it. There are things we can do, a little medication if you want it, a lot of talking, more sleep. But I want you to hear the other part." She leaned forward. "You told me, twice, in the last half hour, that you're doing it alone. That you went three days without help. And I want you to notice the tone of your voice when you said it."

Dess frowned.

"It was proud," said Dr. Walsh.

"I'm not proud."

"You are. It's lovely." She set down the mug. "You've found a muscle, Dess. It's been there all along. But you've been so busy being strong for other people that you never had to use it for yourself."

…

The towel was gone.

She noticed it on the fifth morning. She stood at the kitchen window at 5:54 with the baby on her shoulder, looking out across the yard at No. 14, as she had looked every morning since November, and saw that the porch line was bare. The towel had been taken in. In its place hung nothing. The clothesline sagged in the dawn wind, gray and slack and empty.

He's taken it down.

Of course he has. I told him not to look.

She looked at the second-floor window, the one with no curtain, and the sill, and the small bare patch of wood where a plastic chicken had sat for three months in the sun.

It was gone, too.

Don't, she told herself. Don't be stupid.

She turned away.

On the seventh day, she saw Chidi on the landing. He was sitting on the top stair, with a cardboard tube across his knees, scowling at a tangle of masking tape, and when she opened her door he looked up with the solemn glare of an engineer beset by sabotage.

"Hi, Miss Dess."

"Hi, Chidi."

"The submarine doesn't work."

"I thought it was waterproofed."

"It's waterproofed. It just doesn't sink. It floats. It's the wrong kind of submarine." He sighed. "My dad says that's a design flaw."

"Maybe it needs weights."

"That's what he said." Chidi scratched his ear. "Mr. Theron."

Dess's heart gave a lurch.

"You saw him?"

"Sort of. I saw him through the fence." The boy shrugged. "He's been home the whole week. He doesn't go out. I thought maybe he was sick. I watched his window. The light's on all day."

"He's working."

"He's not working. He's mending a chair." Chidi looked at her with grave eyes. "I saw. It's the one from the kitchen, the one with the broken rung. He's got it upside down on the floor with glue all over it. He's been doing it since Tuesday. Mrs. F says that's what her husband used to do."

"Joaquim."

"Yeah. When he was upset." He considered. "Is Mr. Theron upset?"

She stood on the landing with the baby in her arms and the light slanting down the stairwell and opened her mouth to say something reasonable. Nothing came. She stood there, with her lips parted, looking at the boy's small round face, and a strange hot pressure rose behind her eyes.

"I think he's keeping a promise," she said at last.

"Oh." Chidi nodded. "Those are hard."

"Yeah."

"My mom says the hardest ones are the ones where you have to do nothing."

"Your mom's very wise."

"She's okay." He went back to his tape. "Can I hold the baby?"

"Not yet."

"When?"

"When you're eleven," said Dess. "You'll be great."

…

On the thirteenth night, she did not sleep.

It was not the baby. He had gone down at ten, as he had every night that week, with a long contented sigh. It was not the heat, although the apartment was an oven. It was not even her body, which had begun, over the last few days, to feel like her own again, with its small familiar aches and its faint, fierce, returning hungers.

It was a silence.

She lay on her side in the dark, with her eyes open, and listened. She heard the clock. She heard the fridge. She heard, through the open window, the whole summer night: the crickets, the far-off cars, a dog barking on Wickenden, the soft tick of the maple against the glass. And under it all, she heard the thing that was not there.

At half past three she got up.

She went to the kitchen. She did not turn on the light. She poured a glass of water, and stood at the window, in her nightgown, with the glass in her hand, looking across the yard.

No. 14 was dark.

It was entirely dark. The third-floor window was a black square. The porch light was out. The back door, where a plastic chicken had once sat on a step, was shut. It stood against the night like a house with its eyes closed, and the yard lay between, silver and still, with the dew on the grass and the clothesline slack and the old maple dripping, and nothing moved.

He's keeping his promise, she thought.

He's doing exactly what I asked.

So why do I feel like I've been left?

She put her forehead against the cool glass.

She stood there for a long time. She was thirty years old and she had a son. She had a degree, and a job, and a mother, and a friend. She had a body that was healing, and a mind that was learning, and a doctor with locs and a voice like honey. She had a lemon on the windowsill. She had proved, to herself and to the world, in thirteen nights, that she could stand.

And what she wanted, more than she had ever wanted anything, was to see a lamp come on in a window.

"I'm an idiot," said Dess, aloud.

The glass fogged.

"I'm a complete, utter, colossal idiot."

She drew a circle in the fog with her fingertip. Then, after a moment, she drew a second, and a third, and a line below them; and stood looking at the thing she had made, a small round smiling face in the dark, with a crooked beak, like a chicken.

She rubbed it out.

She went back to bed.

She lay awake until the sun came up, and at 5:54 precisely, as she had done for a hundred and eighty-one days, she got up, and went to the window, and looked.

The window at No. 14 was dark.

It was still dark.

She stood there a moment longer. Then she turned, and went to the cradle, and lifted her son out of it, with his hot sleepy weight and his smell of warm bread, and held him against her shoulder, and said, quite clearly, into the small dark head:

"One more night."

The baby said nothing.

"One more. And then we'll see."