HOURS LATER, MY husband’s still asleep, sheets twisted at his feet, his boxers on, his shirt still off. I’ve wrapped myself in the duvet, burrowed in against the wall.
I think then that I’ll go to her. Talk to her. I want to wake her up and sit with her, the children breathing so close by that we can hear.
I want to tell her that I’m sorry. That what I thought was friendship then was only needing from her, that the moment that she needed me I disappeared. I want to tell her that I left her by herself and that I shouldn’t have; I left her twice. I should have gone back with her when she left that day in Asia, should have called her every day until she was all better, been there with her the whole time.
I want to go to her and tell her that I’m scared I’ll never feel again the way I used to feel just standing next to her. I want to tell her that I’m scared I’m too wore out, worn down, that this constant anxious ache that I have now isn’t about my job or kids or all the ways life isn’t what it should be, that maybe it’s just me, it’s most of who I am. That I loved so much believing that there was such a thing as fixing, getting better. That knowing that’s not true, that it’s all just more of the same, exhausts me more than all those nights that I can’t sleep, the miles that I run.
I want to throw all the words inside my head out into the room, and then to sit and listen to her. I want to sit, the two of us, and stitch them all together, into a string that makes not just sense but something better, bigger, surer than whatever they were, we were, before.
I want to tell her all of this, but in different words, or maybe somehow better, but when I hear the whir of the pump and climb down out of bed and it’s still dark out, she’s crying quietly, and I know there isn’t space, not now, to say any of what I want.
I know there is this other thing I didn’t know about a long time, the whole time that I knew her, this thing that feels both less and more than all that talk and want. It’s what my children taught me, maybe, feeding, cleaning, changing, holding in the middle of the night when they can’t sleep: love but less like saving, talking, more like doing, love where there’s no other side and that’s the part that’s worst but also best.
I sit very close to her and I’m quiet and she starts to cry and I don’t try to stop her. I hear the children breathe. The small plastic bottles fill, the drip drip of the milk goes on and we sit still. I take the bottles from her and I cap them. She wipes herself, pulls down her shirt. I take the plastic horns to wash in one hand, the bottles to put in the fridge. I stand up and she lies down and I go to put the bottles away, wash the horns and set them to dry on a towel on the counter. I climb back up to bed and lie still and do not sleep but listen to them—her, our girls, my husband; they turn and stir and I wait for them to wake up so the day can start.
SHE DRINKS COFFEE in the kitchen as we get ready. We pack lunches, make breakfast. The four-year-old says she has to get the sleep out of my eyes and lies in bed with the lights off and moans until I pick her up, blanket over her head, and carry her to the table to eat her oatmeal with cut-up fruit.
I have to pee, says the baby, two bites into her breakfast.
Okay, I say.
She looks at Sasha. Will you come with me?
She has a hard time climbing onto the toilet, I say.
Sasha smiles at her, clutches her coffee. Sure, she says.
* * *
She comes with me to drop the girls at school. I’m done already, but they have another couple of weeks. She holds the baby’s hand and the baby asks Sasha if she has any children.
I do, she says.
The two-year-old looks at her, waiting.
A baby girl, says Sasha.
Can we play with her? asks the four-year-old.
Sure, Sasha says.
When?
Soon? she says.
We walk as if this hasn’t happened. The four-year-old holds her hand and the two-year-old holds mine.
I ask questions about their sleep and their school day so they’ll stop asking her things. I ask them their plans for the day, what they think they’ll have for lunch.
Can you pick us up? the four-year-old asks Sasha.
She looks overtop both of them at me.
Maybe, I say. We walk them into their classrooms; I hug them, kiss them. They hug her and she seems unsure where to put her limbs; her ears turn red.
* * *
I went to the hospital when they were really little, I say. Right after the baby was born.
We’ve been walking fifteen minutes. She wears the same clothes she wore the night before. Her hair’s pulled back.
I was light-headed and fell over and it was scary. I put my symptoms in the computer and some big red box popped up that said, GO TO THE HOSPITAL.
She doesn’t talk so I keep talking.
I’d gone running, then was nursing. The baby was eating every hour and she never slept.
We cross a busy street and I grab hold of her elbow without thinking. I think I feel her settle into me. Neither of us talks until we’re on a quieter block.
I sat in a hospital bed and no one wanted or needed from me for eight whole hours and it was the calmest that I felt in months.
Were you okay? she asks me.
Fine, I say. I mean, there was nothing diagnosably wrong.
I wanted it for so long, she says.
It’s scary, I say.
I finally have her and she’s mine, but then—I kept thinking I didn’t have a right to her, that I wasn’t good for her, that I shouldn’t be allowed …
None of us should be allowed, I say.
I think about her, she says. The baby, she says. The other baby. All the time, I think about her. I think maybe I got to think that that’s what being a mother is.
It’s part, I start to say.
I started to think that maybe all I could do was care about her, about both of them, from far away, that up close, I was a danger to them, that I would kill her also. That I would hurt her too somehow.
I know all the ways I’m supposed to stop her, but I don’t.
I didn’t really want her, she says. I didn’t know what I wanted, she says. I thought for years she died because I didn’t want her like I should have wanted her.
She looks over at me; her face grown-up, tired. Sasha, I think, I am so sorry.
You were so young, I say.
A fluke, she says. A freak thing, she says. Cells and chromosomes misfiring. The sort of thing that could happen again.
I stay quiet and I lean toward her. This baby is perfect, healthy. The first miscarriage was a freak thing. Her body was deemed, after, perfect. It doesn’t make the fear feel any less.
I wouldn’t survive it, she says.
I’m not sure I would either.
I can’t, she says. Again.
We pass a basketball pavilion, a major street and a large crosswalk. A bus pulls up close to her and I grab her arm again and she starts and I let go and we walk so our shoulders almost touch.
* * *
The third week of our first baby’s life, my mother came to see her. Nursing wasn’t working. I was tired all the time. My breasts squirted milk too hard, too much, and the baby sputtered and choked as she was eating. She clamped down to stop the flow from coming and it hurt and I tensed up and she tensed up and both of us cried all day and night. I’m waterboarding her, I said to my husband. He would fall asleep, as if we should not, every second, be up and making sure that she was safe and happy. How dare you, I would think, and I’d feel far away and by myself. I broke out in hives and began to run a fever. I scratched the hives and they bled and I wore long sleeves in summer for the short periods of the day I was outside. I walked back and forth and up and down the halls of our apartment and I refused to give her anything but my breasts because the books I read and the internet said otherwise, I would have failed her, otherwise, I might not be good enough to have her after all. I kept gushing milk and she kept crying. I felt certain some higher authority would come take her. Instead, my mother: with enough clothes to clothe all of Brooklyn’s babies, with blankets and garish plastic toys that lit up and made noise.