Give

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5Eight Months Later

Len

“Len. The baby.” Laurel nudged her elbow into his side.

He couldn’t rouse himself from sleep.

“Len! The baby!” Laurel said again. Her voice was piqued with annoyance, and, not quite waking, Len heard the tone but not the words.

“Is she really?” he murmured agreeably, to placate her.

“Len, for crying out loud, wake up. The baby’s crying. She’ll wake Jessie.” The elbow jabbed into his side.

At last, Len was awake. “Sorry,” he muttered as he swung his legs off the bed, then shuffled down the hallway to the nursery. The baby—Emma, they had named her—was crying in earnest now, her face red and her eyes scrunched closed. The sound she made was more animal than human; more than once, Len had mistaken her cry for a cat fight out in the yard.

Incredibly, Jessie never seemed to be disturbed. He glanced at his older daughter, fast asleep on her mattress, with her yellow duck tucked in the crook of her elbow and her bottom in the air. He picked up the wailing baby.

“Shhh,” he whispered. In his arms, Emma’s cries quieted somewhat, but that almost made it worse. Len hated what came next. Quickly, he lay her down on the changing table to unpin her wet diaper. For a fraction of a second, her cries ceased. Her little mouth worked, searching for the n****e. When it was not to be found, when instead the cool air hit her damp bottom—oh, her rage! How he hated it, to feel all that helpless fury directed at him. Every night it was the same ordeal: he had to torture her, enrage her, when every impulse in him demanded he appease her.

“Why can’t you just nurse her first?” he suggested to Laurel. He wouldn’t mind getting up again to change her diaper. He felt he would do anything to avoid her desperate cries. But Laurel liked to nurse in bed, lying on her side. She didn’t want the baby’s wet diaper soiling the sheets. He had suggested a towel, but Laurel had scoffed at the idea. Any way you cut it, it would just be more laundry. “How would you like to nurse a wet, stinky baby?” she had said.

He had shrugged in response, defeated.

Plus, Laurel had added more kindly, she liked how she and Emma fell asleep together. She wouldn’t want to have to disturb her, afterwards, to change her diaper.

Len had become practiced at squelching his own bitterness, but the thought had come anyway. Disturb the baby, or you? Still, he had held his tongue.

Now, he jutted out his chin in concentration as he quickly folded the dry diaper and pinned it into place. Then he slid his large hand under his daughter’s torso and lifted her to his shoulder. She cried frantically until he settled her against Laurel’s side. Laurel helped Emma find her n****e, and, then, oh, the sweet bliss of it. He always had to stand there, just for a moment, watching her suckle.

How beautiful she was. His second daughter seemed vulnerable to him in a way that Jessie never had. His memory of Jessie from the night he had driven home alone had stayed with him—the perfect innocence of her. Her sleeping form had held the essence of peace exactly when his whole world had felt tainted and in turmoil.

With Emma, the feeling was not dissimilar. His youngest daughter had come into being at the nadir of his marriage, and yet she had come untouched by all its ugliness. But while Jessie seemed to exude resilience, as if her little toddler self was protected

by some force field he could not see but could only sense, his newborn daughter seemed innocently helpless, dangerously vulnerable. He reached out his hand now, to stroke the back of her tiny head, the pink skin of her skull still visible through the fine hair. Laurel, sensing his movement, opened her eyes and looked at him questioningly.

“What is it?” she asked.

And because he was so impossibly tired, and because he did not have the right words for all that he felt, and because, even if he could find them, he knew he would not risk handing them over to Laurel’s derision, he said only, “Nothing. I just like watching her nurse.” He moved his hand purposefully from Emma’s head to Laurel’s shoulder, just for a moment, and then he returned to his spot in bed, the sheets already cool against his skin.