A lullaby for no one

Chapter Two

By the second week, Naomi had stopped mentioning the crib.

The first time she’d brought it up, over coffee, trying to sound amused rather than unsettled, Nate had looked at her with an expression she recognized from four years of marriage, patient, a little tired, already halfway to a solution.

“We were both wrecked that day,” he’d said, buttering the toast without looking up. “Fourteen-hour day. I probably bumped it moving the porch stuff in. Or you did and forgot, because your brain was fried, which, no offense, but it was.”

“Maybe,” she’d said.

“What’s the alternative? The house, did it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I know you didn’t.” He’d reached across the box they were using as a table and put his hand over hers, and the conversation closed, gently but completely, like a door someone else had decided to shut. And the thing was, he wasn’t wrong. It was reasonable, more reasonable than the shape the thought took at 3 a.m., which had no words at all, just a feeling like a hand laid flat against her chest. So she’d said, yeah, probably, and let it go, and the days filled in around the incident the way water fills in around a dropped stone.

Nate went back to work that Wednesday, and the house changed shape without him in it. His new office was forty minutes into the city, an hour in bad weather, which in this part of the state meant an hour more often than not. He left before Theo was properly awake and came home most nights gray around the eyes in a way that had nothing to do with the baby.

“How’s the new place?” she asked, ladling soup that first Friday.

“New. Good. A lot of names to learn. A lot of systems. Every single task this week has taken twice as long as it should.” He didn’t look up from the soup. “I have to learn them faster than usual, probably.”

There was something in faster than usual that she filed away with the relocation contract’s rigid start date, the ninety day number he kept circling without landing on. She’d learned that pressing him early only made him retreat further into whatever certainty he was building alone. So she asked instead, “Is it what you thought it’d be?”

“Ask me in ninety days.” He said lightly. It didn’t land lightly. The second time this week he’d said the number, though he seemed not to notice he was repeating himself.

“Nate. What happens in ninety days?”

Something crossed his face he hadn’t planned on letting her see, the strain of a man who’d decided to carry a weight alone because he’d convinced himself it was lighter that way, and was only now realizing how heavy it had gotten. Then Theo started crying from the bassinet, hungry and insistent, and by the time she’d gotten him latched the moment had closed back over itself like water.

Days without Nate had a texture of their own. Feed, change, the frantic ten minutes trying to shower while Theo tolerated the bouncer, feed again, the long stretch of afternoon where light moved across the parlor floor in a gold bar while she narrated the house to a baby who couldn’t yet hold up his own head. That’s a very old lamp. That’s your great-great-aunt’s china, and we are never letting you near it. He couldn’t understand a word. She talked anyway, because the alternative was silence, and the house held silence differently than the apartment had, not empty silence but occupied silence, the kind that made her want to fill it before she asked why.

She missed her sister, who’d come every Tuesday without fail for the first month of Theo’s life. She missed her old OB, whose you’re doing fine, had landed as fact rather than reassurance. She missed a coffee shop three blocks from the old apartment, not for the coffee, but for a barista who’d known her order and called her by name.

Cold Hollow offered none of that yet. There was a market on Main Street, a woman at the register whose tag said DOT, pleasant but incurious. On her third visit, Dot studied her while ringing up groceries. “You’re out on Miller Road. The Ashworth place.”

“That’s right. Did you know the family?”

“Knew of them, mostly. Big house for two people and a baby.” Dot didn’t elaborate, and the line built behind them, and Naomi didn’t push, not yet understanding that this small exchange was the first c***k in a door that would open much further in the weeks to come.

She tried that second week to make the house feel like theirs. She hung the one piece of art they’d brought from the apartment, a cheap print of a coastline neither of them had visited, in the front hall. She moved a stack of Vivian’s books into an attic box and set two of her own paperbacks in the gap they’d left.

In a kitchen drawer she found a recipe card in handwriting that wasn’t Vivian’s, looping and old-fashioned, for something called Sunday Bread, ingredients only, as if whoever wrote it had known the recipe too well to write down the steps. She set it on the windowsill above the sink, meaning to ask someone about it eventually, and forgot within the hour.

She spent an hour in the study that same afternoon, sorting Vivian’s remaining books, and found, tucked among gardening manuals and cracked paperback romances, a leather-bound ledger, unlabeled, household accounting so old the ink had gone the color of weak tea, sums for flour, for coal, for something listed only as doctor, per visit. She sat with that one longer than the rest before setting it in the keep pile without quite examining why.

That evening she caught herself standing in the nursery doorway without remembering walking there. Theo was asleep down the hall, not up here at all. She looked at the crib against the inside wall exactly where she’d left it, feeling the room’s cold reach toward her from six feet away, and didn’t go in. She told herself it was because she didn’t want to leave Theo alone. She suspected it wasn’t the whole of it.

She tried calling her sister that evening and got voicemail on the second ring. “Hey, it’s me,” she said after the beep, and then didn’t quite know what to say next, the whole day pressing against the back of her throat. “Just wanted to hear your voice. It’s a lot of house, is what I keep telling everyone. Love you.” She hung up and stood at the window for a while, feeling the specific loneliness of a message left for someone who wouldn’t hear it for hours.

That night, after Theo went down, she made a list, the way she always did when a day had been long and shapeless. Groceries. Pediatrician, establish care. Find a mothers’ group, if such a thing exists here. Ask Nate about the ninety days. She looked at that last line a while before softening it: Talk to Nate, new job, timeline, what’s actually going on. Better. Still true, but with somewhere to hide.

She added one more, almost as an afterthought: Nursery, cold spot by the window? Check for draft. The floorboard by the window seat gives a little too.

It was a good, ordinary explanation. Old houses had drafts. She believed that, mostly, the way you believe things you’ve decided to believe. She checked the monitor, Theo asleep, chest rising steadily, and went to bed without going down the hall to look in on the nursery at all, which she told herself was progress, and which felt, if she was honest, less like progress than like avoidance wearing progress coat.

She slept without waking that night. She would not sleep that well again for some time.