He raises himself to his full height, his eyes blazing. What is wrong with him? She has a urinary tract infection that has knocked her for six, and she is still bleeding. He knows this. But it seems only his needs matter.
Suddenly, without any warning, he swings his arm back and cracks her across the face with all his might. She reels, gasps. Her cheek burns and her eyes brim with tears. She stares up at the horrible, cruel expression on his face and dissolves into tears.
“Tom! Why did you do that?”
She sits up with a gasp, her heart racing, and looks down into the emptiness of her arms. Where is the baby?
A low cry tells her Coco is in her crib, and slowly she realizes that she was dreaming, thank God, it was just a dream. Tom didn’t hit her. She dreamed it, and it’s over now.
With shaking hands she reaches down the side of the bed and pulls out the red, leather-bound diary with AF inscribed in gold lettering. The diary that Tom bought her, and in which she records her dreams, as per the midwife’s instructions. We want to keep an eye on you, the midwife said. We need to make sure you’re well inside and out.
She writes the date and the dream.
Tom smacked me across the face when I wouldn’t have sex with him????
She stares at the words on the page and wonders whether she should score them out.
The baby’s cries get louder, insistent. “There, there, baby girl,” she coos softly to Coco, lifting her out of the crib and relishing that moment when, as always, Coco rolls her shoulders and bottom back in a big stretch, before sensing the proximity of a nipple and widening her mouth like a bird, searching for it. A spear of pain chases right up through the nipple to Aurelia’s shoulder, collarbone, and all the way back down to her knees. She groans at the sharp scorch of it as the baby latches on and suckles.
Her heart continues to race and her mind reels with images from the dream. The look on his face when she rejected him. The crack of his hand against her cheek.
Later, she’ll tell him about the dream in wounded tones and he’ll hold her close, kiss the exact spot on her cheek where the pseudomemory still stings. “Did you eat some cheese before going to bed?” he’ll laugh.
Coco releases the nipple and sinks back to sleep in Aurelia’s arms, satisfied. Aurelia’s breast feels smaller, emptied, and she fastens her bra before lifting Coco to her chest and rubbing her back. Unlike Gaia, Coco tends to wind really well, bringing up a healthy belch within a few seconds that tells Aurelia she’s ready to be settled back into the crib.
But Aurelia cannot sleep. She rises, her head swampy and her body aching, to check on Gaia in her room next door. She sees a foot hanging out of the side of the duvet, a mass of blonde curls, and decides to let her sleep on.
Aurelia pads along the wooden floor of the old house, but it has all the foreign dimensions of a hotel and she makes a dreadful creak that she is certain will wake both children. Mercifully, neither stirs. She heads downstairs to the large kitchen swimming in morning sunlight.
The house may yet feel strange, but that is to be expected—she’s only been here eight days, and with a brand-new baby, and this is not to be their home in any case. This six-bedroom traditional red-painted wooden lodge, named Granhus, Norwegian for “Spruce House,” and constructed in the nineteenth century, will be properly restored after their high-concept summer home is built close by. That will be their summer home, and Granhus will become Tom’s Norwegian office for his architecture firm. Or a holiday rental. Or both. It’s big enough for both. Either way, he promised that it wouldn’t be their base. She found it creepy when they bought it, and she finds it creepy now.
From the window by the sink she can see fields whitened with fresh snow all the way to the horizon, where serrated, snow-dusted mountains soar into the clouds. It’s almost Christmas. From the window by the table, the garden sweeps down to a cliff, an ancient forest of towering pine trees gathered on the site of the new building. Beyond that, she can just make out a belt of deep blue—the fjord.