I looked at it was him. We’d made this little creature together, and now she was showing us just how much she belonged to us.
She mewed again. Another thing Mom said would change. That she’d get louder as she found her voice, but for now, it was so tiny it worried me. Just like it worried me that I didn’t know what she wanted. I had a feeling she was simply unsettled.
Like me, my frayed nerves and Titanic-sized waves of emotions bleeding into her. It had been the same when she’d been inside me. If I was wound up, she’d been wound up, flipping around in my womb. It was the reason she wasn’t nursing well. I was too uptight.
I sat down on the chair in my childhood room, opened the front of the robe I was wearing, and tried to get her to latch on again. She did, sucked half-heartedly, and then fussed again.
“I wish I knew what you wanted, Little One,” I said before singing a soft lullaby as I rocked her gently. I rechecked her diaper, adjusted the swaddled blanket into a tighter position, and then just walked with her into the bathroom where I’d been getting ready for the party.
I wasn’t sure I felt like going. I was exhausted and still hurting. Some of the pain was from the long delivery, but it was mostly my heart and soul that were battered. Garrett had missed our baby’s birth. We’d both been stupid. We’d both lamely expected the baby to show up on her due date, as if we could schedule her like we’d scheduled the rest of our lives.
I pulled out my phone from the pocket of my robe, glancing down at it, hoping for a missed call. A missed text. There was none. I’d talked to Garrett once at the hospital, before I’d actually delivered our girl, and then not again. When I’d gotten a hold of him, it had been through his secretary, who’d called his grandmother, Margery, who’d gotten hold of him on some island where he was inspecting a distillery they were trying to buy.
The service had been spotty. When I told him I was at the hospital, that the baby was coming, I thought I’d lost him because he was quiet for so long.
Then he’d let out an agonized, “But it isn’t due for another week.”
I’d been hit with a contraction that had me breathing hard, and I dropped the phone. Mom had picked it up and finished the conversation. When she hung up, she said, “He’s coming, Edie. He’s on his way.”
But we both knew it was too late.
By the time he got back to an airport, bought a ticket, and flew across the Atlantic, we’d already have a baby.
Still, I’d expected him to be here by now. Days ago.
When I called after the delivery, his phone and his secretary’s phone had both gone straight to voicemail. Margery’s phone did the same thing. I was at a loss. I almost called the distillery but caught myself. If he wanted to know about me and the baby, he knew where we were. He knew…
That was when I’d lost it at the hospital. It was how I lost it now. The thought of him knowing I’d had the baby and still not calling back. Mom had found me in the hospital that way, silently crying into the blanket surrounding our darling little baby. She’d sat down on the bed with me, wrapped me in arms that had been holding me for as long as I could remember, and asked the thing I’d been dreading.
“What’s going on with you and Garrett?”
“I think it’s over. I think I’ve lost him for good.” It was said between more tears, my voice hoarse and ragged.
“He loves you, Edie. I see it every time he looks at you. Whatever this is, remember that. Anything can be made better if love is there.”
“The day he left… I said… We both said such awful things.”
“We often take our stress out on those we love most,” Mom replied, smoothing my hair, kissing my temple.
“I told him if he left, to not come back,” I sobbed, and Mom’s hands had stilled before she moved her hands to my back, rubbing in a circular motion I remembered from being sick or upset when I was little.
“You didn’t mean it,” she said.
“But what if he thought I did?” I asked, looking into her wise face. The person who’d loved me the most after