her,” Cleo said to Max. “Don’t you feel like someone’s going to come and stop us?”
“Yeah, kind of.” Max had insisted to his family that they were going to take Nina home themselves.
“Why don’t you just let us come to help?” Weezy asked. “We can even take a different car, if you want.”
But Max wouldn’t budge. And so, it was just the three of them in the car, Cleo riding in the backseat next to Nina, because she was just so small and they couldn’t really see her, even with the mirror.
When they pulled in the driveway, there was a wooden stork in the ground and pink balloons tied to the front door. They walked in and found everyone waiting in the front hall, and they all gathered around the baby as if they’d never seen her before. Ruby came over to see them, and Max knelt down on the ground and held the little bundle out to her. She sniffed Nina’s legs and then poked her snout on her arm.
Cleo almost told him not to let Ruby lick the baby, but she thought better of it and stayed silent. Ruby looked up at her, like she understood, like she was saying, “I know this baby, I poked her with my nose when she was still in your stomach.”
“Here she is,” Max said to Ruby. “Here’s your new niece.” Then he looked up at Cleo. “Right? Nina would be Ruby’s niece, because Ruby’s like my sister?”
“Yeah, that sounds right,” she said. Cleo was crying now, thinking that Ruby understood everything about Nina, which was absurd. She needed to sit down and she needed that weird donut thing that Weezy had gotten for her. She’d been mortified when she received it, but now she thought it might have been the nicest present anyone had ever given her.
THE FIRST NIGHT HOME WITH THE BABY, they were both too scared to sleep, not that Nina gave them much of a chance. She screamed and cried and nothing they tried seemed to work.
“She was so quiet in the hospital,” Cleo said. They were standing above the bassinet, looking down at Nina’s red face.
“Maybe she was in shock from being born,” Max said. “But she’s adjusted now.” They were grateful when the morning came, like they had survived something. It had been only one night.
The days blended together, all of them sleepless and filled with feedings and diaper changes. Their time was marked by the cycle of Nina’s sleeping and waking. Cleo gave up trying to breast-feed almost immediately. “She doesn’t like it,” she explained to Max. “She seems to know what she wants and she doesn’t want this.”
The doula was supposed to stop by to check on them, to help with breast-feeding if needed, but Cleo refused to call her back. She couldn’t face the woman after she’d yelled at her and thrown her out of the room. She was fine with giving Nina formula. After all, that meant that Max could feed her too, which meant she could stay in bed sometimes.
Max stayed home with them for a week, and the first morning he went back to work, Cleo watched him get dressed and was filled with terror.
“I’ll be back so soon,” he said. “And my mom will be here all day. It will be okay.”
With Max gone, the days seemed longer and more tedious. Weezy was there almost all the time, making comments or offering to help. Whenever Weezy suggested anything, Cleo’s first instinct was to do the opposite. She had to stop herself from yelling, “You’re not my mom” several times a day. It was just the hormones, she told herself.
Weezy often mentioned how Nina was such a good baby, and Cleo got the feeling that she was lying to her. If Nina was a good baby, what were the bad ones like? How much fussier and needier could something be?
Sometimes, she and Nina would wake up from a nap and outside the door would be a laundry basket, filled with clean, folded clothes for Cleo—onesies, pajamas, baby socks, and burp cloths. Things like this usually happened just as Cleo was thinking particularly horrible thoughts about what a beast Weezy was. She’d grab the laundry basket, more thankful than she could ever express, and hope that she’d be a better person soon.
WHEN NINA CRIED FOR A LONG TIME, Ruby would lift her head and look at Cleo with sad eyes, like, Really? This is really what our life is now? Other