Your Turn

Farrah lays the baby down for the second time since midnight. I hold my breath as she tiptoes from the nursery into the hallway. Her feet whisper against the wood. A single creak is all it takes.

She steps into our doorway and signals a thumbs-up before—pap-pap!—her ankles crack like gunfire. I wince and wait for the inevitable. Carleigh doesn’t waste any time.

“Shit, Farrah,” I say, digging sleep from my eyes like it makes any difference.

“Your turn,” she says.

I look at my bedside clock. “It’s too early to keep her up.”

“Then try rocking her back down.” She collapses into bed.

I slam our door. Carleigh’s wailing again. It’ll take at least another thirty minutes to quiet her. I storm into the nursery and pick up our girl, cursing Farrah’s creaky joints. She’s like a relic blessed with a 32-year-old’s beauty. I have half a mind to start calling her Pharaoh again, the nickname I gave her when we first started dating. She hated how her knees sang when she bent to tie her shoes or how her pelvic bone popped during sex. The name didn’t stick, but I was proud of it nonetheless.

Weak light leaks from the monkey dangling off Carleigh’s crib by its tail; her white-noise machine blares. It’s so loud I can’t separate the sound of Ocean Waves from the tick-tick-tick of hail pelting the side of our house. I stare into my arms, but our daughter looks nothing like me. She’s all puffy skin and twisted mouth. Ruby-faced and wriggling. She’s pumping her thighs like it’s leg day for babies. Her arms thrash like a geyser through a garden hose. It’s as if she’s still acclimating. That makes three of us.

Carleigh’s cries reach a new decibel level. My jaw tightens, so I focus on my breathing.

Smell the flower; blow out the candle.

But the candle’s burned down to the wick.

***

In the morning, Farrah’s halfway out the back door for her daily walk, the one activity where she’s not a mother or wife, when I stumble downstairs with Carleigh clutching my neck like a bur. Farrah’s bundled in her parka, faux fur framing her face like a mane. I want to apologize for last night, but with three hours of sleep in my tank compounded over three fucking months, it’s hard to un-weld my eyelids never mind my mouth.

I wrestle a screaming Carleigh into the bouncer on the kitchen table. I wait to hear the back door close. No bye, no see you later. Instead, beneath Carleigh’s airhorn cries, I hear a meaty thud behind me.

Farrah’s face loses its colour. Light toffee gives way to a sickly shade of bone. I think of the blood fleeing her face when she’d fainted from heatstroke at the ruin pub we found in Budapest not a year after we’d met, when we were baby-faced and brazen. I remember laying her on the curb, dabbing her brow, and scanning the neon-soaked night for unfamiliar taxis, my own face getting sweatier by the second.

Farrah wavers.

“Jesus Christ!” I manage as we both look to the floor. Her left hand is coiled on the linoleum. I blink, and then it’s gone. A cold panic leaks down my throat, pushes against my stomach lining like water swelling into ice. I’m hallucinating, I think—I want to think—but the clean edge of her wrist is irrefutable.

Farrah reaches for her hood with an appendage that’s not there. “I’m just gonna . . .” She motions to a chair at the table. I’m back in Budapest, I think, panic abating beneath a sudden spur to do what I’ve always wanted to do: take care of her. I leave Carleigh unclipped and catch her before she faints.

Dead weight in my arms, she weighs nothing at all.

***

People talk about sleep deprivation but not what it does to you.

They talk about it in the same light-hearted, pre-prescribed manner they fashion the rest of their social discourse.

Airports these days!

The housing market!

Babies . . . Sleep while you can!

No one tells you that you become a storm cloud goading the earth in alarming shades of grey. That, without sleep, you’re a fed Mogwai after midnight. You’re Cujo post bat bite. You’re anything but the partner you want to be. The parent you need to be. If you’re anything at all.

***

Farrah spends the morning in bed. I wander into our room intermittently, aimlessly, and sit on the edge of our mattress. I rub my arms to make sure they’re still there.

Around 9:30, I manage to get Carleigh down for a nap. Farrah’s stopped crying, and I assume she’s fallen asleep, which means maybe I can sleep, too. Maybe the two of us can drift off and wake up to find the whole morning a shared delusion, both of Farrah’s hands accounted for. Maybe our fingers can interweave.

She’s sitting up in bed, gazing through the wall. She’s cradling her stump like it’s a dead child. I can’t stop looking at it. There’s no wound to bandage, no bone-and-blood mess. It’s just a shiny knob grooved like a garlic bulb.

The thought makes my stomach lurch, and I have to sit to keep my breakfast down. Like Farrah, I train my eyes on the wall opposite the bed. I focus on the antique dresser she refurbished last year. Duck egg blue drawers. Hammered copper knobs. Its totality moors me.

“Her bottles.”

Farrah’s voice is a cold wind carried in from some faraway place.

“What?”

“Her bottles,” she snaps. “Can you clean them before she wakes up?”

I wonder if we’ll converse like a couple again. If we’re just project managers now. If our new love language is tasks. I close my eyes and see myself walking down the stairs, rinsing the hypoallergenic formula from Carleigh’s bottles, dumped in the sink like a mass grave, then loading them into the sterilizer. If only imagining were enough.

The bed creaks. Mattress rebounds.

“I’ll do it!” I hiss, but she’s already blustering down the hall, her missing hand somehow yesterday’s news, a detriment we’ve silently accepted. It’s something we’re getting good at.

Eyes shut, I fall into my pillow, willing myself to stay awake against a darkness that pulls me into a sleep so brief I can’t be sure I’ve slept at all.

***

Afternoon. I forget my sunglasses, so I’m sleep-hazy and snow-blind as we start our loop around Harmony Crescent. My eyes feel like sandbags from squinting, gritty on the inside, and I don’t see Farrah tussling with the stroller until I’m several feet ahead.

“I’ll get it,” I say, but all I’m met with are grunts tinged with the promise of tears. Farrah’s movements are awkward but determined as she one-handedly tries to free the stroller wheels from a stubborn knoll of snow. A kick of pity rips through my chest.

Across the street, two bunnies dart beneath a wall of snow-dipped hedges bordering the bigger, mid-century, modern homes in our neighbourhood. I wonder how quiet it is inside those hedges. What it’s like to hide.

“I said I’ll get it.” But I realize now she can’t hear me. Seafoam green circles stud the holes in her ears. Funny: I didn’t see her put the earplugs in, but I wish I’d grabbed some, too. Carleigh’s been screaming since noon.

I move to help, and Farrah looks at me with red-lined eyes.

“No,” she commands, louder than Carleigh’s cries, louder than she probably realizes given her ears are plugged up. Or maybe just as loud as she intends.

“Can you just—”

“What?!”

“Can you wait?” I finish, practically yelling.

I grab the stroller, and she backs away, throwing her arms up in a dramatic display of submission. I put my weight into it, but the stroller won’t budge. Carleigh’s cries intensify, animalistic. The sound isn’t just a trigger but a cerebral hijack. Blood floods my face in a feverish wave. My temples throb, and my ability to think rationally gets its throat slashed by Mr. Hyde. In a blazing split second, my inner child becomes impatient, screaming bloody murder to get his way, to make it stop—oh god, why won’t she stop?

I’m sweating beneath my flannel, not just pushing the stroller now but yanking it back and forth, side to side. We need to get moving. We need to lull her to sleep. We need we need she needs she needs. Inside the bucket seat, Carleigh wails like a toy chainsaw.

“Hey!” Farrah’s got me in a bear hug. I scream, resist, spew profanities made up on the spot. I stumble off the sidewalk, and the two of us go down. On her knees, on the slush-soaked pavement, Farrah looks at me seemingly for the first time. Her face is a mask. Unyielding, it doesn’t belong to the woman I married, the one I made love to in a photobooth at a roadside pie factory. Hers is the face of a stranger, though the lines beneath her eyes are as deeply etched as mine.

Another kick in my chest, this time guilt from scanning the street for spectators. My default should be to apologize. Help her up. Or at the very least clear the snot-tear mixture that’s pooling around my mouth.

But those actions are impossible. I can’t move my body. It’s frozen like everything else at the sight of a green bullet lodged in the snow beside her.

Her earplug.

Encased in her ear.

***

Tummy time. Carleigh’s smiling. A coo slips from her lips as Farrah and I lock eyes, our jaws unhinged.

“Damn,” I say.

“She hates this.”

“Not today?”

Farrah grins, rubs the small of Carleigh’s back as she teeters on her belly like a turtle on its shell. Her cloth-diapered butt bobs like a buoy. We’re right there with her, displaced on a wave of relief.

I codify the moment as memory—the three of us holed up in the living room of our rented row home, hiding from the frosted fangs of winter. Afternoon sun cuts through the window, illuminating Farrah’s stubborn streak of greys like a glint of tinsel sprouting from her brow.

“You look pretty,” I say, and it feels good to say it.

“Shut up,” she says but doesn’t fight the smile dragging her cheek into a dimple. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was natural, the dimple, the signature of some master, sagacious sculptor. But I remember the piercing like it was yesterday. How I yanked her face in for a kiss at a basement house show on Gladmore, the walls quivering with distortion, convinced she’d mirror my gusto before I caught the barbell between my fingers, followed by her fist to my throat. (I was lucky to get a second date.) I remember when it got infected, too, her cheek finally rejecting the cheap metal, and the small welt of scar tissue it added to her face—which is to say a new dimple.

The sun paints Farrah’s face in streaks of light and shadow. An expressionist beauty. But the bags under her eyes hang heavy, inflamed with a weight I can’t shoulder no matter how hard I try. It’s a colossal leech biologically assigned to mothers, feeding off her every cell, taking more by the minute despite her nurturing eyes.

“I can’t even hold her anymore,” she says. “Not like I used to. Not properly.” She’s biting back the tears. “I just—I need her to be okay. I don’t care if I’m not.”

It’s the most Farrah’s spoken in days. Every molecule in my body mobilizes to comfort her. I search for the right words—there’s so much I want to say—but nothing seems to fit.

“I’ll get dinner.”

“Wait.” She puts a hand on my arm, her only hand, and dips her head onto my shoulder. She knows we need this. Her skull feels blunt, a reminder there’s no ear lurking behind the curtain of her hair. I bite the inside of my lip until it bleeds, the white-hot pain my only defense against a full-body shudder.

Carleigh digs her tiny claws into the foam mat.

We sit in a silence that’s never been so sweet.

***

My eyes adjust to the dark immediately. She’s in the nursery with the door open, the weak glow from Carleigh’s white-noise machine lightening the whole floor a pinch softer than pitch. I’ve slept for at least five hours—I feel it—some dormant part of my brain awakened for the first time in weeks.

The light on Carleigh’s baby monitor spikes in rhythmic microbursts. Farrah’s humming a lullaby, though I can’t make out the melody.

I creep down the hall to tag in and give her some rest—my rare dose of sleep is starting to riddle me with guilt—but I stop at the sound of her voice. It catalyzes a feeling reserved wholly for parents, fills my stomach with hot honey. She’s not humming anymore but whispering. Muttering sweet nothings to our sweet baby girl. I inch closer to the door, careful not to spoil the moment.

I can hear her now, and the warm feeling leaks out of me as quickly as it entered. Her tone shifts into a spiteful territory, swollen with sadness.

“The fuck was I thinking?”

I step closer—am pulled closer.

“I gardened a lot, you know. I was good at my job. I was a fucking trivia junkie. I was a lot more than this.”

Tiny gulping sounds punctuate each painful reflection. Farrah’s nursing.

“Antique hunter. Furniture lover. A woman who won’t read unless it’s the shittiest fucking smut.” She breaks into tears. “Farrah, the dinner host extraordinai—”

The wood shrieks beneath my feet. I try to hold my breath but instead do the opposite, double-announcing my presence by expelling an awkward conk! sound, like sneezing with your mouth shut.

“Colt?”

Her voice is dripping with tears. I step in as she hoists Carleigh over her shoulder. She’s getting better at it now, using her stump to support Carleigh’s butt while her good hand mines our daughter’s back for burps.

In the faint light, in her white tee, Farrah usually looks full regardless of the exhaustion stripping her down. But tonight, she’s sinking into the glider like it’s swallowing her up. Her sleep shirt is a burial gown. Her body somehow . . . lesser.

“I . . .” I start, in a voice that sounds nothing like mine. “I didn’t hear her wake up. I would’ve come.” She looks thirty years older, not Carleigh’s mother but maybe her grandmother, if either of them were alive.

“She’s been crying for hours.”

“I must’ve . . . I slept through it.”

“You think?”

I take a breath and steady my voice. I can bring the calm or chaos in this moment. I remind myself I have a choice.

“Here.” I put my hands out. “Go back to bed. As long as you need.” I move to grab Carleigh, but Farrah recoils. She keeps working our daughter’s back on autopilot, each pat louder than the last.

I take another step but stop when I see it, the space where Farrah’s feet should be. I close my eyes and rub them like some sort of cliché, then open them again. Her legs swish with the soft grace of the glider, but they end above the ankle. Both of them.

The room spins without warning, like someone’s pulled a plug in my skull. Pain erupts in my elbow, and the air livens with a cascading clatter.

My first thought from the floor: why didn’t we get a softer rug? The natural jute is scratchy on my face. It won’t be long before Carleigh’s crawling on it.

My second: Farrah’s not getting up to help me. And not just because she doesn’t have feet. She’s still burping our daughter, who’s no longer making the world’s cutest swallowing sounds but whining from the gas lodged in her guts. Or maybe from me crashing into her bookshelf.

“Colt?” Farrah says, barely managing one syllable.

I want to lift my head, but it’s easier to keep it down.

“I thought I’d be better at this?”

***

Their eyes are on us like bugs on a bulb. But there’s nothing bright about the sight of a woman missing enough body parts you’d think she was a second-hand Mrs. Potato Head; or the child slung against her chest, caterwauling like a panicked cat; or the man helming the Guest Services wheelchair, easily in his mid-thirties but with acne colonizing his forehead, his bedhead oily and spotted with flakes.

I wish we weren’t these people.

I wish we weren’t parents.

I’m so glad we’re parents.

I feel it in my marrow—affection and animosity competing for residence under the rule of responsibility. I’m Victor Frankenstein, pre- and post-creation. It’s a complex I don’t have the energy to unpack.

Besides, my only goal right now is talking some sense into Farrah so we can get the hell out of HomeSense.

“Down there,” she says. She points to the kids’ books, and I wheel her over. Hidden from the pitying glares of other customers, I exhale a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

“You remember this one?” she asks. It takes me a second to note that Carleigh’s quieted down, another to accept that maybe Farrah was right: getting out of the house, even just to the mall, is doing us some good.

“Yeah,” I say. I follow her finger to If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, the title scrawled across the cover in red crayon font. “I never understood it.”

Farrah tilts her head back.

“As a kid, I mean. My mom read it to me, but I didn’t get it. Why would you invite vermin into your house?”

I don’t need to look at her to know she’s making her are you serious? face. And rightfully so. I don’t know where the complaint is coming from, or the choice of words, but they keep tumbling out.

“Like, why engage with a mouse?” I say. “Why give it a cookie? Of course it’s going to want a glass of milk.” I’m flipping through the pages now. My ears feel hot. It’s a purging I can’t explain, like pinning your inefficiencies on some hated coworker. “Of course it’s going to want a straw and a napkin and a mirror and whatever the hell else it wants.”

“Shhh,” Farrah says in the space where I catch my breath.

“It’s going to take and take and take and take and—"

“Colt!”

But it’s too late: Carleigh’s grunting again. Is this recklessness or self-harm? I can’t tell anymore.

“Thanks,” Farrah hisses, and she pops a soother in our daughter’s mouth.

In the checkout line, she holds a candle in her lap. Our only purchase. She said she couldn’t justify spending $24.99 on a hunk of wax, but I said I’d get it. She liked the scent, Spring Dew, though I couldn’t smell a thing. And somehow the promise of even the smallest flame keeping the darkness at bay has started warming me from inside out.

Carleigh’s no longer fussing. I look at them in the wheelchair as Farrah plants a kiss on our baby’s head. A tuft of brown hair peeks out from the carrier strapped to Farrah’s chest. I no longer see a woman falling apart but a fire that’s still burning. I put a hand on her shoulder, and she meets it with the only one she has left.

“Are we good?” I say.

She looks up at me with tired but soft eyes. There’s something in them, romance or resignation, but I can’t pin it down. We thread our fingers, but already I feel hers retreating.

***

I change her diaper. Zip up her sleep sack. I get my hand beneath her head and lift her from the change table to my chest. We bob like sluggish ravers in the near dark, the white-noise machine bleeding its pastel light.

I run the scenario on repeat: in the morning we’ll call her pediatrician; we’ll solve her crying and inability to self-soothe and her difficulty feeding, which exacerbates the crying.

And this time they won’t call it colic, the medical term for your guess is as good as mine. We’ll get real relief. No more cosmos-splitting wails. No more self-inflicted gashes deep enough to breathe, her cotton-soft cheek lacerated by her own fingernails, tiny marks of suffering with a colossal weight on our hearts.

Tomorrow’s a new day.

In the meantime, I stoop to put her in the crib. A new fire burns in my spine, and I wonder how many disks I’ve herniated picking her up and putting her back down. Picking her up and putting her back down. She’s not getting any lighter. And I’m getting more lightheaded.

And I’m shaking, too, but not because of the pain but because I see my reflection in her mirror. So I keep my eyes closed as I cross the hallway back to our bedroom, my feet whispering against the wood. I convince myself I can fall back asleep. Never mind the ghoul now haunting me or Carleigh’s phantom cries, the ink-black anxiety nipping at my heels.

Farrah’s breathing is shallow, uneven. She’s a bump in the sheets, bundled tight like she’s shielding herself from the inevitable. The HomeSense bag hasn’t moved since she dropped it on her bedside table two days ago. The candle is still inside.

An impulse grabs me to touch her, to say something to tether us. I slip in beside her, but the gulf doesn’t close.

And sleep doesn’t come. The image of my reflection plagues the back of my eyelids. I tell myself the man in the mirror is just tired, worn down. He’ll fill in eventually. He’ll grow back in.

I listen for Carleigh crying, but the house remains quiet.

Does a baby make a sound if there’s no one around to hear it?