Forty Days

The Long Saturday

Chapter 58: Forty Days

The first forty days are not a story so much as a weather system.

Milk.

Laundry.

Heat.

Half-sleep.

The sour-sweet smell of spit-up on otherwise moral clothing.

Time stops behaving like calendar and starts behaving like appetite.

Three hours.

Ninety minutes.

Twenty-seven seconds.

Repeat.

The house changes faster than when we moved in.

Bassinet by the bed.

Burp cloths in every room.

One basket of diapers stationed in the living room like artillery.

The kitchen table now permanently occupied by bottles, pacifiers, unopened mail, and one hydrangea clipping Jude brought over and forgot to reclaim from its water glass.

Clara sleeps like a person with excellent union representation.

Only in shifts.

Only when held.

Only when the rest of us have made plans.

Norah is a mother in the fierce improvised way some people become soldiers.

There are hours when she looks at Clara with such open astonishment I have to turn away from the beauty of it.

There are other hours when she sits on the bathroom floor and cries because the body has become its own country and every border in it is under renegotiation.

One afternoon in week two I find her at the edge of the bed with her shirt half-buttoned and Clara screaming at the general corruption of existence.

"I can't tell if she's hungry or tired or offended by me as a concept," Norah says.

"All three feel on brand."

She laughs once and then cries harder because laughter is structurally unsound that day.

So I take Clara.

Mom arrives every other day with food and exactly one piece of advice disguised as criticism.

"The baby is too warm."

"You need more towels."

"Why is there only one chair in this kitchen if you insist on feeding people."

Jude comes by bearing bread and prayer and the expression of a man who suspects infants are either angels or ambushes.

He holds Clara once with both hands extended like a cautious deacon carrying sacramental wine across uneven flooring.

"She is very small," he says.

"That is how babies enter the market," Norah tells him.

Maria, now capable of entering the house without knocking because everyone has given up on the distinction, shows up with coffee and takes dish duty without asking whether the family unit consents.

"You two look terrible," she says.

"Thank you."

"It's not an insult. It's information."

Fair enough.

Kira appears on the phone whenever Colorado releases her from its own weather.

Clara stares at the screen with the grave suspicion she reserves for all rectangles.

"Tell her I am her glamorous aunt and mountain example," Kira says.

"You tell her," I say.

"I am. She lacks language, not ears."

Somewhere in week three I start keeping the midnight-to-dawn shift because Norah's body has already paid more than mine and because exhaustion is easier to endure when assigned.

At 2:17 one Tuesday morning I am in the kitchen with Clara over my shoulder, walking the same six feet between sink and back door while she protests the unfairness of gas and digestion.

The microwave clock says what clocks say.

2:17.

Clara burps with the force of an indictment.

I wipe her mouth with the cloth on my shoulder and keep walking.

The house is dark except for the over-stove light.

Daniel's photo visible in the next room if I turn just right.

Micah's route card still pinned by the back door.

The bottle drying rack on the counter.

One exhausted man swaying in socks while his daughter settles back toward sleep.

Only this.

By the fourth week Clara begins making one soft goat noise in her sleep that Mom says is "perfectly normal" and I say is evidence of hidden farm ancestry.

Norah finally sleeps through one entire feeding and wakes up crying because she thinks she has failed.

"You slept," I tell her.

"Like the dead."

"Strong review."

She buries her face in the pillow.

"I miss Daniel weirdly," she says into the cotton.

I wait.

"Not because I want anything different," she says. "Just because this is the kind of thing he would've had angles on. Bad ones. But angles."

"Yeah."

"And then I feel guilty because you're right here and Clara's right here and apparently my brain thinks abundance is suspicious."

I sit on the edge of the bed.

"I don't think abundance erases any old rooms," I say.

She looks up at me then, tired enough to be entirely honest.

"Good," she says. "Because I cannot keep doing emotional purity tests on no sleep."

"Excellent policy."

By forty days the house has stopped resisting us again.

The cry that means hunger.

The one that means wet.

The one that means the whole world has become overstimulating and she requires one dark room and a shoulder immediately.

On a warm evening at the end of the sixth week, Norah and I sit on the back steps after Clara finally gives in to sleep.

The monitor glows between us.

The yard is deep green and badly in need of discipline.

Through the open kitchen window I can hear the old fridge kick on, loyal as ever.

Norah leans her head against my shoulder.

"You okay?" I ask.

"No," she says.

Then:

"Yes."

"Your favorite joke will one day legally expire."

"I hope to die before then."

She laughs softly.

Inside, through the screen door, I can see the spare room lamp burning low.

The rocker by the window.

The crib.

Our daughter asleep somewhere beyond sight making small unreasonable sounds into the dark.

Norah closes her eyes.

"This is harder than grief one way," she says.

"Which one."

"You can't schedule it."

"True."

"But easier one way too."

"Which one."

She takes my hand and places it over the center of her sternum, where her heartbeat is steadying at last.

"She stays."

I don't answer.

We sit there until the monitor crackles once and the summer dark gathers closer to the steps.