I’m not sure that I’ll ever “settle in” here, but I manage to say “That will be fine” in a voice that doesn’t sound like my own. It must be the right voice, though, because Schuyler—Sky—smiles and says, “Yes, I think it will be.”
It’s only after she’s left—hobbling out of my door and crossing the foyer to the door to the main house—that I realize why the voice hadn’t sounded like my own. It’s because it sounded like Laurel’s voice, which I’ve apparently appropriated along with her credentials and name.
AFTER SCHUYLER BENNETT leaves I carry the car seat into the bedroom and put it down on the floor. Chloe stirs but stays asleep. I’m tempted to leave her in the car seat but I know that’s not good for her growing limbs (Excessive time in a car seat can put a strain on your baby’s developing spine, one parenting blog had cautioned. Straps on car seats may cause strangulation, another had warned). Which means I’ll have to deal with the bed.
I’d told Schuyler Bennett I didn’t need a crib because Chloe slept with me. I’d braced myself for a lecture on the dangers of co-sleeping, which Peter had been adamantly against, but instead got “That sounds like an eminently sane arrangement.” What I hadn’t told her was that the arrangement I’d come up with in my home had involved stripping the bed of pillows, putting the mattress on the floor, and shoving it up against a wall. That won’t be possible here. The bed’s on a heavy cast-iron frame with peeling (no doubt lead-based) paint that I can already imagine Chloe eating. It sits squarely in the middle of the room. Even if I could budge it I’m not sure it would fit against the angled walls.
She won’t fall off the bed this one night. It’s the same reasonable voice I’d heard before. Laurel’s voice. It scares me a little to be hearing voices again, but if I have to have a voice inside my head, Laurel’s wryly sensible tone is the one I’d choose. But then, I hear Laurel say, all the voices sound sensible at the time.
I LAY CHLOE down in the middle of the bed, put a couch cushion on one side of her (after checking that it’s firm enough that she can’t suffocate against it), and position myself like a human parenthesis on the other. I dump the half dozen ruffled and embroidered pillows on the floor so she won’t suffocate on those either. She wakes briefly and stares at me, her eyes strangely wide in the dim light of the yellow duckie night light I’d brought with us.
Like an alien, I’d thought when she first came home from the hospital, as if she’d just arrived here from another planet. Eventually I had grown used to her. I hadn’t thought of her like that for weeks, but now, perhaps because we’re in this strange place, she looks new to me again. Even the strawberry mark on her nose has gone. The pediatrician said it would fade away, but seeing it gone gives me a pang. How long has it been gone? What other changes have I missed? How well do I know my own baby?
But then she reaches out a chubby hand and grabs a lock of my hair while she sucks her thumb and I feel my heart contract.
That’ll ruin her teeth, some of the other mothers would say, but I’d never had the heart to deny her such an easy means of self-comfort. If it worked for me, I’d try it myself. She drifts off to sleep after a few minutes and I try to follow her. Sleep when the baby sleeps, all the books tell you, but what the books don’t tell you is how the silence of the long nights fills with sounds imagined and real. At home it would be the stealthy footstep of a burglar, the window latch opening, the crackle of electrical wires spreading fire through the walls. I’d made poor Peter get up countless times to check for burglars and loose wires. Aural hallucinations, Esta told us, are a common postpartum phenomenon and not necessarily a sign of postpartum psychosis. Here there’s the whisper of all those pine trees, the hoot of an owl—and a step on the spiral staircase.
I freeze, hold my breath, tell myself it’s just the wood settling in an old house—and hear it again. I imagine those stairs coiling like a snake up to . . . what had Schuyler Bennett said was up there? A study connected to the library. I imagine the length of the old stone house stretching out. Was there a locked door between the upstairs tower floors and the rest of the house? The thought that someone could wander from the house down into my apartment was disturbing. But who could it be? Schuyler Bennett said it was just her and the housekeeper in the house and the housekeeper was away visiting grandchildren.
Then I remember the proximity of the mental hospital and hear Sky’s voice. You don’t have to worry that an escaped serial killer will get out and make their way over. Why is it that sentences that begin You don’t have to worry are always the ones especially designed to produce exactly that effect? I can vividly picture an escaped lunatic—a woman with a gaunt face, unkempt hair, wild eyes, and an inflamed hatred of babies—prowling on the floor above.
Leave it, I tell myself. It was just Schuyler Bennett come to the library to get a book—
A creak, sharp as breaking glass, strafes through my nerves. No, it can’t be Schuyler Bennett. She might be in the library, but she couldn’t manage those stairs with her limp. I hold my breath to listen, tensing
