I rush down the two flights of stairs, the iron staircase shaking under my weight, the wood one groaning like a bereaved mother. I trip over the last step and go sprawling across the floor, crashing so loudly that Chloe will surely wake up.
But she doesn’t.
Because she’s fallen to the floor and cracked her head open.
I crawl the last few feet to the bedroom, seeing it: her dazed, lifeless eyes staring up, her fragile skull cracked open like an egg, blood matting her fine, dandelion-fluff hair—
She’s there. On the floor. Unmoving. I lunge for her, a scream rising in my throat, and clutch—
—a frilly boudoir pillow. Chloe is lying on the bed, thumb in her mouth, her other hand splayed out like a pale starfish against the dark sheets. Her eyes flick open as I land too abruptly on the bed and she lets out a frightened wail. I cradle her in my arms, rocking her and crooning, “It’s all right, baby, Mama’s here. It’s all right. It’s all right.”
I say it over and over again until I’m not sure who I’m trying to convince, her or me.
Daphne’s Journal, June 18, 20—
This day has been like a roller coaster!
I felt much better at support group today. Esta talked about how it’s normal not to bond immediately with our babies and we shouldn’t feel like it made us any less of a mother. That made me feel better because to tell the truth I’ve been feeling guilty that Peter seems so much more attached to Chloe than I am. I mean, it was hard because she was born early and had to stay in the NICU for three weeks, and it was so scary, seeing her in that incubator with all those tubes attached to her. So I felt a lot better talking about that.
Afterward I walked back to the parking lot with Laurel. I was kind of hoping she’d suggest a playdate but then I realized she expected me to have a babysitter already. She gave me the name of one and said maybe we could have a playdate next week. I was feeling really good about that but then when I got home I found Peter sitting outside on the porch. I was terrified! It was like that moment in cop shows when the woman opens the door to policemen and knows her husband is dead. For one thing, ours is not a porch anyone sits on. It’s a place for seasonal decorations and packages to shelter from the rain. He was sitting on a straight-backed chair he’d pulled out from the kitchen.
“What’s wrong?” I asked right away. “Where’s Chloe?” I tried to get past him into the house but he blocked my way.
“She’s fine,” he said, holding up the baby monitor. “She cried for two hours straight. I had to come out here for air.”
“You left her when she was crying?”
“There wasn’t anything I could do for her, so yes.”
“Did you try feeding her?”
He just looked up at me, clearly exasperated. “I would have,” he said slowly, as if he were talking to a child, “but you didn’t leave any bottles or formula.”
I knew that couldn’t be true—I remembered carefully preparing two bottles and leaving them in the refrigerator—but still I felt a hot flush of shame at the thought that I’d left my baby without any food. What kind of mother does that?
Of course I immediately ran inside and opened the refrigerator, only where I thought I’d left the bottles was a container of yogurt and a half-eaten banana, which I remembered putting back after my breakfast. There were two bottles in the sink, but they were dirty and caked with curdled formula. When I opened them the smell of spoiled milk hit me in the face. They couldn’t have been the bottles I made up before I left the house.
I looked in the cabinets and the pantry for formula. Hadn’t I just bought a new case? It was true that I hated buying formula. I had wanted to breastfeed but because Chloe was born early the doctors said she would expend too many calories nursing. I’d tried pumping milk for a while but my nipples cracked and bled and by the time Chloe got out of the NICU she was already used to formula and the bottle.
Peter had been really nice about it. “This way I get to feed her too,” he’d said. And he’d been true to his word, getting up in the middle of the night for her two A.M. feeding even when he had to be at work in the morning. I knew that the least I could do was remember to buy the formula and keep the house stocked with clean bottles.
I went into the nursery. Chloe was sleeping on her stomach in the crib, her face red and tear stained, her playsuit damp. I wanted to pick her up but I didn’t want to wake her before I’d made up a bottle for her. I looked under the changing table and found a sample of powdered formula that had come with some diapers. It wasn’t the brand we used but it would have to do.
I went back into the kitchen and started scrubbing the dirty bottles. Peter followed me in, leaned against a cabinet and stared at me.
“Why didn’t you drive to the store and buy formula and bottles?” I asked, concentrating on washing the bottles to keep my voice steady. I never knew what might set Peter off. He’d told me once that his mother had been very critical and that whenever anyone criticized him he heard her voice. It was why he’d decided to run his own business instead of working for a company.
When he didn’t answer right away, I looked over and was shocked to see that he was crying. “She was
