the thick residue.
Mother Ruby had told me the baby would sleep for six or more hours the first night, exhausted from the birth.
Mother Ruby pulled her great birthing bag up the steps and unzipped it at the door of the blue room. The baby was awake and nursing. When she pulled away from my breast, Mother Ruby listened to her heart and slipped her into a cloth sling with a metal spring that was somehow also a scale. She exclaimed at the ounces the baby had gained—unusual, she said, in the first twenty-four hours. The baby whimpered and began to suck air. Mother Ruby pressed her against my other breast, checking the baby’s latch with her index finger.
“Keep eating, big girl,” she said.
We both watched the baby nurse, her eyes closed, temples beating. It was the last thing in the world I had ever expected to do, breast-feed a baby. But Mother Ruby insisted it was what was best for us both; that the baby would thrive and we would bond and my body would regain its shape. Mother Ruby was proud, and told me so two or three times an hour. Not all mothers have the patience, she said, or the selflessness, but she knew I would. I had not disappointed her.
I was proud, too. Proud that my body was producing everything my baby needed, and proud that I could tolerate the relentless clamping of the baby’s jaw, the sensation of liquid transferring from deep within my body to deep within my daughter’s. The baby nursed for more than an hour, but I didn’t mind. The feeding gave me time to study her face, memorize her short, straight eyelashes; her naked brow; the pinprick white dots scattering her nose and cheeks. When her eyes flitted open, I studied the dark gray, looking for signs of the brown or blue they would become. I wondered if she would resemble me or Grant, or if she would look like a maternal or paternal relative, none of whom I had met. I did not yet recognize anything about her.
Mother Ruby scrambled eggs while reading aloud from a book on newborn care. She fed me small bites while quizzing me on the text. I listened to every word and repeated every answer verbatim. Mother Ruby stopped reading when the baby fell asleep and refused to continue, even when I pleaded with her to keep going.
“Sleep, Victoria,” Mother Ruby said, closing the book. “It’s the most important thing. Postpartum hormones can warp reality if they aren’t tempered with generous stretches of sleep.” She reached her arms out for me to hand her the baby. Although sleep was already pulling me under, I was reluctant to hand her my daughter. Separation, I feared, could be irreversible. The pleasure I found in the baby’s touch was new and unreliable; I was afraid if I gave her up I wouldn’t be able to bear her touch when she was returned.
But Mother Ruby did not understand my hesitation. She reached in and withdrew the baby, and before I could protest, I was asleep.
Mother Ruby was not the only one to visit that first week. The day after the birth, Renata shopped for a featherbed for the blue room and a Moses basket for the baby, carrying them upstairs in two trips. She came back every afternoon with lunch for both of us. I lay on my new featherbed with the half-door open, the baby asleep with her cheek pressed against my bare breast, as I ate noodles or sandwiches with my hands. Renata perched on a bar stool. We rarely talked; neither she nor I could communicate in the presence of my nakedness, but our silence grew more comfortable as the days passed. The baby ate and slept and ate again. As long as she stretched across my body, skin to skin, she was content.
On Tuesday, while Renata and I ate in our accustomed silence, Marlena came to the door. I’d stopped answering the phone, and we had an anniversary dinner the following day. Renata let her in, and she delighted over the baby. She held and rocked and shushed her with a naturalness that caused Renata to raise her eyebrows and shake her head. I asked Renata to retrieve cash from my backpack and give it to Marlena; she would have to do the flowers for the dinner herself.
“No,” Renata said. “You keep her here. I’ll do the flowers.” She got out the cash and also my event calendar, where I had written the purchasing list and the address of the restaurant. Renata scanned the book. I had nothing else for thirty days.
“I’ll be back with lunch tomorrow,” she said. “And I’ll show you the centerpieces. You can approve them.”
She turned to Marlena and shook her hand awkwardly under the sleeping ball of baby. “I’m Renata,” she said. “Stay here as long as you can today, and come back tomorrow as well. I’ll pay you whatever hourly rate you usually make.”
“Just to hold the baby?” Marlena asked.
Renata nodded.
“I will,” Marlena promised. “Thank you.” She spun in slow motion, and the baby sighed, sound asleep.
“Thank you,” I said to Renata. “I could use a nap.” I hadn’t slept deeply in days, always aware, even in sleep, of the baby’s location and needs. It seemed I had inherited a maternal gene after all, I thought, remembering Renata’s words on the drive to our first dinner together.
Renata walked over to where I lay on the featherbed, my hand reaching out the half-door and stretching into the living room. She stood over me as if trying to figure out how to hug me but gave up and nudged my hand gently with her big toe. I squeezed her foot, and she smiled. “See you tomorrow,” she said.
“Okay.”
Renata’s boots padded down the stairs. The metal frame of the door rattled as she walked out.
“What’s her name?” Marlena asked, kissing the baby’s sleeping forehead. She settled onto one of the bar stools, but the baby stirred. Standing up again, she walked the length of the room and back with a slow sway.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m thinking about it.”
I hadn’t actually thought about it, but I knew I needed to start. Even though I wasn’t doing anything but feeding and diapering and swaddling, there didn’t seem to be space, mental or otherwise, for anything else. Marlena moved into the kitchen, the baby nuzzling the length of her chest and pressing her pink cheek against Marlena’s shoulder. She began to cook with one hand. Easily. I couldn’t cook, and I definitely couldn’t cook one-handed with a baby on my shoulder.
“Where’d you learn?” I asked.
“To cook?”
I nodded. “And babies.”
“My last foster home had a daycare. The woman kept me because I home-schooled and helped with the infants. I didn’t mind. It was better than high school.”
“You home-schooled?” I asked. My mind flashed back to the task list on Elizabeth’s refrigerator door; I checked my watch reflexively.
“Yeah,” she said, “the last few years. I was so far behind, the county thought it might help me get caught up, but I just got further behind. When I turned eighteen, I gave up on school and moved in to The Gathering House.”
“I was home-schooled, too,” I said. One o’clock. Elizabeth would have been just drying and putting away the last dish, drilling me on my eights, maybe my nines.
Something simmered on the stove, and Marlena added salt. I was surprised she had found anything to cook in the empty cabinets. The baby startled awake, and Marlena transferred her to the other shoulder. She angled the baby so she could see what she was cooking and mumbled something soft, a prayer or a poem, that I couldn’t make out. The baby closed her eyes.
“You’re better with kids than flowers,” I said.
“I’m learning,” Marlena said, not appearing offended.
“Yeah,” I said, watching her work. “Me, too.”
As Marlena chopped, the baby’s head jiggled gently. “You should sleep,” she said. “While the baby is happy. You know she’ll be hungry again soon.”
I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “Wake me up if she needs anything.”
“I will.” Marlena turned back to the stove.
I closed the half-door, waiting for sleep. Marlena’s soft lullaby floated through the crack, the tune familiar. As
