“What are you yapping about over there? I’m trying to focus.”
“Birth certificate. Social Security card, pediatrician information. It looks like her name is … Elise. Aww, that’s cute. Eli.” She bends down and kisses the baby’s nose. “You look like an Eli.”
Once she’s done and changed, I pick her up, and she starts to fuss and cry again.
“Now what?” I ask.
“Oh, I bought some pacifiers. Let’s see if that works.”
Jessie runs over to open a package and cleans the thing off in my sink. Meanwhile, I look down at her birth certificate.
Elise Harlow.
Amelia gave her my last name. Was she ever planning on keeping her?
“Here,” Jessie sings as she approaches.
She places it in Eli’s mouth, but she doesn’t seem to have any interest. Only Jessie doesn’t give up. She tries again, and it breaks through Eli’s screaming enough to get her to suck on it.
Miraculously, she starts viciously chomping on the pacifier.
“Also, I ordered dinner. I haven’t eaten yet, and if that continues … I’m going to get angrier and angrier,” she admits. “I got you something, just in case.”
“Thanks. I haven’t eaten yet, but I don’t have much of an appetite at the moment. I’m feeling kind of sick to my stomach, to be honest.”
She grabs a big box off of the cart and begins to open it. “Well, you should eat something. You’re gonna need your energy tonight.”
“What are you opening?”
“It’s a pack and play. It’s somewhere for her to sleep. It has a little bassinet on top and a changing station right next to it.”
What I think is going to take hours, instructions, tools, and a lot of fighting between the two of us takes Jessie minutes to put together.
“What in the world just happened? How did you get it together so quickly?”
“I know, right? I’m impressed with myself. Clearly, parents aren’t messing around with how easily they need this shit to come together.”
There are two little contraptions on top of the crib. I don’t understand what each one is for.
“What am I looking at here?” I ask as I stand over it.
“This one is where she sleeps, and this one”—she points to the one with a plastic bottom—“is where you change her.”
I lean down slowly and place her in the bassinet like she’s a bomb that could go off at the slightest movement. By some miracle, she doesn’t wake up. It’s probably all the crying she’s done. I’d be exhausted too.
As I stand next to Jessie, we both peer down at my daughter as she sleeps snuggly in her new bassinet.
I turn around and glance into a bag from the store. “So, what exactly did you buy? It looks like the entire store.”
“It’s not like you can’t afford it.” She joins me, hands on her hips.
I ignore the dig. “What do we need to get through the night?” I ask.
She goes straight for a box and opens it quietly. “First things first. This sound machine. It’ll drown out any noise that might startle her awake.”
I freeze in place. I don’t want that.
“Open it now,” I whisper, refusing to move until she puts in the batteries and dangles it off of the pack and play.
