“Gear,” said Jess, as Adam pulled out a plastic seat with suction cups that doubled as a feeding chair and a bath seat. He felt confident enough to dwell in unknowns, fortified by consumer goods. He was quite sure their daughter (their daughter!) was going to sleep all night from birth because he had purchased a $300 blanket with black-and-yellow stripes called the Swaddlelullabee. He wasn’t even worried about a wedding weekend with a baby just a few weeks old, because there were these portable baby travel-cots that folded up into a tiny bag you could carry over your shoulder.
“The part I really don’t get, though,” Adam said, “is that Clara leaves you high and dry for years, and then just summons you to her side the minute she decides to come back home.”
Jess probably would have seen his point if Clara’s call had come at any other time, if their lives weren’t once again intersecting at a point so crucial that it was eerie. Hadn’t this always been the nature of their connection, how Clara could be so close and far away at once? Clara, who by now was as much a myth as an actual person—every time Jess planned to travel to see her, she had already moved on someplace else. Clara kept in contact, but on her own terms, impossible as ever to hold, all of it difficult to explain.
Although Jess tried. “It wasn’t high and dry, exactly. She stays in touch—you’ve seen her letters. Honestly, Clara is probably closer to me than she is to anyone. She’s a wild one, like a dandelion. She doesn’t do things the way everyone else does.” For example, getting married: Clara’s wedding, to someone she hadn’t even mentioned before, was coming at the tail end of the devastating time she’d had. It had been twoyears since her miscarriage, and while Clara didn’t mention it in her letters anymore, Jess knew how deeply she’d been affected. It wasn’t the sort of hardship a person simply shakes off, and Jess was going to be at that wedding because Clara needed her, and being needed by Clara was no small thing.
Besides, it wasn’t as though Jess had been sitting idly by waiting for the summons; Adam and the baby would be living proof of that.
So they were going. It wasn’t even up for debate, because as long as Adam had known Jess, he’d known that Clara was somebody who mattered—which was not to say he didn’t grumble about taking two days off work, but he booked them. The travel, the wedding, the hassle of it all—Jess knew none of it was rational, but she wasn’t about to miss Clara’s wedding to appease reason. The journey was just a few hours up the highway. Reason didn’t always have to be king.
But while ignoring reason had seemed an inspired idea when Jess was growing a human being (because what was reasonable about that?), when the baby was born—Arabella Jean, the middle name for Adam’s late mother, Bella for short, six pounds eleven ounces—Jess found herself clinging to any semblance of rationality, rules, and structure. It turned out that she might be a creature of reason after all, now adrift in a world upside down with sleepless nights and disappearing days, sidewalk circuits walking to nowhere, feeding a body that was never satiated, that constantly mewling, wailing, sucking mouth. Eleven hours of sitting propped up on pillows while the baby cried and refused to sleep.
What had happened to time? It was as though the baby’sarrival had undone a zipper, turning the world inside out, which was almost literally what had happened to Jess’s body, now mangled and destroyed. But her body was the least of her problems.
Adam tried to help, but he couldn’t, and his uselessness made Jess hate him. She hadn’t known it was possible to hate Adam, who bounced through life like a rubber ball. Jess loved his bounce—what a way to travel, and she got to bounce alongside him—but now they were so tired, and he had to go to work in the morning. He had clients and deadlines and managed a team. So Adam started sleeping on the couch, leaving her alone in the dark cave of their bedroom while the baby cried, and then he bought earplugs, and Jess had never felt so betrayed.
Bella cried almost constantly, refused to feed, and even in those rare moments when she did eat contentedly, Jess would stare at her ear, thinking how it resembled a gaping maw, and start anticipating the dark night ahead. It defied everything Jess understood about narrative—how stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end—the way her baby’s furious needs went on and on without ceasing.
And it was here in this broken place that everything Jess had never understood about mothers in fairy tales—“Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel”—made sense. In the original version of the latter, there hadn’t been a stepmother but a mother proper, and Jess could understand it, sending your kids out into the woods with a trail of breadcrumbs, a path that would never lead back home. She almost felt relief at the idea, and then she began crying along with Bella. She peeled off the breastfeeding pillow and got out of bed, her sore and decimated body unaccustomed to being upright. She walked around the room and the motion calmed the baby, but still Jess cried and cried, clutching her bundle toher heart, where its beating, she had read, might prove soothing.
“I’m so sorry,” she kept saying to the baby through her tears. When she wasn’t plotting to send the baby into the woods, her heart was breaking with the knowledge that this poor child lacked a loving mother. How did anyone do this?
Jess tried asking her own mother, who had no answers. “I don’t remember feeling like that,” her mother kept saying. “I think you just slept.”
Apparently there were people who charged thousands of dollars to teach your baby to sleep, and Jess was willing to try it, but her mother thought it was nonsense and Adam had lost his faith in such things since the disappointment of the Swaddlelullabee.
Walking was the only thing that calmed the baby, at least until Jess stopped moving. And so she didn’t, and they went around the room, around the house, and in the evenings, through the neighbourhood. It was the closest thing to good times during those terrible early days, the beginning of June so the evenings were as golden as afternoons. Adam would join them when he managed to get home on time, and he’d wear the baby on his chest, because Bella hated the stroller along with everything else in the world. Being outdoors, breathing the fresh air and feeling the sun on her skin—for Jess, this made it almost bearable. As they walked, they’d pass other couples like them, shell-shocked and shattered, bearing their own tiny bundles—afamily—and it was like looking into a mirror. Jess wanted to tap those other new mothers on the shoulder and say,I know, I get it, and we’re going to make it, because on those evenings she almost believed that they were.
All this was a moment that seemed like a lifetime, which itwas: the baby’s so far. It was also an eternity and so far from the comfortable and happy life she and Adam had had before, something that Jess grieved.
It was three weeks, or maybe four, before the broken pieces of Jess’s universe started to assemble into something that sort of made sense, day and night nearly distinguishable. She still saw four and five o’clock in the morning as she rocked by the window, streetlights illuminating Bella’s head with its dark curls. But Jess would stroke it now, thinking, sometimes,this is love.
There had scarcely been room in Jess’s frazzled mind to think about Clara at all, much less her wedding; that is, until the baby was five and half weeks old and Jess received an email with the subject:LANDED!Clara was back, the two of them on the same continent again, but Jess felt so alienated from herself and the world that it meant very little. Clara wanted to see her, to come to the city, but Jess couldn’t do it, set a date or make a plan. She was so exhausted—a person could be still alive after sleeping no more than scattered half hours for five weeks, something she would have never believed. There had been nights when the closest she’d come to dreaming was bizarre hallucinations of the baby grown gigantic, exploding out of her arms, out of the room, taking the roof right off the house, and threatening to crush Jess with the enormity of her life force.
It was a struggle, all of it, to string words into a sentence, to follow a conscious thought to its end, even though Jess was starting to get a handle on ordinary days, to anticipate feedings and diaper changes. She’d even made a list of meals she could cook with one hand so Adam didn’t have to bring home take-out every night, and sometimes Bella fell asleepearly in the evening, and Jess and Adam would have a half hour or forty-five minutes alone, and it felt like a blessing, a sliver of something recognizable.
The wedding weekend crept up on them, impossible then imminent. Clara had asked them to arrive on Thursday, when her close family would gather before the ceremony. Clara wanted Jess to be there to save her from all the sisters and cousins, she said. She wanted a chance to finally catch up after the four years they’d been apart.
So Jess and Adam packed the car, and somehow their sedan wasn’t big enough to accommodate the bouncy chair, the bassinet, a box of diapers, the take-along baby swing with the plastic toucan, the breastfeeding pillow, an assortment of ordinary pillows that Jess required behind her back during nighttime feeds, and enough other items to fill up an array of tote bags.
“Are you sure we need all this?” asked Adam. The irony—he wasn’t the one home all day, so he didn’t understand how each of these items was essential in holding a fragile world together: the bouncy chair so Jess could put the baby down for a few minutes, and the swing to soothe her evening rages and help put her to sleep. The plastic bathtub, however, they could live without, because otherwise the trunk wouldn’t close.
And with that, they were done, they were really doing this. Adam slammed the trunk shut, which woke Bella up. She started crying in her car seat while Jess was trying to buckle her in. Jess squeezed in beside the baby, fitting her legs around the swing, the plastic toucan’s beak stabbing her in the thigh. The passenger seat, which used to be hers, was now a tower of bags and diapers, one she hoped would not topple. She hummed along with the calming CD, hoping to coax the baby from her fury.
The three-hour journey took six hours, with five stops: for diaper changes, feedings, coffee, and donuts, plus two more stops because the baby was covered in puke.
“Tell me again why we’re doing this?” Adam asked at the rest stop as he changed Bella on a picnic table covered with graffiti. Jess was trying to rinse spit-up off her T-shirt, but mostly just succeeding in getting wet.
Adam remarked, “I can see your nipples.”
“Who hasn’t seen my nipples?” Jess replied, deadpan, amazed at how many strange things were unremarkable now. “But hey, we’re almost there.”
They rolled up the long driveway shortly before four o’clock. Jess stared at the house, thinking how much Clara had hated this place, remembering the week they’d spent together after her dad died, all the solitary parts of her friend that Jess had never got to know.
They parked around the side of the house, and Clara came outside looking like herself, exactly like the Clara Jess had last seen at the airport five minutes ago—or had it been a thousand years? Her cheeks were round and rosy, her hair long and tangled. She wore a flowing skirt and that jingly anklet, her bare feet filthy. She looked so happy, so well, which was a relief, and Jess could tell that Clara was examining her with an equally critical eye, neither of them quite believing that the other was real. Clara was a most uncanny mirror; her radiance and beauty made Jess even more conscious of her own pathetic state: her stained shirt, her stupid ponytail, her saggy abdomen, and the bags under her eyes.
But if Clara saw any of that, she didn’t let on. “You’re here,” she said. “Sometimes I wondered if I’d ever see you again. I wondered if I’d made you up. Nick thinks I did.”
