“All right,” said Jess, turning out onto the main street, ready to embark upon the latest spin on the hamster wheel that was her life now. She was still thinking about the article because she, unlike Adam and so many of the people who left comments on Facebook, could absolutely imagine how such a tragedy might happen. How a seemingly good and loving parent could have a single lapse. Jess had a newfound awareness of how easily things could slip through the cracks. Lately she’d been wondering if her life was a sieve.
She glanced back at Bella, who was looking drowsy, eyelids heavy, lulled by the car’s steady hum. This wasn’t part of the plan. “Hey, baby,” Jess called back, as Bella’s eyelids shut and stayed that way. Her nap wasn’t supposed to happen until later that morning. Too bad for her that her parents’ busy days didn’t accord with her physical needs, just another thing to feel bad about. They had stopped breastfeeding,and Jess was troubled by Bella’s ease with weaning, by what it meant that her baby had let it go so easily, that sometimes what appears to be wellbeing might be a sign of darkness lurking deeper. How do you ever know?
Of course, this was preposterous (and there you go, Bella was asleep). They were lucky to be able to afford great childcare. Bella ate better at daycare—organic food rich with variety—than she did at home. According to her teacher’s report, she liked papayas, while Jess wasn’t sure she’d ever tried a papaya herself. Bella’s teachers were all fantastic, multilingual, with academic qualifications and electric personalities that radiated warmth. Adult-to-child ratios were above government standards. It was a very good place, but it didn’t matter. No place would have assuaged Jess’s anxiety at leaving her baby. Anxiety might be perceived as a manifestation of guilt, but it wasn’t. The problem was the seemingly irreconcilable identities of mother andhuman person.The situation as it stood was just barely tolerable, but this didn’t mean that Jess couldn’t also be frustrated by her inability to be two things at once.
Her parents didn’t understand this. “You don’t even have to go back to work, honey,” her father pointed out near the end of her leave. They’d come into the city to see Bella, the flexibility of their retirement mapping nicely onto her days with the baby. Jess had seen a lot of her parents these last few months, perhaps too much.
“But I want to go back,” she told her dad. She loved her job. She’d spent years working to get where she was.
“So then you have nothing to complain about,” said her mother, as though life were that simple. As though freedom to make a choice somehow took away the right to tell the complicated truth about what such choices entailed. And none of the choices were easy.
“If I didn’t go back to work,” Jess told her parents, “there’d be a whole lot more to complain about.” She wasn’t kidding. Mothering a baby had been such a primitive way of being, the world shrunk so small, and she was beyond ready to get back to reality, to substantiality.
But she hadn’t anticipated this difficulty: she had returned to the real world a different person and her circumstances had changed. She hadn’t realized that she’d still be expected to have boozy lunches with donors, or speak in complete sentences after missing a night’s sleep because the baby was sick or teething. Just three days after Bella started daycare, Jess received her first call to come pick her up because she was running a fever, and she had been consistently sick ever since. And this was normal, all the other parents assured her. Never mind the year you’d spent coddling your baby and buoying her up with the immune-boosting powers of breast milk. Now you had to shove them out into the world to be felled by one virus after another. Immunity was a bitch.
Jess had never imagined the morning scramble: making the baby breakfast; getting her settled in her highchair and feeding her; taking time to wipe the splatters off the walls and eventually sweep up all the items that she’d hurled to the floor; getting her changed and dressed, and usually changed and dressed again; all this on top of a basic morning routine that had always tested her limits even when there wasn’t a baby involved.
The commute to work was now twenty-five minutes longer, and that was when traffic was light, the weather was fine, and the baby didn’t kick up a fuss at drop-off, didn’t cling to Jess while pitching a gigantic fit, didn’t hold on so tightly that one of the teachers would have to pry Bella’s tiny fingers, furious fists, and solid grip off her.
Even once the baby was installed at daycare, she occupied a huge percentage of Jess’s too-limited attention as she anticipated the phone buzzing with news that Bella was sick again, or imagined that no call meant something even worse—a gas leak? Carbon monoxide poisoning? Jess would then flip the coin to envision catastrophe befallingherinstead, her poor baby left motherless, an orphan. At some point she and Adam should get around to making wills.
Jess was lucky that her job provided her with some leeway, a door that shut, lots of flexibility and work-from-home options, but she had to be careful. As the only parent on staff, she had to make sure no one thought she was letting the team down, particularly now as she was looking to advance. So in the meantime she kept on, like a woman whose physical and mental capacities were not stretched to their limits. It was clearly an act, but she had no choice.
Though she was not above complaining. She vented to everybody: supermarket cashiers, janitorial staff, streetcar drivers. The morning of the day it had all gone wrong, she sent a text to Clara explaining the situation: there was an outbreak ofscabiesat daycare, so she would understand if Clara preferred to cancel their plans for the evening. But the text was really just another excuse to share her disbelief at the absurdity of it all.
“It’s understandable, though,” Clara told her at the end of the day, once they were finally face to face. (Face to face, andon a weeknight! They’d been able to take such casual closeness for granted once, but Jess would never do so again.) “I mean, actual scabies. I’d be complaining too.” Clara had come over anyway after Jess stressed that Bella didn’t actually have scabies; the outbreak was in another building, and the chances of Clara being affected were remote, but still.
“Five kids are down with a rash,” said Jess, “and they’ve had to call in Public Health. But now there’s all this trouble on the listserv because half the parents are blaming it on the school’s policy of non-toxic cleaning supplies, which is apparently a violation of public health rules. And the other half are furious, terrified of toxins, and replying in all caps that they’d RATHER HAVE TO DEAL WITH SCABIES THAN AUTISM. Which, understandably, has rubbed the parents of children with autism the wrong way. To be honest, I’ve never even stopped to worry about whether Bella might have scabies—which means she probably does. The worst thing about having children is that the list of terrible possibilities is endless.”
So daycare drop-off that morning would have been drama enough, but Jess was still hung up on the article about hot cars—even though the day wasn’t really that hot, and she was certain she had not left Bella in her car seat today, because her hands were still raw from the vigorous hand-scrubbing routine required upon arrival at daycare and she had a lingering paranoid itch. But still she kept second-guessing, glancing back at the car seat as she drove away from the centre—definitely empty. She could be sure.
But everybody was always sure, and they weren’t always right. Wasn’t that the problem?
—
When she arrived at the library she parked her car in the lot, gathered her bags from the passenger seat, and checked the empty car seat twice. She imagined what it would be like to return to the car at the end of the day and see a little body there. To be that mother. But she wouldn’t be, not today at least. Jess breathed deeply and clicked her key fob. Her daughter was at daycare, perhaps right now contractingscabies—but at least scabies was treatable. And now Jess was barely late for work, with very clean hands to boot. Silver linings, good vibes only. Her baby was fine. And outside the exhaustion of the everyday, Jess had something good to look forward to: scabies notwithstanding, she’d be seeing Clara in just a matter of hours.
Clara was coming into the city for an interview—another one, this time for an impressive-sounding position with the municipal government creating a master plan for the city’s archeological resources. After many delays, things were moving forward for her and Nick. He’d received his permanent residency permit and could start looking for work too. For the last year, they’d been living at Clara’s brother-in-law’s cabin, helping with renovations and winterizing the place, but it was about to go up for sale and they had to come back to reality. Clara no longer talked about trying to get pregnant, which Jess knew didn’t mean the longing was gone, just that nothing had happened yet. It would have been easier if Clara had been able to share what she was going through, instead of leaving Jess to tiptoe around guessing, but that was Clara, always keeping what was most tender to herself. The more present she was in Jess’s life, as she was these days, the clearer this was.
The itching, Jess prayed, was psychosomatic, but it continued as the day progressed, on the back of her neck and under her arms, behind her knees. She kept glancing out her tiny porthole window to the parking lot, not that she could even see her car, or that it would mean anything if she could, because Bella was at daycare. The proof was in the itching. Jess did a presentation for a school group and felt wooden in her performance, a year out of practice, but she wasn’t sure the students even noticed, which was almostworse, underlining her niggling sense of the pointlessness of all of this, the exhausting rally of her day, a relay with a single runner, holding onto that baton for dear life.
She spent that afternoon shut away in her office trying to finish up grant applications there was never enough time for, emerging only to check out the “Sleeping Beauty” exhibit she’d helped to curate, hundreds of different versions of the story and similar versions from Italy and Egypt and fromOne Thousand and One Nights.There was a recent graphic-novel version narrated by a hamster, pop-up books and miniature books, full-colour spreads and books that were so old their pages were brittle enough to crumble. All of this under glass, of course, climate-controlled. You could look but not touch, but there was so much to see.
“Sleeping Beauty” wasn’t a story meant to render readers weak with desire, but Jess had a different feel for it now, at the end of a long day on a trail of sleepless nights. Wouldn’t she like to prick her finger and fall into a century of rest and have vines grow thick around the palace walls. Impenetrable. No need for the hero, the prince on his steed. Turn back, good sir, and let me sleep. Why did everyone think the curse was such a bad thing? Benevolent witch, that fairy was. Maybe everyone had gotten the story wrong. Jess was so tired.
The exhibit was good, though. She hadn’t altogether lost her groove and she was part of a great team, even though they had their challenges. Nancy and Imelda had been having a feud since the replacement of the carpet. When Nancy lost the battle to get the pattern she wanted, she decided the one that was installed triggered her migraines. She’d been on sick leave half the time ever since, which left Imelda to carry both workloads. When Nancy made it in, the two of themwere always squabbling, and Jess sighed now as she saw them emerging from their cubicle. She wasn’t in the mood for diplomacy.
There was concern about the new girl on reception, they explained, who had offended everyone by dying her hair blue and wasn’t keeping the pencils in the reading room properly sharpened. “There have been complaints fromscholars,” Imelda disclosed.
“Could you just sharpen the pencils yourself?” said Jess. A reckless suggestion.
“It’s not part of my job description,” Imelda reminded her.
“The sharpener’s noise aggravates my headaches,” Nancy added.
Jess tried not to snap as she told them, “I’ll take care of it.” She wondered what they would think if she showed them the article about babies dying in hot cars, if it could possibly provide them with an iota of perspective.Do you ever look out the window?she wanted to ask Nancy and Imelda. Could they fathom how microscopically she cared about the pencils, the carpet, about somebody’s blue hair?
—
