On Wednesdays Jess finished work early and picked up Bella before all the other parents arrived. Now that Bella had settled into daycare, she cried when it was time to go home, and this felt like a punch in the gut. Lately Jess was driving more and more slowly to pick-up, because there seemed no sense in rushing to inevitable torture. She took the tears personally, even though the teachers told her that it happened all the time and was part of a necessary period of adjustment. But to Jess it was another indication of her failure at all things.
This day in particular, after being wracked by anxiety with scary images strobing through her brain again, she had been looking forward to taking her squishy, miraculous, perfect girl in her arms and burying her face in her neck, inhaling her sweet-sour scent. But Bella was having none of it. The teacher doing pick-ups was the cold one who had no truck with Jess’s feelings.
Perhaps no one batted an eye as Jess carried out her screaming child, but she didn’t look around to see. The point was to get out, because Bella would calm down eventually, even if she was still screaming and wriggling as Jess fought to get her fastened into her car seat.
“Transitions are difficult for everyone,” Bella’s other teacher, the nice one, had reminded her the other day, and as Jess put her key into the ignition she thought what an understatement that was.
The irony was not lost on her that the car seat was an instrument of safety in the event of impact. Before the invention of airbags, babies rarely died from being left in hot cars. Back then, car seats were fastened to the front seat beside the driver, where it would be difficult to forget who was along for the ride, even if the baby had fallen asleep.
Out of sight, out of mind—although listening to Bella’s screaming, Jess wasn’t sure how this was possible. A better mother would count her blessings: a baby as furious as Bella could never be forgotten. Such a baby could almost make you want to forget her on purpose…but no, Jess was joking. It wasn’t funny. It was important not to think of things, because if you did they might come true.
But surely the universe wasn’t so methodical. No one was up there keeping a tally of Jess’s darkest thoughts. Bella’s ragebegan to subside, or perhaps it was just that her voice had gone hoarse. Jess turned on the stereo, and the CD launched into “You Are My Sunshine,” the darkest brightest song that Jess had ever heard. She didn’t even like it, but Bella did, and she finally calmed down. Jess checked her out in the mirror, red-eyed and teary-faced, runny-nosed. Jess wanted her to stay calm, so she started singing along with the track. The verse about waking up from a dream to discover her sunshine gone, all empty arms and crying—it was the kind of despair she’d been imagining all day.
She pulled into the driveway, and there was Clara, delivered like a wish come true, waiting on the front steps beside the pretty planter whose flowers had been dead for weeks. Jess felt a rare surge of energy as she jumped out of the car to rush over to her friend, her lodestar.
“You’re like a vision,” Jess told her, clicking her key fob, the car locking behind her with a beep. “I’ve been out of my mind, and Bella screamed and screamed all the way home. My ears are still ringing.”
Clara had come down the steps to greet them. “She’s asleep,” she said.
“What?” Jess said, looking toward the car, where Bella was still strapped into her car seat, her furious, snotty face now angelic in slumber. Jess had left her in the car. Not for long, it was true, and she hadn’t gone far, but it had happened just like the article said. They can disappear from your mind, fall between the cracks. She’d forgotten about Bella and had just now turned around to find her there, the same thing they’d all seen, those poor parents—the very image, the sleeping baby, an illusion. As though they could reach out and brush the soft curve of that cheek and the baby would stir.
“Jess?” Clara was calling from far away. Jess’s heart was pumping in her ears, sounding like traffic, even though there wasn’t another car in sight. She couldn’t stop staring at the baby. She was frozen. She couldn’t even breathe, she realized, struggling to do so now. Clara was holding her, and Jess could hear a voice saying, “The baby, the baby,” and she recognized the voice vaguely as her own.
“Jess?” called Clara. “The baby’s fine, Jess. The baby’s fine.” She held Jess by the shoulders and tried to get her to look her in the eye, but Jess was looking through her. She couldn’t focus. “Where are your keys, Jess? Bella’s fine, Jess. We’ve just got to get her out of the car.”
—
“I don’t even know,” Jess said once they were inside and Bella had been changed and her grubby face wiped. They were sitting in the kitchen with a bottle of wine. Bella was in her highchair eating little defrosted cubes of pea risotto. “Nothing like that’s ever happened to me before.”
“A panic attack,” said Clara, as though it were simple, as though it were nothing. She topped up their glasses as Jess tried to explain the article about the poor babies and their poor parents. “You have to realize that’s the kind of thing that happens to hardly anybody,” Clara reassured her. “Those stories are outliers.”
“Tell that to the people it happened to.”
“But think about all the people itdidn’thappen to,” said Clara reasonably. “Child mortality rates used to be brutal. Parents today have less to worry about than at any other time in history.”
“The risks are real, though,” Jess insisted. “I mean, last week Bella choked on a grape. Agrape. You’re supposed to cut them in half, but this one should have been quartered.”
“And Bella was fine.”
“She coughed it up.”
“Things happen,” said Clara.
“There is not enough room in my day right now for things to happen,” said Jess. She refilled her glass. It was easier to be calm now. Twilight was cozy, and Clara was there. “I feel like you literally saved my life today.”
“But if it hadn’t been for me, nothing would have happened at all,” Clara said. “You would have gotten her out of the car right away.” They looked at Bella. She was banging on her tray with a plastic spoon, smiling her not-quite-toothless smile, green peas smeared around her mouth, unaware of the emotional havoc in her midst; the catnap in the car had rendered her cheerful. She adored Clara, who was such a baby charmer. Clara had carried Bella into the house, not missing a beat as the baby transitioned from sleep to chatty wakefulness.
The house was a mess. Breakfast dishes were piled beside the sink, two baskets of clean laundry were stacked in the hall, and a bag of dirty diapers was tied up by the door, still waiting, after three days, to be taken out to the garbage. They paid premium for bags that masked odour, so the bags didn’t smell, but maybe they did and Jess was just immune to it. It was possible that the whole house reeked, so Jess apologized for everything being such a disaster. She should have tidied up.
“Hey, I invited myself over,” said Clara. “You don’t need to be sorry.” She was happy to report that her interview had gone well, and she wanted to talk about it. Jess considered, as she filled Bella’s sippy cup and tried to listen, that maybe Clara hadn’t come over tonight to go through an itemized list of Jess’s struggles, to hear about the panic, the mess, and how the house had started to feel like Jess’s days: confining,claustrophobic. The walls were closing in and there wasn’t enough light.
When they bought the place, Jess recalled, it offered so much space they couldn’t even imagine how to fill it. There had been a spare bedroom and a linen closet; now they didn’t have either, because the spare room was the nursery, and the linen closet was stuffed with small appliances in need of repair, outgrown baby clothes, and a decapitated wooden rocking horse. At the start of her maternity leave, Jess had entertained all kinds of notions—she would learn about carpentry, she’d fix up the horse!—but then the year was up and the horse still had no head.
“It’s too small,” she complained, the house. They’d been trying to put down roots, but instead of roots, it was baby stuff that had spread everywhere, all that gear that had to be stored somewhere, and that somewhere was everywhere, and it sometimes occurred to Jess that nearly every surface in their home was made of plastic and played a stupid song.
“We need a house with a basement,” said Jess. Not a condo, but somewhere planted firmly in the ground. A place to store boxes of photos and her grandmothers’ china, camping equipment and fishing rods.
“But real estate’s a nightmare,” Clara said. “I mean, there are basements, but they’re all tiny apartments with five-foot ceilings that smell like backed-up toilets. I should know—I’ve been looking.” She sighed. “I never thought it would be this difficult to find work. It doesn’t matter how long my CV is. If all the experience is international, it’s like starting from nothing. It’s dispiriting.”
