Avoiding my own reflection, I slam the car door and carry him up the porch steps. I knock softly, as if—despite our mutual hysteria and the odors clinging to our clothes—Jack and I will be mistaken for polite.
Down the street, the setting sun makes the white houses glow amber. Cicadas drone, atonal and urgent. I grew up two blocks from here, and this neighborhood still looks the same: cracked slabs of sidewalk, bundles of coupons spilling from every mailbox. It makes me think of ding-dong ditching the neighbors, of lying down in the middle of the road to make a suicidal snow angel on a Tuesday night in January because our mom had kicked us out of the house. She needed to balance her checkbook. She needed, she told us, to hear herself think.
Jack will never know the pleasure of lying in the middle of the road. We live in Queens.
Bees emerge from a mess of lavender beneath the living room window and hover way too close to the baby’s bald head. The veins visible at his temples still freak me out. It’s alarming to think of his anatomy, delicate but complete. To realize I’m the one responsible for ensuring he grows into a full-size, weather-resistant human—and though I’ve googled it before, I can’t remember what you’re supposed to do if your baby gets stung by a bee.
I can’t remember if I locked the car, or if it’s even customary to lock your car in Deerling, Ohio.
I can’t remember the last time I slept more than two consecutive hours.
This baby has driven me a little bit crazy. I once believed I was capable of understanding that an infant cries because he is an infant—because he was born, if not literally yesterday, then last week or last month or last spring—and not because he has specific designs on ruining his mother’s life.
But I was wrong. I’m not capable.
From inside I hear footsteps, the first confirmation that anyone’s home, and I consider turning on my heel. I should go to my mom’s. No matter what I interrupt, Jaclyn will give the impression of being overjoyed to see me. For a moment I imagine myself trusting her joy, doing nothing to resist it, wrapping it like a blanket around my shoulders. But the baby makes quick getaways unrealistic. Even if I managed to strap Jack into his car seat in record time, Carrie would see the New York plates on the retreating car and know.
A teenager answers the door. We stare at each other, unblinking. After a while she says, “Greetings.”
I should compliment her hair, formerly cloudlike but now pulled away from her face and secured in cornrows—definitely her mother’s work. I should exclaim over her height, her upcoming birthday. Because Nina is not yet a teenager; she’s two weeks from turning thirteen. Lately, as far as I’m concerned, people are either babies or not-babies. Nina might as well be college bound. She sleeps through the night—or, if she doesn’t, she’s secretive about her sobbing.
Nina’s gaze lands on Jack. “What’s all over his shirt?” she asks. It’s her first time meeting him. Her arms hang loosely at her sides.
“Spit-up.” It’s overwhelming, Nina no longer being three. “Is Carrie here?”
Nina steps willingly aside as her mother appears in the doorway. The relief I expected to feel at the sight of her eludes me. Carrie’s features are stitched tight with guarded confusion, her toned arms are covered in tattoos I’ve never seen, but she’s fundamentally unchanged. I would recognize this woman with my eyes closed. We’re like dogs born in the same litter, programmed to remember each other’s scent.
“Why is he crying like that?” she asks.
I kiss the top of Jack’s head. He’s two and a half months old, but it’s been years since Carrie and I welcomed unplanned visits from each other. “What do you mean? He’s a baby.”
“He sounds hungry.”
“He ate an hour, maybe two hours ago. He was asleep on the highway, but he hates getting in and out of the bucket seat. It’s super awkward. I’ll be glad when he has some neck control.” I’m shouting, ostensibly to be heard over Jack, but also because I need to shout.
I need to shout, to pull my own hair, to sink my teeth into something firm but yielding.
“If he was sleeping, why didn’t you bring the whole car seat inside?”
She’s a genius. “I didn’t think of that. I’m not used to driving. In the city, we—”
Carrie reaches for Jack. I hand him over, and the relief is immediate. It’s like climbing to the fifth floor of our apartment building and letting the grocery bags slide from my wrists.
“I gave birth,” I announce. Nina has vanished into the recesses of the house, and I’m glad. Carrie may resent my arrival, but she’s still the only person on earth whom I want to see right now.
“You did,” she concedes.
We’re Facebook friends, the connection forged in memory of our actual friendship, long dormant. Carrie has left congratulatory comments on the pictures I can’t stop posting.
“I need help,” I say. And the admission is cathartic.
Carrie Hart’s body is familiar to me, from the shape of her eyebrows to her small and permanently arched toes, but her expression in this moment is impossible to read, overcompensating for all the years in which we intuited each other’s every thought.
“Amanda,” Carrie says, “how am I supposed to help you?”
Jack is curled against Carrie’s chest, his screams reduced to hiccups. His pose, fetal, induces a surge of grief. Part of me wants to snatch him back, and part of me wants to abandon him with Carrie. I’ve been fantasizing about waiting rooms, long lines at the supermarket, gridlock traffic. Everything that used to make me miserable.
“You already are,” I say.
* * *
“Take a shower,” Carrie tells me, still holding my baby. “You smell like spoiled milk and . . . something else.” When she wrinkles her nose I see the sixteen-year-old she used to be. I flash upon climbing into the passenger seat of her pickup truck, early morning, before school, her obvious disdain of the Victoria’s Secret “Endless Love” body mist my mother gave me for Christmas in 2001.
Whatever happened to that truck? I want to ask her, but it’s the wrong time.
“Jalapeño chips,” is all I say.
Before turning down the hallway, I steal a look at the two of them. With one hand Carrie opens the refrigerator, removes a carton of orange juice, and pours herself a glass. Whenever I try to multitask with Jack in my arms, he protests, demanding 100 percent of my attention at all times. When Carrie does it, he’s none the wiser.
I’ve realized that the handling of newborns is a language your body either retains or forgets forever. Gabe’s mother trembled the first time we gave her Jack to hold. She cupped his head in her palm like he was made of ash.