“Wake up,” I said to his offensively prone body. Gabe groaned and rolled over. Balancing Jack on one forearm, I pulled the covers from Gabe’s shoulders and yelled at him. This time, he sat up straight and rubbed his eyes. “Is the baby okay?”
“He is. I’m not. I need you to take him. I need to sleep.”
“Amanda . . .” Now that Gabe could see no one was on fire or unresponsive, he performed his annoyance, squinting at the time on his phone. “I have to be at work in four hours.”
Before the baby was born, Gabe had decided he wouldn’t use up all his sick days right away. We agreed he would cash them in one at a time, opting to stay home with me after especially challenging nights. We believed this plan bespoke foresight and restraint—back when we still believed some nights would be challenging and others would only be nights.
“And I have to take care of this baby all day, every day, forever. If I could go teach Faulkner to a bunch of teenagers instead, believe me, I would.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about. You don’t even have to get dressed.”
“Can’t. Can’t get dressed.”
We went on like this for a while. The more I cursed, the harder Jack cried. Eventually Gabe told me to calm down. I told him to take his fucking baby. He said to me, “You’re the one who wanted this.”
I would have strangled him if my hands had been free.
In fact, we both counted the days of my cycles. We both spontaneously and independently brought home presents for a baby who didn’t yet exist, not even in embryonic form. Gabe’s pick was a New York Public Library onesie, which Jack, with his phobia of long sleeves, wore exactly once. I indulged in a pair of charcoal-gray booties—thirty-four dollars from a boutique in Bushwick. I could have invoked Gabe’s own anticipation, his own longing, but I didn’t. It was easier to dismiss the evidence and believe this 3:00 a.m. version of Gabe, whose voice was shot and unfamiliar. I believed what he’d said and also what he wasn’t saying: I was the one who wanted this; he was the one who didn’t.
It’s been my fear all along—even before we had Jack—that I tricked Gabe into making a life with me.
I took the baby into the living room. I lay with him on the couch while he screamed into my ear. Gabe sank promptly into a deep sleep; he was snoring by the time Jack released his last rattled sob. When I could safely transfer the baby to the vibrating chair on the coffee table, I located my phone and crept into the kitchen to call my mother.
She answered on the second ring, her voice clear and uncompromised by sleep. It used to take my mother days, sometimes weeks, to call me back. She was slow to acclimate to contemporary cell phone usage, didn’t understand that the point was to be available at all times. But Jack’s arrival did the trick. Now she requests photos of her grandson daily, is always prepared with heart-eyes and kissy-face emoji and, apparently, for a nocturnal emergency.
“Is he okay?” she asked.
I started to cry.
“Oh, honey.” My mother’s name is Jaclyn. We named the baby after her, my consolation prize for letting Gabe pass Feldman onto Jack. Minutes after he was born, when a nurse automatically labeled the plastic bassinet “Baby Flood,” Gabe said with a lilt of panic, “That’s not his name!” The nurse told him to relax; the sticker was not a legally binding document.
“Gabe is an asshole, it turns out.”
She went quiet. Gabe would be a sore subject between us if we ever talked about him. Mom has never been able to forget, or forgive, the circumstances under which we first got together.
“What’s going on?”
“He expects me to do this by myself. I don’t think he even realizes he expects it, but since he’s been back at work, I’ve become the default parent. When Gabe wants to take a shower he goes and takes one. If I want to take a shower—like, for instance, after days of Jack vomiting my own breast milk into my hair—I have to ask Gabe if it’s okay. And sometimes, Mom, he has the nerve to say it’s not.”
“Well, honey, Gabe has a job.”
Until recently I, too, had a job. I wore imitation silk blouses from H&M and skirts that were either too loose around my waist or too tight around my hips. Working as an office manager for a branding agency didn’t typically impress people, but secretly, I was sometimes impressed with myself. Riding the subway to West Fifty-Eighth Street, depositing my coat in a break room with a view of Columbus Circle—these were elements of a routine that, to anyone from Deerling, Ohio, would have looked like success.
For years Gabe encouraged me to apply for a better position within the company, which hired new designers all the time. The candidates were mostly boys with skinny ties and large glasses. My task was to show them to the conference room and offer them coffee, which they invariably accepted, though it was past noon and they must have understood I would have to make a fresh pot. Gabe—who maintains an endearing belief that I am an artist, sticking my doodles to our refrigerator as if to encourage a small child—always wanted me to throw my own portfolio into the pool, but portfolio was a generous term for my life’s work. My bosses didn’t want to see faded sketches of my childhood best friend or the view from our bedroom window in Queens (air shaft, puddle, pigeon). All the company wanted was to hire a twenty-three-year-old with a degree in graphic design.
When I was pregnant with Jack but still hiding my bump beneath blazers and sweaters, a position opened up in project management. The job paid twice as much as I was making. The money meant more to me than having a career vaguely related to art, and I applied. During the interview, I sat in my boss’s office—where I often sat, computer open on my lap, as he dictated his correspondence through wet mouthfuls of Caesar salad—and claimed I could do the job in my sleep. No training necessary. For years I had been booking travel and arranging meetings for the guys who already did the job. I knew everything about our company, our diverse roster of clients.
“And I’ll still pick up your dry cleaning,” I added desperately, inappropriately. “And I’ll keep watering the plants. That ficus won’t die on my watch!”
The following Monday, an email informed me that “after discussing the matter at length,” the firm’s partners had chosen someone with more experience—and also, when I had a free moment, could I call Connor and let him know he got the job?
Jack, by then, had started punching and kicking and turning somersaults in utero. Even through the thick material of my sweaters, his acrobatics were discernible to anyone who stared hard at my midsection. My intention had been to take three months of unpaid leave, but now I thought, Why? Daycare would nearly negate my salary. Gabe’s job came with health insurance. The men for whom I worked defined me by the college degree I didn’t have. One option was to quit right then and never come back. So I did.