Such a little thing
She knew he wasn’t asleep, though she always grabbed the baby as soon as she stirred, waking at the same time. Maternal instinct. She grabbed the baby before she could cry, but she knew from the way he was hunched in the bed, as if holding in his anger, that she was too late. He was already awake.
She fed the baby in silence, not daring to croon a low tune, praying that she would go straight back to sleep when she was full. He didn’t move. He wouldn’t sleep until the child was back in the crib and still, not until he could try and forget she was there at all. When he slept, her own darkness would fall.
Since the baby was born, she had begun to recognise the different types of darkness. At first there had been the soft glittering darkness of clear starlit skies, when happiness radiated from the crib and her new maternity. Then there had been the darkness full of moving shadows that gave her bruises when she stumbled out of bed half awake and frowned at her when she woke him accidentally. And now there was the dense, suffocating darkness, full of his cold disapproval, when there was no light, no spark left to push away the shadows.
Darkness covered the baby in the crib. She waited, bent over the crib like part of the darkness. There was a struggle that almost became a cry, a sigh, then silence. She sensed the slight change in the silence as he let out his breath, and the rigidity of the shape next to her relaxed. She almost reached out to touch him, but could not bear for him to flinch away again. Instead, she wrapped her loneliness in darkness, hoping to find comfort where there was none.
They walked by the river. She carried the baby in the sling. He walked with his hands in his pockets, a slight frown on his face. They walked past the poplars that hissed and fluttered in the breeze. They walked because that’s what couples did when they had a day off work. To spend time together as a family. She stole sidelong glances at his face, noted the working of his jaw as he clenched his teeth and wished he was somewhere else.
It hadn’t always been like that. In the beginning he had been proud to be a father. But pride was not enough. It did not replace the feeling of being in control of his life, his own master. Now he brooded. He said he was tired. His job tired him during the day; the baby wore him out at night. But she recognised it for what it was. The baby had stolen a part of her from him. And she couldn’t give it back.
The robins sang through their silence, back and forth across the path. Such a sweet song that could do nothing for them. Not the robins, not the whispering poplars, not the river curling by beneath a windy, cloud-smeared sky. Once they would have listened together. He would have asked, ‘What bird is that?’ And she would have been proud to be able to tell him.
Now he asked, ‘If we could start over again, would you still want this?’
And she didn’t know what to say. He thought he was giving her a choice, because for him, a choice was possible, pros and cons, weighing up advantages versus disadvantages, profit and loss. But what mother could understand how such a thing could be? She felt the cruelty of even asking.
The baby slept and she held the little weight in her arms against her chest. Such a little thing, so little she weighed in the world. She wondered if this little thing was enough, this unknown creature that demanded so much and squeezed more out of her than she had ever imagined she possessed. So little she was, to replace the robins and the poplars and the broad river, and the great hole in her chest where her heart had been.
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