Her milk has come in, but her milk is not enough. Or else her milk is enough, but it is wrong, off, sour, bad, and the baby, Hannah, keeps screaming. The baby—sunken eyes, matchstick limbs, skin stretched tight over tiny bird bones—beats her head against Lisa’s chest and slivers her nails against Lisa’s clavicle and opens her mouth but not to suck and she will not stop screaming.
Her husband’s eyes are dry, defeated, his face all dark circles and slack flesh. “Please,” he says. “We need to feed her.”
Lisa holds Hannah tighter, a tiger in her chest. Not five days ago, Hannah twisted inside her, raising and collapsing mountain ranges with elbows, knees, shoulder blades. Now, Lisa is empty, bleeding, a deep ache in her arms, her back, her neck, her shoulders. The furniture thrums, the shadows loom.
Tom sinks onto the couch, closes his eyes, sways forward. Hannah thrashes, arches her back as though to throw herself to the ground. Lisa will not sit down, will not shut her eyes any longer than it takes to blink, because when she does, she has learned, her muscles begin to release and the room lilts gently from one side to the other and she cannot trust her arms to keep hold of her baby.
She does not need to fight with her husband; she only needs to win. She makes her voice honey, molasses, cake batter, and she cajoles, “You go to sleep.” She swings the baby in wide, swooping arcs. She makes her voice class president, Girl Scout, CEO, and she swears, “If it’s not working by morning, we’ll do a bottle. First thing.”
Tom’s head, she knows, swims with dehydration, infant blood sugar, electrolytes, and cardiac rhythms. His thoughts run to the maternity ward nurses’ very serious exhortations about the mental state of new moms, especially—they’d gestured toward the windows overlooking the hospital’s crowded parking structure, the busy ambulance bay—right now (Watch her, she’d read in their eyes as Hannah clamped down on her nipple and she curled her toes at the pain. Watch her, she’d heard them whisper as Hannah wailed skin-to-skin on her chest and she tried so hard to look so happy). Tom’s thoughts are running, sprinting, flying, but his body is so, so tired, and she knows that she will win.
“One more night,” he relents.
Cuddle the baby tight to her neck, wedge the baby’s head just under her jawline, keep her own body moving, and the baby quiets. Rest the baby in the bassinet, sit or stand or slow to an amble, and the baby fusses. When the baby fusses, she thrashes; when she thrashes, she screams, and so Lisa picks up the pace: living room, hallway, kitchen.
The hospital take-home bags, abandoned days ago, slouch against the lower cabinets. “Just in case,” a nurse had explained, thrusting cartons of ready-feed formula, reams of newborn slow-flow nipples, at Lisa. “Better if you don’t need it, but this way if you do, you won’t have to go out.” Hospital staff had moved her quickly, kindly through discharge, the transport tech’s eyes darting back and forth over his mask as though he were completing a hostage exchange.
Now, Tom sleeps, Hannah screams, and Lisa speedwalks: straight lines, diagonals, one room to the next. On her eighth lap, she comes upon her mother, sitting impatiently in the purple armchair. Her mother wears a silky blue kimono embroidered with peach and cream-colored goldfish. Her hair falls to the floor in wild, glossy curls. She is tall and beautiful and ten years dead, and Lisa is so, so glad to see her.
Her mother rises, steps closer.
Lisa holds out her daughter. “Do you like her?”
“Do you?”
Lisa flinches.
“You need,” says her mother, “to feed that baby.”
Lisa, always obedient, taps her pinky against her daughter’s pursed lips, and Hannah opens her mouth. The hardness of the palate, the pull of the suck, as though the baby intended to swallow Lisa’s nail. There is something fierce in her daughter, an unforgiving core swaddled within all that helplessness.
“No shit,” says her mother.
Lisa brings her baby to her breast.
Her mother observes the latch. She peers inside Hannah’s mouth and finds no tongue-tie, no cleft. The baby is alert. Her rooting and sucking are strong.
Lisa cradles Hannah closer, feels the rise and fall of the baby’s whole body with each new breath. Her daughter’s forehead is wrinkled, her eyes worried. Her hand fists tightly around the hem of Lisa’s sleeve.
“Mom,” says Lisa, the word dusty in her mouth. “Mommy. I need your help.”
Her mother laughs. She reaches for Hannah, settles on the couch, loosens her kimono.
Lisa feels as though she is sinking. Except for the rhythmic chk-chk-chk of her daughter’s suck and swallow, the room is so, so quiet. Her mother, voice like a cool hand to her forehead, begins to hum, and Lisa lets herself be lulled.
She wakes alone, her cheek sore against the bristly carpet, and rises, arms stiff. Her breasts ache hot and heavy and hard; the skin across her chest stretches translucent. Hannah cries angrily from her bassinet, and Lisa’s breasts answer with a tingle, a popping static that sharpens and intensifies, knives behind her nipples. She lifts her shirt. Clearish gray drops fall like tears, like snot. Her milk. She pulls Hannah close, tips back her daughter’s head. Hannah’s latch feels electric, zapping right down to Lisa’s belly button. The baby’s eyes narrow in concentration; her little suction mouth pulls and pulls. Lisa untenses, unspools. She feeds her baby.
They own a baby scale now, overnighted before they even left the hospital, and every day at noon Tom sends an email documenting Hannah’s undiapered weight and twenty-four-hour urine output. Apparently, it is going well; on Tom’s laptop screen, a white-coated, ponytailed Dr. Michelle nods exaggeratedly, smiles wide, offers two thumbs up. Lisa’s eyes keep wandering to her own image on screen-in-screen, her own sweatered arms pulling Hannah, lips pursed, limbs spindly, to rest against her own swollen chest.
She remembers sitting with Tom, just a few months ago, in one of Dr. Michelle’s pediatric exam rooms, three fragile human bodies discussing Northside Pediatrics’ commitment to the standard vaccination schedule, its weekend and evening hours, its twenty-four-hour helpline. She remembers the bright plastic, developmentally-appropriate toys scattered about the waiting room: the rubbing alcohol scent of the air, the nuzzling animal decals (a pair of giraffes, a family of penguins) that decorated the muted pink walls.
She remembers liking Dr. Michelle. She remembers assuming that, when the baby came, there would be help.
“Let me just share my screen with you for a second,” says Dr. Michelle’s voice, as her determinedly beaming face is replaced by a blue-hued growth chart, the baby’s improved position on which is reflected with a large red star. “Gaining like a champ!” she says. “I just thought that was cute.”
Tom scoops the baby from Lisa’s arms, nuzzles her against his collarbone. The baby taps her hands, listens to her father’s heartbeat, feels the soft cotton texture of his shirt.
The screen blinks black for a moment, then Dr. Michelle’s smiling face blooms back into view. “The feeding’s going better?”
Lisa’s breasts grow hard again, heavy; her nipples press tight against the absorbent pads stuffed into her nursing bra.
“They’re doing great,” Tom says.
Dr. Michelle nods. “And how are you two managing? These are crazy times.”
“It’s unbelievable,” Tom agrees.
“But you’re managing?”
Lisa remembers to smile.
“You’re managing,” Dr. Michelle repeats, “and you’re taking care of your baby, and that’s great. Keep sending the weights, call if there are any problems, and we’ll do another check-in in two weeks?”
Tom offers a thumbs-up. “Sounds great!”
“Okay with mom?”
Lisa startles, remembers, again, to smile. This is help, she reminds herself. This is the help they are getting.
She holds Hannah—small thing, warm thing, heavy thing. Her phone rests on the arm of the couch. She will not check the Times app.
The air is redolent with baby shit, a sharp, yogurty tang, an expensive, yeasty bread. Not three feet away is the diaper changing station: small, square, pastel washcloths, a teal pop-top of extra gentle baby wipes, an open plastic sleeve of diapers, each one smaller than Lisa’s hand. Q-tips and Vaseline for Hannah’s umbilical cord stump. Butt Paste and Desitin for her diaper rash.
Laughter bursts from the bedroom: Tom is Zooming with his team.
The baby nurses, dozes, nurses. How quickly she has gotten used to being satiated, to Lisa-on-demand.
“It’s not forever,” she says to the empty room. Time is passing and someday when all of this is over, she will look back and realize all of the time that has passed. It will be a new time, and she will be sorry, then, for having wished all of this old time away.
“Why,” says her mother, laughter on her lips, “don’t you try to enjoy it, this baby-haze, these cocoon-hours, this snuggly, milk-lipped tunnel?”
Her hair swept into a foot-tall beehive, she wears a strapless crimson ball gown and elbow-length opera gloves. She nods at Lisa’s loose joggers and exposed breasts, at her milk-stained cardigan, its deep pockets stuffed with tissues and Chapstick and protein bars.
“You know you’re lucky,” her mother says.
Lisa does sometimes check the Times app; she knows.
Skirt rustling, her mother walks over to the window. Outside there is sunshine, grass, the neighbor’s farmhouse-shaped mailbox, the empty street. She pulls briskly on each finger of her gloves to free her hands, taps the glass with glittery green fingernails. Hannah opens her eyes. “I’ll get you something to drink,” her mother says.
Lisa stares down at Hannah. This hold is called the reverse cradle, baby held to the breast by the opposite arm, her hand supporting the baby’s head.
Her mother is back, gliding to the couch with a full glass of water. Her eyes sparkle like her nail polish. The ice bobs pleasantly, clinks against the glass.
Happy hour. Cocktail parties. Lemonade.
“You never know,” says her mother. “That new time you’re dreaming about might be even worse.”
The cabinets are stocked with pasta and jarred sauce, cereal and shelf-stable milk. The freezer and countertops burst with gifts of muffins and gourmet cookies, soft pretzels from Tom’s sister in Philly, snack baskets and Harry & David fruit towers from nearby friends and distant cousins, but this bounty doesn’t matter because Papa Gianni’s is offering curbside pickup and Tom is going stir-crazy, he must leave the house, he has, he says, already phoned in an order.
“Come for the ride?”
She will not.
When he returns, the scrape of his key in the lock is jarring, unfamiliar after weeks without comings or goings. “Hold on,” he says, stepping through the front door. “Just give me a minute.”
He drops the box in the hallway, walks to the kitchen, dispenses hand sanitizer into the palm of one hand with the elbow of another, rubs his hands together, and, when they are dry, takes a trash bag from the box under the sink and removes a baking sheet from its drawer below the oven. He lifts the box, gently shakes out the pizza onto the baking sheet, then folds the box into the trash bag and takes the now-full trash bag to the garage. When he returns, he sprays disinfectant to soak the spot on the floor on which the box had rested. He washes his hands in the kitchen, dries them with a paper towel. In closing, he returns to the hallway with a disinfectant wipe and scrubs down the doorknob until it is wet with disinfecting bubbles, and then he locks the door, opens the trash can with his foot, and deposits that final wipe.
“Okay?” he says.
Lisa steps forward, rests her head on his shoulder. Hannah smushes, sleeping, between them. Her husband smells of clean citrus now, grapefruit and lemons. Lisa realizes that she is ravenous.
“When this is over,” Tom says, “we’ll take her out. We’ll go places. We’ll show her everything, the whole world, and it’ll be weird. Like, this is a dog, and this is a tree. This is the sun, and these are people.”
Hannah’s fontanel pulses, grotesque and alive.
Lisa squeezes her eyes tight and bites into her slice. Sauce squirts, spicy and sweet, under her tongue. She presses hot cheese against the roof of her mouth. She swallows sharp bits of crust that scratch her throat. She eats four pieces.
At night, her mother, wearing yoga pants and a soft ballet-wrap sweater, ponytail cascading down her back, hovers cross-legged above the purple armchair with a thin onyx cigarette holder in her right hand. Lisa sits on the floor, Hannah sucking away at her breast. The baby is efficient and awake, her hand cool against Lisa’s hot skin. Tom snores lightly from the bedroom.
“You’ll stay here,” Lisa says, “right?”
Her mother doesn’t answer. Her image fades in and out, insubstantial, a favorite song on a faraway station.
Lisa leans against the armchair, fantasizes a future. She will put the baby in her mother’s arms, and she will go back to sleep. She will put on a dress. She will pull the car out of the garage and drive east until sunrise. She will play loud music or no music at all, and she will think of nothing and no one else.
Her mother holds out her arms.
Lisa rises with her baby and folds her body into her mother’s. She presses Hannah tight against her own chest. It is dark and quiet. Her mother brings her cigarette holder to her lips and takes a long, satisfied drag. Ash snowflakes down, settles on the baby’s head.
Her mother exhales, and Lisa closes her eyes, dizzy.
No one is going anywhere.
Carol M. Quinn's fiction has recently appeared in Orca, Border Crossing, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Joyland, among others. Her flash fiction, "Epilogue," was selected for first place in the 2019 CRAFT flash fiction contest. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in New York with her family.
Photo by Kristina Paukshtite