Jeff’s stomach makes wet gurgling noises. He’s supernaturally hungry, probably because of the edible he took thirty minutes ago. Parenting is easier on this stuff. He wishes Ellie would use it too, but when he brings it up, she says she doesn’t want to get it in her breastmilk. He wants to suggest that she pump, or even that they use formula for a day or two, so that she can have one relaxing trip, followed by some deep, much needed sleep. But that conversation will start a fight. And his fights with Ellie are unpredictable these days. Something as small as suggesting she remove dairy from her diet causes her to tremble with rage – a rage she represses because she doesn’t want that type of vibe near the baby. Frankly, neither does he.

Today is different though, because they’re going to their favorite hot pot restaurant. It was where they first met, on a tinder date that started on a Friday afternoon and ended two days later. At Red Dragon, a slim, impeccably dressed Asian woman always welcomes Jeff by name, and all the staff smile when they refill his broth. He feels a shift inside him at the thought of showing off the baby. She really is perfect. Disorientingly so. Sometimes it makes Jeff dizzy just to look at her.

Ellie loves her too, but in a tired, anxious way that is no fun at all, not for him, and certainly not for Ellie. Jeff has worried about Ellie since the baby was born, and the doctor laid her hot purple body on Ellie’s chest. Ellie used to tweeze her eyebrows. She was always shopping for clothes on sale. Now she stays in bed, the baby beside her. She refuses to do anything but watch tv and breastfeed.

Jeff pours a steaming cup of spiced tea into a mug. He adds a few biscuits to a plate and carries his offering on a tray, down the hallway to the bedroom. Ellie glances up from her phone when he enters. “Not right now,” she says, her gaze returning to the screen.
“I’ll leave it here for later,” Jeff replies, setting the tray on her nursing table. “You’re driving us today, right?”
Ellie scowls, “I already said yes.”

She hasn’t driven their Camry in two months.
“Soon you’ll be zooming around with the baby, and I won’t have to come with you when you visit your mum,”
“You think this is funny?” Ellie puts her phone down. “I pushed a child out of my vagina, and now you’re giving me shit about driving?”

Jeff knows that something about giving birth has hurt Ellie, more than physically. When it rained, she would sit up in bed holding the baby, jumping each time thunder punctuated the sheet-like rain. Jeff could not travel back to Kenya to run his business, because she was too scared to be left alone. Then there were the millipedes. They came with the rain, and the neighbors, a kind American missionary family with three kids, told them that they would eventually get one in the crib. Ellie had nightmares of the long black creatures slithering into the baby’s ear and killing her while she and Jeff slept on. Ellie began a night vigil. The shadows beneath her eyes took on a raised texture.

Jeff forces himself to count to three under his breath. Swears on his own life that he will not pick a fight with Ellie, not today.
“You’re doing a great job, dear.”
Ellie rolls her eyes, “We’ve still got an hour.”
“We do. Plenty of time to get dressed,”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she says, adjusting her kanga over her breasts. The butter-popcorn smell of poop permeates the room.
He raises his hands in mock surrender, “Nothing. I’ll be in the study.”

Jeff is working on a letter for the baby, for when he dies. He’s covered oral hygiene, car maintenance, and is in the middle of a section on financial management, but there is still disaster planning, home ownership, career opportunities given economic trends, and other things he knows he is forgetting. He tries talking to Ellie about his foreboding – well, it isn’t a foreboding per say, just an accounting of the possibilities – but when he starts to explain how to access his bank accounts, she gets annoyed. Oh – and he needs to get life insurance. He pulls out his phone and adds a reminder to his calendar, and then goes back into the bedroom.

The baby, as pale as him, with the same dark hair from the photograph his mother showed him of himself as a newborn, is awake. He sits down next to her, as gently as possible. The doctor told them her eyes were yellow. Jaundiced. Ellie is upset that they hadn’t noticed this before the doctor pointed it out. He tries to look now, for what he is supposed to see. Tomorrow morning, he will take the baby into the garden and lay her across his lap, her body folding over his legs, her face turned against the sun.

Ellie is ready. She’s pulled on a strappy pink dress and some hoop earrings.
“Come here, sexy Mama,” Jeff growls. Ellie giggles.

They blink at the brightness outside their front door. Jeff holds the car seat in which the baby nods off, safely buckled in. He likes to be the one who does the buckling because he knows he won’t ever mess something like that up. Ellie, on the other hand, can be absent-minded. Not to speak of other people, like Ellie’s mother, or the nanny. Jeff’s grip tightens on the car seat. Their Camry is under an acacia tree in their front yard. It is April, still cool enough that they don’t sweat on immediate contact with the outside air, but desperately humid. Birds chirrup loudly, a cacophony of invisible watchers above them. Thorns from the tree dot the driveway, but Jeff refuses to wear anything other than slippers in Dar.

Jeff pretends to concentrate on clipping the car seat into its base, but he is watching Ellie. She is expressionless as she approaches the wheel. She sits in the driver’s seat. Her hand, holding the keys, hovers over the ignition. He walks around to the front passenger’s seat in time to see the flash of humiliation that contorts her brow.
“What if the baby wakes up while we’re halfway there?”
“She’ll be fine. And so will you, come on.”
Her hands are shaking. “You should drive, and I’ll sit at the back with her.”
He exhales quietly. This is not the Ellie who has traveled continents solo, who had met him at the end of Masaki peninsula and playfully touched her lips to his.

Lunch is awful. Ellie insists on standing and rocking the baby while the broth boils off to nothing in front of them. The coos of delight from the people at the restaurant make Ellie jump, and when he asks her, with as little irritation as possible, to calm down, she retorts that the bacteria people carry on their fingers and in their saliva is enough to kill a newborn. Admittedly, that revelation tenses him up too. Jeff pushes tasteless beef strips into his mouth and keeps up a meaningless banter for Ellie’s sake. When one of the waitstaff tries to hold the baby’s little hand, Jeff makes a mental note to bring hand sanitiser next time they leave home. He is relieved when lunch is over. He needs more pot.

At home, Jeff places the baby in her crib and takes 10mg more of edibles. Ever since college, when he found that his natural intelligence did not get him all the way to straight A’s, that mind-slitting, wire-taut tension began and would not go away until he was stoned. He is waiting for the high to kick in when Ellie approaches him.
“The broccoli was nice,” she says.
Jeff knows Ellie had only nibbled at a floret, but he smiles. “I’ll cook your broccoli, any day,” he waggles his eyebrows suggestively, and she laughs.
But she grows serious too soon.
“What is it?”
She shrugs, “This is harder than anyone said it would be.”
Jeff considers this as he pulls her onto his lap.

He doesn’t think of parenthood as ‘hard’ or ‘easy.’ For him, it is essential, a non-negotiable extension of his life, like working to make money. And because it is essential, there is no comparison to make, no alternate reality in which he is not a dad. There’s just this living room, golden with dusk light, the pile of colorful rattles and plastic books on the mat. Trees rustle, evening approaches, and the nanny cooks milk with cinnamon for their evening tea. Ellie goes back to the bedroom, and Jeff’s phone pings. It’s the reminder to look up life insurance. He gets his laptop and settles onto the sofa.

He finds an insurance plan with no physical examinations required, only self-reporting. Of course, the danger is that if he reports inaccurately and dies, the insurance company could deny Ellie’s claim. But he has nothing to hide. No chronic illness, no risky physical activities, and very sexually safe. He reaches the section on mental health, and his fingertips hover over the question. Have you experienced thoughts of self-harm or suicide in the past? Depression and anxiety are his wife’s issues. She is the one who has sported swollen eyes and a tear-streaked face for almost every day of the last 2 months. Jeff’s lot in life is to be happy.

***

Jeff wakes up early. Ellie and the baby are still asleep as he rummages as quietly as possible for his shorts. He finds them and steps over the changing mat toward the door, silent, careful. But the baby begins to cry, that high urgent pitch that means she only wants Ellie. Ellie shoots up from bed, blinking and fumbling with the mosquito net.

“I told you not to move her,” she says, lifting the child from the basket. Jeff had extricated the baby from Ellie’s arms and placed her in the crib last night. Ellie knows as well as he does that bed sharing is dangerous. He feels a brief surge of annoyance.
“Sorry dear.”
Ellie, the baby against her chest, glances at him. It is searching, then forgiving. “Refill this? I need to feed her.”

Jeff picks up the giant travel mug that Ellie holds out to him and heads to the kitchen. The baby is still crying when he returns. He places the mug on the table near Ellie’s nursing station, which consists of a tall-backed armchair and a coffee table he had spent half an hour manoeuvring into their bedroom before the baby was born. Ellie is trying to latch her, using the angled push the doula taught them. It isn’t working. The baby makes loud sucking sounds, noises that the doula said are responsible for the baby’s painful gas. Jeff watches a familiar pinched expression grow on Ellie’s face as she removes the baby from her breast. He moves toward the bed, wanting to be helpful.

“You’re doing great,” he says weakly.
Ellie glares at him, “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Are you happy now?”

A long time ago, Ellie told Jeff about Eckart Tolle’s pain bodies: supernatural densities of grief looking to join and multiply. He senses her pain now, drawing his out.

“Maybe you should just go,” she says.

Before Ellie gave birth, Jeff watched dozens of videos of women in labor, intentionally desensitizing himself to the vision of large heads and tiny bodies slithering out of screaming women. He knew all about the contractions that must follow his own daughter’s birth. During Ellie’s labor, Jeff was the one who paced her breathing. And when their baby came, he had cut the cord.

The baby is crying again, loud, puncturing notes, urgent and afraid. Jeff stands up and moves toward the armchair. “Let me try.” It is a sign of her despair that she doesn’t protest. The baby cries louder when he takes her from Ellie, and she makes as if to snatch her back, but Jeff holds tight. He cradles the baby’s head and rocks her until the wails reduce to whimpers. He tilts the baby’s head so that her chin faces the sky and brings her to Ellie’s nipple. The baby latches, her cheeks puffing and sinking as she takes in streams of milk. Jeff makes sure Ellie’s arms are secure beneath the baby before removing his own. Ellie leans her head back onto the chair.
“She was so hungry,” Ellie murmurs.
“You’re doing great, dear.” She holds his gaze. He has always been a little afraid of her intensity. Now, he steels himself to meet the earnestness of her face – so round and child-like; how is she a mother? How is she his wife?
“Are you happy?” Ellie says.

Happy? He sits on the floor by her feet, watching the baby twirl her hands in prenatal patterns as she feeds. How to explain that he carries in him the certainty of separation – whether it is one year, or 50 years from now? How to explain this weight?

“You need a mental break, dear. It’ll be good for us to get out of our heads for a while, and your mum would love a sleepover with the baby.”
Ellie frowns, “You mean pot.”
He nods, once.
“I can’t remember the last time we got stoned together,” she says.

He can. The last time they were stoned together was the day before Ellie placed a stick on his pillow, two unmistakable lines across the film. He had blinked at it, then jogged downstairs, heart pounding, to do some push-ups. Ellie had followed.
“Moving on quickly, I see,”
He heard the strain in her voice and forced himself to stop mid-set. “I can’t be a dad in this shape.” He had stood up and gestured at his stomach, which was, in retrospect, quite flat compared to now.
“That’s not a dad-bod, that’s a father-figure,” she smirked.
She still smirked back then.

In their living room, Jeff grins and makes a goofy arm-pumping gesture, “It’s going to be a party!”
She smiles, that small half-smile that drags softness out of him. “A real party, or an Us party?”
“Let’s just say we’ll watch more than one episode of Unbreakable before you crash.”
“This isn’t a good idea.”
“Dearest,” he pauses, takes all the need out of his voice before continuing, “it’s my best idea yet.”
But she shakes her head. “She’s too young for a sleepover. You get high, and I’ll watch her.” She touches his shoulder, and her fingers linger by his neck. “Who says I can’t party sober?”

Their evening begins with pasta. Ellie likes Jeff’s carbonara, so he boils pasta while she sits with the baby on the sofa. If it were up to him, they would have a salad. Rocking a colicky child does not burn as many calories as a legitimate workout, and Jeff is overweight. Ellie, on the other hand, has shrunk. Her breasts leak through the old t-shirts she exclusively wears. She smells of salt and is constantly taking showers. He takes 50mg of edibles and waits for the high to kick in. It’s a new dose for him, but that’s because it’s a special night. They are trying to relax together. Jeff sees Ellie rise, and he can tell from the sway of her hips that she is having a good time… And yes, pot is a good relaxant for him… and yes, maybe everything is okay…

Then it isn’t.

Calmly, Jeff turns the stove off. The bacon sizzles into silence as he stands over it. When he turns around, Ellie is no longer in the living room, so he goes to find her. She emerges from the bedroom while he is in the hallway, holding a finger over her lips. The baby is sleeping. He stands still, not knowing what to do with himself, until she reaches him.
“Something’s wrong,” he says.
“What is it?”
“I can’t – I’m just… not.”

What he means is that a series of repeating patterns spins through the back of his eyeballs, taunting him. He squeezes his eyes shut, but the images won’t go away.

“Hey,” he feels Ellie touch his shoulder. “Hey, you don’t look so good.” Her touch makes him real again, but she removes it, and again he is nothing. The sound of sobbing echoes through the corridor. It is a deep and broken sound. It cannot possibly be the baby. “Come here,” Ellie leads him into the bedroom, pushes him gently until he is seated on the bed.

The room is dark except for moonlight. He feels his way into a lying down position. The sheets are cool and dry, rubbing persistently against his skin. The moon is large and rapidly approaching. It demands that he open the window, demands that he subsume himself in its light. Jeff is afraid. He feels the cool of Ellie’s hand again. Her fingers trace reassuring patterns on his back.
“Don’t leave,” he pleads.
“I won’t.”
Jeff closes his eyes.

His last hope is sleep. If he can lose consciousness, maybe he will wake up normal again. Maybe the patterns will disappear. Tears stream down his cheeks. He cannot move his arms. He hears, as if from a distance, the baby crying. Ellie’s hands leave his back, and he is unmoored. He hears her give herself to the child in the rhythmic, disembodied sounds of suckling. He hates it. He is forced to listen. He wants to open the window and fall, but his body will not move. The moon grows brighter and bigger.

***

Jeff wakes up to the smell of fresh coffee. He hears the bedroom door open, and the mattress compresses as Ellie sits next to him.
“What happened?” Ellie speaks so gently that Jeff knows she’s truly afraid.
Jeff chuckles weakly, “Bad trip.”
“You were trying to jump out of the window.”
Jeff rolls his eyes, “People do dumb shit when they’re high.”
“That wasn’t ‘dumb shit,’ Jeff.”
Jeff sits up, “Where’s the baby?”
“It’s okay, the nanny’s got her.” Ellie rubs her forehead. “I’ve been so worried about the baby, I forgot to worry about you.”
Jeff ignores the sharp current that races up his spine.
“Here,” she offers him the mug of coffee and watches him drink it.
“You don’t have to worry about anything,” his tone is firm.
She presses gently on the stubble of his chin, “I’ll get you some toast.”

Jeff needs to finish signing up for life insurance. He sighs. Even though his head hurts, and his body is cement, he wants to get this done now. Because you never know, do you? He reaches for his laptop, which is mercifully close to the bed. Have you experienced thoughts of self-harm or suicide in the past? His mouse hovers over the No button as he thinks of Ellie, who is a bright-blue dart in a foggy night. He thinks of their child, so shockingly his, and so herself, at the same time. He is a father now. A provider. He is the happiest he has ever been.

 

 

 

 

Photo by Tasso Mitsarakis on Unsplash