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Three Months Later
It’s 3a.m. I’m driving down Sunset. The road dark and desolate. Tension knots every fiber of my being. Isa is behind me in her car seat. Her deafening wails piercing my ears. Please, my sweet baby, stop! She’s like a broken record. Why won’t she stop crying? I’m going mad. Then I remember Bublé. I let go of the wheel with my right hand and fumble with the radio. Frantically scrolling station after station. Nirvana…The Beatles…The Best of Broadway…Isa’s screams growing louder and louder. Dammit. Where is Bublé? Then, suddenly I see a figure clad in a long white dressing gown and a face mask standing in the street a few feet ahead of me. He’s back—the specter! My hand flies back to the wheel and I blast my horn, but he doesn’t move. I floor the brake. The car comes to a screeching halt, and something crashes through the windshield. Shattering the glass. The ghostly figure catches it and holds it up like an offering. It’s my baby! My precious Isa, the splinters of glass clinging to her onesie, glittering in my headlights. The man vanishes like a vapor, taking her with him.
A scream spills from my lungs. Bathed in a sheet of cold sweat, I snap my eyes open. Isa’s wails start up again. It takes me a moment to come to my senses. My baby’s alive—right next to me in her bassinet. Relief floods me. I had another one of my horrific nightmares. They’re so real to me that the line between what’s imagined and what’s real is blurred. Sometimes I think they’re premonitions.
The last three days have been a living hell. Someone seriously needs to amend that pregnancy bible What to Expect When You’re Expecting because I wasn’t expecting this. I’ve been home from the hospital for three days, and for the past thirty-six hours, my newborn baby hasn’t stopped crying. It seems like every half hour she screams at the top of her lungs. Hungering for my breasts. Needy and greedy. I’ve hardly slept.
My pregnancy was punishing enough. Extreme morning sickness, then the PGP, and bed rest, followed by my emergency C-section. All the blood, sweat, and tears. I almost died.
Now, this…a baby who cries all the time. I’m more convinced than ever that the universe is getting even with me for what I did. And my terrifying nightmares are its way of telling me the worst is yet to come.
Lying flat on my back, my head anchored on three pillows, I make an effort to sit up, planting both hands on the king-size mattress, but it’s futile. I’ve barely raised my body when a knife-like stab of pain shoots from my pelvis down through my legs. I can’t help but wince. The pain is excruciating. I thought the PGP would go away after Isa’s birth, but it hasn’t, and the incisions from my C-section have only added to the agony. My obstetrician promised me that the condition would get better on its own. But I’m beginning not to believe him. More what-to-expect lies.
I collapse back down on the mattress, unable to reach for my baby, lying next to me in her bassinet. Unable to put her to my breasts and soothe her desperate cries, I feel frustrated and forlorn. What kind of mother am I? As another sharp pain shoots through me, I battle tears.
I turn on the night light above me and, swiveling my head, stare at the handsome man sleeping next to me on his back, snoring softly. How can he not hear Isa crying? It’s like he’s dead to the world.
I give him more than a gentle nudge. He stirs and grunts. But his eyes stay glued shut.
“Ned, please, you’ve got to get up.” My voice is loud enough to be heard above Isa’s relentless, high-pitched screams. I nudge him again. “Ned, please get up. I need to feed Isa.”
Tempted to toss the glass of water on my night table on him, I nudge him again. The third time works like a charm.
Fluttering his eyes open, he seems disoriented. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Isa. You need to get up and put her to my breasts.”
Slowly sitting up, he turns on a light and lets out a long, exasperated sigh. My poor, jet-lagged husband just got home from Europe and hasn’t gotten more than six hours’ sleep over the past couple of days because of our needy, non-stop crying baby. Then again, neither have I. We’re both zombies.
Slowly, he pulls down the thick comforter and swings his long, muscular legs over his side of the bed. Clad in blue-and-white striped pajamas, my six-foot-three athletically built husband rises like a phoenix. My eyes follow him as he rounds the bed and trudges over to the bassinet. I watch as he lifts a bawling Isa from her frilly makeshift bed. He holds the tiny lifeform firmly in his large hands, supporting her perfectly formed little head. A glimmer of hope. Maybe he’s just exhausted and will be a great father after all.
Still wailing madly, the poor little thing’s face is tomato red and scrunched up, just like her two tiny fisted hands. Ned’s lips are pressed tight in a thin grim line. Certainly not the look of a new father you might see in a Hallmark movie or a commercial for Huggies. I manage to shrug down my half-buttoned pajama top before he lowers our baby to my chest. I carefully hold her against one of my swollen, achy breasts as she struggles to latch on to the nipple. On top of the PGP and incisions, my milk production hasn’t been good and my small nipples are far from ideal for sucking. I fear Isa may not be getting enough to eat and hence the reason why she cries so much. So loudly. So vehemently. And why she looks tinier to me than when I first brought her home from the hospital, weighing a mere five pounds twelve ounces. On the small side to begin with—the twentieth percentile—I fear she’s losing weight. That can’t be good. In fact, it petrifies me.
My husband rakes his hand through his swathe of dark, sleep-mussed hair and audibly yawns as he watches Isa attempt to feed. It’s not going well. She’s unable to stay latched to my breast and cries in frustration.
While I fight back tears, Ned yawns again and then stares at me with glassy, bloodshot eyes. “Ava, I can’t keep this up. To function, you know I need uninterrupted sleep.” He pinches the bridge of his manly, straight nose. “When is Rosita coming back?”
Rosita is our full-time housekeeper. The person most responsible for getting me through my very difficult pregnancy. The person responsible for keeping our house sparkling clean, stocking our refrigerator, and helping me with the tiniest of tasks, from getting out of bed to taking a shower, and that’s just for starters. She was supposed to take on nanny duties but had a sudden family emergency the day before I unexpectedly went into labor, and flew back to El Salvador. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I’ve had neither the time nor energy to find a replacement.
“I don’t know,” I tell my husband. “I got a text from her yesterday. Her mother has to have surgery. It may be a while.”
Ned lets out an exasperated breath. “What about your mother?”
I’ve never heard or seen my husband eager to see my mother, Rena. From the get-go, the two of them have never gotten along. They’re like oil and water.
“Not till Sunday. She’s on a winning streak in Vegas.” It hurts me that she chose slot machines over the birth of her first grandchild, but that’s my mother.
“But that’s almost a week from now!”
“Shh! You don’t have to yell.”
He sucks in a breath. His expression softens, his eyes repentant.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s just that I’m so tired.”
I give a reassuring smile. “It’s okay, honey. I understand.”
