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The first is that she likes being swaddled. He’s so exhausted that it doesn’t even sound like a word anymore, but he does it, and almost as if on cue Charlotte settles herself. After a moment of quiet, she blinks up blearily at him. Their newborn has been nursed, burped, changed and is full, clean, and dry. And now, hopefully, sleepy.
“I was less tired back when I was sleeping in caves,” Mac murmurs, curling up on her side.
At six weeks old, Charlotte is hitting her second growth spurt, and is eating so much that the mere smell of MacKenzie sets her squirming and fussing for her next feeding. The result of which is that Mac feels like a glorified dairy cow (even though he balked at the notion when she moaned it as Charlotte began to cry at two in the morning) and has gotten approximately no sleep in the past forty-eight hours.
“Really?” Will asks tiredly, scooping their newborn up in his arms.
Mac, face half-planted in her pillow, shakes her head, and then shrugs. “We didn’t have four thousand dollar mattresses in Afghanistan, though.”
His eyes focus in on the radio clock on his nightstand. It’s almost 5 AM. By the time he looks back to his wife, her breathing has evened out. Slowly, her limbs relax, and in under a minute she’s fast asleep.
The baby, less so. Shushing her, he lifts her up to rest against his shoulder. Stroking the light, downy hair covering Charlotte’s head he pads out to the living room and carefully settles down onto the couch, switching on the television and turning on the Olympics — 5 AM in New York City means he gets to watch the men’s individual large hill live from Sochi, it appears — on low.
At least, Will thinks, it isn’t curling. Skiing might actually keep him awake.
Snuffling, Charlotte wriggles against his chest, her feet kicking out against his stomach until he slides down further on the couch and throws out the recliner, giving her all of his torso to get comfortable on. One of his hands slides up to check the base of her neck, make sure she’s not too hot in the swaddling blanket, not freezing in this mid-February cold snap. He’s far more paranoid than MacKenzie about all of this, but unlike Mac he’s never waded through war orphans in disease-stricken refugee camps that lacked running water, and he knows that she has other things to be paranoid about so they can be well-matched.
The second is that Charlotte falls asleep more quickly when she can hear someone’s heartbeat. The third is that she'll fall asleep even more quickly if you’re also walking her around whatever room you’re in, or swaying, but considering his exhaustion he knows she’ll make do with being bounced and rocked.
This can’t last forever, right? The constant fussing and crying and feeding? Every website he’s checked says it should calm down once Charlotte’s through week twelve and out of the “fourth trimester” or whatever Babycenter calls it. And then she’ll start developing her own personality and before he and MacKenzie know it, going to college and moving out and getting married.
(Maybe he’ll be dead by then, because he honestly can’t quite bear the thought of this little girl growing up.)
Until then, he and Mac are in the trenches with an unhappy infant who’s growing at a rate that just seems cruel, all things considered, for all three of them. But mostly to Charlotte and Mac, who are both by turns hungry, miserable, or trying to sleep. He, on the other hand, gets ten hours at the studio every day, and usually gets back to the apartment as Mac is settling the baby down after her first feeding of the night.
Which brings him to number four.
Mac swears that no matter how rough the day has been, within five minutes of News Night starting, Charlotte will be quietly nursing for her 8 o’clock feeding. Well, your ranting had to be soothing to someone eventually. Not that he doesn’t come home to a list of notes from Mac every night. Or on one occasion, get Mac via cell phone directly put in his ear during the broadcast so she can hiss at him to stop letting a Congressman off the hook.
On the TV screen, a French skier bails on his landing.
They considered sending Sloan or Elliot along to Sochi. But now considering the clusterfuck it’s turned out to be, it’s probably for the best that Mac decided to staff the job out to correspondents who can work Twitter well enough to document the broken knobs on their bathroom doors and won’t quit over said broken hardware and criminally low pay.
“Uncle Jim was telling me about a time he and Mom were stuck in a… well, hotel is too nice a word… about fifty miles outside Karachi where the doors locked from the outside,” he starts off with, remembering the conversation he had with his executive producer this morning. “I think they would have taken Sochi over Taliban-controlled Sindh. At least the Russian mob is upfront about monitoring your internet. Or maybe not. Mom and Uncle Jim are adrenaline junkies to the next degree. You, on the other hand, will never be allowed to leave Manhattan. Except maybe to go to Sarah Lawrence. I think I could handle that.”
Rubbing small circles into her back, he cranes his head to see if Charlotte’s eyes are closed.
They are, but still—
“Mom and I were joking that we should get you started on skis, or something. Make you one of those kids who can ski before they can walk. Four Olympics from now you could — I mean, hopefully wherever the hell they’re hosting the 2030 games is actually, you know, cold…” A Canadian skier wipes out next, slush flying up around his comically splayed limbs. “You probably won’t be able to be a figure skater, sweetheart. Between Mom and I, you’ll definitely be too tall. And besides, between Mom and I, you’ll probably be more inclined to trip over the ice than to land a triple axel on it.”
Will would think it’s the vibrations coming from his chest that lull her to sleep. But Mac’s sworn from twenty-six weeks pregnant on that Charlotte could recognize his voice, would settle down in the control room where she’d hear it coming out of every speaker, or in their bedroom or on the couch when at the end of the day, and he’d lie with his head next to her belly, talking nonsense and hoping for Charlotte to stop moving and elbowing and kicking so that Mac could get comfortable. There are studies, though, he knows, that have come out of UNC Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt. About newborns who respond to stories they read in utero, quieting enough to hear them repeated even if they don’t understand the words, just the cadence.
The sky is starting to lighten. Actual sunrise probably won’t be for another ninety minutes, which he knows because he’s seen the sun rise almost every day the past six weeks. If it wasn’t so goddamn cold he’d take Charlotte out on the balcony. But in a month or two, maybe, if he keeps taking the morning shift like he has been. He hasn’t smoked a cigarette in nine months, or laid out on one of the chairs looking moodily at the sky since Mac moved in with him into the new apartment and they moved into renovation hell, so it’d be nice to finally put this balcony to some actual use.
Will saw Habib on Wednesday. Because it was a Wednesday, because he’s actually been showing up since Mac got pregnant, because the sleep deprivation might actually drive him insane. (Maybe not in these moments, with his daughter’s warm little body a comforting sort of weight on his chest, but more in the middle of a pitch meeting when he thinks he’s either going to start firing his staff or hallucinating to compensate.) It’s stupid.
Or silly, as Mac prefers to say. Don’t be silly, Will.
Name five things only you and MacKenzie know about the baby, Habib had said, after he spent thirty minutes freaking out in his office about how he was never going to get good at this, how anyone — someone younger, dependent on fewer antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications — could take his place and do a better job taking care of Charlotte and MacKenzie.
Name five things.
The fifth is that "Someone Like You" makes her smile. That when he sings "Someone Like You" Charlotte smiles, that is. He thought it was a fluke when it first happened a week ago, and he hasn’t had the time or energy to try it out with other songs, but Charlotte likes it when he sings. He’s been singing to Charlotte long before they knew she would be a Charlotte, and "Someone Like You" is Mac’s favorite song by Van Morrison. And he knows it’s just him, because she didn’t crack a smile at Sloan or the radio.
So he has… some capacity to make Charlotte happy.
More than that, silly, Mac said earlier. She knows who you are. And that you love her. She only makes that noise at you. Like it or not, Billy, but our daughter loves you.
Five things.
Will thinks he’ll work on number six after he gets some sleep.