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for seven months, linda was made of glass.
roy wouldn’t touch her. not with a hard open palm, not with a tight fist. he would yell at her plenty, but he wouldn’t strike her. the closest he got to her was in pictures, putting his hand on her belly or around her waist and smiling for the camera. they didn’t even have sex. didn’t mean roy wasn’t getting it from somewhere, some unfortunate girl, but it wasn’t the two of them doing it.
for the first time in their marriage, linda was blameless. she did everything right for seven months. the ultrasound told them that baby was a boy, and that nearly won linda sainthood. roy tillman’s first child, a boy, just as god intended, just as it was always meant to be. sometimes, she thought he might never hit her again. she thought that baby was her ticket out of the dog house. that she needed him as much as he would need her.
for seven months, linda was made of glass. and then she shattered.
neither of them were ready. linda had to cook dinner, and baby had another eight weeks in her belly, the first and last place he’d be safe from the world, from his father. but something happened—the doctors could never give her a straight answer, and she wondered what good all that schooling was if they couldn’t even tell her why her baby was coming eight weeks shy of a full term—and he couldn’t stay put. it was the first and last time linda saw roy scared, unsure of what was happening, unsure of what to do, for once.
they’d planned a home birth, baby delivered by midwife in their marriage bed, like when roy was born. but a midwife wouldn’t be enough for this. roy drove through stop signs and red lights, until his truck squealed into view of the hospital, narrowly avoiding a causing a crash in the lot. nurses smoking outside the entrance startled, and he rolled down his window and shouted something’s wrong, my wife, pregnant.
later, linda thought that was the last day that roy cared about her. she believed that for a little while, until she realized it wasn’t her that he’d cared about that day. it was baby. his first child. a boy. just as god intended. just as it was always meant to be.
it hurt.
everything hurt.
linda didn’t get to hold baby. he wasn’t doing so well. they took him right out of her and spirited him away somewhere, down some white corridor, into some white room. linda could barely tell up from down, but she laid there, crying. where’s my baby, she thought over and over. when she opened her eyes and saw roy talking to a nurse at the door with a smile that was far too easy, she thought don’t let him near me.
linda had to lay in bed for a day. some nurses hovered over her, but mostly over roy. when he wasn’t in the room, they dropped their voices to conspiratorial whispers and told linda how lucky she was. “easy on the eyes,” they said. “you don’t meet gentlemen like him anymore.” linda tried a half-smile, an absent sure before she asked about her baby again, a locked groove, a broken record.
when they saw him, it was through glass. linda put her hands on the glass, cool to the touch, looking down at her baby in his incubator. he was still supposed to be inside her, safe, warm from her love and her body and not this artificial heat.
“is that him,” roy said beside her, peering through the glass like he was visiting the zoo, staring at some unsightly creature that didn’t deserve his gaze. “small, in’t he?”
“they said he’d’ve been bigger if this didn’t happen,” linda said, quiet, measured, her breath fogging the glass, she was so close. “he was eight weeks early, roy.”
roy grunted. “he looks like a lizard.”
and maybe he did. a white lizard under a heat lamp, his veins all blue and delicate through his thin skin. maybe to roy, he looked like that. but all linda saw was the most perfect baby to’ve ever been born, laying there and needing her. she thought he could only be more perfect if he was in her arms, sleeping, or nursing, or just staring at everything new, which was everything.
linda cried, back in her room. i want my baby.
they sent her home without getting to hold him. when they crossed the threshold, roy slapped her. so it was her fault, then. all that. it was three weeks of that, of stupid bitch, and what did you do, and why’re there dishes in the sink, and quit your belly-achin’, and go to the hospital by your own goddamn self. he didn’t go with her until he had to, until one day the doctor called the house and said he’s ready to come home. they stood at reception, finishing the paperwork, roy with a pen in his hand, linda holding baby in his new blanket, his little cap, weighty and perfect in her arms, his cheeks all red.
roy let her look at the birth certificate before he slid it across the desk into the nurse’s hand.
linda’s heart sank. “gator?” she said, looking up at roy. “not…?” not roy, like you, like your father, like your father’s father, like his father’s father, like you said he would be.
roy laughed like it was all some good-natured joke. some normal kind of crack-up, like they were both in on it. “like i said the other day,” he said, “he looked like a lizard. don’t worry, still usin’ your dad’s name in the middle. this’ll suit him better.”
when they drove back home, gator whimpering in his car seat, already fussy, linda looked out the window and saw the tillman ranch gate pass overhead as they drove through. for a moment, she thought that it looked like a cemetery gate. and she glanced over at her baby, snug and warm, free from her body, free from the cold steel of the hospital, and she thought that, if she really loved him, she would’ve handed him to a different woman, a better woman, and told her to run. take him and don’t look back, she imagined herself saying, don’t ever let him know where he came from. she stepped over the threshold with gator in her arms, and she stood there for a moment, convinced she was standing in a mausoleum where, someday, she might be its occupant, and her baby would sit atop a kingdom with her bones in its foundation. and then she cleared her head and carried gator to his bassinet.
she had to start dinner.