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Claire woke up slowly.
What had awoken her, she couldn’t tell at first. She ran a mental check of every potentially painful part of the body: breasts? Heavy, but not hurting. Nipples? Well, it had only been a few days since she’d given birth, so they weren’t starting to chafe yet, though she would definitely be using that balm Jill had overstocked her with at the baby shower. Stomach? A little, but some of that could just be hunger. Or a bit of nausea from waking up too early. Privates? Yeah, but again, 3 days postpartum. She braced herself up on her side, perched on an elbow, reaching a hand down and checking her gel bottoms. Still comfortably cool, and there didn’t appear to be any fluid leaks. Okay.
“Al, would you-”
She rolled over, only to find her husband, Albert, missing from the bed.
Now, this was not unexpected. He would get up to use the bathroom during the night, or be up very early in the morning to make breakfast. Claire squinted at the clock on his side of the bed: three twenty-seven am. Well, definitely not making breakfast.
He had volunteered to get up and help if the baby was crying and could be soothed that way. Maybe he’d grabbed one of the bottles from the fridge? She’d been pumping as much as possible, following those little pamphlets she’d been given at the hospital. Claire found it funny how much new mothers had to be taught about their own bodies. Eventually, she thought, you figured it out on your own - but at least, this way, the baby wouldn’t go hungry.
She listened for him in the hallway. No sound of running water or flushing from the bathroom. No sounds from the kitchen, either. Claire closed her eyes and focused.
Where are you?
As she listened, she heard the faintest of muffled sobs and sniffling from down the hall. That was the baby’s room, but it wasn’t coming through the baby monitor, so it wasn’t directly in the crib. Frowning, Claire swept the blankets aside with one hand, eased her legs off the side of the mattress, found her slippers, grabbed her robe, and padded off down the hallway.
When Claire and Albert had moved into this house six years ago, they had re-done the whole thing by hand. It had been built in the early 1900s, but re-papered sometime in the 80s with some very odd choices. They had ripped up the wall-to-wall carpeting, the peeling linoleum, and the cheap, haphazardly applied wallpaper. Claire had painted their bedroom a beautiful dusky Ashes of Rose, and Albert had hung original artist workups from the old Sears catalogue from the 20s and 30s. Some of them had pencil eraser marks or white-out over the illustrations of women’s and men’s fashion, and most of them were missing the ad-copy that would be added later by the editors. If you took them out from under the glass, Albert showed her, you could run your fingertips over the bumps in the paper and see where people had changed their minds about the designs in the ads.
Albert was also extremely proud of the grandfather tower-style clock in the hall. It was the prize piece of the upstairs landing, with its gentle, soft tick tock tick tock running at all hours. He silenced its chiming when they went to bed (Claire had nearly fallen off the toilet when the Westminster Quarter started playing the first night it happened) so the whirring of gears and pealing of bells every fifteen minutes was thankfully only during their waking hours. Claire found the massive pendulum hypnotic, an incredibly soothing thing to watch. It reminded her of Albert, of all these choices that he made - beautiful, creative, strong, steady. Reliable.
The sniffling continued, and Claire moved past the clock, with its revolving face to show the phases of the moon and the change of seasons, and continued walking.
The baby’s room was a soft, pale blue with white ceiling. On one wall, a framed painting of a cloud of balloons, signed and dated. Chris had done it, painting every single one by hand. Claire knew it had taken him weeks to complete, even at its A4 size. He originally suggested they put it in a baby scrapbook with photos, but they had proudly hung it on the wall, wanting everyone to see. Chris always seemed embarrassed whenever he came to visit because of it, but it added a lovely bit of colour.
The window was large, taller than it was wide, with white gauze curtains over a pull-down blackout blind. Something they could use to make it totally dark, hopefully letting the baby get a sense of night vs day. They had no fantasies about the little one sleeping completely through the night for several months, but it was, like all things they’d learned, a good habit to get into and keep up until it became automatic.
Claire let her eyes adjust to the darkness as she looked over to the enormous armchair and side-table next to the crib.
Albert was sitting there, holding their apparently-sleeping child (for her little stomach was rising and falling as he supported her in his arms) and weeping. Profusely. Claire could see how shiny his face was, even in the dark. His mouth was contorted into a pained-looking grimace, and she hurried over, gently touching his cheek and then checking on their baby. “Al, is everything okay? Is something wrong? She doesn’t have a fever, do we need to call an ambulance?”
“No,” he began, before losing his voice to cracking tears. “No, she’s fine. It’s not her, it’s not - I.”
Claire knelt sideways, avoiding putting pressure on her privates, and leaned against his side. He burrowed into her, still holding their sleeping baby girl.
“All the things I could have been doing. All the things I should have been doing. For Jake.” Claire heard how haunted his voice sounded.
They sat for a moment longer, then Claire got up.
She held out her hands to him.
“Give me the baby. Go and make a phone call.”
It took several more minutes of coaxing, but Albert surrendered their sleeping infant, and as Claire put her back in her crib, she heard her husband talking quietly on the phone from the other room. At first he was sad, then stressed, and then -
“Oh.”
Claire could hear the moment Jake hung up on him. It hadn’t taken long, and as she walked down the hallway, she could hear Albert’s muffled crying again. He was normally too proud to cry, especially in public, or when he knew she was watching. He would grit his teeth so much that Claire could hear it creaking in his jaw, rather than cry.
It made her heart ache like nothing else in the world.
She found him sitting on the bed, his cell phone in his hands. He was staring at the screen, at the lit-up little phone book application.
Claire sighed, picking up her own cell phone. This was important. Jake had not come to her baby shower, because Albert had been there, but he had sent her a few gifts from their registry, along with a hand-carved wooden duck. Claire had tied a pink ribbon around its neck and put it lovingly on the baby’s bookshelf to watch over her.
Jake answered on the second ring. “Hello? Claire?”
“Jake, hi. I know it’s four in the morning, but this is important. Your father-”
“I don’t want to talk to him.”
Claire squeezed her eyes shut. “I know, and I just-”
“I said, I don’t want to talk to him. He’s not my father. I don’t care. He’s not gonna-”
“Do it for me, then.” Claire gripped her phone to her ear. “If you won’t do it for him, or for yourself, do it for me. You’ve come so far, Jake, and you know he has, too.”
The silence in her ear prompted her to look at the phone. He’d hung up on her, and she almost swore.
Albert looked up at her in silent sadness. No. No, this doesn’t end here.
Claire hit redial and waited. And listened.
The call connected. It was silent. It was silent for over a full minute and Claire wondered if he’d accidentally answered, or was just going to let them hang, or if he was-
She could hear breathing on the other end of the line. And Jake finally, finally, in a voice so broken it sounded like he was dying, said, "Okay."
A sense of relief washed over Claire, and she felt a smile fill her lips. She passed the phone to her husband, curling up beside him on the bed. She put her head on his shoulder.
And she heard him take a deep breath.