“Believe me when I tell you that nothing you could do or say would ever hurt me more than the death of my child is hurting me, now.” He stated it so plainly that it was more fact than recrimination. “Besides, what good has all of that solicitous concern done for you?”
If he was referring to my long-built up meltdown at the crematorium chapel… “You have a point.”
“I want things to be normal, again,” he said with a frustrated sigh. “Or, I want them to be the normal that they’ll become.”
“You want to rush straight to the new normal,” I reframed it for him. “But you’re kind of forgetting that stuff like this takes transition. You can’t just take off that suit and finish being shaken by this. And we’ve got a baby now—”
Holy shit. Holy shit, we had a baby now.
The corner of his mouth twitched. “And aren’t you looking forward to a time when that sentence won’t send you into clinical shock?”
“I’m not in shock,” I protested. Yeah, I couldn’t feel my face, but I wasn’t in shock.
“You’re as pale as my shirt,” he said, pinching the garment outward in demonstration as he worked the buttons.
“Be that as it may,” I replied with a roll of my eyes, “I’m worried that you’re going to try to force yourself to feel all better, and it’s going to blow up in your face.”
Probably not the best turn of phrase, considering my suicide fears. At least, I knew the only guns Neil owned were for hunting weird fat birds in Iceland, and those were locked up at his brother’s house.
Neil looked down at his hands as he finished with his buttons. “Sophie… I’m not going to force myself to feel better about this. I will never feel better about this.”
That swelling pain under my ribs flared to life, again. Neil wasn’t trying to make things “normal” so he could ignore the grieving process. He was trying to incorporate his grief into his life, because it would always be there.
The lump in my throat made it difficult to speak. “I don’t have any idea what you must be going through. I’m never going to have any idea. So, if I’m doing something wrong, or I’m not helpful… I want to be. I just don’t know how.”
“I don’t know how to do this, either,” he admitted. “I suppose, just like everything else, we’ll have to muddle through together.”
He opened his arms to me, and we held each other, not for the last time that day.
* * * *
I was sleeping like a bear in January when soft humming crackled over the baby monitor. Although Olivia had been living with us for less than a week, the broadcast frequency of the monitor somehow triggered my brain into full wakefulness. I felt across the bed. As I could have predicted, Neil was already up.
Although I still didn’t have a maternal bone in my body—and I’d begun to suspect that I never would—I wasn’t going to let Neil bear the brunt of caring for Olivia.
I yawned as I stumbled from the room, rubbing my bare arms. It wasn’t cold in the apartment, but my skin was still warm from sleep. Soft light spilled from the door to Emma’s room, and I stopped, a hand on the frame, to look in.
Neil stood in front of the window, looking out at the skyline on the other side of the park. He held Olivia against his shoulder, gently bouncing her while he murmured a soft lullaby.
My heart ached at the thought of him once holding Emma like this. He’d put her picture on the dresser, the “we’re expecting” photo she’d sent out to announce the pregnancy. In it, Michael stood behind her, his arms wrapped protectively around her stomach.
Olivia was only eight months old. They’d spent more time with her during the pregnancy than they had after she’d been born. That unfairness left a bitter taste in my mouth, and I swallowed thickly. It didn’t help.
Though Olivia had spent her first couple of nights in her playpen in our bedroom, pulled up close to Neil’s side of the bed, he had worried about the soft sides, whether or not they would be safe with her habit of snuggling her face into them, so we’d had a crib delivered. It was the same model as the one she had in her nursery, which was currently in the hands of the moving company who would be bringing her things to Sagaponack. It was astounding how much stuff she’d already amassed in her little life. Now, living with us, she’d be living the same life Emma had as a child, with her very own bedroom in a ton of different houses.
As I watched, Neil carefully adjusted Olivia against his shoulder, one big hand coming up to cup the back of her head.
He looked up, half turning to mouth, “Is she sleeping?”
I couldn’t help but smile at Olivia’s wide blue eyes staring at me over her grandfather’s shoulder.
“Not even a little.” I came into the room to stand beside them. For the first few nights Olivia had been with us, I’d felt oddly removed from the entire situation. It seemed so intimate, to care for someone else’s child. It felt, still felt, like Emma was in the room with us, judging me for not loving her daughter as much as she had. But the more
time I spent with Olivia, the more silly I found that idea. There was no way anyone would ever love Olivia more than her parents had, but I was certain I would never love any other child on the planet as much as I loved Olivia. I’d known that from the moment she’d been born.
At first, I’d just thought Neil was exhausted, and that was why red ringed his eyes. But, with the baby in his arms, he couldn’t wipe away the tears that spilled down his cheeks. Not that he would have hidden them from me, in the first place.
“Do you need me to take her?” I asked, putting my hand on his arm.