Grace launched into a long conversation in baby talk, her big eyes fixed on Patrick. She had inherited Ellen’s mother’s violet eyes. Ellen was very vain about Gracie’s eyes, deliberately dressing her in colors that would make them even more startling. She had literally never been out in public without someone stopping to compliment her on them, although each time she would act surprised and flattered as if it was the first time someone had noticed. “They come from her grandma,” she’d say modestly.
“Right.” Patrick nodded along respectfully as Grace continued to babble. “Yep. I see. Gotcha. So you’re not sure. You can’t make up your mind? Well, that’s because you’re a woman, you see.”
“Hey,” said Ellen.
“Actually, it’s probably because you take after your mother and you’re overanalyzing the situation. You’re thinking, But what does it mean if Daddy takes me to the beach? Is he subconsciously trying to say something else? Is he repressing his real desires?”
“I’m not even listening to you.” Ellen stood up and stretched her arms high above her head.
Ellen had just recently started treating clients again on a part-time basis. Her mother and the godmothers took Grace every Wednesday morning. They dressed her up like a princess and took her out to restaurants where they fed her tiny morsels of smoked salmon and shaved chocolate and who knew what else. Patrick’s mother minded both Jack and the baby after school every Thursday afternoon. Maureen gave Grace long, warm baths and fed her mashed pumpkin and never sent her home without a pink bow pinned to her wispy, sweet-smelling hair. Jack had found Grace of only mild interest when she was a tiny baby, but now that she was starting to respond to him, he’d made it his life mission to make her laugh with increasingly crazy versions of peekaboo. Gracie had a very specific wicked chuckle she reserved especially for Jack.
Patrick was in charge on Saturdays, when Ellen did her longest stint and saw four clients.
There was a three-month waiting list to see her at the moment, but for now she didn’t want to do any more hours than this. Having a baby had been like starting a demanding new job and beginning a passionate love affair and moving to a new country with a different language and culture all at the same time. The baby filled her mind, her heart and her senses. She wanted to inhale her, to gobble her up.
The love she felt for Grace seemed to permanently hover on a knife’s edge between joy and terror. “Babies are pretty resilient,” Patrick’s mother would say when Ellen expressed her concern about anything, and Ellen wanted to say, “Are you kidding? They can die in their sleep!”
Once, when her mother was visiting without the godmothers, Ellen came out of the nursery from checking on Grace and said, “I love her so much it’s just…”
“Excruciating,” supplied her mother. “I know. It doesn’t really get any better. You just learn to live with it.”
Ellen met her mother’s eyes, which now reminded her of her daughter’s eyes. She’d always known that the fierce, furious way Anne looked at her was because she was trying to hide how much she loved her, as if love was a weakness. She had always considered it one of her mother’s more adorable flaws. If only she could be more like me! Open to love! Now for the first time she understood that her mother wasn’t resisting love so much as bearing it. Now she knew that you could love so much it literally hurt: an actual pain in the center of her chest.
Fortunately, whenever her feelings threatened to become impossibly transcendent, the banalities of motherhood were there to bring her back down to earth. You couldn’t be carried away by sentiment when you were dealing with an exploding nappy or trying to work out why avocado and cottage cheese were no longer acceptable, and the constant wondering: Is she tired, or hungry, or teething, and what is that monotonous “uh, uh, uh” sound she’s making and how can we get her to stop?
“I think I’ll take her and Jack down to the beach,” said Patrick. “Get Jack away from that computer.”
“OK. Gracie’s hat is on the chest of drawers,” said Ellen. “And the sun cream is—”
“We’re all under control,” said Patrick.
“Good,” said Ellen. “There is a bit of a breeze, so—”
“Ellen. Respect the Dad.”
“OK. Just—okey dokey.”
“Oooh, it’s killing her,” said Patrick to the baby. “There’s so much more she wants to say. So many further instructions.”
Ellen rolled her eyes. “I’m going to get changed for work.” She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt covered in baby food stains. “You two have fun.”
Patrick lifted Grace’s hand and waved it at her. “Bye, Mummy.”
Ellen lingered and looked at the two pairs of eyes staring back at her. “Her eyes are the same shape as yours. Mum’s color, but your shape.”
“And look at our identical bald spots.” Patrick lifted Grace up under her armpits and bent his own head.
She left the room, and when she got halfway down the hallway, she ran back and poked her head around the doorway. She spoke very quickly. “If-you-want-her-blue-cardigan-it’s-in-the-bag-at-the-front-door-and-that’s-all-I’m-going-to-say!”
As she walked up the stairs she could hear him saying, “She can’t help herself, Gracie. She really can’t.”
Twenty minutes later she was dressed and standing at the window of her office, her hand on the curtain that Patrick had put up. She could see him walking on the beach with the baby on his hip, an umbrella under his arm, the beach bag over his shoulder. Jack was walking backward in front of them, probably trying to make Grace laugh. Ellen squinted: Patrick had dressed the baby in the blue cardigan.
She watched them stop at a spot near the water. Patrick handed over the baby to Jack, and got down on his knees and began to dig a hole for the umbrella. He always took such care setting up the beach umbrella it would probably stay put during a cyclone.
“Hurry up,” she said to the window. “She’s out in the sun.”
Patrick stopped digging and looked up at the house as if he’d heard her. He lifted both arms and waved them high above his head as if he was waving from a mountaintop. Ellen laughed and waved back pointlessly.
Even the way Patrick inhabited his body was different now than when she’d first met him: His movements were bigger, freer, looser. It had been over a year since they’d had any contact with Saskia, and every month that had gone by Patrick had changed more: relaxed, becoming sillier, happier, more trusting, less irritable and angry. He sang country music songs with an American accent as he did stuff around the house—songs about “cheatin’” women and “stone cold hearts.” It was as though Ellen hadn’t known the real Patrick at all, as if she’d fallen in love with a sick person and now he was healthy. It felt like a surprise bonus: an unexpected free gift with her order.