Chapter 26 Tessa
The log is laminated.
Three weeks after we brought her home there was a document on the side of my mother's refrigerator, under the charter, in a plastic sleeve. It had a dry-erase pen on a string taped to the corner. It tracked feeds, output, sleep intervals and weight. It was color-coded and it had a legend.
"Beckett, there are four colors and a legend," I said.
"Green's a feed. Blue's a change. Red's a weight. Black's anything else." He did not look up. "Yellow's if something's off but not off enough to call anybody."
"That's five."
"Yellow's not a color on the legend, yellow's a flag."
I stood in my kitchen at nine in the morning and looked at a laminated sheet of paper. Then I had to go and do something else in another room for a minute.
It works. That is the joke and it has been the joke since May. This house has beaten every system that man has ever brought into it. It ate his feeding chart. It ate his medication schedule twice. Margaret personally destroyed a spreadsheet of kitten weights by sitting on the scale for four months.
And then a five-pound person arrived. None of his systems had worked here because none of them had ever been pointed at something that could actually be run.
Willa Douglas is the only thing on this property operating on schedule, including me.
I had my whole speech ready about it and never got to give it. On the second Tuesday I came in from the clinic. He was standing at the counter with the baby scale and a look on his face.
"Problem?"
"There's no problem."
"You've got the face."
"There's an anomaly," Beckett said.
The scale said eleven pounds. Willa weighed seven pounds four ounces.
Margaret was sitting on the corner of the scale with her tail down over the edge and her front feet tucked under, looking at the middle distance like a woman on a bus.
"That's eleven pounds," I said. "That's what every kitten in this house weighed from January to April."
"Every single one," he said. "Brodeur and Mister Tony both weighed eleven pounds. Mister Tony is the size of a shoe."
"Have you tried moving her?"
"I've tried twice and I'm not going to talk about the second time."
He wrote it in the log in red. Weight: 11 lb 0 oz. Then he wrote in black underneath, in block capitals, because he is who he is, contested.
He has done it three separate Tuesdays now. That log is going to outlive all of us. It is going to say our daughter weighed exactly eleven pounds three times, with a footnote on each one. I'm not going to correct it, ever. When she is twenty I'm going to hand her the whole thing in the sleeve.
Margaret's actual position on the baby took nine days to arrive and was delivered without comment, the way she delivers everything.
She had been on top of the refrigerator since the 29th of May, which is where she goes when the building has been altered without her consent. She did not come down for the hospital bag or for my brother or for Sofia, who she loves.
On the ninth day I came out at six in the morning and she was in the bassinet.
She was not near it. She was in it. She was sitting up on the mattress about four inches from my daughter's head. It was the posture she uses on the reception desk when she is deciding whether a person may enter the building.
I did nothing, very slowly.
She looked at Willa for about two minutes. She put her nose a half inch from Willa's ear and held it there. She sat back and looked some more. Willa made a noise in her sleep and moved one hand. Margaret's tail went once, hard, against the side of the bassinet.
Then she got out and went under it. She turned around twice on the rug and lay down.
That is where she sleeps, under the crib, since June. She is nineteen. She has bitten four veterinarians including my mother. She has never in her life allowed a human being to pick her up on purpose. She now goes on duty at about nine every night under a piece of furniture that contains a baby.
Bear sleeps against the leg on the other side.
Nobody in that house has said one word about it out loud. Beckett will not, because acknowledging it might make it stop. I will not, because I want to see how long they can both keep it up.
The second-graders sent a certificate on the last day of term, on construction paper, with a border of about four hundred stickers.
Honorary kitten namer. Willa June Douglas. age: 6 weeks. this is for life.
There were twenty-two signatures, two in pencil and one upside down.
"And they took a vote," Miss Ansah said.
"Of course they did."
"The new litter came in Monday and I told them the convention.
Goaltenders who have won a Cup." She had her hands folded.
"And Marcus put his hand up. He said Willa is a goalie's daughter, and could this one be goalies' daughters instead.
It was unanimous, Doctor Reeves. I've never had a unanimous anything in eleven years of teaching. "
So there are four kittens in the back room of that clinic named after the daughters of men who have stopped pucks for a living. There is a small tabby called Delphine and a black one called Pilar. I cannot say the other two without doing something with my face.
Beckett read the certificate at the counter and did not say anything for a while.
"They spelled June right," he said, and went and put it on the refrigerator. He moved the charter across two inches to make room. It is the first time anyone has moved that board since December.
On a Thursday at the end of June I slept for nine hours.
I went to bed at ten. I did not wake at midnight or at two or at four.
I opened my eyes and it was light, properly light, the kind of light that is on the wall at seven.
The house was quiet. I lay there for eleven seconds with my heart going like a bird, because I could not construct any explanation for it that was not terrible.
Then I heard him in the kitchen saying something in a low voice to a person who cannot talk.
I came down the hall with my hand on the wall.
He had her in the crook of his left arm and a bottle in his right hand. He was reading the back of a bag of dog food out loud to her in the four-in-the-morning voice. He went through the nutrition panel line by line like a man reading the news.
"Crude fat, minimum, twelve percent," he said. "That's a lot of fat, Willa."
"What time did she go down?"
"Ten."
"And she woke at…"
"Twelve fifty. And three ten. And five forty. And she's on the last one now."
"You did all four?"
"Yeah."
"Which night is this?"
He put the bag of food down.
"Tessa."
"Which night is this?" I said.
"It's every night," Beckett said. "Since the fourth."
I stood in the doorway of my mother's kitchen at seven in the morning and did the arithmetic on my fingers like a child. It came to nineteen nights. Then I sat down on the floor, not in a chair. I sat against the cupboard with my knees up.
"Hey," he said.
"I'm fine. I'm not crying, this is…"
"I know," he said.
He put Willa in the bouncer and came and sat down beside me with his back against the cupboards. For a man that size in that kitchen that involves a certain amount of planning. After about four seconds he put his arm round me and I put my face in his shirt.
"Nineteen nights."
"It's the off-season. I've got nothing to do until September."
"Don't do that. Don't make it small so I don't have to have a feeling about it," I said, into his shirt. "You're not allowed. That's mine, I said it to you in a truck in February."
"You did."
"So say it properly."
"I take the nights," Beckett said. "All of them. Since the 4th of June. I didn't tell you because you'd have made a rota. You'd have made one in forty minutes and laminated it out of spite."
"I don't own a laminator."
"I own a laminator."
"I know you do," I said. I sat on the floor of my mother's kitchen and cried about eight hours of sleep for four minutes. It is not a thing I have ever done. He did not tell me it was all right and he did not tell me to stop.
In October a man tried to carry a twenty-two-pound bag of food from a van to a door and I took it off him in the parking lot.
In December I could not accept a decaf without making it a negotiation.
In April I sat at that table from nine at night until half past two doing $400,000 of arithmetic alone.
There were three people within reach who have done it before. It did not once occur to me to ask.
And on a Thursday at the end of June I was unconscious for nine hours in a house full of animals, with my daughter four rooms away. Nothing bad happened, because somebody was awake.
I've thought about which moment of this year was the biggest one. There is a good case for a heartbeat on a screen on Wadsworth. There is another for a man sitting down on my couch at ten past three in the morning after I told him to get out.
It was the floor of the kitchen. It was nine hours of nothing.
The other thing about that week is my brother.
I came in from a two o'clock on the Friday and the house was silent, which in that house means something is wrong.
Eli was on the couch on his back at two in the afternoon, asleep, with his boots still on. Willa was face down on his chest with her knees up under her. He had one hand flat over the whole of her back. He must have learned it by watching, because nobody taught him.
My brother was eleven when our mother died. He was eleven when he came into a kitchen and found me on the floor and could not get me to say why. He has not taken a day off since 2019.
He woke up at twenty past and did not move, because of the baby.
"Don't," he said in a whisper, without opening his eyes properly. "You're doing a face."
"I didn't say anything. I'm not doing a face."
"Tessa, I can hear the face. Go away."
"How long have you been here?"
"Since eleven. I did the runs. Then she started up and Douglas was on the phone to the lawyer. I said give her here, and then it was two o'clock."
"You lost an argument to a baby."