Chapter 23 Sasha
Sasha
At the sound of a loud thud near the front door, Sasha rose from the porch swing, Freya still asleep against her chest.
“Angeni?” she said.
As she came through the door, she saw Angeni sprawled out on the wood floor. Sasha held Freya with one hand and used her other hand to shake Angeni’s shoulder.
“Angeni?”
When she didn’t move, Sasha placed her hand in front of Angeni’s mouth, confirmed there was breath coming out of it. She was alive.
Freya roused and, absorbing the tension of the scene, began to wail.
“Aurora? Erik?” Sasha called as she made her way through the house and then to the backyard.
She called for them again as Freya wailed louder. Aurora was the first to come.
“What’s wrong?” Aurora asked, panic all over her face as she put her hands on Freya, likely assuming something was the matter with the baby.
“Freya’s fine. She just woke up. It’s Angeni. I think she passed out again,” Sasha said in a rush of words.
Aurora ran inside the house, and Sasha followed behind. Aurora said, “Oh my god” as she knelt next to her friend.
Erik came through the door with Matt and Jer behind him.
“What happened?” Erik asked, joining Aurora on the floor next to Angeni.
“Should I call 911?” Sasha asked.
Before coming to the island, Sasha would have said she wanted Angeni Luna to suffer.
But being here, next to her unconscious body on the floor, Sasha was genuinely worried.
It wasn’t that she had come to regard Angeni as a special human being deserving of care and concern; it was simply that she had come to regard her as human, period.
“I’ll call,” Matt said, pulling his phone from the back pocket of his jeans.
But just as he did that, Angeni stirred, raising her head from the floor.
“Ang?” Aurora said.
Angeni looked around the room, noticeably disoriented.
“What happened?” she asked.
She put her hand to her head.
“Are you hurt?” Erik asked.
“You passed out,” Aurora said.
“My head,” Angeni said, rubbing at a spot near her temple. She must have hit her head when she fell.
Angeni pressed up to her knees, and Erik placed his hands on her shoulders.
“Wait, babe. Take it slow, okay?”
Angeni’s eyes settled on Freya.
“Is Freya okay?”
“Freya’s fine,” Aurora assured her.
“It’s you we’re worried about,” Erik said.
“Maybe we need to take her to the hospital, just to make sure her head is okay,” Jer suggested.
“The hospital?” Angeni said.
“I think that’s a good idea,” Erik said. “Sitka, can you be with Freya while I’m gone?”
Sasha nodded. “Of course.”
Sasha could feel Aurora’s eyes boring into her as she continued to bounce Freya in her arms, lulling the baby to a calm state. Sasha knew Aurora had been suspicious of her since seeing her with Erik. She didn’t trust Sasha. She had reason not to.
Erik helped Angeni to her feet. She was unsteady, teetering side to side.
“I’ll pull the car around,” Matt said, going out the front door ahead of them, keys jangling in his hand.
“Can you walk, babe?” Erik asked Angeni.
She took one shaky step, and that answered his question—she could not walk. He scooped her up into his arms, cradled her like a baby. She looked so small there, helpless.
After they left, Aurora announced her plan to do some food prep, on the assumption that Angeni would not be up to her usual tasks when she returned.
Aurora loved Angeni. It reminded Sasha of Daphne—that loyalty of sisterhood.
Sasha’s throat tightened at the thought of Daphne, tears starting to form in her eyes.
Sasha placed Freya in the bouncer and went to collect the mail from the table by the front door. She noticed a paper on the floor that must have fallen from the stack. As she picked it up, she saw that it contained just one line, typed across the middle.
You Should Be Charged With Murder.
She felt herself get woozy and understood that this was why Angeni had passed out.
Who had sent this?
It was something that Sasha had every right and reason to send, but it hadn’t been her.
She rifled through the mail until she found a red envelope that had been opened. There was no return address. The postmark was Seattle.
Her first thought was that someone else had had a similar experience to hers—losing a loved one due to a home birth propagandized by Angeni Luna. She had felt so alone in all this, and, perhaps, she wasn’t.
“What is that?” Aurora asked, glancing over from the kitchen.
“What?” Sasha asked.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Sasha stood there dumbly, the paper in her hand.
“What is it?” Aurora asked, more concerned. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and then made her way to Sasha.
“I just saw this letter,” Sasha said.
Aurora was already taking it from her hands. Sasha watched her face fall as she read.
“Who sent this?” Aurora asked.
Now she was the one who looked like she’d seen a ghost.
“I don’t know,” Sasha said, showing her the red envelope.
“This is why she passed out,” Aurora said.
“Has this happened before?” Sasha asked.
Just how many deaths were there? How many people were sending threatening letters, seeking vengeance?
Aurora shook her head. “No, never.”
Aurora folded the paper in half, then in half again, and stuck it in the waistband of her skirt.
“I need to talk to Angeni about this,” she said.
Sasha couldn’t make out her expression. She looked concerned, but also afraid.
“It must have really upset her,” Sasha said.
Aurora was looking out the front window, her eyes still, unblinking.
“I need to talk to her,” she said again, “when she’s well.”
She inhaled deeply through her nose and then turned abruptly and left.
In multiple Instagram posts, Angeni had talked about “the wonders of breastfeeding” and her respect for it as a natural, on-demand process—the baby expressed hunger, and the mother’s body made exactly the right amount of milk.
She explained to her followers that this was why she didn’t believe in pumping.
Sasha didn’t know much of anything about breastfeeding or pumping but became quickly aware, upon perusing Angeni’s Instagram page, that this was quite the controversial topic.
I’m like you. Can’t bring myself to pump. Makes me feel like a machine and also like I’m tricking my body into letting down milk. I feed on demand, that’s it.
Ummm, some of us need to pump because we aren’t, like, attached to our babies every second of the day and we have shit we have to do . . . ???
This “I don’t even pump” thing is a weird flex. What’s wrong with pumping? It’s still breast milk.
Angeni tried to explain in follow-up posts that “our ancestors didn’t pump” and that she wanted to respect the rhythms of her baby and her body, without disruption from a tool or machine.
Some people praised this and said that they were in agreement about keeping the process as “spontaneous and instinctive” as possible.
Others acted as if Angeni had declared the earth was flat.
It shocked Sasha, the emotionality of these women. It was a fascinating competition in virtuousness. Sasha couldn’t care less what Angeni, or any mother, did with her boobs or the magical milk that came from them. Weren’t there more important things to worry about?
All this to say that when Angeni left for the hospital, there was no breast milk on the premises.
“Erik says they want to keep her there overnight,” Aurora said.
Freya was getting fussy, and Sasha was walking a figure eight around the living room and kitchen, trying to get her to settle. She knew she wouldn’t settle, though. She was hungry.
“Okay, well, Freya needs to eat,” Sasha said. “And some bites of chicken liver aren’t going to cut it.”
She wasn’t sure if she should mention that she had a case of formula in her room, hidden in her closet.
She knew Aurora would raise an eyebrow at this.
To these people, having formula in the house was akin to having narcotic drugs.
She couldn’t even imagine Angeni’s reaction if she knew that Sasha had already given Freya a bottle of formula, which was why Freya hadn’t been hungry for her mother’s milk.
She’d only done it the one time, as a kind of experiment, just to see.
She felt surprisingly guilty about the whole thing, had promised herself she wouldn’t do it again.
Aurora bit on her thumbnail. “Should I see if we can bring Freya to Angeni?”
Sasha rolled her eyes at the ridiculousness of the situation and decided it was about time to introduce some common sense.
“Can’t we just give her formula? For this one day?”
Aurora, still gnawing on her nail, looked up from her phone. Predictably, she looked terror stricken.
“Angeni won’t like that,” she said.
Her allegiance to Angeni was both admirable and annoying.
“I know she won’t,” Sasha said. “But I think these are, like, extenuating circumstances.”
Aurora started pacing the kitchen.
“I should ask Erik,” she said, starting to type.
“Do we need to bother him with that?” Sasha said.
Aurora looked up, seemingly surprised at Sasha’s directness.
“I’m not sure you really understand how important Freya’s nutrition is to Angeni,” Aurora said, carrying the torch of righteousness for her friend.
“Oh, trust me, I know,” Sasha said.
Freya wailed and wailed, as if sensing that there was food present and she was being denied access to it. Sasha already knew that Freya took formula just fine. She’d had no hesitation with the bottle.
“Let me ask Erik,” Aurora insisted.
She stopped at the island, bent over, texting Erik.
“Okay,” Aurora said, looking up with a grave expression on her face. “He said to do the formula, just for today. He’s not going to tell Angeni.”
Sasha was pleasantly surprised—at both his ability to be logical and his willingness to lie to his soulmate.
“All right, we are one step closer to a happy baby,” Sasha said.
“I can run to the store,” Aurora said, already reaching for her purse on the island.
“There’s formula here,” Sasha said, keeping her eyes on Freya’s beet-red face.
“There is?”