103 Rhys
103
Rhys
My hair was still wet when I walked downstairs in gray sweatpants and a T-shirt. Ginger looked up and smiled at me, nervous.
“You mind if I shower too?”
“No, go ahead. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
She kissed Leon on the forehead. He was still in the carriage. Then she grabbed her handbag and went upstairs. I sat on the sofa in the same room where I’d spent the past year and a half, but now everything felt different. Fuller. Warmer. Leon looked at me, and I looked at him. I took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure what to do with a baby. This was the closest I could remember being to one. I jiggled one of the toys hanging down over his head, and he laughed, moving his arms, trying to grab it. I pulled it away a little, and he reached higher. Maybe this wasn’t so hard. Maybe we could get to know each other, like each other, even if I had no idea how.
I thought that, at least, until he started crying.
At first, it was just pouting. His lips crinkled and he moaned, but then he closed his eyes, clenched his fists, and shouted so loud he scared me.
“Hey, Leon, look.” I shook his rattle.
He didn’t care. And he didn’t like the funny faces I made either.
“Shit. No, fuck, I shouldn’t have said that.” I bit my lip. “Hopefully the thing about your brain being like a sponge is just a myth. Wait a second.”
I hurried upstairs and knocked on the bathroom door. I heard Ginger turn off the water and couldn’t help but imagine her naked. That still stung me. My lust. My desire.
“Rhys? What’s up?”
“Leon won’t stop crying. Can you hurry?”
“Pick him up. He loves to be carried around.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Rhys, I’ve got shampoo all in my hair. Just do it. You bend over, take him out of the carriage, and sit on the couch. It’s easy. He’ll stop crying, I promise.”
I ground my teeth as I walked off. He was still crying downstairs, his eyes humid. He was a sly little boy. I could tell he was trying to arouse my sympathy. I picked him up and held him to my chest. I was scared of everything: him falling, me holding him too tight, just everything. I walked him close to the window, and he was hypnotized as he looked at the pool as the sun glimmered on the surface of the water. When he got tired of it, I sat on the sofa with him in my lap, and he stretched out, relaxed.
He grabbed the pacifier hanging around his neck and put it in his mouth himself. I smiled. We stared at each other a while. And in that instant, there alone, observing each other in silence, him sucking on his pacifier, me cradling him, I remembered the message I’d written Ginger a year ago. She’d probably just read it that very same day. I told her in it that I sometimes wished the baby she was expecting was mine. That I wished everything had been different, as if it was a parallel reality. Later I thought I’d lost my mind in that moment, but if I had…then I was losing it again.
I reached out with my free hand and rubbed his cheek. He didn’t react—he went on staring at me as before. I wondered what it would be like to live like that, blindly trusting in any stranger who just came along and picked you up, so relaxed I could fall asleep without fear or terror, without a head full of doubt, without all those threads getting twisted up and complicating things as I grew.
“You all right?” Ginger asked.
I stopped rubbing his cheek and looked away. She approached uncertainly but smiled when she saw Leon had fallen asleep. She sat beside me on the sofa. The two of us here, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, almost like a routine. I expelled a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding in.
“Yeah, he calmed right down.”
“I told you. All he wants is to be held. I’ve spoiled him.” She reached over. “You want to hand him off to me? He won’t even notice.”
“No, he’s fine.”
I relaxed, leaning back into the sofa. Ginger did too, pulling her legs up beneath her and resting her head on my shoulder. I don’t know how long the three of us stayed like that. Just breathing. In silence. Without saying a word. But it was perfect. It was what I needed to start to process everything, to comprehend what I’d done the other night, all that I could have lost, how Ginger and her life had changed… We were no longer the people we’d been. But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t worse; it was just different. A newness within that familiar feeling that surrounded me when she was near.