Chapter Twenty-Nine
TWENTY-NINE
Meredith
1992
She doesn’t like watching him leave alone in the early morning before first light. They always did the walk to work together.
William doesn’t like it either. He’s the cheerful one first thing, the morning person who’ll have the coffee ready, the radio on, pulling them both out of their sleepy state, forcing them to get beyond what the clock on the wall is telling them. Now he rolls out of bed at the very last moment—Meredith will hear the alarm clock sounding over and over before there is not a minute more to spare. Only then does he rise, dress, no time for breakfast. He’ll stuff his feet into the shoes he left by the front door late last night and be gone with barely a word spoken. The euphoria and delight of having a newborn baby in the house—the feelings everyone promised were coming—are nowhere to be seen or felt. There’s just a body-numbing exhaustion that makes merely acknowledging each other feel like an effort some mornings. Meredith’s not sure she can cope alone, and yet she feels she cannot burden William with any of the work at home, not when he’s already stretched so thin.
Fiona refused to wait. Perhaps she could sense the change of routine, too, the lack of it defining Meredith’s day. She arrives in a flurry of panic two weeks early and nothing is ready. The freezer hasn’t been filled with homemade meals. Her tiny wardrobe of clothes hasn’t been washed and folded as Meredith intended. Half the baby kit remains unboxed in the corner of the nursery. Neither of them has banked the hours of sleep everyone said they’d need.
But Meredith finds some order in the chaos. It’s what she’s good at. She lets go of the tight structure that once surrounded her day. Fiona dictates everything now and she has no choice but to let her. Meredith sleeps when she sleeps. She leaves the apartment only once Fiona wakes from her naps. Mealtimes are missed, dinner is rarely ready by the time William arrives home. The two of them spend hours curled up together on the sofa under a cozy cotton blanket. How on earth will there be time for any of this when she returns to work?
Fiona wakes continually through the night, so Meredith makes a temporary bed on the floor of the nursery, that way William won’t be disturbed, and she can be closer to this precious bundle, right there the second she is needed. William raised a mild objection to her leaving their bedroom but was too tired to turn it into an argument.
“I’ll never see you,” he sighs. “Between my hours and Fiona’s nocturnal habits, when will there ever be time for you and me again? I miss you.”
“It won’t be forever. She needs me more right now. Soon she’ll be sleeping through the night and I’ll be back in with you.” She places a kiss on William’s cheek, noticing the deep fatigue in his eyes, the drained grayness of his skin. He can’t even raise a smile.
“We’re newlyweds” is all he adds before he drops heavily onto the sofa.
It’s months before Fiona comes close to sleeping through the night, and as hard as he tries to hide it, Meredith feels the resentment softly radiating from William. He starts to work later, hoping the baby will be in bed by the time he gets home. He eats dinner there, too, sometimes goes to his own bed without nudging open the nursery door to check if either of them is sleeping.
Meredith misses him, too, but she is swept away by her love for Fiona, shocked by the strength of the bond already welded between them. There will be plenty of time for William and me later, she thinks, years and years of us to come. I will be back to work before I know it, I need to devote this time to my beautiful Fiona.