33. Nora
NORA
Sunday morning arrives, and I feel terrible.
Not Harper terrible—not the acute crisis of a sick infant who can't tell you what's wrong—but the specific, bone-heavy misery of a stomach bug taking hold. I wake up at six on the couch under the blanket I pulled over myself last night, and for a moment I just lie there cataloging the damage.
Everything aches. My head is full of cotton wool. My stomach has opinions.
The baby monitor crackles. Harper.
I sit up.
Here's the thing about being sick when you're the only adult in the house: it doesn't matter. Harper doesn't know. I feel awful. She doesn't know Tyler is still on a plane somewhere over Pennsylvania. She knows she's hungry, that her diaper needs changing, and that she wants someone to come.
I go.
She's in good spirits, actually, much better than yesterday, the bug apparently out of her system, looking at me from her crib with the alert curiosity of someone who has slept well and is ready for the day.
I pick her up, and she grabs my hair, and I don't even have the energy to redirect her, so I just carry her to the changing table and let her hold on.
"Morning, baby girl," I tell her. "Mommy feels absolutely dreadful, so we're going to have a quiet day."
Harper has no thoughts on this either way.
The morning passes in slow motion.
Harper takes her bottle without a fight, cheerfully exploring the living room floor while I sit on the couch and try to look functional.
Every time she heads toward something she shouldn't touch, I get up.
Every time she needs something, I get it.
The mechanics of baby care are in my muscle memory by now; I could do this half asleep, and today I'm essentially proving it.
Tyler texts around nine, still on his way home.
Tyler: How are you? How's Harper?
Me: She's great. Up early, eating well, and completely recovered.
Tyler: And you?
I look at the message. Harper is sitting in the middle of the floor, trying to put the green giraffe toy in her mouth with great determination.
Me: Fine.
"That's not true," I tell Harper.
She looks at me and offers me the giraffe, which is generous of her.
"Thank you, sweetheart."
By lunchtime, I'm running on fumes, stubbornness, and the clarity that comes from having no other option. I heat Harper's puréed vegetables—she's having the sweet potato, which she regards as a personal triumph—and put my toast down after one bite because the idea of eating anything is ambitious.
I'm managing. That's the thing. Alone in this house with a recovering baby and a fever that's definitely present now, and it’s fine, it's okay; I know how to do this. I've been doing it alone for years, this general maintenance of one's own life without a safety net.
But the house feels different today.
Not different in a frightening way, not lonely in the way it used to feel lonely when I moved from placement to placement with everything I owned in the back of someone's sedan—just quieter than it should be.
Like a room where someone was just sitting and got up.
Like the space is aware of what's missing.
I think about the night Harper had the stomach bug. How I texted Tyler at 3 a.m., and he was there, not physically, but completely present, fully in it with me, worried and alert and refusing to go to sleep because I was awake and handling something hard.
I didn't feel alone that night, even though I was.
That's the thing I'm sitting with while Harper naps after lunch, and I'm lying on the couch with a blanket, feeling genuinely dreadful and trying not to show it even to myself.
I haven't felt alone in months.
Even the nights Tyler's been away, even through the worst of the sleep regression, I haven't felt the bone-deep loneliness I used to carry everywhere—and I didn't notice it going—which is exactly how these things work.
You don't notice the absence of something until it's been absent long enough to become normal, and then one day you realize you can't remember the last time you felt it.
The last time I felt truly alone was probably August. Standing in my apartment with overdue notices on the counter and nothing on the walls, and the Morrisons already gone. Before Harper's doorstep arrival. Before Tyler's terrified voice came through the door.
Before all of this.
My phone buzzes. It’s a photo memory—my mom in her garden, squinting at the sun a year before she died. I feel the reflex, the automatic reach, the beginning of the thought that always comes.
I should call her—and then it stops at the wall it always meets.
I hold the phone.
But instead of the usual wave of grief, something else comes with it today. Something softer.
She would have liked Tyler. The way he loves Harper, the way he says my girls without a care in the world. She would have watched him for five minutes and understood something about him that would have taken me months to put into words.
She would have liked Nora-with-Tyler better than lonely Nora with nothing going for her.
I think I do, too.
Harper wakes up from her nap at three, and I get her up, and we sit on the couch together, her standing on my legs and bouncing, which she finds extremely satisfying, while I try to look better than I feel.
My fever is higher now. I know it is. I'm not going to check because what would that accomplish? But I know.
Tyler will be home eventually.
I've been doing this alone for years. A little bit longer is nothing.
But I notice, sitting here with Harper's warm, solid weight on my legs and the house quiet around us, that I'm not dreading the hours. I'm just waiting for them to pass. There's a difference.
There's a specific comfort in knowing someone is coming home.