9. Heidi
HEIDI
County Memorial discharges me two days after Ivy's birth.
Discharge takes most of the morning. A nurse checks my stitches, asks whether I have support at home, and pauses when I say I am going to my mother's house instead of mine.
“Is that where you feel safest?” she asks.
The question is routine. I still have to look at Ivy before answering.
“Yes.”
I sign papers while my daughter sleeps in the clear hospital bassinet. Beau's name appears beside mine on forms we completed before labor. Father. Emergency contact. Person authorized to receive information.
I do not cross him out. The fact that he failed one duty does not erase every legal fact, and I refuse to make decisions about the rest of Ivy's life while I am wearing a hospital pad and cannot sit without lowering myself one careful inch at a time.
The nurse shows me again how the car-seat straps should lie. I listen as though I have never heard it. There is comfort in an instruction that has one correct answer.
Beau has returned our car to County Memorial and left the keys with Mom.
She drives. My brother Dash carries the second bag and checks the back seat twice before allowing me to lower myself beside Ivy's car seat.
Beau has moved to a short-term serviced apartment.
I know because Mom made him send the address before she would collect the key to the marital house.
Beau waits near the discharge doors.
I did not know he would be there. The sight of him beside our car stops me in the wheelchair.
He has brought the yellow sleeper from the nursery. Ivy is wearing the hospital shirt and blanket because the clothes in the second bag stayed packed through discharge, and the useless tenderness of the gesture nearly undoes me.
“Can I help with the seat?” he asks.
Dash's hand tightens on the wheelchair handle.
I look at Beau. He appears not to have slept. I want him to look terrible. I want to touch the roughness along his jaw.
“Dash has it.”
Beau nods. “Can I see her before you go?”
I pull back the edge of the blanket. He crouches beside the seat without touching it.
“Hello, Ivy,” he whispers.
My milk lets down at the sound of his voice. Pain and warmth spread through my breasts. I turn my face toward the window.
“We need to go,” I say.
He steps back. Dash pushes the chair past him.
At Mom's house, every movement requires planning. Ivy needs feeding. I need medication, clean pads, water, and help standing. Nobody suggests that two days postpartum should look like recovery completed.
The guest room is the room I slept in after my father died, after my first disastrous apartment flooded, and the night before I married Beau. Mom has put the bassinet beside the bed and a basket of supplies within reach.
I stand in the doorway holding Ivy and remember fastening pearl buttons while Beau waited at the end of an aisle.
“Do you want a different room?” Mom asks.
“No.”
I want my own bed. I want the nursery. I want to complain to Beau that the hospital has sent us home with a tiny person and no adult supervision.
The wanting is so ordinary that it frightens me.
Mom takes the bag, not the baby. “One thing at a time.”
I sit on the bed. Ivy begins to root against my gown, and the next necessary thing saves me from answering.
Beau calls from the serviced apartment and asks when he can see Ivy.
“Not today.”
He swallows his answer. “Tomorrow?”
“I need the whole written history first. Messages, emails, call logs. From the beginning.”
“Heidi, there is nothing sexual in them.”
“That is not the question.”
“I can show you. It will prove what I've been saying.”
He sounds relieved.
“Complete,” I say. “No deleted thread presented as complete. No summary.”
“All right.”
I end the call and feed our daughter while my mother sits close enough to help without taking over.
The first night at Mom's house is a sequence of small failures. I cannot climb out of bed with Ivy in my arms, so I have to call for my mother. I soak through a pad and cry because the bathroom is six steps away. My milk comes in hard enough that my skin feels stretched and hot.
At midnight, I wake convinced Ivy has stopped breathing. She is making the same soft snuffling sound she made five minutes earlier. I put two fingers against her chest anyway.
At one, I cannot make the diaper tabs meet properly. At two, she cries after feeding and I cry because she is crying. At three, my body feels too heavy to lift from the mattress.
“Mom.”
The word comes out small.
Mom appears in the doorway wearing her robe and one slipper. She takes Ivy long enough for me to stand, then walks beside me to the bathroom without pretending I do not need the help.
“I thought Beau would do this,” I say.
She adjusts the towel around my shoulders. “I know.”
“I don't want to need him.”
“That would be convenient.”
I laugh once, then wince.
“No comedy,” I tell her.
“Terrible restriction.”
She waits outside the bathroom door while I clean myself and breathe through the ache.
Mom helps without telling me I am lucky Beau is trying. Dash labels containers in the refrigerator and leaves after confirming the front lock works. Their care makes Beau's absence easier to survive and harder to excuse.
At three in the morning, Ivy opens her eyes against my breast. I tell her that her father knows her name. It is the only fact about him I can give her without bitterness, so I repeat it until she sleeps.
At four, Beau sends a message asking whether Ivy fed.
I stare at it until the screen dims.
He has a right to know whether his daughter is well.
I type that she ate at three twenty and is sleeping.
Then I add that my milk has come in and delete it because the fact feels too intimate to hand him.
I add that she hates being swaddled and delete that too because I want to keep one new thing for myself.
She fed well. She is asleep.
His answer comes at once.
Thank you. Please tell me if either of you needs anything.
I nearly write that I needed him at 4:04 two days ago.
Instead I put the phone down and listen to Ivy breathe.