12. Tess
Tess
Imake him stand in the entryway while I send the babysitter home. She blushes furiously when she notices him there, but has the good sense to take her money and leave.
I make him stand while I lay out the ground rules, because if he sits down it turns into a visit.
“No photographs. Not one. Not for you, not on your phone, nothing.”
“Okay.”
“No presents. No bear, no savings bond, nothing with a bow on it showing up at my door.”
“Okay.”
“Nobody comes with you. No driver waiting, no assistant in the car.”
“There’s nobody outside.”
“I checked.”
“I know. I watched you check.”
“You don’t say her name in public. Not on a stage, not in an interview, not in a caption. If somebody asks you about her you say nothing, and I mean nothing, not a smile, not a no comment with a face on it.”
He nods.
“You don’t ask me for another chance. Not tonight and not in a month. If you’re here to work back toward me through her, leave now and I promise I won’t be angry, I’ll just be glad I found out early.”
That one takes him a second.
“That’s fair.”
“And you don’t touch me.”
“Tess.”
“You don’t touch me. Not my shoulder, not my hand, you don’t move my hair out of my face. I’ve watched you do all three to strangers.”
He looks at the floor and back up, and his jaw is doing something.
“Alright.”
She’s in the bouncer in the living room, in her loud mood, shouting her opinions at the ceiling fan. He crouches about six feet away and stays there.
“Hey.”
She goes quiet. She looks at him with that enormous flat baby stare, the one with no manners in it whatsoever, and she takes him apart for a few long seconds.
Then she screams. Not a fuss. The real one, from the back of her throat, both arms up, her face going plum, and it happens so fast that he rocks back on his heels.
“Okay. Okay, no. That’s fair.”
“Give her a second.”
“I don’t want to make it”
“Then don’t stand over her.”
He backs off and sits on the floor near the bookcase with his back to the wall, which is smarter than I expected.
After a minute she gets bored of being upset and goes back to the fan.
We do that for a while. Him against a wall.
Her ignoring him. Me standing in my own living room with my arms crossed like a bouncer.
Then she drops the plastic ring and he leans over and picks it up and holds it out, slow, and she takes it out of his hand and doesn’t scream. His face when she takes it out of his hand.
“Can I hold her?”
“You can try.”
He does everything right, which is what makes it awful.
Hands under the arms, head supported, careful lift.
And then he’s got her out and slightly away from himself the way people hold a baby they don’t know, and I watch him realize halfway up that he has no plan for the second half of the movement. She loses her mind.
The lab scream, and then worse, and she throws her whole body backward, and he says “whoa, hey, no, hey” in a voice I have never once heard him use, and he bounces her, and it’s too fast, and it makes it worse.
He tries the shoulder. Then the cradle. Then walking her to the window and pointing at the streetlight and doing a low hum with no tune in it, which is a good idea, which is a genuinely good idea, and she screams into the side of his neck the entire time.
I let it go longer than I should. Nobody made me stand there and watch it.
Then I say, “Give her to me,” and he does immediately, and she stops before she’s all the way into my arms. Three seconds.
She grabs my collar and shoves her face into my throat and makes one wet aggrieved sound and it’s done.
The quiet afterward is enormous. He’s standing in the middle of my living room with his hands out in front of him, looking at them.
“She does that with everybody. She did it to my mother.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what.”
“Don’t try to make me feel good about this.” He puts his hands down. “That’s the first true thing that’s happened to me in two weeks. Let it be true.”
He glances toward the stove, then back at me, and I watch him decide not to make me end the visit.
“I should go.”
“You don’t have to run.”
“I should go.” He picks his jacket off the back of the chair. “Can I come tomorrow?”
“When?”
“Whenever you say.”
“After dinner. I’m not moving her whole day around you.”
“After dinner,” he says.
Then he leaves, and I stand at my front window like a woman in a movie and watch him walk down the street to a truck parked outside a taco place. Alone, late at night, in a city where he can disappear.
But he doesn’t disappear. He is back early the next evening and waits in the truck until the time we agreed on. I know because Sadie and I are at the window watching a man sit in a parked truck rather than knock before I told him to.
He comes to the door with nothing in his hands.
“You said no presents.”
“I did.”
“So this isn’t one.” He takes a spiral notebook out of his jacket, the gas station kind, cover already bent back.
“It’s questions. I wrote down everything I don’t know and it turns out that’s most things.
If you want me to put it away I’ll put it away, I’d just rather ask you than google it, because google’s going to tell me what babies do and I want to know what she does. ”
I stand in my doorway with my daughter on my hip.
“Read me one.”
“Right now?”
“Read me one and I’ll decide whether you’re coming in.”
He opens it to the first page and holds it out a little, which is new, which means he needs reading glasses and hasn’t dealt with it.
“What does she do right before she cries. Not the crying. The thing before?”
I don’t say anything.
“It’s not a real question,” he says fast. “I know it’s not. It’s just, at the lab, before she went off, she did a thing with her mouth. She pulled it in. And then two seconds later, the whole. And I keep thinking if I’d known what that was I’d have backed up.”
Sadie chooses that exact moment to take a fistful of my hair and pull.
“She pulls both lips in,” I say. “It looks like she’s thinking something over.”
“And then how long have I got?”
“Not long.”
He writes it down. On my doorstep, standing up, notebook braced on his forearm, and he writes slowly, the way a man writes who hasn’t written anything by hand in years.
“You can come in.”