1. Akemi #2
He pulled at her shirt, and she nursed him to calm him down. Gingerly, she picked her way back across the tile floor. The cut on her foot spilled a bright trail of blood as she walked.
“Sorry about that.” She slipped back into the call carefully, so that just her face showed on her section of the screen.
“Is everything alright?” the blonde woman asked, looking concerned.
“Fine,” Akemi said with a wry smile. She pressed one foot on top of the other to stanch the bleeding. “My toddler gave me a scare. Apparently he’s found a way to climb out of his crib. He’s never done that before.”
“I know what that’s like.” The blonde shook her head, but her smile was friendly. “I’ve got a climber too.”
“I apologize for the interruption.” It was a fight to keep her voice steady. Adrenaline coursed through her body; her heart still beat twice as fast as usual.
“Hey, we get it,” said one of the men. “We’re parents too.”
She managed to wrap up the call on a positive note, and then she went to bandage up her foot. As soon as she got the bandage on, she jumped up and grabbed Kaleo, who was heading towards their death trap of a kitchen.
“You do not want to go in there right now,” she told him.
He screamed his dissent and arched his back, trying to escape.
Akemi put him into his crib. “Can you just stay in there for a minute while I clean up?”
He climbed right back out again.
“Right.” She let out a heavy breath and grabbed one of her carriers.
It took a few minutes to wrestle him into it, and he screamed in her ear for all of the fifteen minutes that it took to clean up the broken glass.
First she swept, and then she crawled around on her hands and knees with a paper towel, hunting down every last glittering shard. All with Kaleo on her back – and he was getting heavier by the day.
When that was finally done, she released him from the carrier – now soaked with pee – and his stupid useless diaper too.
Switching brands every time she changed location was a recipe for disaster – blowouts galore, and one rash so bad that it had sent her to the local urgent care, where she trailed her baby around the waiting room for three hours and then went back and forth with a doctor via a translation app with middling success.
She was exhausted.
Luckily her water baby still loved baths.
Instead of trying to clean him up with wipes, she just put him straight into the tub and got warm water running from the tap.
When he sat down and started to splash – he usually preferred splashing with his feet in an effort to send his head crashing into the tub spout – Akemi was finally able to take a moment to breathe.
She sat down on the cool tile floor and leaned back against the wall.
“I’m so tired I could cry,” she said aloud. “Don’t you still need a nap?”
Kaleo gave her a grin that made her heart somersault with joy.
“You’re worth it, though.” Akemi handed him a bath toy and leaned in, slumping against the side of the tub. “You’re perfect. It’s not your fault I’m struggling.”
She needed backup.
Various options spun through her head.
Recently she’d met a family with a traveling nanny. Maybe she should do that.
But the idea of interviewing strangers and finding someone she could trust with her son when she was already tired to the point of tears felt hopelessly overwhelming.
She pulled her phone from her pocket and called Lorenzo.
“Amore!” He picked up the call right away and greeted her with a delighted grin. “How are you?”
“Not great,” she said, but Lorenzo’s grin was so catching that she felt her face pull into a small smile of its own.
The man was gorgeous. He probably had a score of women knocking down his door.
At that thought, her smile disappeared.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Our child escaped containment today,” she told him.
A small line of confusion appeared between his eyebrows.
“He climbed out of his crib.”
“Very impressive! He is very advanced, our little lion.”
“Yeah, except he did it while I was on a work call, and he broke a glass pitcher in the kitchen.”
“Is he hurt?” Lorenzo exclaimed.
“He’s fine.” She put the phone in Kaleo’s face to capture his toothy grin. “Somehow he emerged unscathed.”
“Leoncino,” his father crooned. “Babbo sente molto la tua mancanza.”
Kaleo talked back to him in a string of baby babble that sounded vaguely Italian.
“We miss you.” Akemi was so tired that the words came out unguarded.
“I miss you too, amore. Both of you.”
Those words tugged at her heart, and suddenly she missed him so much that she could hardly breathe.
Paradoxically, that made her want to run as far and as fast as she could. She didn’t like missing a man; she didn’t like the hold he had over her. She just wanted her freedom.
Even so, she missed him.
“Could you come here?” Akemi didn’t consider the question before blurting it out.
She was so sleep deprived that her brain wasn’t working properly; there was no lag time between thought and speech. It felt way too vulnerable, and she wanted to take the words back the moment they were out.
“Amore, I would love to come, but I cannot leave my work until next month.”
“It’s okay,” she said quickly.
He cared about them, but they weren’t his top priority. He had a whole life there in Italy, and she had never asked him to leave it behind. Not for long, anyway.
She was afraid of what the answer might be.
“It has been more than three months,” he said. The mandatory ninety-day period had passed, and she was legally allowed to enter the Schengen Area again. “You could come here to Italy. I am working long hours, but my mamma would be happy to help you with Leo.”
Akemi winced at the thought of spending so much time with Bruna. “I don’t know. Italy is so far away.”
He didn’t insist, just nodded sadly.
“You are always welcome here,” he said. “I miss you.”
“I miss you too,” she said. But her thoughts had already tumbled onwards.
In that moment, even more than she missed her sometimes-partner, she missed her family. She missed her mom and her sisters and her childhood home.
“I think I need to head back to Pualena for a while.”
“Will you still be there for Leo’s birthday?” he asked.
“Yeah.” She had left the weeks around his birthday open, knowing that she would want to spend them with her family in Hawaii – she was just calling it quits a little bit sooner than she had planned. “Definitely.”
“I will join you there before his birthday,” Lorenzo promised.
Akemi nodded, but her heart twisted with a sudden pain.
November was months away, and she wanted him with them now.
Jetting around the world by herself used to feel like freedom. These days, being far from the people she loved brought an unprecedented level of pain.
The bathwater had gone cool. She said goodbye and set her phone aside. Then she scooped Kaleo out of the bath and wrapped him in a towel.
He rested his head on her shoulder, content to cuddle for a moment, and she felt a sudden despair.
They were so lucky that he hadn’t been hurt.
Unattended in the kitchen, any number of disasters could have happened. The thought made her feel ill.
Suddenly, she was sick of travel.
She just wanted to be someplace familiar and safe.
“Okay, kiddo,” she said, resting her cheek against Kaleo’s soft black hair. “It’s time to head home.”