Chapter 13
Audrey
Astrid let herself in on a Thursday because I didn't hear the knock.
I was on the couch with Nova on my chest, both of us half-asleep, the TV on mute.
I hadn't showered. The robe I was wearing had spit-up on the shoulder that I'd wiped with a burp cloth and stopped thinking about.
Duke had been here yesterday and left the kitchen clean.
Since then, I'd gone through four bottles and a pump session and left all of it on the counter.
"I brought soup," Astrid said from the doorway. "And rice. And the chicken thing from Rosario's that reheats."
She didn't wait for me to get up. She came to the couch first, leaned down, and put her arms around Nova and me together.
She held on for a second, her chin against the top of my head.
Then she went straight to the kitchen, put the containers in the fridge, and started on the bottles at the sink.
I watched her from the couch and didn't have the energy to tell her she didn't have to do that.
"How's it going with Duke?" she asked, her hands in the water.
"It's going well," I said.
And it was. That was true. It was also the surface of something I didn't know how to describe to my best friend while she stood at my sink doing the dishes I hadn't done, so I gave her the surface and kept the rest.
Duke showed up the first week with takeout from the Thai place near the firehouse, not asking if I wanted it, just setting the containers on the counter, washing his hands, and picking up the baby. He held Nova against his chest while I ate pad see ew with one hand.
The rocking chair showed up the second week.
Duke carried it in from his truck without explaining where it came from.
I didn't ask. It was old, well-used, the armrests worn smooth by years of someone's hands.
Not something he'd bought. Something from a family that kept things.
I put it in the nursery corner by the window.
"It's perfect," I told him, and I meant it. I used it that night at one in the morning, rocking Nova in the dark, and I used it the next night, too.
Duke at the kitchen sink at one in the morning, washing bottles with Nova in the crook of his left arm, his right hand working the brush with the efficiency of a man who had held patients and equipment at the same time for years.
He rinsed each bottle twice. He set them on the rack without looking.
Nova was asleep against his chest with her fist in his shirt.
I taught him the cries. Hungry was short, rhythmic, escalating.
Tired was a low drone that broke into sharp bursts.
Mad was loud and sustained and usually about the yellow onesie.
Wet was whimpering, more complaint than crisis.
And the one I didn't have a name for yet, the one that was just this is too much, and I need someone to hold me until it stops.
Duke took notes on his phone. He asked me to repeat the tired cry twice.
He read them back to me at the kitchen counter like he was studying for a certification exam, and I corrected his description of the mad cry, and he updated it without arguing.
He was holding Nova against his chest, and I was looking for my phone when I pulled the spare key from the kitchen drawer, set it on the counter, and said, "So you can stop buzzing me at six in the morning.
" He put it on his ring that night. Neither of us said anything about it after that.
I lay awake in the dark and wondered when sharing a baby became sharing a key, and when sharing a key became something I couldn't name.
The fog came in pieces. The same robe two days running.
A yogurt commercial that broke me on Thursday, a woman on a porch feeding a toddler in morning light, and I was crying before I understood why.
Then I was crying about crying, about how tired I was of the tears showing up uninvited, about the fact that my body was doing things I hadn't authorized, and my mind was trailing three steps behind everything.
Astrid was drying the last bottle at the counter. She asked about the pediatrician appointment that afternoon, and whether I wanted company. I looked at her from the couch and watched myself answer from somewhere outside the conversation.
"Duke and I are going," I said. "We've got it."
She paused on Duke and I. Didn't comment. Set the bottle on the rack.
I'm not okay. I don't know how to talk about it.
The thought sat in my chest while Astrid moved through my kitchen, putting things in order, and I lay on the couch, giving her the version she could carry home with her.
The fog was not lifting the way the books said it would lift by week four.
The crying was not slowing down. I was an L&D nurse who had coached a thousand women through the postpartum weeks, and I couldn't coach myself, and the distance between what I knew professionally and what I was living was the loneliest thing I'd ever felt.
Astrid hugged me at the door before she left. She held on for a beat longer than she meant to, her arms tight around my shoulders, her chin against the side of my head. She saw more than I wanted her to see, but she didn't push.
The waiting room at Hartsdale General's pediatric office smelled like hand sanitizer and the particular warmth of a room full of babies.
Duke was beside me with Nova's carrier between us.
He was in jeans and a Hartsdale Fire T-shirt, off-shift, the soft version of himself.
I was wearing the cleanest of my three rotation outfits, hair up, the presentable I could manage.
A nurse called Nova's name. We went back.
The exam room was compact and bright, with a poster about infant CPR on the wall beside the light switch. The intake nurse was someone I recognized from the floor, a woman named Priya who gave me a polite nod and nothing more. She was professional enough to keep it flat. I appreciated that.
She handed Duke a clipboard while I was undressing Nova on the exam table.
"Father's information," she said.
Duke took the clipboard. He didn't hesitate. He didn't look at me. He sat in the chair beside the exam table and started filling it out, pen moving across the boxes with unhurried certainty.
His name. His birthday. His phone number. His address. Father. He checked the box. He filled the line.
I stopped moving.
Nova was half-undressed on the exam table, one arm out of her onesie, looking at the ceiling with the expression of a baby who had opinions about being cold. I was looking at the wall. The CPR poster. The light switch. The corner where the wall met the ceiling.
The form Duke just filled out was for the pediatrician's records. It wasn’t the form that mattered.
The form that mattered was filed four weeks ago, with his name not on it.
It was in a county office somewhere, stamped and processed, the birth certificate of a child whose father's section was blank.
He didn't know. He sat in this chair, filling out a pediatric intake form with his full name and phone number because he was her father, and it didn't occur to him that any version of this existed where he wouldn't be.
He didn't know. He didn't know.
I picked Nova up off the table and held her against my chest.
The pediatrician came in. Dr. Larsen was calm and thorough.
She asked about height, weight, the soft spot, the reflexes—Nova did the reflexes with mild offense, her face scrunching at the light, her foot pulling back from the touch with the personal affront of a person who had been alive for four weeks and already had opinions about being handled. Duke laughed once, softly, beside me.
Questions were fired off about feeding, sleeping, and the routine. I answered peer to peer, fast and clean. She listened, nodded, and kept moving.
Duke held Nova on the exam table while Dr. Larsen checked her back, his hand spanning her entire back, fingers spread, palm covering her from shoulders to hips. Dr. Larsen glanced at it.
"That's a big hand for a little baby," she said.
"Yeah," Duke said.
I watched his hand on her back and tucked it away with everything else I wasn't letting myself feel.
Vaccines would be at the next visit. We dressed Nova together the way we did everything now—me working the onesie, Duke holding her legs still, four weeks of practice turning two people into something that moved without negotiation.
The parking lot was warm, the late sun coming sideways across the cars. I was at the passenger door of Duke's truck with Nova in the carrier when he came around to put her in the back himself.
I said it before I meant to.
"Thank you for coming with us."
Duke took the carrier from my hands. He stopped. He was right there, close enough that I could see the sunburn on the bridge of his nose, and his face did something I wasn't ready for.
"Don't," he said.
A beat.
"Don't thank me for being her father, Aud."
He said it without performance. Without asking me to receive it as anything more than what it was. A statement of fact.
I didn't answer him. I got in the truck. He put Nova in the back, checked the straps, and closed the door. We drove to my apartment in silence.
My mother arrived at my apartment on Sunday with two containers of food and the key I'd given her the week Nova was born.
She let herself in, set the containers on the counter, and started unpacking without asking where anything went.
She already knew where everything went. She'd been coming twice a week since I got home from the hospital.
She warmed the chicken in my oven, set the table for one because she'd already eaten, and put a glass of water beside the plate. She stood at the counter while I sat down.
We did the Sunday things, just in my kitchen instead of hers.
The Yarn Room customer who'd been working on a scarf for two years.
Marcie's plan for an advanced crochet workshop.
The observation that I was too thin. I ate the chicken because she'd decided I was eating it, and I laughed at a joke I'd heard before because the joke was hers and the kitchen was warm and this was the oldest thing we had between us.
Then the question, casually dropped between the chicken and the water glass, her back to me while she wiped down the counter.
"Is Duke legally named as Nova's father?"
I took a beat. "Not yet."
She nodded without turning around, telling me that was probably smart, that there was no rush on something like that, and then she moved on, asking about Nova's sleep, the pediatrician appointment, and whether I'd been getting outside at all. I answered everything she asked.
She finished wiping down the counter, picked up her coffee, and turned to face me.
"Sweetheart, do you want to marry Duke?"
"Mom."
"I'm asking because if he's not going to marry you, I'm not sure why you'd give him legal rights to your daughter."
The warmth in her voice was real, and so was the calculation underneath it, careful and practiced and dressed up as love.
"He's her father, Mom. That's not about whether we get married."
"I know he's her father. But fatherhood and legal rights are two different things, Audrey.
One is a feeling. The other is a document, and a document gives a man standing in a courtroom.
" She took a sip of her coffee. "I'm not saying he's a bad person.
I'm saying you should think about what you're giving him before you know what this is. "
She moved on to ask whether I wanted her to plate the rice. She didn't push it. She never pushed it past the first pass. She just made the pass, let it sit, and went to the stove.
I sat at the table and felt the whole of it settle into me.
She wasn't asking about Duke. She was asking about the architecture.
Marriage, then legal fatherhood, then permanence, in that order, because that was the order that protected a woman.
That was my mother's map. She drew it from the life she'd lived.
In her version, you didn't give a man his name on a document until he'd given you his name on a different one. Anything else was risky.
And the marriage question was the one that was still sitting in my chest. Not because I wanted to marry Duke. Because she had asked me if I wanted to, and I'd not known the answer fast enough, and the not-knowing had scared me more than either answer would have.
I ate the chicken. I let her hold Nova on her shoulder and pat her back while we watched the baking show we always watched on Sundays.
My mother's hand on my daughter's back, steady and sure.
I watched her hold the baby and felt everything she'd said sitting between us on the couch, unresolved, doing its work.
She left at dusk. I walked her to the door. She kissed the side of my head, slightly too hard. I stood in the doorway and watched her walk to her car.
The apartment was still after she left. Nova was asleep in the bouncer. The containers were in the fridge. The kitchen was clean because my mother had cleaned it. The counter was wiped, the dish towel was folded in thirds on the oven handle—her fold, nobody else's.
I went to the window. The evening light was dropping over the street, going orange at the tree line. I stood there with my arms crossed and my forehead close to the glass.
My mother had spent the afternoon asking me to think about what I was building and who I was building it with.
She loved me. She was afraid for me. Her fear was careful enough to pass for reason, and somewhere inside both was a woman who had signed a marriage certificate and watched it not hold and never stopped believing the certificate was the part that should have saved her.
Do you want to marry Duke?
I didn't know. I didn't know, and the not-knowing was a door I'd never stood in front of before, and I could feel it opening whether I was ready or not.
I kept coming back to Wednesday night. Nova had been crying and then stopped, and the silence woke me faster than the crying had.
I got to the nursery door and found it already open—Duke in the rocking chair with her against his chest, singing something low and off-key I didn't recognize.
His voice was quiet enough that I shouldn't have been able to hear the words from the hallway. But the song carried.
I'd sat down on the floor outside the door because my legs wouldn't hold me. My back against the wall. My hands on my knees. He didn't see me. The song went on past the point where she needed it, because he wasn't ready to stop.