6. Josh
Chapter six
Josh
Iris doesn’t stop.
Down the hall I hear the guest room door. Footsteps follow, quick and even, no hesitation. She has the schedule. She knows where she’s going.
I get up anyway.
I pull on the sweatpants from the end of the bed and stop in my doorway.
Liv is already at the nursery door in a sleep shirt — something oversized, washed-pale gray, the hem falling to mid-thigh.
Her hair is mostly down with a section at the back still gathered from sleep, working loose as she moves.
She has one hand on the door jamb, reading the room before she enters.
She doesn’t look back at the sound of my door.
“I have it,” she says.
“I know.”
I follow her in anyway.
The nursery is eight feet by nine. I measured it when I moved in and thought briefly about making it a home office.
It was already small when it was empty. Then I added the dresser and the rocker.
Now I have added the changing mat balanced on top of the dresser, and the makeshift crib on the floor.
What’s left between the door and the crib is a single path.
If there’s already a person standing in it, you turn sideways to pass.
Liv is already standing in the path.
She’s crouched beside the drawer, palm flat on Iris’s chest. Iris is not persuaded. She’s doing the full-body clench: both fists locked, legs rigid, face the exact color of a tomato. I have seen this face many times since Iris and I met, and it still looks alarming every time.
“It’s time for her two a.m. bottle,” Liv says, keeping her palm flat on Iris’s chest. “But she won’t take it like this. She’s completely rigid. This is something else.”
“She’s going Full Tomato,” I say.
Liv turns her head slightly. “I’m sorry, what?”
“The fists. The red face.” I gesture to Iris’s coloring. “The Atomic Tomato. It means gas. Or an incomplete burp from her last feed. Or she's just mad.”
A pause. She looks at Iris’s furious, clenched expression. Then at me, across the drawer. The absolute faintest trace of a smile touches the corner of her mouth before she quickly buries it.
“Try picking her up?” she asks.
I reach in. Iris is damp with sweat—evidence of a small body that has been working very hard at being mad. She comes up against my neck. She doesn’t stop crying, but she does root her face aggressively into my shoulder, searching for comfort.
“Okay,” I say. “I hear you.”
I need to move. Crying babies require motion, but my guest room has become an impossible obstacle course.
Liv stands up right in front of me, effectively trapping me against the wall.
With nowhere to walk, I lock my knees and settle for a rigid, side-to-side sway in the six inches of empty space beside the doorframe.
Liv goes to the dresser and opens the second drawer. She pulls out the formula canister and stares at it for a second, a frown tightening her forehead.
“I don’t know why I put this in here,” she says over Iris’s crying, her voice completely flat. “The formula is in the kitchen. This made sense to me three hours ago.”
“You were operating on pure panic,” I say. “It’s fine.”
She shakes her head, clearly furious with her own lack of logic. She clutches the canister against her chest.
“I can grab the bottle—” I start.
“No, you have her.” She nods toward the door. “I’ll go.”
She means the kitchen. The warmer, the water. She handles the formula; I keep Iris moving. It is the correct division of labor.
Except I am standing in the only clear strip of floor, and Liv needs the door.
We both look at the six-inch gap between my chest and the dresser at the exact same moment.
I take one step back and press my spine flat against the wall. I shift Iris to my far shoulder, tucking her in close. There is now, technically, enough room for a person to pass.
Liv turns sideways and comes through the gap.
Her shoulder crosses directly in front of my chest. The hem of the sleep shirt passes close enough that I could count the threads, bringing the faint, scent of her perfume with it.
“I’ll be right back,” Liv says from the hall.
I keep swaying in my six-inch corner.
Iris has finally stopped screaming. I look down at her. She is staring up at me, her cheeks still wet. She’s looking at me with that intense, slightly suspicious stare babies give you when they aren’t sure you know what you’re doing, but they’ve decided to let you keep trying.
I keep moving.
Iris’s crying has changed. It’s less of an emergency siren and more of a steady, formal complaint. She is letting me know exactly how she feels about having to wait three minutes for a warm bottle.
“You’re entirely right,” I tell her. “The kitchen staff is moving too slowly.”
She grabs my collar
I lean my head back against the wall. I have a surgery at seven and a consult at nine. It is 2:09 AM and the math is as bad as it sounds.
Iris tightens her grip.
But my brain isn’t on the math. It’s on the hallway.
From the kitchen, I hear the lower-left cabinet open. The squeak of the hinge. The rush of water in the sink.
I know every sound this apartment makes. For seven years, it has been my quiet sanctuary after a long shift. I know the hum of the refrigerator and the rattle of the pipes.
But I have never stood in the dark and listened to someone else moving through it.
The nearly silent brush of Liv’s bare feet against the hardwood as she crosses back to the sink. It shouldn’t sound this familiar. It shouldn’t feel this right to have her awake in my kitchen in the middle of the night.
I stop that thought exactly where it is.
Iris has loosened her grip on my collar. She’s making the sound I’ve started thinking of as her working-it-out sound — not distress, not sleep, somewhere in between, like she is reviewing the available information and reserving judgment of me.
“Take your time,” I tell her. “Neither of us is going anywhere.”
Liv appears in the doorway.
She tests the bottle on the inside of her wrist — holds the forearm still for a count, nods once.
She angles toward me. The room has not expanded in her absence.
She comes in, stops at the edge of the path, and holds the bottle out at the right angle.
I tilt Iris just enough to find the nipple. Both my arms stay on the baby.
Iris finds it on the first pass.
Her fists go flat open. Her legs release. The quiet that follows is the absolute quiet of a very small person who has decided, after deliberation, that her needs will in fact be met.
Liv keeps her hand on the bottle. Thumb at the base, fingers angled up. I have both arms around Iris — one spanning her back, one at her neck — and the bottle is between us, Liv holding it steady while Iris works.
“She’ll want the full feeding,” Liv says.
“I know.”
“Do you want to sit?”
The rocker is directly to my left. Getting there means passing Liv in the doorway with a feeding infant. I run the geometry. The answer is no.
“I’m fine,” I say.
She nods once and doesn’t argue.
The apartment is quiet.
I shift Iris slightly for a better angle, and the motion brings me a half-step toward Liv’s side of the bottle. She adjusts her grip without looking at me. A small recalibration. Neither of us mentions it.
I watch Iris eat. Liv watches Iris eat.
The hall nightlight throws an amber shape across the floor between us, just catching the edge of Liv’s bare foot. She used to walk around her apartment barefoot when we were together. Now I’m a person who used to know it.
I look at the two-ounce mark on the bottle.
Iris is working steadily. In the few hours we have been together, she has developed clear preferences: an even feeding pace, a preferred bottle angle, genuine irritation if you break her latch to check on her.
She is four months old and she already knows what she wants.
I have thirteen days left to learn the rest of it.
Thirteen days isn’t very many.
Across from me, Liv has her head tilted a few degrees. “Almost there,” Liv says. She’s watching the bottle.
“Yeah.”
I watch the two-ounce line drop. Between us, Iris makes the working-it-out sound again — low, ruminative, a hum that isn’t a complaint, just commentary. Liv’s chin tips up a fraction. Then settles.
Another minute. Then Iris takes a last slow pull and releases.
I bring Iris up to my neck—flat palm, center of the back, steady rhythm. She considers the situation. Then she burps once.
“That’s my girl,” I say. “I love a woman who burps with conviction.”
“That’s one,” Liv says.
A smile touches her mouth before she remembers she’s supposed to be managing a schedule.
She reaches for the cloth on the corner of the dresser.
So do I.
Our hands land at the same time.
Mine covers hers.
The cloth is caught under both of us, one small square of cotton neither of us seems willing to claim. Her hand is cool beneath mine. Iris breathes against my neck, warm and damp and fully unconcerned with the fact that I have forgotten how to move.
Liv stays still.
So do I.
I count to three before I make myself lift my hand.