The Wrong Baby That Split Their Marriage

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Natalie

The pumpkin costume has a stem on the top of the hood, and six month old Benji is determined to eat it.

Every time I pull the hood over his head, he catches the green felt between two damp fists and hauls it down over his eyes, aiming for his mouth.

Then he gets angry because he can’t see.

We’ve been doing this for several minutes on the bathroom floor while his big brother Owen bangs on the locked door.

“Mooooooooom. I need that white stuff!”

“What white stuff?”

“For my face.”

“You mean face paint? You said you didn’t want face paint.”

“That was before I changed my mind.”

Benji releases the stem long enough to grin at me.

His two bottom teeth gleam. I kiss his wet chin and lift him into my arms, stretching one hand toward the door to turn the lock.

Owen shoulders his way inside in a skeleton costume he has already worn to bed twice.

There is a chicken-nugget stain on the ribs.

I tried to wash it out last night, but apparently some things are permanent, edible oil product being one of them.

“I need to look dead,” he says. “And scary.”

“You look very dead, and a little bit scary.”

He checks the mirror, unconvinced. “My cheeks are pink, death doesn’t have pink cheeks.”

“Death can be pink cheeked and cute as a button,” I say and reach to pinch the cheek closest to me. He dodges my attempt and shoots me an annoyed look that only a six year old boy could muster.

“Moooom,” he whines

“All right. Get the white paint out of the basket. The washable paint.”

He leaves the door open. From upstairs, Lucy announces that her wings are broken, that they have always been broken, and that she cannot possibly go anywhere looking like this.

She’s eight. Last year the wings were pink and satisfactory.

This year she has painted them black and become a dark fairy, a distinction she explained to me while I picked dark glitter glue out of Benji’s hair.

My fault for not watching him while his big sister painted her wings and added black sparkles to them.

My phone lights up on the sink.

Adam: Landed. Getting the car. Still on for tonight.

I read the message with my thumb resting against the edge of the screen. He was supposed to land at two. It is four-sixteen, and the parade at Little Acorns daycare starts at five.

Me: Can you head straight to the daycare? I’ll take Benji over with the big kids. His carrier will be in the infant room.

The answer comes quickly.

Adam: Of course. Tell them Dad’s coming. Love you.

I could call. I could ask whether he has his luggage yet, whether there is traffic, whether coming means he can actually be there before I need to leave with Lucy and Owen. Instead I shelve my irritation for later, put the phone down and fasten the snaps between Benji’s legs.

There was a time when Adam coming home made me change my clothes.

I would hear his key, drop whatever I was doing, and go to him.

He used to catch me around the waist and lift me clear off the floor, even in the narrow hall of our first apartment, where it invariably meant one of us hit the thermostat.

For years, after the children came, I still looked forward to that sound.

Now I calculate what chores I might get done if he’s home before bedtime, and maybe even squeeze in a bath for myself, some alone time.

I don’t like that about myself. I don’t like a lot of my thoughts lately, so I keep them occupied with other things. Permission slips. Grocery orders. Whether there are enough clean bottles. I am very useful when I don’t have time to think.

Owen returns with the paint and a brush that looks suspiciously like one from my desk.

“Where did you get that?”

“The blue room.”

“My office.”

“That’s what I said.”

The room at the back of the house contains a desk, a printer, two baskets of unfolded laundry, and the folded travel crib.

Before Lucy was born, I designed catalogs for a small publishing company.

Afterward I took freelance jobs, usually the ones people needed yesterday and didn’t have much money for.

Since Benji arrived, I’ve mostly been designing birthday invitations for people who assume I enjoy doing them for free.

He goes to Little Acorns two mornings a week.

I booked the place while I was pregnant, imagining paid work, uninterrupted coffee, perhaps even a trip to the dentist. Most mornings I spend the first hour catching up on whatever the night before prevented me from doing.

Then someone calls from school, or the washing machine starts leaking, and suddenly, before I know it, it is time to collect him.

“Not that brush,” I tell Owen. “The orange one in the basket.”

He exchanges it without complaint, which makes me feel worse for the sharpness in my voice.

By four-forty, Lucy’s wings are repaired with electrical tape, Owen’s cheeks are adequately corpse-like, and Benji is strapped into his carrier, the cutest little orange jack-o-lantern I’ve ever seen.

I have packed the usual bag, checked it, and put the bottle he will need at home in the refrigerator.

A clean sleep sack waits on the nursery chair upstairs.

I send Adam a message telling him both things, then delete the sentence reminding him to check the diaper before bed.

He knows how to change a diaper.

He changed plenty when Lucy was small, before the promotions, before every few nights away became most of the week.

He knows how to hold a baby. He knows how to make our children laugh until they can hardly breathe.

When Owen had nightmares about a dog from a movie, Adam invented an entire police department staffed by cats and narrated their patrol outside his bedroom for three nights straight.

Then he went to Phoenix, and I spent the next month being asked why I couldn’t do the voices properly.

“Is Daddy really coming?” Lucy asks from the back seat.

“He’s driving here now.”

“Because I can carry the candy bags if you have Benji.”

I glance at her in the mirror. She is arranging the black tulle over her knees with careful, irritated fingers.

“You don’t have to worry about that.”

“I’m just saying I can.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

Little Acorns occupies a converted house beside a church parking lot.

Usually the windows are covered with finger paintings.

Tonight there are paper bats, and someone has put a smiling skeleton in the director’s chair.

The parade is a short circuit around the lot, followed by cider and cookies inside.

Families can stay until six. For reasons nobody has successfully explained to me, this requires almost as much preparation as an interstate move.

Kendra meets us at the gate with cat ears crooked in her hair.

“Benji! Look at you.”

He leans toward her, pleased to see someone who hasn’t spent the afternoon preventing him from eating felt. She takes him while I free Lucy’s wing from the stroller handle.

“Adam’s coming to collect him after the parade,” I say. “I’m taking these two over to Linden.”

“That’s fine. Will he want the carrier?”

“Yes. I’ll leave it by the cubbies.”

Carmen, the other infant teacher, is settling babies into a low parade wagon. Three of them wear the same pumpkin costume as Benji. A fourth has an orange sweatshirt with a black cat face on the front. One is asleep with his mouth open and another is chewing a fabric leaf.

“They’re taking over,” Kendra says.

“The pumpkins?”

“Every year. Last year we had six.”

“I know, not very inventive but Costco had them…”

I trail off, feeling unoriginal all of a sudden. She laughs and waves her hand, “I get it, I get it, you just grab what you can find sometimes. You’re a busy woman, don’t be too hard on yourself.”

I appreciate the sentiment, but still can’t quell the creeping guilt that rises inside my stomach. I always feel like I should be doing more for my children, maybe if I had a husband who stayed home with us, I could have a fighting chance.

I kiss Benji’s cheek before Kendra settles him beside a little girl dressed as a bee. His hood slips crookedly and leaves one ear exposed. He immediately finds the strap and tastes it.

“Benji’s on the second wagon,” I tell Lucy, who is holding up my phone to take a picture.

“I know which one he is, he’s my brother.”

“I’m just trying to help.”

“You’re in the picture.”

I move out of the way.

The children make two circuits while parents crouch and wave and call names in increasingly ridiculous voices. Benji sees me on the second pass and kicks both feet. I take a photograph of him laughing, then another of Owen leaning over the wagon to explain something important about skeletons.

At five-sixteen Adam calls.

“I’m outside. Which gate?”

“The side one. Can you see the scarecrow?”

“The man or the decoration?”

Despite myself, I smile. “The decoration. Please don’t say that to Mr. Feldman.”

“That man’s coat has been asking for it for years.”

A moment later he comes through the gate, tall and slightly rumpled in the navy coat I bought him last Christmas.

His suitcase is still visible through the back window of his car.

He has loosened his tie, and when he sees us his face changes so completely that I remember, for a second, the thermostat in the apartment hall.

Owen launches himself at his legs. Lucy pretends she won’t, then does.

Adam catches them both. “Good grief. A fairy and a crash survivor!”

“I’m a skeleton.”

“Who replaced my son with all these bones?”

Owen laughs into his coat. Adam looks up at me over their heads and mouths hello.

I want to go to him. I have Benji’s bag over one shoulder and Lucy’s candy pillowcase caught around my wrist, and I stay where I am while he kisses the top of Owen’s head.

“Benji’s inside now,” I say. “Kendra took the infants in because it got cold. Carrier by the cubbies, bag here. Bottle’s in the fridge at home.”

“I got your message.” He reaches for the bag. “Go. I’ll take him home. You promised them the good houses with the full size chocolate bars.”

“I know, and if we don’t hurry they might have to pass out the cheap fun size, then what will we steal from their bags later?”

We laugh and the kids both make an irritated squealing sound.

“Oh, one more thing, Kendra needs you to sign him out before you go so she can keep track of the pumpkins.”

“Nat. I can collect my son.”

He says it gently, smiling, and kisses my cheek. His mouth is warm. I can smell coffee on his breath and the soap he has used for as long as I’ve known him.

“I know,” I say. I’m just not used to letting somebody else handle it, is what I don’t say. And it’s nice, having him here to take a small part of the work from me.

A phone vibrates in his coat. He checks the screen, frowns briefly, and silences it.

“Work?”

“Nothing that can’t wait.”

He squeezes my hand before going inside. I watch through the open doorway long enough to see him greet Kendra, then Owen pulls at my sleeve because the full size candy bars operate on a limited schedule.

We leave.

For twenty minutes it is almost exactly the evening I imagined.

The porches on Linden glow with orange lights.

Dry leaves catch against our ankles. Owen forgets to say thank you at one house and shouts it from halfway down the path when I remind him.

Lucy takes her little brother’s hand to cross the street without being asked.

I send Adam a photograph of them beneath an enormous inflatable spider.

He replies with a heart and a picture of the back of an orange hood against his shoulder.

Home. Sleepy pumpkin.

At the next house, Owen catches his foot on a raised paving stone.

He falls hard enough that the sound reaches me before the cry does.

I am beside him instantly, lifting his chin, checking his teeth while he sobs into my sleeve.

Both palms are scraped. The knee of the beloved costume has a hole in it.

“The candy’s fine,” Lucy says anxiously. She is already gathering the spilled pieces. “Owen, look. I got all of it.”

But Owen wants to go home. He wants his pajamas and the dinosaur bandages, and nothing I say about the next street changes his mind.

In the car I call Adam. It rings out. I send a message saying we’re coming back early, then pass Owen a tissue at a red light and tell Lucy there is enough candy in their bags to last until college.

“That isn’t an actual measurement,” she says.

“It’s the one I’m using,” I reply and smile.

We pull into our driveway shortly after six. Adam’s car is there, the kitchen lights are on, and for a moment I’m grateful so intensely it makes my eyes sting. Somebody else can find the bandages. Somebody else can warm dinner while I hold Owen.

Adam meets us in the hall, his phone in one hand.

“What happened?”

“He fell. Can you do his hands? I want to check Benji.”

“He’s asleep. Had some of his bottle and went right out.” Adam puts the phone on the console and reaches for Owen. “Come on, bones. Show me the damage.”

I hear him offering to amputate, then Owen laughing wetly as they head toward the bathroom. Lucy goes to spread the candy on the kitchen table. I leave my coat over the banister and go upstairs.

The nursery door is half open. I push it wider, careful of the noisy hinge, and look toward the crib beneath the window.

The baby is lying on his back in Benji’s gray sleep sack. His cheek presses into the mattress, his mouth slightly open. For a second I think the light is making him look strange.

Then I move closer.

I know before I reach the crib.

“Adam,” I call.

Downstairs, Owen is still laughing.

And this baby?

Is not ours.