Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Natalie
At six in the morning, I find Adam sitting at the kitchen table with a mug between his hands. He is still wearing his clothes from yesterday. His tie lies over the back of the chair, and there is a dark patch on his shirt where Owen cried against him.
I have slept for perhaps forty minutes. Every time Benji made a sound, I woke. Every time he didn’t, I went to check.
“Coffee’s fresh,” Adam says.
I take a mug from the cupboard and pour it. He watches me add milk, then looks away before I can ask what he wants.
“The officer called back last night. After you went upstairs.”
I turn toward him.
“He wanted my account directly. I gave him the times from my phone.” He swallows. “The director wants us to come in this afternoon. Danielle and her husband will be there.”
“I’m not taking Benji back there.”
“I know. Mom can come here for an hour.”
“Did you tell her?”
“Yes.”
The answer surprises me. Adam protects his mother’s opinion of him with a care he would deny if I pointed it out. He calls her from airports. He sends her the school photographs I order. She tells me frequently how hard he works.
“What did she say?”
“She asked if the babies were all right. Then she said she’d be here.”
I sit at the far end of the table. Between us is Owen’s abandoned skeleton glove, laid palm-up beside a pumpkin sticker. I move it away from my cup.
“Tell me what happened.”
“You heard Kendra.”
“I heard what happened at the daycare. I want to know what you did.”
He rubs his thumb over a chip in the mug. “I went inside. Kendra said Benji needed changing and she’d bring him out. I put the bag beside the carrier. Then Lambert called again.”
“You said it could wait.”
“I know.”
“What couldn’t wait?”
“The Tulsa proposal. There was an error in the numbers they were sending to the client.”
“Was somebody going to die?”
“No.” He accepts that without looking up. “I took the call in the hall. When I came back, there were babies on the mat. One was beside our carrier. Same costume. Carmen asked if I was signing out Benjamin Bennett, and I said yes.”
“Did she hand him to you?”
“No.”
“So you picked him up.”
“Yes.”
“And you were still on the phone.”
“Yes.”
I close my eyes. I had been picturing a teacher handing him the wrong child, an error he accepted without looking. This is worse. He had reached down and chosen a baby that wasn’t ours, and he didn’t even know it.
“I put the phone away in the car,” he says. “Then Lambert called when I got home. I had an earbud in while I gave him the bottle. The calls from the daycare were silenced because I still had the work focus on. I didn’t see them until you told me to get the phone.”
“You fed him while you were working.”
“I thought I could do both.”
The coffee is too hot, but I drink it anyway. My hands need something to do.
“Did you even take a picture of his face?”
“No.”
“You sent me the back of his head.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
He presses his lips together. In the silence I can hear the refrigerator running and the little scratching sound the bare branch makes against the window above the sink. I meant to cut it back weeks ago.
Adam leans forward. “Natalie, I’m sorry. I can’t make it sound better. I wasn’t paying attention, and I took the wrong child, and I scared you. I scared everybody. I will never do anything like that again.”
“What color are his eyes?”
He blinks. “Benji’s?”
“Yes.”
“Blue.” He answers quickly. “They’re blue.”
For a second I feel relief, and then I hate that I needed it. He knows the color of his son’s eyes. Of course he does. That doesn’t explain why he failed to look at them.
“What makes him laugh?”
“The noise. When you blow on his stomach.”
“What else?”
“Nat.”
“What else?”
He looks toward the stairs as if an answer might come down them. “I don’t know what you’re asking me.”
“I’m asking what you know about him that you found out yourself.”
His face changes. I wait, and he can’t give me anything.
“Which bottle does he refuse? How do you get him to take his medicine when he needs it? What’s the song that settles him in the car?”
“I can learn those things.”
“He’s been here for six months.”
“I know.” He catches himself too late. “I’m trying to say I’ll do better.”
“And who teaches you? Who makes the list? Who stands beside you while you learn?”
He puts the mug down hard enough to spill coffee. “I haven’t been sitting around doing nothing.”
“I didn’t say you had.”
“No, but that’s what this sounds like. You make it sound as if I disappear for a few days to enjoy myself. I’m up at five, I’m in meetings all day, I eat in hotel rooms. I do it so we can live here. So you don’t have to worry every time the car needs something fixed or the kids have school fees.”
“I worry about plenty.”
“Not that. You’re standing in a kitchen I paid for telling me I don’t care about my family.”
He stops as soon as he hears himself. I look at the table because I don’t want him to see what that sentence does to me.
“I didn’t mean...”
“Yes, you did.”
“Natalie.”
“Whose kitchen is it?”
“Ours.”
“You just said it was yours.”
“No. I said I paid for it. That’s different.”
“What did I pay?”
He looks miserable now, which makes me angrier. He has hurt me, and already I can feel the familiar impulse to help him explain that he isn’t a bad person.
I leave him to it.
“My job,” I say. “My sleep. The work I turn down because you might be away. The appointment I cancel because someone’s sick and your meeting can’t move. What do you think pays for you to get on a plane without wondering who’s collecting Owen?”
“I know you work hard.”
“Then don’t talk to me like I live here for free.”
He pulls the dishcloth toward him and wipes up the coffee, slowly and badly, leaving a crescent of it beneath the sugar bowl.
“You’re right,” he says. “That was a horrible thing to say.”
I stare at the crescent until he notices and lifts the bowl.
For years I have told people we are fine. Busy, but fine. Adam is away a lot, but he’s wonderful with the kids. I’m tired, but who isn’t? I have said it often enough that sometimes I believe it, particularly when he comes home and the house becomes louder and funnier for a few hours.
Then somebody needs a clean uniform, or wakes with a fever, or can’t find the rabbit they sleep with, and everyone calls for me.
“When Owen broke his arm,” I say, “you told me you were coming home.”
“I tried to change the flight.”
“I know you tried. I’m talking about what happened after.
You couldn’t get here, and I understood.
Then you asked if we were okay, and I said yes because his arm was in a cast and there was nothing else to do.
” I put my mug down. “I wasn’t okay. I drove home shaking.
Lucy had been so scared she threw up in the waiting room, and I didn’t have spare clothes for her. I washed her shirt in the sink.”
He looks at me. “You never told me that.”
“I called you from the bathroom.”
His face goes still.
“You said you couldn’t hear me. You were going into dinner with the client. You asked if Owen was all right, and when I said yes, you said we’d talk later.”
“We did talk later.”
“About his arm.”
Adam stares down at his hands. The house creaks above us, and we both look toward the ceiling. No footsteps follow.
“Last night,” I say, “when Kendra told me she had him, I wanted you. For about half a second I wanted you to take the phone and tell me what to do, because I couldn’t think. Then I remembered why I was holding somebody else’s baby.”
He starts crying. He turns his head, but I can see it.
I don’t feel pleased. I feel tired and horribly exposed, as if I have taken off something I won’t know how to put back on.
“I need you to stay somewhere else.”
His head comes up. “For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you saying you want a divorce?”
“I’m saying I can’t do this conversation and then make you breakfast and find your charger and kiss you goodbye. I can’t go back to normal today.”
“I don’t want normal either.”
“But you don’t know what else you want yet.”
He opens his mouth, closes it, then looks toward the window. It is getting light. The branch scrapes the glass again.
“Can I still see them?”
“Yes. Here, for now. With me or your mother.”
He flinches but nods. “All right.”
“We’ll explain it together. We won’t tell them anything is their fault.”
“Of course not.”
“I need to say it out loud.”
“All right,” he says again.
He goes upstairs to pack while I start breakfast. The eggs stick because I forget to heat the pan properly. I scrape them into a bowl and make toast instead.
Owen comes down first, wearing pajamas under the skeleton top. He asks if Benji is still the right baby, and I crouch beside him before I answer.
“He is. He’s upstairs asleep.”
“Can I look?”
“Yes. Quietly.”
He goes back up. I press my hand over my mouth, then take it away when Lucy appears behind him.
Adam brings down an overnight bag. He puts it beside the front door, the same place he always puts luggage, and the children barely look at it.
We sit with them at the table. I explain that Dad will sleep somewhere else for a little while because we are upset and need time to work things out. Adam says he will still see them, that they can call him, that neither of them has caused any of this.
“Is it because of the baby?” Lucy asks.
“That’s part of it,” I say. “The rest is grown-up stuff.”
“Are you going to stop being married?”
“We haven’t decided that,” Adam says. His voice holds, though I can see what it costs. “We’re going to take some time.”
Owen spreads jam with the wrong side of his knife. “Will you be back for my thing?”
“What thing?”
“The school thing.”
Adam looks at me, and I don’t answer for him.
“The family reading afternoon,” Lucy supplies. “He gave you the paper.”
“I’ll find the paper,” Adam says. “Then I’ll talk to you about it.”
Owen accepts this and asks for more jam. Lucy goes quiet. When Adam kisses her goodbye, she holds him longer than usual, then lets go abruptly and takes her plate to the sink.
At the door he turns to me.
“I’ll be back for the meeting.”
“Your mother’s coming at one.”
“I’ll be here before that.”
I nod. He waits another second, perhaps for a touch, perhaps for permission to give me one. I keep my hands at my sides.
After he leaves, I hear the car sit in the driveway for a long time before the engine starts.
Lucy stays at the window until he turns out of the street. Then she asks whether she can take a picture of Benji to school.
“Of course. Why?”
“I want to show Maddie his costume.”
I find the photograph from the parade, the one with his ear sticking out beneath the hood. Lucy leans against me while I send it to the little printer in my office. We wait for the colors to emerge, and she takes it carefully by the edges.
“He was smiling,” she says.
“He had a good time.”
She nods and slips the photograph into her backpack.
I stand beside the printer after she leaves, looking at the papers covering my desk.
Beneath a school fundraiser form is a half-finished sample layout I made in September.
I move the form aside. The design isn’t bad.
I remember enjoying it before somebody needed me downstairs.