Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 13: Now

Thomas makes a small choking noise and I'm startled back to the present. To my relief, he's only regurgitated a thin trickle of formula, which pools in the corner of his mouth.

Was that a burst of maternal instinct I just felt? It must have been.

There's no risk of him being mauled by a wild animal, or whatever biological fear lurched me back to his crib side upon hearing him in distress. But my gut reaction is, apparently, to protect him, and that's more than I've come to expect from myself lately.

Thomas's eyelids flutter. He lets out an audible sigh, about to give in to sleep. While I've been standing here, fantasizing about a time before he existed, the room has grown dark around us. Since Thomas's arrival, time doesn't stand still, exactly, but it doesn't pass in a way that makes sense to me anymore so I've stopped bothering to try to keep track of it.

I scan the parlor for something to wipe the spit-up from the creases in the baby's neck. The parlor was the first room I focused on renovating after Owen and I got back from our honeymoon.

I remember the painstaking care with which I sanded and refinished the old oak floors, eventually deciding to cover the less-than-beautiful spots with a Turkish kilim carpet in rich, earthy hues.

The bottoms of my bare feet press against the same woven carpet now. It's beginning to bunch up underneath the new rocking chair, not far from where I'm standing beside Thomas's crib. Every time one of us sits in the new rocking chair with Thomas, its runners tug the carpet's woven surface in either direction.

I glare at the rocking chair. The deep, pensive red stain on its wooden surface clashes with the exposed brick of the fireplace across from it.

In fact, that rocking chair clashes with everything else in the entire room and I wish it weren't here.

Back when the davenport was in front of the fireplace, the carpet was safe. But now, with the rocking chair in the middle of the room and the davenport shoved against the far wall, the parlor's balance has been disturbed.

It feels wrong, somehow, in here. Off-kilter.

I have the sudden urge to tug the carpet back into place. But to do that, I'd have to shove the crib, the rocking chair, and the old maple secretary out of the way and I'm exhausted just imagining the physical effort that will take.

I'll ask Owen to help me later.

The sound of people talking in the kitchen leaks through the fireplace. I can make out the voices of Owen, Liza, and Marcus, in the stumbling rhythm of an awkward conversation.

Owen must have invited our neighbors to sit down and socialize. They're probably wondering where I am and what the hell I'm doing.

The formula that Thomas regurgitated a moment ago has now begun to run down onto his onesie.

My gaze lands back on the new rocking chair, where Owen has discarded a muslin burp cloth adorned with frolicking elephant babies. Alongside the little elephants, their mothers raise triumphant trunks. Upon closer inspection, I find that the elephant babies and their mothers are already soaked in one kind of fluid or another.

Well, I'll just have to stop by the bathroom to wash up before joining Owen and our visitors in the kitchen. I reach down into the crib to collect the grey goop from the side of Thomas's face using the hollow of my right hand.

As soon as I touch him, he screams. His entire little body stretches and extends away from itself as if someone cruel has dipped him in ice water.

I jerk away so quickly that my hand collides with the railing of the crib.