Renata ♥ Mark: Chapter 6 “Latching"

The real estate agent who sold Mom’s house – Desi, a stolid, icy woman who answered the phone with a firm “Yes?” – did so with relative speed. When Mark and I met with her for the first time, I was already pregnant (although none of us knew at that time), and she had the buyers ready to move in by the time I was exactly thirty weeks along. 

“Just get rid of everything in there,” Desi instructed me on a short phone call. “Clear out the trash. The buyers have agreed to get it professionally cleaned after.” 

That ‘trash’ being the majority of Mom’s belongings, Paige and I agreed to spend a weekend with a rented dumpster and an empty room separating the ‘sells’ from the ‘throws’. I couldn’t lift anything heavier than my purse and Mark was in Toledo for work (I didn’t ask about Cody – he and Paige had recently had an earthshaking fight about Maddox being on the waitlist for Montessori kindergarten Cody had seen on Instagram). This meant that Paige did most of the work while I pointed and directed. Maddox, running amongst us somewhere in the detritus, would repeatedly pick up flotsam from my mother’s life off the floor and asked Paige what it was. “Mommy, what’s this?” 

“A honey-scoop, baby,” she’d say, more patient than I’d seen her. “Put it back.” And he did. I put my own indulgence of Maddox down to hormones, if I'm honest — that stretch of my nephew’s toddlerhood might have been my favorite. Maddox was, as always, easy to adore, and his emerging personality and expanding vocabulary amazed me more. He refused haircuts, screeching and hitting every barber they tried, shaking himself free of the black smock, until his curls had turned into a silly little afro. I often found myself wondering why Paige and Cody weren’t in a constant state of awe and pride at their child’s charmingness, all while I lowered myself to the ground, despite my state, to play with him in building a fort for his soldiers.

By early evening we'd cleared most of the ground floor, and Paige declared us to be done for the day, and for a moment we were kids again and some small part of me wanted to fight the attempts by my little sister to unilaterally decide anything. But she was right; we’d carried the last of it out to the dumpster, where the light was going soft and the sky was illuminated in Nordic colors. Paige produced a years-old beer from the fridge in Mom’s garage, first as a joke, then, soon after, she began reading the ‘use-by’ date with real intent.

“It only expired a few weeks ago,” she said, holding the bottom of the bottle close to her face.

“Drink it. Beer doesn’t go bad.”

She popped the lid. “I don’t think you’re right about that.” But she drank from it anyway, wrangling Maddox toward us. “It tastes okay,” she said, wiping dirt from the boy’s hands. “Have some water?”

“Yeah, I’ll get Fiji for the road.”

I shot Paige furtive looks while she drank, feeling a hunger, giving her the clinical attention you give something you've been denied. It had been thirty weeks, and most of it – the impatience, the sleeplessness – I could lie to Mark about and say it was caused by the pregnancy. But the pregnancy’s effects were felt in a different place, somewhere in my psyche that those hormones touched, telling my higher brain this was a part of the life cycle. The thirst I felt, however, was something different, an unnatural feeling, that of a virus attaching itself to a healthy cell.

Maddox wandered toward the fence at the tree-line, dragging a stick through the grass, and it took me a moment to place why him playing in that particular corner of the yard bothered me. I realized when I saw the shadow of a tree branch, caused by the last bursts of daylight, cross his face: it was where Mom had done it. There was no reason to mark the spot on her own property, like those roadside shrines after a car wreck. Grass grows over anything eventually, and now my nephew was kneeling in it, absorbed, digging at something only he could see, and neither Paige nor I said a word, and I understood, watching her finish that beer twelve feet from where our mother had died, that she too was realizing the same thing.

It was that specific moment, Paige and I watching Maddox play in the shadow of the place where his grandmother had snapped her own neck (efficient as she was, she attached the noose at both ends first and then climbed to the branch via a step-ladder; there was something odd about seeing her sway so naturally right next to a cheap Lowe’s ladder standing by her loyally), that I knew I’d detour on my way home. 

Three weeks later we were at the OB's for a growth scan, thirty-three weeks by then, and everything about the baby measured correctly down to the decimal, and Mark cried a little at the sound of the heartbeat the way he cried at near everything then, openly and without any apparent cost to himself. The OB was an older man, our usual midwife Maeve was in Hawaii, so he went through a laundry list of lifestyle questions Maeve would normally skip. No, I hadn’t been horse riding or trampolining, nor did I plan to. No, I wasn’t smoking, and I didn’t need a prescription for a nicotine patch. Mark interjected, his face tightening in worry. “Is there something wrong?”

“Not at all! Everyone’s healthy as a horse. Just checking in.” He turned to me. “Have you been drinking?”

I shook my head no. I felt like my lie was something that would set off an alarm, a real one, like the ones you hear in a hospital when someone tries to steal a baby from the nursing unit. I’d stopped at Gloria’s Divorce, a terrible dive bar partway between Mom’s old house and home three weeks ago, the night after we first started packing. It smelled like peanuts and ballsweat, I recall, and the only patrons were men in high-vis shirts who looked at my body for one reason or another. The bartender, too, looked at me for a second too long when I ordered, at my stomach and then at my face, and poured it anyway, and I drank it looking back at him the whole time, daring him to say something, though I’ve no idea how I would have handled a confrontation I couldn’t hold over email. I had two more after that. I remember driving home with the false clarity drunk people mistake for competence, and very little else until Mark's key in the door the next morning, and me lying groggily on the couch, having apparently discarded my clothes beside me the night before, and neither of us saying anything about it. 

Owen was born seven weeks later, small but measurably fine, the numbers on a chart I read later all entirely within the norm. The first time they set him against me and he found the latch on his own, something he did on pure impulse, a wonder of nature that still surprises me. I watched Owen’s jaw working and Mark staring at us both in awe and I thought, with a disappointed firmness in my decision, that Owen would be bottle-fed from day one.