Lost Signals (49 page)

“Well, there you go.”

“What
 
? The static
 
?”

“Okay, we’ll blame this on a serious lack of sleep, but never mind the static, you just explained the whole monitor thing to yourself. Brianna cries all the time, right
 
?”

“Pretty much.”

“So instead of a precious newborn to cuddle, you have a little crymonster. I mean, it can’t be easy to cuddle with her when she’s crying.”

“No, but . . .”

“So, maybe Tess is transferring that wish to the monitor.”

“That has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Really
 
? It makes perfect sense to me. I bet once the colic is gone, Tess’ll be fine. I bet you both will, or, at the very least, you’ll manage to get more sleep. Let her carry the damn thing if it makes her feel better.”

“Yeah, yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s a ridiculous thing to even worry about.”

“I agree, it is. But you’re a first time parent. Everything is something to worry about.”

***

The pediatrician, a middle-aged woman with a kind face, frowns as she measures Brianna and it deepens after she puts the baby on the scale. “She’s eating well
 
?”

“Yes, very much so,” Tess says.

The doctor nods and re-measures Brianna’s head. “Yes, yes, we can hear you, little one. Just a few minutes longer.” She bends close to the baby’s face and shines a light in her eyes.

Jackson’s gut clenches, but when the doctor finishes, the frown is gone. “Okay, she’s a little smaller than I’d like, but she’s healthy,” she adds. “Let’s try supplementing her daily feedings with eight ounces of formula. Four sometime in the morning, and four again at night.”

“Okay,” Jackson says.

Tess is chewing her lower lip.

“Not to worry, Mom,” the doctor says. “You’re not doing anything wrong and I’m not overly concerned. She might just be a slow grower, but we’ll see what happens with the formula. And you—” she turns back to Brianna “—I’ll see you back in a month. Maybe we’ll get lucky and your colic will be gone. That will make everyone happier, won’t it
 
?”

***

He wakes up in the middle of the night alone again. This time, the monitor is gone too. He tiptoes down the hall and sees Tess standing beside the crib, her head bowed, rocking slowly from side to side even though Brianna’s not in her arms. She’s whispering, but whatever she’s saying, it’s too low for him to hear, and he creeps back into their room before she notices him there.

***

On Saturday afternoon, with Brianna’s cries reaching every corner of the house, Jackson takes Tess gently by the shoulders. “Why don’t you go out for a little while
 
? Go to the coffee shop or the bookstore. Just get out of the house and give yourself a break
 
? You just fed her so she’ll be okay for a while, and if she isn’t I’ll just give her some formula.”

Her face shifts with indecision, but finally, she says, “I haven’t been to the bookstore in ages.”

“I know you haven’t.”

“If you’re sure
 
?”

“I’m positive.”

“Okay, maybe I will. It’ll be nice to get out of the house and be a grownup for a change instead of just a mom.”

He watches as she gathers her keys and purse, saying nothing as she slips the monitor into the latter, but after she goes into the powder room, he pulls the monitor out and rearranges things so hopefully its absence won’t be immediately noticeable. Her face wreathed in relief, she heads out the door, and once the car is out of sight, he sinks down on the sofa.

The monitor is about the size of a walkie-talkie. Plastic, with two switches on top. One to turn it off and on, the other to adjust the volume. He exhales through his nose. His hands are shaking and he doesn’t know why. A hunk of plastic is nothing to be afraid of, but still, unease settles into his chest as he turns it off. The house falls silent. Instantly. As though Brianna’s cries were severed with a knife.

He turns it back on. There’s the too-long crackle of static before Brianna begins to cry again, but it doesn’t sound like a fresh cry. It sounds as though she paused mid-cry to take a breath and the monitor picked it up right in the middle. If that were the case, he still should’ve heard her
 
; the door to the nursery room is open.

He flips the switch again. Silence. Is it possible something in the monitor itself is making her cry
 
? There are people who can feel electric wires hum in the amalgam fillings of their teeth
 
; maybe it’s using a frequency that hurts her ears. He puts his ear near the monitor and turns it back on. Listens to the hiss of static and hears something else faintly in the background, something he can’t define, can’t explain, but then Brianna cries and the static is gone. His arms go all over goosebumps.

He turns the monitor off again and takes the steps two at a time. Something’s not right. That cry, that cut-off cry. He’s heard it before. And what he heard behind the static . . . He walks into Brianna’s room and his mouth goes dry. Her crib is empty.

***

Tess comes home with a bag full of new books. Jackson has Brianna in his arms and the monitor, with the volume turned down, in the middle of the coffee table.

“How long have you known
 
?”

The bag drops from her hands. Her mouth works.

“But the more important question is, how many times have you done it
 
?” He presses a kiss to Brianna’s forehead and places her gently on the sofa. Stares at Tess while he closes the distance between them with long, lazy steps. He curls his hands into fists, but what he really wants to do is grab her by the shoulders and shake her. The only thing that keeps him from doing so is the fear that if he starts, he won’t stop. Won’t
want
to stop.

She drops her gaze. “I only did it a few times, I swear,” she says in a rush. “You have no idea what it’s like to be with her all day, every day. You have no idea how awful I felt that I couldn’t make her feel better. So I, I—”

“You shut her off. You sent her away.”

Tess wrings her hands. “Jackson, I swear, I didn’t mean to—”

“How could you, Tess
 
? How the hell could you do that to our daughter
 
? You have no idea what it’s doing to her, let alone where she goes when she’s not here. Maybe this is why she’s crying all the time. Maybe she’s terrified we’ll send her back. Did you even think about that
 
? Did you even fucking think
 
?”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t think. You get to go to the office all day so you don’t hear it. I can’t think, I can’t sleep, I can’t read, I can’t even take her for a goddamn walk
 
!”

Brianna’s wails grow even louder.

“And she’s fine. She isn’t hurt. She comes back perfectly fine.”

“She’s fine
 
? Do you remember what the doctor said about her being too small
 
? And her eyes
 
? Do they really look fine to you
 
? Because let me tell you, they don’t. They look scared. Wherever she goes, wherever it sends her, it isn’t a nice place. And tell me this, were you ever going to tell me, or was it your little secret
 
?”

“I don’t know, okay
 
? I don’t know.”

“Well, no matter. It’s over now. I’m going to put an end to it.”

With Brianna back in his arms, he races up the stairs, Tess at his heels. “What are you going to do, Jackson
 
? What are you going to do
 
? Please, don’t do anything. Please. We can figure something out, okay
 
? We can . . .”

He shuts the door to Brianna’s room in her face and locks it.

“Jackson, no, please. Let me in. Let’s talk about this some more. Please.”

The monitor’s child unit is plugged in the outlet behind Brianna’s bureau. Ignoring Tess, Jackson pulls the furniture away from the wall. “Don’t worry, babygirl, everything is going to be okay now.” With one quick move, he pulls the cord free, and Brianna stops crying. Tess falls silent as well.

He rubs Brianna’s back. “See
 
? You’re all better now. Daddy fixed it.”

He unlocks the door . . . steps out into the hallway. Tess’s face is streaked with tears and her mouth opens, but all that emerges is a steady hiss of static.

For sale
 
: baby shoes. Never worn.

—Author Unknown

Week 21, Third Trimester

Carrie came home
to a house with a heartbeat, walls throbbing and windows rattling.

She stopped in the entryway, counting Mississippis, the floor vibrating beneath her feet. The
th-thump-th-thump
reverberated down the stairwell, opening up into the entryway and the living room beyond.

At twenty-one Mississippis, the heartbeat transformed into a baffled
sshhhh-pop
, and then resumed.

She hung her keys on the hook beside the door and dropped her shoulder-bag, heavy with material for an article. The recording upstairs didn’t stop.

She walked into the kitchen, not trying to soften her footsteps across the hardwood. She flicked on the overhead kitchen light and searched loudly through the cabinets. In the refrigerator, a Tupperware container of meatloaf on the top shelf looked the least moldy. She pulled it out and slammed the door hard enough for it to open again.

Now
the recording upstairs paused. Carrie waited in the center of the kitchen, Tupperware in one hand, plate in the other.

She thought she heard the desk chair creak.

She waited some more.

When Danny didn’t call down, she fixed herself food she didn’t want and sat down at the kitchen table. Mail was strewn across the surface. Not indicative that Danny had gone to work today, but at least he’d left the house.

She ate mechanically, riffling through the circulars, the bills. She didn’t look down the hall, where the kitchen light would hit the corners of the closest boxes marked BABY CLOTHES or BABY BEDDING in her spiky shorthand. A list of everything was already in the tax folder upstairs, also written in her shorthand. Danny had never gotten around to it.

At the twenty-first week, the fetus has eyebrows and nails.

When she finished, feeling more bloated than sated, she dropped the dishes into the sink, briefly ran the faucet, and dumped the meatloaf, container and all, into the garbage can beneath.

Another chair-creak upstairs, but no floor creaks. At the twenty-first week, the fetus is more active
 
; the movements you
thought
you felt during the previous month become apparent. You already know this, but the realization that something is alive inside you becomes more pronounced.

She started up the stairs. Guest bathroom at the top, door closed, hallway to the left. At the sixteenth week, the fetus’s bowels begin collecting meconium, a tarry kind of proto-poop. That had been Danny’s term for it. Hysterical at the time.

Door on the left was the guest bedroom-slash-office, painted a gender-neutral green during the twelfth week. A fetus’s gender doesn’t form until around the twenty-fourth week. Evelyn if it’d been a girl. Ethan if it’d been a boy.

Danny sat at the small desk, head buried in his crossed arms on the desktop, turned away from her, tincan headphones on his head. On the computer, Windows Media Player was up, playing the forty-five-second-long file. The pieces of the crib that Danny hadn’t taken out of the room yet leaned against the opposite wall. The single bed that had used to be in here was still in the basement.

At the twenty-first week, the fetus is a half-foot long, weighs nearly a pound.

The crib was for later, after the basinet.

Danny’s shoulders shook, minute twitches, and Carrie raised her hand, as if to touch him. But she stood in the doorway, almost ten feet away, and she wouldn’t enter this room. Not unless she absolutely had to.

She continued to the master bedroom.

Television on the dresser tuned to CNN and Anderson Cooper’s strangely symmetrical face, work clothes shoved in the hamper. The basinet was already gone, removed three weeks ago. She’d been the one to remove it.

She couldn’t avoid looking at herself in the shower, even when she had the water set to scalding and the bathroom fogged. The stretchmarks along her hips seemed even more pronounced then, like accusatory slashes on her body. She scrubbed these areas raw.

At least her nipples had finally lightened back to roughly their natural color. The vertical line on her lower belly had faded away.

Her hands pressed against it. Carrie had only felt movement once, early one morning during the sixteenth week. She’d rolled to wake Danny up, but it had stopped before she could touch her husband.

Her face grew momentarily hot. She took a deep breath and went back to scrubbing.

Much, much later, she was still awake, turned away and facing where the basinet would’ve been, when Danny finally shuffled through the dark. The mattress settled and shifted as Danny laid down. Before, he would rub the spot between her shoulder blades, a silent good night whenever he came to bed late and thought she was asleep.