by LIZZIE THOMPSON
11:36 PM:
My best friend died when I was 6 months old. I don’t remember it, obviously. It was my Aunt Jill’s baby, who was 3 months younger than me. She and I were meant to be raised as best friends, sisters, almost. It was attributed to SIDS – sudden infant death syndrome – but I’ve seen pictures of what our cribs looked like back then, filled to the brim with stuffies and blankets, and I think it’s probably more likely she suffocated. I imagine people call a lot of explainable infant deaths SIDS, if only to remove the burden of guilt from themselves. You can’t point fingers if it’s sudden. Unexplainable. Dead babies are a heavy enough grief on their own, without adding in a whole layer of blame.
I’ve only met Aunt Jill a handful of times throughout my life. She’s not really my aunt, but rather my mom’s best friend who was bestowed the honorific of Aunt the way all young mothers call their friends “Aunt” to their children, as if the idea that blood is thicker than water is but a myth; as if when push came to shove, we wouldn’t all circle our wagons and clan up to protect our young. At the end of most days, I think biology probably wins out over friendship.
1:44 AM
Jill and my mom catch up by phone maybe once a year, exchange holiday cards. Once when I was about ten they went on a three day cruise, my mom coming back hungover and sunburned. I heard her, talking to my dad in a low voice in the kitchen the evening she got home. She was done feeling guilty, she needed a Tylenol, could he please find her heating pad?
I get it, the distance. Jill had twin boys a few years later, but if I were Jill I’m not sure I’d want to watch my best friend’s daughter grow up when my own never got the chance. When I was in high school, a girl died from cancer and her mom came to our graduation, stood in the back, watched as everyone besides her daughter graduated. It was fucked up, we all agreed later on the bus to the graduation party the school planned so none of us would die in a drunk driving accident on graduation night.
2:19 AM:
None of us died on graduation night, and now I scroll my phone and stare at images of people who used to know when I had my period by when I skipped gym class and who now could not tell you my daughter’s name. Our lives, reduced to tiny squares. Just a glimpse. We used to put it all out there – sixty photos from the same party. The volume was the value. Now withholding is the currency of clout. You’ll get what I show you, leave you wondering about the rest.
What I wonder is who among us will be grieving first. Which of the families on these perfectly filtered and edited posts will look different next year. Which one will be absent a husband in the Fourth of July photo, a simple caption of Freedom telling us everything without telling us anything at all.
3:07 AM:
Today was a good day, once I add it all up. I took the baby for a walk and only wondered four times if when the car driving toward me passed me would be the exact moment I descended suddenly into post-partum psychosis, pushed the stroller off the sidewalk, sending my precious new baby hurtling into the four thousand pounds of steel. This is an improvement from last week when I wouldn’t leave the house, convinced I would pass out while walking the baby, tipping her fully out of the bassinet attachment, sending her rolling into the street, hurtling toward four thousand pounds of steel.
I washed my hair today and took the remnants of the chipped nail polish off my toes. I only cried twice. The baby cried infinite times.
4:21 AM:
My nipples are cracked. How sanitary can it be for baby girl to be nursing blood-laced milk? I text my sister, who had a baby three years ago, and ask her if this is normal. She doesn’t respond. Because it’s 4AM and she’s asleep. Still.
7:30 AM
I don’t remember putting baby back in her basinet. I wake up cradling a pillow and my breath catches when I realize. This is it. I wonder if I’ll call it SIDS. I lift the pillow, vomit ready to rise as soon as I see what I’ve done. For when I see her, as grey as when she first came out, cord wrapped tightly. The seconds it took until we heard a wail stretching for decades.
Another wail. But not from a guttural place of loss and guilt as I realize I fell asleep on top of my baby after forgetting I was holding her, bringing her to bed with me, accidentally smothering her with a pillow. There is no baby underneath a pillow. Instead a wail from the bassinet. Where she is swaddled and on her back on a flat surface, exactly how I’m told all the good mothers do. Where she was asleep but is now awake, demanding more, more, more.
My husband pads in from the couch where he spent the night so he can take over this morning and I can get some sleep. Get some rest.
Sleep and rest are different, I want to tell him. He moves to take the baby from me when she has had her fill, and for a moment I am electric. I tense my arms, electric shock wiring buzzing from my forearms to my biceps and across my shoulders. No. She is mine. You cannot have her.
The moment passes. I hand her to him.
Take her. But then you must, you must bring her back.
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Lizzie Thompson received her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and her BA in English with a Concentration in Creative Writing from Barnard College. She lives in Los Angeles, CA with her husband and two children.
© Lizzie Thompson
Halfway Down the Stairs 