Chapter 1 - The Trench of Day Seven
The silence that settled over the house on Monday morning at six o'clock was different from the silence of sleep. It was the sterile, terrifying quiet of an empty runway. Evan had kissed the crown of my head, his eyes bruised with the exhaustion of seven straight nights of fragmented sleep, and pressed a fresh travel mug of decaf into my trembling hands.
"I can call in sick," he whispered against my hair, his hands hovering over the tender swell of my belly where thirty-two staples had been pulled just seventy-two hours prior. "Screw the probation period. I’ll take the write-up."
"No," I lied, my voice sounding paper-thin against the hum of the refrigerator. "The rent doesn't pay itself, and we already burned your PTO. Go. We have a system now."
We did not have a system. We had two cribs, two infants whose wake windows overlapped by precisely five minutes, and an incision that burned like a line of live embers whenever I engaged my abdominal wall.
By nine in the morning, the system collapsed. Ava woke with colicky screaming that turned her face the color of a pomegranate; as I hauled my torso upright using the edge of the nightstand, my surgical binder dug viciously into my hips. I reached Grace just as she vomited breast milk across her swaddle.
Standing between two screaming cribs, clutching my left flank with my palm to keep from collapsing, I felt the phantom weight of my mother’s promise. *Six weeks.* That was what she had whispered into the sterile humidity of the operating room. *Let me be your mother for once.*
Instead, my phone lit up on the changing pad. A message from Carol:
*Megan’s sectional wouldn’t fit up the stairwell! Had to pay fifty dollars extra to have the delivery guys hoist it over the balcony. My feet are killing me! How are my precious angels? Send pictures of their little toes!*
I stared at the screen through a blur of burning tears. Ava’s cries rose in pitch, sharp and frantic. Beside her, Grace began to choke on her own spit-up. With no hands left to type, no mother to take the second baby, and no breath left to bargain with God, I let the phone slide between the cushions of the glider.
I picked up Ava with my right arm, supporting her neck against my collarbone, and used my left forearm to cradle Grace against my aching ribcage. The strain on my lower abdomen was instant—a searing, tearing sensation that made my knees buckle. I sank onto the floor carpet, leaning back against the baseboard, holding both girls against my chest while my suture line wept fluid against the cotton of my nightgown.
"I'm here," I whispered into the chorus of their screams, weeping so hard my chest shook. "I've got you. Mama's here."
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I did not text Carol back. I did not send pictures of their toes. For the first time in thirty-one years, I let her message sit unanswered in the cold, digital ether.
***
