Meredith

MEREDITH

11 YEARS BEFORE

March

Dawn comes quickly. The morning after a birth is never easy. I wake to Josh leaning over me, kissing me before he leaves.

“What time is it?” I ask, bleary-eyed. I try to shade my eyes from the morning sun that streams in through the break in the curtains.

“Six,” he says. “There’s coffee on the table beside you. What time did you get home?”

“Around four.”

When I got home, it took me a while to fall asleep. I was scared, wondering if the same person who texted me had also followed me home. I thought about waking Josh and telling him what happened. But I didn’t want to worry him unnecessarily. Josh already worries. He’s said it before, how he doesn’t like me driving home alone in the middle of the night after a birth. Many, if not all, of the hospitals I visit have sketchy parking garages. Some of the hospitals are in the city, in rougher neighborhoods that I have to walk through to get to my car. There aren’t many people on the street after nightfall. I’ve always been dismissive of his concerns. If anything, I’ve agreed to the pepper spray, to downloading some app on my phone that tracks my whereabouts all of the time. Josh feels better because of it. This way, he said—when he convinced me to download the app and accept his friend invite—if you go missing, I can find you. He said it in jest and we both laughed at the time. But now it’s not funny.

It works both ways. I can keep tabs on Josh, too, though I never have.

Josh has suggested before that I shut down my private doula practice and teach yoga full-time. He likes that yoga classes are held during business hours. That the hours are predicable. That the clientele is primarily female. I don’t tell Josh about what happened last night because he’d want to reopen this discussion. That’s not an argument I want to have. I love the practice of yoga. But teaching yoga can be repetitive, mundane. I couldn’t do that for the rest of my life. I love what I do. I love the miracle of birth.

“What’d they have?” Josh asks, and I tell him a boy.

“Zeppelin,” I say.

He pulls a face. “As in the blimp?” he asks.

I laugh. “As in the band,” I say, not sure it makes it any better.

“Do you want me to wake the kids?” Josh asks, but there’s no need because I hear them down the hall, their feet hobbling toward our room. They appear in the doorway, all bedhead and out of joint. Delilah clutches her doll, Leo his beloved blue blankie. He never goes anywhere without that thing. He hangs on Delilah’s arm, and already, at six in the morning, she’s whining at him to stop touching her. Leo deifies Delilah. He can’t get enough of her. All he wants is to be with her, in any capacity. He’ll play hours of school, of house. Delilah, on the other hand, wishes he was a girl, a big sister preferably.

“Come on, guys,” Josh says as he stands before the floor mirror, tying a half-Windsor knot into his houndstooth tie. Josh always wears a tie to work. He’s always well groomed. He wants to look good for his clients because looking good fosters confidence and respect. I get that. I stare at his reflection in the mirror. My husband is incredibly handsome. How did I get so lucky? I often wonder.

The kids jump into bed with me. Before Josh leaves, he tells them to be good for Mommy. Delilah finds the remote and turns the TV on. Together we sit quietly in bed watching Bubble Guppies. Delilah lays her head on my lap and Leo snuggles in closely beside me. I wrap my arm around him, wishing we could stay like this all day. Ever since Delilah started kindergarten, our days go by exceptionally fast. I miss the long, lazy days we used to have, when they were younger. But before nine o’clock comes, Delilah will be in school, Leo at the sitter’s and me at work.

I reach for the coffee Josh has left me and take a sip. An hour of sleep is never enough. The exhaustion wears me down, makes me feel physically ill.

My phone is on the table beside me, volume turned up because it has to be. I never have the luxury of powering it down at night, because a client might need me. I reach for it in the hopes that I somehow misunderstood the text messages from yesterday. I take a look, ever hopeful, yet there they are, just the same as they were last night, instantly evoking fear.

I hope you rot in hell, Meredith.