Chapter 11

11

The night nurse had the softest hands I had ever felt. She barely fit in the nursery chair. She smelled like citrus fruit and hair spray and she was unflappable.

I was tired.

Every new mom goes through this, Blythe. I know it’s hard. I remember.

But your mother must have been worried because she hired the woman without asking us and paid her fee. We were three weeks in and the baby wouldn’t sleep longer than an hour and a half at a time. All she wanted to do was feed and cry. My nipples looked like raw ground beef.

You barely saw the night nurse—you were asleep most nights before she came. She brought me the baby every three hours, not a minute sooner or later. I would hear her heavy feet coming toward the door and startle from the glorious depths of sleep and fish my breast out of my nightshirt with my eyes barely open. I would hand her back when we were done. She would take her to the nursery and burp her, change her, rock her, and put her to sleep in the bassinet. We rarely exchanged a word but I loved her. I needed her. She came for four weeks until your mother said to me on the phone in her firm but delicate voice, Honey. It’s been a month. You need to do it on your own now.

On the last shift she was with us, the night nurse brought the baby into our room for the early morning feed before she went home. But she didn’t step out of the room like she normally did. You were snoring beside me.

“She’s a sweet baby, isn’t she,” I had whispered to the woman. I shifted to relieve my stubborn hemorrhoids and then fiddled with my nipple in her mouth. I really didn’t know if she was, but it felt like something a new mother would say of the warm, pink flesh she’d pushed into the world.

She stood over us and looked down at Violet and my huge brown nipple as she tried to latch again. We still hadn’t got the hang of it yet and milk sprayed the baby’s face. She didn’t answer me.

“Do you think she’s a good baby?” Maybe she hadn’t heard me. I winced. The baby was on. The nurse stepped back and watched us as though she were trying to figure something out.

“Sometimes she opens her eyes so wide and looks right at me, like . . .” She let her words trail off and then she shook her head and sucked through her teeth.

“She’s curious. She’s alert,” I clarified with words I’d heard other mothers use. I wasn’t sure what she was implying.

She stood still and silent while I fed. She nodded sometime later. Too much time later. I wondered if there was something else she wanted to say. When the baby was done, she lifted Violet quietly and patted me on the shoulder. She left to put her down and I never saw her again.

You were irritated when it took weeks for the smell of the woman’s hair spray to leave the nursery, but sometimes I went in there just for the scent of her.