Chapter 35

35

Violet quietly watched my shape stretch and morph. He moved all day long, dragging his impossibly small heels across my belly and back again. I loved to lie on the couch with my shirt pulled up, reminding us all that he was here. That we would be a family of four.

“Is he doing it again?” you would call from the kitchen, finishing up the dishes.

“He’s at it again,” she’d yell back, and we’d laugh.

The baby had caused a shift in our relationship somewhere along the way, although I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what that shift was. We were kinder to each other, although there was also a new distance between us, one you seemed to fill with more work. I took that space to turn inward. To him. We were happily each other’s worlds, even as early as that. Mother and son.

When the technician rolled her wand over the mass of white static and said, You’ve got yourself a boy in there, I closed my eyes and I thanked God for the first time in my life. I kept the news to myself for two days—it took you that long to ask what had happened at my ultrasound appointment. This was uncharacteristic—you had cared enough during my first pregnancy to come to every one of them. We were, at that point, passing each other in the night. You had several big projects on the go, new clients with big money. I needed so little of you then. I had him.

Violet wanted to help me go through her old baby clothes. We sat together in the laundry room and folded the tiny sleepers as they came out of the dryer. She would lift each one to her nose as though she were remembering a time and place when she wore them. I let her dress her doll in a knitted sweater and she pretended to nurse him. I marveled at the unusual carefulness with which she touched everything, the softness of her voice.

“This is how you did it,” she said, gently bouncing the doll twice to the right and then twice to the left, and then back to the right again.

At first I didn’t know what she meant—I didn’t remember doing that with her. But I took the doll from her and stood up and mimicked how she’d just rocked the baby. The familiarity of the motion came back to me instantly. She was right. I laughed as I kept bouncing the doll back and forth, and she giggled, nodding her head.

“I told you!”

“You’re absolutely right.”

It seemed impossible that she would remember this, that it would stay with her all these years. She put her hands on either side of my huge belly and mimicked that same motion for the baby inside me, rocking with my belly in her little hands. Soon we were dancing, the three of us, to the rhythm of the spinning washing machine.