Fullepub 
Chapter 66
66
I wonder if you watched as her vagina, swollen and burning, opened up to release a new being, half of you, into the hands of a doctor who congratulated you on your son. A boy, for the second time. I wonder if your eyes filled with tears as they placed the slippery baby on her sweaty chest and saw him gape toward her nipple. I wonder if you held that woman’s shaking hand while they yanked thread through the skin of her perineum, pulled and tugged until the damage was dealt with. I wonder if you took her by the elbow and led her to the toilet in her room, where she cried in pain and hovered with shaking thighs, blood pouring from her, her insides heavy, her vulva pulsing, her body so weak after an experience so strong. Did you squirt warm water up into her bloody parts like the nurses taught you before? Did you get into that wide hospital bed with her, and the baby, and wonder how you’d ever loved a different woman? Did you put your phone on silent so she wouldn’t hear my texts as she was trying to get colostrum into the baby’s mouth? Did you argue to circumcise his penis, like you did with Sam? Did you take her home to bed the next day, in soft jersey cotton pajamas she’d bought just for the occasion? And was that bed you took her to the place where you made this baby, the place where you came inside her with such euphoria that you didn’t give a shit what happened afterward?
I couldn’t sleep for days after meeting her.
I couldn’t sleep until I went into the basement.
I brushed off the layer of dust on the storage container. Inside were Sam’s things. Onesies, blankets, footed pajamas, a few other little things he loved. Benny the Bunny. I carried the box upstairs to the foot of my bed and began my ritual. Night-light on. Organic lavender lotion on my hands, the kind I used to rub on his skin after his bath. The white noise machine was at the bottom of the box. Ocean waves. I placed it on the bedside table.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember every last thing of his inside. The soft mint-green one-piece from your mother. The pajamas that matched Violet’s. The muslin blanket with the hearts on it. The tiny red socks. The flannel blanket from the hospital. I could list them all, I could do it again right now, a game of memory. None of it had been washed. So much of him was in those fabrics.
This was an indulgence I’d allowed myself only a few times since Sam died. I saved it for when I needed it most.
I lifted each item slowly to my face and inhaled as deeply as I could until my nose stung, letting my mind soak up whatever it could find . . . banging pots on the kitchen floor while I made oatmeal, sucking soapy water from the wet facecloth in the bath, cuddling for stories, naked, happy, the risk of a diaper-free bum on our duvet. I craved these little silent movies of him. It didn’t matter to me that these memories were not exact, that most of them hadn’t happened precisely as they did in the scenes that played through my head—I just needed to see him, and then I could feel him with these things in my hands. If I focused just enough Sam could be right there next to me, and I could feel alive again.
When I finished caressing each of his things, I chose the pajamas he wore the most, thin in the knees from crawling after Violet, stained at the neck from blueberry jam. The light-knit blanket from his crib. And Benny. I used to be able to find him in that fur, distinctly, breathing him in to fill my brain like an anesthetic. But now Sam’s scent was nearly gone and Benny felt a bit damp and musty. I ran my thumb over the stained part of his tail that looked like nothing but old rust now.
I’d kept an unused diaper, too. I laid everything out on the bed, each article as it would have been: the diaper inside the pajamas, the blanket laid underneath, Benny tucked in near his neck. And then I picked him up and I cradled him in my arms, and I smelled him, and I kissed him. I turned off the night-light. I tucked in the corners of the blanket so he was wrapped and warm. I swayed to the ocean waves and hummed the lullaby I always sang. I rocked him back and forth. And when he was still and heavy, when his breathing was long and deep, I carefully slipped into bed so as not to wake him. I moved the pillows, made a safe spot. And I slept there, with him in my arms.
• • •In the morning, I put everything carefully back. I carried the box down to the basement. Back in the kitchen, I put the kettle on the stove, pulled up the blinds, and began another day alone.
