Replication - chapter 24 (with images) (Patreon)

Three days before the interview, I'm still at the kitchen table when the sun comes up. The apartment has taken on the closed-in smell of a person who's been stopping short of things, takeout containers thrown out but the recycling not taken down, the blinds adjusted but never opened all the way. The burner phone is on the table beside the cold coffee. I've been drafting the reply to Kate's email since last night and still haven't sent it.

He's nine or ten days old by now. I know his weight, his Apgar scores, the blood pressure readings on his mother's discharge paperwork, the bilirubin check from day two. What I don't know is what he looks like in the light from a window that isn't a hospital room. Whether he cries the way I used to cry, my mother always said I screamed so hard in the first weeks that my tía could hear it from downstairs, and she did an impression of it for thirty years, this full-body performance of red-faced howling that got funnier the older I got and less funny the older she got, or whether he's the other kind, the ones who just look at things, taking the whole slow measure of whatever the world is serving. I don't know if he has my father's hands. I don't know what his hair looks like dry. I know his gestational measurements and the sound he made in the delivery room, which was immediate and furious and fine.

The clock on the microwave says 6:43. I've been sitting here since before five.

I send the reply. Professional, brief, the warmth of someone who knows the work and doesn't need to sell it. References available. Flexible on schedule. Could she tell me what they're looking for?

Her response comes that evening: a week and a half old, they're back home, Mark goes back Thursday, her mother arrives Friday for the week, after that she's not sure. She wants someone with real newborn experience, she's talked to three agencies, two of the people were fine with the wrong feeling. She doesn't explain the feeling. Could I come Wednesday afternoon?

I write back: Wednesday at two.

The next two days are the quiet of a person waiting out the last hours of a thing. I put the recycling out. I run the vacuum over the living room carpet. I find a water stain on the baseboard near the radiator that must have been there for months, a brown ring, dry, the paint bubbled and cracked along its edge, and I stand looking at it for a while before I go do something else. There's a New England Journal issue from three months ago still in the plastic mailer on the kitchen table and I peel the mailer off and put the journal on the shelf with the others and then take the stack of them down and put them in the recycling. They're not mine anymore in any way that matters. I sleep eight hours both nights, which I haven't done in months, and wake up each morning to the alarm before it goes off.

The build happens Tuesday morning, before I'm fully awake. Not by plan. I just end up in front of the bathroom mirror before the coffee's brewed, stripping nude.

The baseline is running in the glass. The face I've been wearing for ten days: pale skin, dark hair, the default the mesh settled into that first week and returns to when nothing's holding it otherwise. I've been sleeping in it and eating in it and sitting at the kitchen table in it, and I've stopped fighting whatever arrangement it makes and started just inhabiting it, like giving up on a room temperature you can't change.

This is the last one.

I know that while I'm still just standing there looking. This is the last build. After this there's no other reason to build anything. This one is built for an infant, who will know this woman as hands and a voice before he knows anything, who will not remember her at all once he's old enough to form actual memories. That's the job. Not for Kate. Not for Mark. Just to be near, and let go of when the time comes.

I let the baseline settle. Close my eyes. Start.

The face first. Plainer than Claire, plainer than Linda, the face of someone you'd trust with a baby without quite being able to say why. I round the jaw, pull the cheekbones lower, widen the forehead. A few actual years, distributed unevenly, fine lines at the outer corners of the eyes, the skin at the temples thinner. I widen the eyes a fraction, shift the iris to a warm amber-brown rather than the deep default. The skin: something with more color than the hospital pallor has been running, a faint late-summer tone, nothing dramatic, the kind you get from time outside.

I open my eyes.

The woman in the mirror is nobody. That's exactly right. She looks like the competent person you hoped would show up, the one who has done this before and will do it again without making it anything. Not attractive enough to be a distraction, not plain enough to raise a question. She looks like she belongs in someone's house taking care of someone's baby.

Every face before this one I built to be remembered. Leila, so Mark would want her in the room. Claire, so Kate would let her past the door. Lauren, so she could gain access. Linda Walsh, so a floor full of nurses would stop checking. This one is built to be trusted and then let go of without grief.

I hold the face in the mirror a moment. Then I press the name into the mesh, like pressing a stamp into wax, waiting for it to hold. Amy. Two syllables, nothing to them, easy on a baby's ear.

Now the body. I'm not pulling against the baseline. I let the tissue settle into something a little fuller through the face, heavier in the arms and hips. The normal uneven distribution of a woman in her mid-thirties who isn't tracking it. The breast tissue is where it's been for months, sitting with the weight it always has. I look at the breasts closely, feeling their weight with my hands.

A thumb drags across the nipple, still too close to the surface, still giving me everything it picks up, a quick heat moving down through the ribcage and gone before I've done anything about it. I put my palm flat against my sternum for a second. Breathe.

The mesh settles. A warmth through the chest that fades without landing anywhere. The build is done.

I look at Amy in the mirror for maybe a minute. Then I go make the coffee.

—

The street Kate lives on is lined with trees, the shade covers most of the sidewalk and cuts the heat down to something you can actually walk in. There's a coffee place at the corner with a line out the door, and a dry cleaner next to it with a faded hours sign that somebody never replaced after it fell. I park a block down and walk in flat shoes, a linen-blend top, dark pants. Dressed for a pediatrician's waiting room, present, practical, nothing to think about.

There's a bike locked to the railing out front with the front tire going flat.

I buzz and Mark's voice comes through the intercom, efficient and brief. The elevator is slow. I watch the numbers move.

Kate opens the door before I've reached it, Sean in her left arm. She's in a gray t-shirt and sweatpants, her hair in the quick ponytail she puts up when she's done deciding things about her hair for the day. She looks at my face and then at my hands, in that order. She's been on a couple of weeks of newborn time and the face shows it.

"Hi... Diana, right?" She stops herself. "Amy. I'm sorry."

"Amy," I say. "Don't worry about it."

He's asleep against her left shoulder in the white hat with the fold at the top. I've seen a lot of infants as Linda. He is small in a way that still catches me, the actual weight of a person very new in the world, his gravity at rest.

Kate steps back and I come in.

The apartment smells of the eucalyptus lotion they send you home from the hospital with and underneath that something warmer, unmistakably him, the smell that belongs to new people and nobody else. The dining table has been pushed to make room for a pack-and-play half-assembled in the corner, one wheel jammed up at the wrong angle. A bouncer sits on the floor beside the couch. There are folded burp cloths on the coffee table, the TV stand, the arm of the couch, the top of the baby monitor charging on the side table. A breast pump sits on the kitchen counter in a disassembled pile beside a box of lanolin nipple cream that's already been opened twice. The apartment is organized around the one thing now, all other priorities folded in behind it.

Mark stands from the kitchen table. Laptop open, legal pad beside it, pen in hand.

"Mark Calloway."

"Amy," I say. He nods and doesn't pursue the last name.

He has written questions. He asks about sleep schedules, feeding support, what I'd do if the mother was struggling to latch and had already been walked through it once. He asks about colicky infants. He asks to see the CPR card and I pass it across the table without a pause.

Kate is on the couch with the baby against her chest, half-listening. I sit next to her and the baby stirs. Small complaint sounds at first, the pre-cry inventory.

"He's probably due," I say, not aimed at anyone.

Kate is already moving him to position. "Yeah."

Mark writes something. He has the air of a man who has understood that most of the variables in this situation are outside his area of competence and is managing that by covering the ones that aren't. He does it orderly, practical, a step ahead of emotional, his natural register for anything he can't fully control.

The room goes quiet except for the feeding. Outside, through the windows, someone starts a lawnmower on the block.

After a while Mark sets his pen down. He and Kate exchange the look that couples develop in the first couple of weeks with a baby, the fast arithmetic of a decision.

"Could you start Monday?" she says. She's still looking at the baby. "My mother's here Saturday and Sunday, but Monday she leaves."

"Monday works," I say.

She nods without looking up.

Mark writes it down. He'll have the practical details sorted by end of business, the rate, the schedule, whatever background check he's going to run that will come back clean because the background is built to come back clean. He's thorough, that's his administrative nature, checking what's in front of him and not what isn't.

I should go. There's nothing left to say and the interview is over and I got what I came for. I stay on the couch for for another thirty seconds, watching Kate with the baby, and then I stand.

Kate looks up when I get to the door. "Thank you, honestly." She said the same thing in the hospital lobby, in the same register, and the words are identical and the weight isn't. Then she was thanking the nurse on her way out of a building she was glad to be leaving. Now she's thanking the woman she's going to hand her baby to on Monday morning.

"I'll be here at eight," I say.

She nods. She's already looking back at him.

I take the elevator down. The lobby is empty, the marble floor reflecting the afternoon light from the glass doors. I walk out and the heat comes back immediately, the full August weight of it, settling against the linen-blend like a hand pressed flat.

The bike is still there. Tire still going flat. Nobody home.

I walk the block back to the car. I get in, turn the AC on, sit with the engine running while the interior cools from what it's been sitting in.

Monday. Eight in the morning.

I pull out onto the street and drive north through the afternoon.

—

Mark opens the door, holding a baby monitor. He needs to put it down somewhere to shake mine, and instead of setting it down he just keeps holding it through the whole introduction.

"You've seen these," he says.

"Yes."

He sets it on the kitchen counter. He covers the rest in a quick, itemized run: feeding log is the notebook on the table, don't stress about the timing, Kate wants to try to stretch him to three hours but if he's hungry he's hungry. Pediatrician is Rodriguez, number's on the fridge. Bassinet is in the nursery and there's a pack-and-play in their bedroom but he mostly sleeps in the nursery now. Kate has a two-week check this morning, should be back by one. Mark's number is in the phone under his name.

He runs a hand down his tie and picks up the briefcase he set by the counter.

Kate comes out from the hallway with the baby against her shoulder. She's in jeans instead of the sweatpants from Wednesday, her hair up. The jeans and the hair are doing a lot of work. The baby is in a white onesie, awake, eyes open and doing the slow, unfocused scanning of a two week-old, the world still arriving in shapes that don't mean anything yet.

She and I cover the rest while Mark waits by the couch, not quite tapping his foot. The nipple cream is in the bathroom cabinet. There's a Dohm in the nursery, you just turn the top. He's been going about two and a half hours between feeds but last night was three and a quarter so maybe. Formula in the cabinet above the microwave if we need it. I tell her we probably won't.

She wants to show me the transfer hold she uses, the only one he doesn't fuss about, so she takes him off her shoulder and positions him in her forearms, face-up, and hands him to me with the slow care of a woman handing her two week-old to someone she's known for four days. He goes from her arms to mine and the weight of him lands in my hands.

He weighs more than you expect. Even after six weeks of deliveries the density of a newborn catches me, the compactness of a person in a small space, more present than their size suggests. His head is in my left palm. He smells of the yellow hospital shampoo still, and under that the deeper warmer smell that's just him.

Kate watches for a moment. Whatever she's checking for she either finds or decides to let go of. She kisses the top of his head, my hand near her mouth, and goes to get her bag.

Mark is already at the door. "I'll be on my phone," he says, to the room, and goes.

Kate comes back from the bedroom with her bag and stops at the counter to add something to the feeding log, the 5:40 AM entry, a small notation in her two-AM handwriting. Then she looks at the baby in my arms one more time.

"He'll probably go down again soon," she says.

"Okay."

"The log... time and side, if I'm pumping just write B for bottle, the ounces are on the..." She stops herself. "You know this."

"I've got it."

She smiles, small and tired. At the door, half-turned: "Call if anything."

"Go," I say.

She goes. The door closes. The latch clicks.

The apartment settles around us. The coffee maker on the counter has a little heat left in it. The ceiling fan turns in the living room. The refrigerator hums from the kitchen.

The baby's awake in my arms.

I carry him through the apartment slowly, the living room, the window at the front that looks out over the trees, the kitchen where the feeding log sits open on the counter. He takes things in without sorting them. His fist is at his mouth, sucking with moderate interest. He smells of the warm close smell of a person very recently alive.

The nursery is off the short hallway, door open. I carry him in.

The room's been repainted gray-green, a color that reads differently in morning light than afternoon. The crib is white with a mobile above it, wooden animals painted imperfectly on purpose, the brushstrokes visible. A small bookshelf holds maybe fifteen books, board books on the lower shelf and a few with pages above them. I read the spines from where I'm standing: a book about trains, one with a yellow cover that's just colors and their names, two or three where the title is the name of an animal. There's a blue cloth elephant on top of the bookshelf, fat and faded, that looks like it came from someone's childhood and not a store. On the wall, a print, just a circle in blue paint, nothing else, and in the bottom corner of the frame, in small letters: a name. His name. I don't look at it directly.

The bassinet is on the far side of the room, a white mesh oval on a stand, the mattress covered in a fitted sheet with small gray elephants. I put him down head last and he goes from horizontal in my arms to horizontal on the mattress and lies there blinking, adjusting to the new surface.

I sit in the rocking chair by the window.

The window behind me looks out over the same street as the front, trees, the coffee place on the corner with its usual line, the August heat already thick against the glass before ten. The chair creaks when I shift my weight.

He's still awake. His head turns toward the window light, then back toward the ceiling. He makes a sound, a brief, experimental noise with no content yet, just the equipment being tested. Then he looks at the ceiling again. Then at the mobile above the crib, the wooden animals hanging in the still air.

I look at the bookshelf while he settles. The blue cloth elephant. Whoever chose it knew that a stuffed animal gets used if it's soft enough, and that one looks soft enough. The books were chosen the same way, carefully and in advance, for a person who can't read yet and won't for years but who will have them read to him in this room, the same ones until he knows them by heart and can finish the sentences. These things were assembled for a future that's arriving now, one day at a time, and the room has the feel of careful work waiting to be needed.

He's two weeks old. His face still has the flattened look of the very new, the features not settled into what they'll be. I've been watching it since the delivery room, the handed-off infant in the warmer, the baby at Kate's breast, the sleeping weight against her shoulder across three hospital shifts, and it still doesn't quite resolve into the face he'll have. A face-in-progress. It will take months to arrive.

His eyes start to go heavy. The lids lower and open and lower again. I reach over to the Dohm on the shelf and turn the top and the white noise comes up, a mid-range hiss, rain on a window, and he registers it and his lids go still and he's asleep.

I sit in the chair while he sleeps.

There's a feeding due in thirty minutes or so. Until then there's nothing to do except be here, which is a thing I haven't been practiced at. I watch the mobile turn in the air from the ceiling fan. I look at the blue circle on the wall. Outside, a truck goes by on the street and the window glass shakes once and stills.

I find myself rocking in the chair slightly without deciding to, a slow, nearly-nothing movement. The breast tissue shifts with it, the weight rearranging itself inside the sports bra with each forward tilt. A month ago that would have registered as interruption or irritant, the body insisting on itself in the middle of whatever else was happening. Now it's just what the body does when you're sitting in a rocking chair in a room with a sleeping baby. A small, continuous fact. I rock and the room holds its quiet and the Dohm does its rain sound and his chest rises and falls in the bassinet across from me.

He wakes at 10:47 with a low, unhappy sound that builds fast into a cry. I'm at the bassinet before I've finished standing up.

He's red-faced, fists clenched, his whole body committed to it, total, nothing held back. I put my hand flat on his chest. He keeps going. I slide my hands underneath him, left under the head, right under the back, and lift.

He comes out of the bassinet and into my arms in one motion, and the crying drops a register immediately, not stopping but changing, the pitch dropping from full alarm to plain complaint. The body recalibrating to being held. I bring him up against my chest and turn so his face is at my shoulder and his ear is near the collarbone.

I stand still.

His hands open and close against the cotton of Amy's shirt, the fabric against his palms. At two weeks, texture and warmth and pressure are most of what there is. I put my hand flat on his back, not moving, and the heat of him comes through the onesie into my palm. The cry fades to a murmur and then stops.

He breathes.

I can feel each breath against my shoulder, the small chest rising and falling, the rhythm fast, forty or fifty times a minute, two or three times an adult's. His hands go still, one resting against my shoulder and one tucked against my chest. His weight in my arm is dense and solid.

It's quiet in the room except for the Dohm.

He shifts. His head turns slightly against my shoulder and he makes a sound and his head leans heavier and he goes still again.

I look at the print on the wall. The blue circle. The name in the corner I'm not looking at.

His hand is open against my chest. Amy's wrist is pale, the blue-green veins mapping the back of it, the inner wrist pallid in the morning light. His hand against it is warmer in color, not dark, but warm, olive-tinted, the melanin still deciding what it's going to do. His hair is black. The wet-looking black of a newborn who came out with a full head of it, and it's starting to grow past the flattened birth shape into something with its own direction. His face in profile against my shoulder: the set of the jaw, the brow, the nose not yet decided.

I hold what I'm looking at and I don't follow it.

There's a Zapotec word for holding, one that means more than the English word does, that carries inside it the sense of keeping something from being lost. My mother used it when she held the youngest ones, a word I had as a child and have since lost, one of the forty and then the thirty-nine and then however many are left, bleeding out at a few a year without my noticing the going. I can't find it from here. I look at his face and I let it not come.

He's hungry. I can feel him start to root, the small turning motion of the head, the mouth working, which is the body asking before the brain has fully woken up enough to cry about it. I carry him out to the kitchen and open the refrigerator. Kate left a pumped bottle on the middle shelf with the date on a piece of masking tape, the milk cloudy and cold, the seal still on it. I pull the cap and run it under warm tap water until it's close to body temperature and test the inside of my wrist. Then I carry him back to the rocking chair and sit and hold the bottle to his mouth.

He finds it immediately. His whole face organizes around it, the sucking reflex absolute, and the room goes quiet except for the Dohm and the small sounds of a person eating. His hand comes up and rests against the bottle. His eyes are half-open, going somewhere interior, the focused inwardness of a newborn at a feed.

I hold the bottle and watch his face.

The bottle takes fifteen minutes. He slows toward the end, the pauses between sucks getting longer, and then stops. I tip the bottle away and lift him to my shoulder and pat his back, and he gives up a small burp, and I feel him go loose against me, the whole body releasing toward sleep.

I keep him there and stand up, rocking him in my arms.

The morning light has moved across the floor, angling in differently now, going toward noon. Outside the window the street is running its usual schedule in the middle of an overcast Monday, the delivery trucks, the people who have somewhere to be and the people who don't, all of them going about their business in the August heat. In here the Dohm runs its rain sound and the baby breathes against my shoulder, and I sit in the gray-green room with his weight in my arms.

The feeding log needs updating. The notebook is in the kitchen and I'll get to it in a minute. His diaper needs checking. These are the facts of the next hour, the next day, the days after that, the ongoing list of what a newborn needs, and Amy is here to cover it, and Amy knows how. Kate will be back by one. The afternoon will have its own shape.

His breath slows further, the intervals lengthening. He's down, fully out, his whole weight given over to my arm. The warmth of him comes through both our shirts. His chest rises. His chest falls.

A car passes on the street. A door closes somewhere in the building, below us. He doesn't stir.

His hair is against my neck. The black of it is still fine at this age, not yet thickened, and it catches the light when I look down at him. His hand has opened against my shoulder and the fingers are loose, the palm turned slightly up, the hand of a person who has gotten what they needed and let go of everything else.

I don't put him down yet.

Somewhere under the weight of him a word surfaces that I wasn't looking for. The one my mother used on my brothers when she wanted them close, an endearment with no clean English version, something like dear son, the kind of expression you only ever say to someone you'd reach into traffic for.

Xiiñe' gaana'.

The Dohm runs. Outside, the street. In here, the quiet of a weekday morning, the room still and warm and doing nothing except containing what's in it.

His breathing.

Mine.