Emilie Richards - The Swallow's Nest

The door was open, but the light was off. She didn’t need light, though, to know the room was now occupied. Toby was in the nursery they had planned for their own child. She hadn’t considered the possibility, but it stabbed her now. Toby was not their child. He belonged solely to Graham and the woman he had impregnated. And now his baby was firmly implanted in the room, in the dream she had shared with him. A dream of a baby they had created together.

She didn’t go inside despite continued wailing. Toby was Graham’s to care for. She walked slowly down the short hall to the master bedroom. The door was open, and here, at last, was light shining from two lamps and spilling brightly from the connecting bathroom. Graham, fully dressed, was facedown on the bed, as if he had collapsed there because he didn’t have the strength or energy to strip off his jeans and slide between the sheets.

For a moment she wondered if he was breathing. She held her own and watched until she could make out the steady rise and fall of his back. She wondered how long he had lain that way, clearly so exhausted he couldn’t do anything but sleep. Even quiet, cheerful babies took enormous energy. Constant feeding and diapering and toting from one place to another. After an evening of babysitting she had always been relieved to give infants back to their parents. She’d loved the cuddling, the nurturing, the singing of lullabies, but she had also felt drained.

How much more drained was a man who had just endured a year of cancer and chemo? Considering the state of the downstairs, no one else was helping. From all the signs, Graham had been on his own.

One part of her felt sympathy, another thought he deserved exhaustion. Graham hadn’t asked for cancer, but he had asked for his son.

The wailing was louder now. So the baby wasn’t giving up; he was just getting started. And Graham? Graham was sleeping too soundly to hear him.

Lilia knew she should wake him. A part of her was ready and willing. She could tell him she would be downstairs in the sunroom when and if he got Toby back to sleep. She almost did both.

Instead she found herself in the hallway again, and this time she entered the room where the cries were growing louder and louder and stood in the doorway. The shades weren’t drawn. A street lamp was all she needed to see a crib had been installed in a corner, along with a changing table and a dresser. Everything looked brand-new and possibly expensive. She wondered which credit card Graham had used.

She nearly turned away, nearly went downstairs to let the baby cry and Graham sleep on until the cries woke him. But none of this was Toby’s fault. As angry as she was, as hurt, she couldn’t let a baby who had asked for none of this suffer. She padded slowly to the side of the crib and stood looking down at him.

Toby was so impossibly small. She always forgot how tiny babies were, how fragile. They had no defenses except their cries. And how sad, how forlorn he sounded, as if he believed that nobody cared about his distress, nobody even recognized it.

She scooped him into her arms before the desire to do so registered. He was so light. For a moment she wondered if she dropped him if he’d simply fly away, if his bones, like a bird’s, were hollow, and he would gracefully soar to the heavens.

Miraculously the cries stopped. In the lamplight she examined his face, and oddly, he seemed to examine hers. On that awful day she’d seen Graham in his features. Now she saw her husband again. Since the beginning of human reproduction fathers had seen themselves in babies that weren’t their own. But this was no mistake. She certainly didn’t see herself when she looked at Toby, but she did see the man she had married.

He whimpered, and without thinking she rested him against her shoulder. He squirmed, but he didn’t cry. She adjusted him so his face was turned toward hers, and he seemed to relax.

She wondered when he’d last eaten. Had he been hers she would have offered him a breast, sat in the corner rocking chair—and yes, she saw now that there was one in the corner away from the window—and sung to him as he nursed. But he wasn’t hers. She had no idea what Toby ate and when. She did know, though, that he was wet. The dampness was seeping through the little footie pajamas he wore.

As she changed him she murmured. Of course the wailing began again. Few babies enjoyed being changed. But she turned on a lamp so he could see her better and told him who she was as she stripped the pajamas off his impossibly tiny body and warded off the chill with a flannel blanket over his chest as she removed his diaper.

“I’m Lilia, Toby. And this is my house. I hope you never remember the day you arrived, because it wasn’t a good one for you or for anybody else.”

She wondered how true that was. Had it been a good day for Marina? Had she been so relieved that after she drove away she’d gone somewhere to celebrate?

She found wipes and cleaned him thoroughly, noting the beginning of diaper rash. Would Graham know it if he saw it? Wasn’t anybody helping who could point out the need to change Toby more frequently? Clearly the baby had sensitive skin, and despite a quick search through the changing table drawer, she saw nothing to relieve it.

Tomorrow she would shop.

That thought surprised and annoyed her. “Except that you’re not mine to worry about, are you?” Still pinning him to the table, she pulled dry pajamas from a drawer in the dresser. Somebody had folded and placed baby clothes in drawers. Somebody had made certain the dresser was an easy reach from the table.

She pulled the pajamas over the baby’s flailing arms, then scooped him up again and took him to the rocker, grabbing a blanket from the foot of the crib as she passed.

Seated, she tucked the blanket around him. “I guess we’ll find out if you were just wet or hungry.” A pacifier sat on the closest window ledge, and she tucked it into his mouth. Then she began to rock. He squirmed; he protested. But in a minute he began to settle.

“So I was saying...” She was surprised that her voice quieted him even more. “I’m Lilia. And you’re Toby. If I’m not mistaken you are now my stepson. What you are for sure is a surprise. What a way to start your little life, huh?”

One arm shot up, and he batted at her chest, surprising her. He was no longer crying. Now he was squinting at her, as if he was trying to figure out who she was. She remembered that babies saw faces, that faces intrigued them.

“I have four brothers. All but one of them have children. They’re a rowdy group, Toby. They would eat you alive. Then they would spit you out and teach you to surf and fish and hike up mountains.”

She wondered why she was telling him this, and she thought of Eli’s oldest son, the child who wasn’t his by birth, but was as much a part of their extended family as any other child.

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