Julia Fierro - Cutting Teeth

HANKSDADDY76 Hahaha we’ll see. I just met the guy. Let me ask him on a date first! Thank you, ladies! Truckloads of BABYDUST your way!!!

Rip signed off and erased the online history.

He stood over Hank, whose soft whistling snores were so sweet, Rip knelt and kissed the boy’s cool forehead. He longed to wake his son and tell him what a great big brother he’d be. Hank was patient to a fault, and Rip imagined the two boys (in his fantasies, the second baby was a boy) wrestling in their apartment. Hank was all happy squeals as the slobbering toddling baby boy nibbled on Hank’s chin. The baby would be gushed over at playgroup, and now that Hank was off to full-time preschool next year, Rip and the new baby would settle into the routine Rip had treasured when Hank was an infant. Naps every three hours (a chance for Rip to take a little snooze and bake a loaf of gluten-free bread). Ready-made formula bottles (no messy finger foods until four months). Strolls in the park, where young women in their mid-to-late twenties, their biological clocks recently wound, would stop to admire his baby, to place their hand gently on Rip’s arm, and coo, “oh, he’s sooooo cute,” as they buzzed with procreative hunger.

Almost, Rip thought, as if it were the baby’s daddy they wanted.

He thought about leaving Hank on the cot, squeezing in next to Grace on the bed. It was a full-size (their bed at home was a king) and he knew their bodies would press together, and maybe, just maybe. Then he heard the sound coming from next door.

Moaning. Each long moan punctuated with a grunt.

“What the fuck?” Grace muttered.

He froze, standing over his wife, listening to Tiffany. And getting harder and harder.

Leigh sat inthe rocking chair in the corner of the guest bedroom and held a sleeping Chase in her lap.

He had fallen asleep with his cheek pressed against her milk-heavy breasts. She was scared to move, in case she woke him and lost him to his bed, or Tenzin’s arms, which he often preferred. She felt like a teenage girl in bed with a slumbering boy for the first time — possessive, proud, and fearful. She rocked him and cuddled him the way she couldn’t — the way he wouldn’t let her — when he was awake.

A sleeping Chase was easiest to love.

The baby was asleep in the ancient crib in the corner. Tenzin was asleep on the air mattress under the window.

Then Leigh heard it. A lowing. A moaning.

Tiffany and Michael.

Leave it to Tiffany to bring a little X-rated action into a family weekend. Leigh laughed, and her hand flew to cover her mouth. Just as quickly, she removed it. Tiffany had told her she had a radiant smile and shouldn’t hide it, the very opposite of what Leigh’s mother had told her — that her teeth were too large and she should do her best to smile close-mouthed in photos.

She dared to lean over and brushed her lips across Chase’s, tasting strawberry-flavored toothpaste.

Leigh had known Chase was different right away. She had been told by her birthing class instructor, and the how-to-parent books she’d read, that the first weeks of a baby’s life should be filled with quiet nursing, mother and baby dozing in bed, warm naked skin on warm naked skin, the sugary scent of breast milk on the baby’s breath. Baby’s eyes locked on Mama’s in an unconditional love — saturated gaze.

Instead, they’d been filled with Chase’s cries. His mouth popping off her nipple again and again. His eyes hadn’t met hers. She had tried to stick with nursing. She had hired a lactation consultant. She wouldn’t be one of those women who abandoned breast-feeding after a few nipple sores, she told herself. She set her alarm every two hours and felt a nervous sweat spring out right before the alarm sounded, calling her to what felt like a doomed match.

Leigh had tried to relax. She had even meditated, after the appointment with that French pediatrician with the shock of greasy hair, the one hipster parents raved about for his laissez-faire approach to children’s health. He had asked Leigh if, perhaps, her anxiety was the problem. She had believed him. She had blamed herself. And her breasts.

She had heard about those “twice-exceptional” kids — who had delays and gifts. They might not be able to get along with classmates but they learned how to read at age two, and picked up Japanese by watching YouTube videos. Not Chase.

Thank God he wasn’t autistic, she told herself on Chase’s “off” days — although there were times she wished he’d been diagnosed with something so they’d have a way to help him. To explain him. As her own mother had said once, in a casually observant tone Leigh would never forget, there was something just not right about Chase. And although Leigh knew Chase loved her, she still wished for his eyes to meet hers in that look the parenting books had promised, as if it would act as a marker, proof she’d fulfilled her maternal duties. She was lucky, she thought, if she could hold Chase’s attention for more than ten seconds these days.

Stop, Leigh told herself, and laid her hand on Chase’s chest. It rose and fell in time with his breath and, it seemed, in time with the sigh of the waves below.

Do-over.

“Time for a do-over,” Tenzin often sang when Chase’s mood turned explosive, and he screeched and gnawed on his forearm with frustrated rage. Do-over, do-over, Tenzin sang until Leigh felt as if their four-story brownstone, the down payment had been a gift from her father on her wedding day, had been put under a spell. A happy enchantment.

“Do-over,” she whispered in Chase’s ear now, picking away the strands of hair plastered to his sweaty cheek.

What was it Tenzin had said a few weeks ago? When she walked in on Leigh in the master bathroom — the cuts Leigh had just made on her own upper thigh a pattern of bright red crisscrosses, the razor still in her hand?

Leigh had watched Tenzin’s reflection quadruple in the wall-to-wall mirrors. Tenzin had spoken calmly, as if she hadn’t seen the blood rising, filling the paper-thin slashes until a drop rolled toward Leigh’s knee.

“Your bad mood only serves your enemy.”

Then Tenzin left. The click of the lock catching had seemed to multiply as it bounced off the hand-painted Italian tile, and Leigh had thought, absurdly, There she goes, quoting the Dalai Lama again.

Leigh hadn’t understood at the time. Enemy? She knew who Chase’s enemy was, and when she thought of neurology, she imagined a posse of outlaws — black-toothed, greasy-haired, village-pillaging bad guys, running amok inside Chase’s brain.

But this was serenity. Her still and silent boy. She examined every freckle on his long, tanned arms. She studied the purple veins branching across his eyelids. It was a chance for Leigh to be still, too. There was no one to impress. No one to apologize to. Just her and her sleeping beauty. A perfect Chase and a perfect Leigh.

At least he had beauty, she thought. It just might be what saved him someday.

She lifted his limp arm and let his palm fall flat on her cheek, sliding his hand up and down.

“Mmm, gentle touch,” she whispered.

As Chase accelerated toward boyhood, she feared his physical contact, rough and unpredictable. She tried not to flinch. Or pull away. Like that afternoon, when he’d jumped joyfully on the sofa downstairs, or on the beach afterward, when he had hugged her and squeezed until she had to peel him off her throbbing throat. All of this witnessed by the other mommies, so she had to hide her reaction, reminding Chase calmly, “Gentle touch.” She had seen Brad lose his temper and shout, “Jesus, Chase!” when during one of their “wrestling matches”—an assignment from Chase’s occupational therapist — Chase’s long limbs whacked Brad in the throat, or worse, in the groin.