Once was enough to teach him to keep a spare diaper over Doug's middle whenever he was changing him. "The fountains of Versailles," Mary called it; she was writing her dissertation on Voltaire. What Pete called it did not bear repeating, but then he'd had to wash his face.
The other thing Doug did was stay awake. Pawing through The First Twelve Months of Life one day, Pete protested, "The book says he's supposed to sleep seventeen to twenty hours a day." Before the baby was born, that had sounded reasonable. It even sounded as if it left parents a few hours a day to live their own lives.
"I don't think he's read the book," Mary said wanly. "Here, you take him for a while. My shoulder's getting sore from rocking him in my arms."
Pete took Doug. The baby squirmed and yarped and dozed off. Pete carried him into his room (the bassinet was in there now, though Doug still looked small and lost in a crib), set him down. Doug sighed. His mouth made little suck-suck sounds. Pete backed away and started down the hall.
He'd got about halfway to the front room when Doug let out an "Ooo-wah!" behind him. He stiffened in outrage. Then his shoulders sagged. He turned around and went back to pick up the baby.
"This all comes with the territory," he said when he reappeared, as much to himself as to Mary. Doug was already back to sleep in his arms. He tried to put him down again. This time he did not even get out of the room.
It was Mary's turn to console him. "It gets better."
"Sure it does," he said, and wondered if he would live that long.
But it did, some. Doug began to sleep, if not more, at least at more consistent times. He was awake for longer stretches during the day and less during the night, though he still wanted to be fed every couple of hours around the clock. Mary's fair complexion made the circles under her eyes seem darker than they really were, or so Pete told himself. As for him, the two staples of his life were Visine and caffeine.
Doug learned to smile. At first the expression was hard to tell from the one he wore when he had gas, but it soon became unmistakably an outlet for pleasure and the baby's first real communication other than screaming. Pete cherished it for that. The sight of his face or Mary's could touch it off.
Doug also developed another expression, a way of looking at things out of the corner of his eye. It made him look absurdly wise and knowing, as if he had a secret and was doing his best not to let on. Pete loved it. He would even smile when Doug assumed it while being cuddled after a crying bout. "All right, you self-satisfied little beast, that's more like it," he would say.
Doug seemed to reserve that smug look for him. Mary saw it much less often.
However much Pete came to love his son, though, he never got used to the hour after hour of banshee wails that marked Doug's bad days. Calling them colic gave them a name, but not one that really helped. In the moments he could grab, Pete read about colic with desperate intensity, trying to find some clue to making Doug feel better, or at least shut up.
The more Pete read, the less he found he knew. Colic wasn't the digestive upset people used to think it was. At least, the babies who were having fits didn't show any unusual intestinal activity. Also, breastfed babies got it as often as babies who used bottles. Colicky babies put on weight just as fast as any others.
They made a hell of a lot more noise, though.
Pete noticed early on that Doug owned an exquisite sense of timing. A couple of times Mary drove down to the Seven-Eleven to tide them over on diapers. Pete did the big Saturday shopping; he welcomed the chance to get out of the condo.
Both times, Doug had been out like a light when Mary left on the diaper run. Once he made Pete forget to put chili powder in a recipe, which wasn't the same without it. The other time, he caught his father with his hand on his zipper. Pete was about to burst by the time Mary got back. By then Doug was quiet, and looking smug.
Sometimes he wouldn't be quiet, no matter what. Those were the worst. Evolution designed a baby's cry to be noticed, to make its parents want to fix whatever was wrong. Evolution did not design parents to listen to a squawking baby at close range for hours, not and keep their marbles too.
They tried everything they could think of. Pete put a cotton ball in his left ear while he was toting Doug around. Sometimes, when the din was very bad, he put cotton balls in both ears. They didn't block Doug's racket, or come close. They did blunt the edge of it. Out of some perverse mommy equivalent of machismo, Mary refused to have anything to do with earplugs.
In any case, they were only for Pete's sake, as he put it one frazzled middle of the night. Except on the days when nothing helped, two things helped with Doug. One was bouncing him while sitting on the edge of the mattress. The other was cranking up the rock on the stereo. The rhythmic thump of the bass seemed to soothe him. He especially like Led Zeppelin, which dismayed Pete and horrified Mary.
Bouncing and Led Zep or not, though, Doug kept his gift for interrupting his parents, and Pete in particular. He wished he'd never thought, even as a sour joke, that the baby was doing it on purpose. It made him notice just exactly how often Doug's crying sabotaged things he needed to do or, worse, wanted to do.
The baby started yowling out of the blue one morning, for instance, just when Pete was shaving that impossible spot above the center of his upper lip. His hand jumped. He didn't quite slice off his lip, but he gave it the old college try.
"I haven't needed that much styptic pencil since I was fifteen years old and just learning how," he grumbled as he poured himself a bowl of Special K.
"There's still some blood under your chin," Mary told him. She was holding Doug, who by this time had calmed down considerably. He turned his head to try to follow his father across the kitchen as Pete walked over to wet a paper towel and watched him out of the corner of his eye while he dabbed at himself.
Pete threw the crumpled towel in the trash. He scowled back at his son. "Pleased with yourself?" He didn't sound as if he was kidding, or as if he was talking to a baby. He sounded more like someone talking to a fellow who had just done him a dirty trick.
Mary caught his tone. "For heaven's sake, Pete, he's just a baby. He doesn't know what he's doing."
"Yeah, you said that before. But enough things have happened with this crazy kid that I swear I'm beginning to wonder."
Mary felt Doug's diaper. "I can tell you what's happened with this crazy kid. I can also tell you that you're going to change him, because if I don't take a leak you'll have to change me too. Here." She thrust Doug at him.
He grinned a lopsided grin. "I'd have more fun putting the powder on you." She made a face back over her shoulder at him as she hurried down the hall.
Doug somehow missed interfering with dinner that evening, which gave Pete hope for the future. The baby nursed vigorously just after eight and was sound asleep (better yet, soundless asleep) by nine. Mary levered herself out of the rocking chair with her free hand, carried him over to his father on the couch. "Give him a kiss and I'll put him in his crib."
Pete leaned forward to kiss Doug's fine sparse fair hair. It had a sweet, clean smell that only had a little to do with being just washed. Pete knew he could do his own hair with Suave baby shampoo from now till doomsday and it would never smell like that. Doug was fresher-baked than he, and that was all there was to it.