The man notices Grace in the backseat.
“How old?” he says.
“Three weeks,” says Ben.
The man shakes his head, as if Ben has said something painful.
“Enjoy it,” he says, glancing back at his son. “You won’t believe how fast it goes.”
Ben nods. A polite smile. But he rolls up his window—it doesn’t need to be said, how efficiently an infant proves the relentlessness of time.
When finally they can see the front of the line, it’s dark. Real darkness, a deep sea, not like the nights they knew in New York. They can see the constellations in this black sky, but the glow of the stars is not as bright as the klieg lights that shine from the tops of the police cars, or as the flashlights that wave in their hands.
A group of college students is standing around on the side of the road, while a police officer points a flashlight into their trunk.
“Do you think that’s them?” says Ben. “Those kids?”
But the backseat has gone quiet. He turns. That’s when he sees her: his wife’s head is slumped against the window, eyes closed.
“Annie,” he says.
Nothing.
“Annie!” he says again. “Wake up.”
Then he’s out of the car, and he’s swinging the back door open. He is shouting her name in the dark. A clarity of focus. He shakes her and shakes her. Her head falls forward against her seatbelt.
The people in the car behind him are watching him now, a man and a woman. Does he need help, they are asking, but he does not hear them, and he does not see them. He sees only Annie, her face slack, her eyes closed—and their baby still sleeping in the car seat beside her.
“Annie!” he shouts again.
Now the baby wakes up and begins to cry—and it is her voice, and not his, that finally wakes his wife.
“What?” she says. “What’s wrong?”
Relief comes to him in the form of his heart beating too fast. A difficulty speaking.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” says Annie, but a sudden understanding flashes across her face. “I’m fine,” she says. She’s yawning. “I’m just exhausted.”
It’s true that for weeks her sleep has been landing like this—sudden and unannounced, no matter the hour. Sleep when your baby sleeps—that’s what all the books advise. But right now, Ben is not thinking of all those times these past weeks when Annie has fallen asleep sitting up in a chair or when he himself has dozed off in his clothes and his shoes and without eating any dinner.
His movements are angry as he goes back to the driver’s seat. He has an urge to slam the door—a feeling more than a thought.
“I couldn’t do this without you,” he says, facing forward. He doesn’t need to explain what he means.
In the rearview, he sees Annie holding a bottle up to Grace’s mouth.
“Yes, you could,” she says, their daughter’s lips smacking against the plastic of the bottle. “You’d have to,” she says. “So you would.”
At the front of the line, a policeman asks for their driver’s licenses.
“What about the baby?” he says.
Ben feels his face flush.
“She’s only three weeks old,” he says.
“I need every passenger’s name,” says the policeman, and so Ben gives him her name—first name, middle name, last, which still sounds new in his mouth, and weird, like something invented, which, in a way, it is.
“Wait here,” says the policeman.
When he looks down at his clipboard, something changes. He steps away from their car. He puts on a paper mask.
Ben is not prepared for this. The feeling of getting caught. He wants to apologize or explain, like a teenager trying to buy beer. But Annie touches his shoulder from behind. Don’t say anything, says her hand.
The next time the policeman speaks, he is talking through a mask: “She’s on this list,” he says, nodding in the baby’s direction.
Annie takes over, leaning out the passenger window.
“What list?” she says. “She’s fine. See?”
At that moment, Grace is staring at the warning label on the inside cushion of her car seat: a diagram of an infant’s head flying forward in response to the force of an airbag—you are never allowed to forget all the terrible things that can happen to a child if you make some kind of mistake.
“You need to turn around, sir,” he says, as if speaking to criminals. He points to the other lane, eastbound. “You need to go home.”
They’ve seen no other car turn around in this way, but here they are, Ben twisting the wheel, hard to the left, backing up and twisting it again. He can feel the other drivers watching him.
“I told you we shouldn’t leave,” he says, as they ease back down the hill in the dark. “We should have stayed home.”
A slice of moon has appeared on the horizon, but it’s not enough to light the woods.
“If it had been up to me,” says Annie, rigid in her seat, “we wouldn’t be here at all.”
And there it is: the thing unsaid for all these months.
He does not speak right away, afraid of what he might say. She had a job offer in New York, but it had seemed so vital to get away from the place where things had gone wrong between them.
Now she is talking to the baby.
“Daddy wanted to punish me,” she says.
This is the opening of a jar. Months of restraint give way: it turns out that all the things they haven’t said—whether from kindness or fear or something else—are still sitting there, just waiting to jump from their throats.
But haven’t they been happy here?
“We were so sick of New York,” he says.
“You were,” she says.
He is suddenly furious.
“I’m not the one who wanted to use the donor milk,” says Ben. “I always thought it was weird using milk from strangers—who knows what they put in their bodies?”
It means something to Annie, breast milk, something profound that he does not understand and that does not include him.
In her silence, he goes further.
“You could have tried harder to feed her,” he says, which, even as he says it, seems not true at all, a thing he has never thought before until now. “Maybe if you could just commit to something for once.”
Maybe then, he says, we wouldn’t be in this situation. But regret is pooling in his mind already. He is afraid to finish the thought, which is a substitute, anyway, for the thing he really means: I am afraid for our baby girl.
“Fuck you,” says Annie.
These words are followed by a silence that lasts the rest of the night.
He wishes she would yell, but she does not yell. And it feels as if he cannot speak, either.
Later, Annie goes to sleep in Grace’s room. Ben wants to sleep there, too, beside his wife and his baby, but the door is closed. He cannot imagine turning that knob.
This has always been her harshest punishment: to make him sleep alone. He lies awake for a long time before sleep and then wakes quickly, after only a few minutes, to the intense smell of the tea she drinks at night—mint and eucalyptus—the smell of his wife coming to bed. But the scent fades too quickly to be real, an olfactory hallucination, a doctor once called it—he has had them all his life. This is the truth: Annie is not in the room. Here he is, alone in their bed.
Meanwhile, on that same night, in another part of town, the swirling sounds of an organ are streaming out into the street. A row of bridesmaids stands shivering outside a church. Every wedding after this one will be canceled or postponed. But this one goes through, the last vows to be said in this town.
The bride has been feeling woozy all day. It’s normal, her mother says. Just nerves. And anyway, she was up so late the night before, finalizing the seating arrangements, after a long day of work—a nurse in a doctor’s office. No wonder she feels so tired. She does look a little pale, the bridesmaids agree, but two smears of blush put the color back into her face, and an extra layer of concealer hides the gray beneath her eyes.