The Night My Mother Answered The Wrong Knock
The Sleeper With The Daisies
The lamp beside the couch threw its usual soft yellow light over the room. The afghan my grandmother crocheted was folded over the recliner exactly the way it always sat. Family photos lined the mantel the way they had my whole life, Dad in his Army portrait, Eric and me at nine and eleven in matching Easter clothes, my own high school graduation photo squeezed in beside the rest.
Nothing in that room looked out of place, except for the portable crib set up beside the couch, and the fact that it should not have existed at all.
I recognized it before I recognized what was inside it. My mother’s old portable crib, the one she kept for when we visited, the one I had used for Molly a dozen times over the last four months.
Inside it, a baby girl slept on her back, one arm thrown up over her head the exact way Molly always slept, dark lashes resting against round cheeks, a pacifier fallen loose near her shoulder, a pink blanket kicked halfway down.
For one long moment my mind simply refused to process what I was looking at. Then I noticed the sleeper.
Yellow. Small embroidered daisies stitched across the collar.
The exact sleeper, down to the stitching, that Molly had worn to this house for Sunday dinner two weeks earlier, because my mother had bought us matching ones off a clearance rack at the feed and general store in town, one for Molly and, she’d told me at the time with a strange little catch in her voice I hadn’t thought twice about, one more, just in case.
My stomach twisted.
I looked toward the diaper bag sitting open on the arm of my mother’s chair. Inside were the same brand of wipes I used. A bottle brush identical to the one on my own kitchen counter. A little terrycloth bib with a duck stitched onto the corner.
I tightened my arms around Molly without meaning to.
“Where did that bag come from?” I asked.
“He said you brought it,” my mother started, then stopped herself hard, hearing what she was saying out loud for the first time. “No. Not you. I keep saying you, and I don’t mean you.”
Molly made a small sound against my shoulder, and in the crib, the other baby stirred, turning her head but not waking. We both froze at the same instant, two grown women holding our breath over a sleeping infant like the room itself might shatter.
As the blanket slipped, I saw something around the baby’s ankle. A plastic hospital bracelet, wrinkled and loose the way they always are on those first few days, the kind the nurses tell you not to cut off until the pediatrician’s first visit confirms everything checks out.
I handed Molly to my mother before I had fully decided to.
“Hold her,” I said.
“Laurie.”
“Please. Just hold her a second.”
My mother took her instinctively, the way thirty years of catching newborns for a living never fully leaves a person’s hands. I knelt down beside the crib on legs that did not want to hold me, and reached out to turn the little plastic band toward the lamplight.