It felt different the second time. I could sense it, even before they cut the cord. There you were, my precious girl: pearl-skinned and limpid-eyed, a glossy conker whose world had just cracked open, fresh air whistling through it, and you so delighted by everything, from sunlight flickering on a wall to the soft nap of your blanket, your limbs pumping, priming for life. If Élodie’s birth had been a coup de foudre—a bolt of lightning, a love at first sight that felt almost violent—something in me quietened and calmed when you came along, Emma. It was like stepping from the tumult of a storm into still darkness, a place as safe as my own mother’s womb.
But it doesn’t last, this sense of security. It isn’t long before I’m shaken out of this gentle, cushiony night. Like a diver wrenched to the surface too quickly, I come up gasping.
One day, when I go upstairs to wake you, see if you need changing, I find your older sister framed in the doorway to your room. I ask her why she’s there but she slinks away without answering. The bruise I find later, on the inside of your tiny thigh, is shaped like spread butterfly wings, dark blue in the center. I stare at it while you lie quietly on the changing mat, legs frog-kicking. Part of me wonders what could have caused it while another, older part of my brain, more reliant on instinct, knows it’s a pinch-mark made by fingers smaller than my own.
In some deep cellar of my consciousness, I’ve been dreading this moment since the day I brought you home from the hospital two months ago—no, since the day I found out I was pregnant again.
Élodie is ten now, and at school during the week. For those hours at least, I have some respite. After they leave in the mornings—she always wants Greg to walk her if he’s home—I feel my body let go slightly, and it seems to me that La Rêverie does, too, the overstretched atmosphere deflating like a lung.
“Greg,” I call. “Come and look at this.”
He peers down at you. “What? That?”
“Yes, that.” To me, it’s as obvious as a sailor’s tattoo on your new-hatched skin. “Don’t tell me you can’t see it.”
I peel up your sleeper, hands unsteady as I search you for other marks. There’s nothing on your torso but there are what look like fingerprints on your left arm, just above the elbow. Four little smudges that can’t be wiped away.
“What about these, then? I suppose they’re nothing too.”
“They’re just bruises. She must have knocked against something.”
I turn to him, trying to keep my voice steady. “She can barely move on her own. How does knocking against something do that? How can she have bruised the inside of her thigh when she can’t even crawl yet?”
He gives me his best forbearing look. “I’m sorry, Sylvie, but I don’t know what you want me to say. A bruise won’t do her any harm.”
“Are you being deliberately obtuse? Those are fingermarks.”
A blend of complex emotions crosses his face. Then he hardens. “You don’t know it was her. I actually think she’s been pretty good since the baby arrived. The new camera has been a real success—she’s been going round taking photos of everything, especially Emma. But you can’t bear to give her the benefit of the doubt.” He shakes his head.
Tears roll off my chin and land on Emma’s leg, just below the bruise.
“And now you’re crying again,” he says. “I don’t know what to say to you, Sylvie, I really don’t.”
His face changes again, turning implacable, perhaps even bored, and for the first time I can see Élodie in his features.