Dan and I spend the night perched carefully on the unfolded window seat, which is designed to hold a single person. Each time the baby moves—even though he never wakes up—our heads shoot off our shared pillow.
I get up a few times to adjust the light weave blanket that covers Jeremy from the chest down, but mainly just to look at him. It’s all I can do to not pick him up and try to settle in the gliding rocker, but if there’s one thing I remember clearly about Eva’s days as an infant, it’s that you never wake a sleeping baby.
And so I return to the window-seat-cum-bed and slide back against Dan’s warm body. He throws an arm around me to keep me from falling off.
When morning comes and Jeremy finally begins to stir in earnest, Dan leaps over my prone form and heads for the door.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“To get his bottle,” he says.
I laugh.
“What?” he says, looking back at me with his hand on the doorknob.
“Nothing,” I say, trying to keep from laughing. “Go! Go!”
Eva and Mutti show up while I’m in the middle of a diaper change. I am astonished at how terrible Eva looks. Her face is puffy, and her eyes have dark circles around them. She drags herself across the room and throws herself down on the window seat.
I do the tabs of the diaper up quickly, look at Mutti and incline my head toward the door, asking her to follow me.
Once we’re out in the hallway and the door is closed, I turn to her. “What’s going on? What happened?”
“She had a bad night. She had a nightmare about Roger, and then couldn’t get back to sleep.”
“Oh no. Should I have stayed at the hotel with you two?”
“No, Schatzlein. Although if we stay another night, you may want to consider letting her spend the night here as well. The only thing she’s been talking about since three this morning was when we could come back.”
Dan returns from the kitchen with a bottle. “What’s going on?”
“Eva had a rough night.”
“Where is she now?”
“In the room.”
He turns and peers through the small window, tapping his chin with his finger.
“Dan?” I say.
“What?”
“What are you thinking?”
Instead of responding, he opens the door and goes in. Mutti and I follow.
“Come on, Eva, get your stuff,” says Dan.
“Huh?” she says, frowning.
“You and I’ve got some shopping to do. It’s a good thing I brought my truck.”
For a moment it looks like Eva will refuse. But then she rises and grabs her jacket.
“Where are you going?” I say, turning to Dan, who is struggling to get his second arm into his own jacket.
“Family business,” he says, winking. He turns back to Eva. “Come on, Kiddo. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
It’s late afternoon before we see them again.
“Ma!” says Eva, bursting through the door. “Holy crap! You won’t believe all the stuff we bought!”
Dan follows her, looking very smug.
“Like what?” I say from my perch on the window seat. The doctor came in this afternoon and removed Jeremy’s splint, so Mutti and I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to teach him patty-cake. Peekaboo is much more successful.
“Like a crib, a playpen, a bottle sterilizer, bottles, sleepers, snowsuit, onesies, blankets, slippers, sheets, socks, a changing table, diapers, wipes—oh, and a wipe warmer—a nursery lamp, one of those windup music box mobile thingies, a dresser, bumper pads, a battery-operated swing that plays lullabies, a car seat, a stroller, rattles, stuffed animals, one of those spring-up baby gyms with toys that dangle—Oh! And an ExerSaucer! Wait until you see it! It’s got everything—piano keys, and chewable butterflies, and frogs, and sparkly water bubbles—”
“Whoa! Whoa!” I cry out in alarm. I turn to Dan, dumbfounded. “Dan! Is this true?”
He smiles wickedly. “She missed a few things. But yeah, it’s more or less true.”
“We didn’t need to get all that! At least not here!” I lower my voice to a whisper and lean in close. “Besides, surely they’ll send us his other stuff at some point.”
“Trust me. We needed every last stuffed duck.”
I glance over at Eva, who has taken over my spot in the patty-cake lesson, her face shiny and bright.
“Besides,” Dan continues, “we’re going to need two of almost everything anyway. One for your mother’s house, and one for ours.”
“Does it all fit in your truck?”
“Not sure. We made several trips. But if it doesn’t, we can always rent a U-Haul.”
“A U-Haul?”
“Only if we have to,” he says, slipping out of his jacket. He pulls a book out from under his arm: What to Expect the First Year.
He settles on the rocker and puts his feet up. He flips through the book until he finds the chapter he’s looking for, and is lost to the world for an hour and a half.
In the middle of the next afternoon, Jeremy’s doctors, accompanied by Sandra, come to discharge him.
We had been forewarned by the nurses that he was going to be released—and also that, even though we are only walking him across the street to the hotel, DCFS would be inspecting our car seat. Despite this obvious disconnect in logic (after all, they’re not also checking the crib or stroller), I don’t want to buck any more of Sandra’s rules. And so the softly padded car seat sits conspicuously on the floor at the end of the crib.
Sandra takes one look at it—a Britax Marathon in a pattern called “cowmooflage”—and rolls her eyes so hard that if I were her mother I’d warn her about them getting stuck up there. But at least she seems satisfied that we don’t intend to bungee-cord the child to the roof of the car.
She hands me a thick manila envelope, shakes my hand, and wishes me luck. Her eyes are stern while she’s talking to me, but when she shakes Mutti’s and Dan’s hands, they’re filled with kindness. And when she pulls Eva into a hug, I see the Sandra I first met—the one who wasn’t railroaded and humiliated. But while I feel bad about upsetting her faith in the system, I’m still utterly unrepentant about the outcome.
And so, fifteen minutes later, we cross the street to the hotel. Dan leads, carrying the cow-spotted car seat. Mutti and Eva follow, clutching hands. I bring up the rear, grasping Jeremy tight to my chest because he’s swimming in his brand-new red snowsuit with farm animals on it, and I can’t help feeling he’ll slip from my grasp.
Although there’s nothing tying us to Lebanon anymore, we stay an extra night. Partly because it’s a long drive home and it’s already late afternoon; and partly because Dan now freely admits that we need a U-Haul.
My understanding of the situation isn’t complete until Dan swings open the door of his hotel room and I see the sheer volume of things he and Eva purchased. It’s nothing short of astounding. Bulging plastic bags cover both beds and the easy chair. Boxes containing the furniture and larger items fill the center of the room. Obviously, we’re all sleeping in the other room tonight.
Dan is completely unapologetic.
Although Eva is eager to give the new playpen with its removable full-sized bassinet a test drive, I wait until she and Dan run out to pick up our dinner and then call the front desk to see if they offer cribs.
It arrives just as Dan and Eva return carrying brown paper bags of Chinese food.
Eva takes one look at the hotel’s crib and shakes her head. “Uh-uh. No way.”
I investigate the inside and find that it is lined with a full-sized sheet. I’m not impressed, but I happen to know that we have several sets of crib sheets in the room four doors down the hall, along with a suspender-type device to keep them in place. But even so, this glaring fault leaves me dubious. “Did you guys get soda?” I ask Eva.
“Yeah,” she says.
“Give me a can,” I say, extending a hand sideways.
A cold Sprite appears. When it passes easily through the bars of the crib, I turn and tell the hotel employee that we won’t be needing the crib after all. I also make a mental note to write a scathing letter to the head of the chain when we return home about exactly what happens when babies’ heads get stuck through the bars of cribs.
It takes us forty-five minutes to figure out how to assemble the Pack ’n Play. You’re supposed to straighten both the long sides first—or both the short ones—but if you don’t do it in exactly the right order, the fourth won’t lock. When it collapses on Eva’s legs for the sixth time, she bursts into giggles and so does Jeremy.