Jon

Jon listened for Gail. Their bedroom door was closed, and he stood in front of it for several moments listening, but he heard nothing. He went downstairs. He listened for her footsteps as he loaded the dishwasher, and he listened for the creak of the hardwood after he came in from taking out the trash. After he filled a glass with ice and gin and splashed some tonic into it, he climbed the stairs and paused again near their bedroom door, listening. Nothing but silence.

He drifted to his office, fired up his computer, and half-heartedly clicked through a dozen sites, looking for a different answer than the one that Paige had given when he called her back. He was searching for that wrinkle, that crease that always lay at the center of any intractable problem. But Paige assured him that the law landed squarely on the side of the birth mother. The law strained to keep families together, she said. He and Gail and Maya weren’t a family yet, she didn’t quite say. Dignity and respect. She wanted to come for Maya right away, but after some shouting, Paige made a phone call to Carli. When she called back, she agreed to noon the next day.

They’d been through this too many times. Nothing quite like this, but every month after they started trying, started failing, really, they’d been through a version of this. He and Gail were wired so differently. Most of the time they compensated for each other, traded weaknesses for strengths. But having a baby proved different. If Jon had never said anything, they’d probably still be living on Paulina. Gail would be growing Tomassi Grinding during the week and shrinking her marathon times on the weekend. But he did say something, and once they started trying, once they started failing, Gail became obsessed. Her expectations would race ahead of her every time, even as the fear crept up Jon’s spine. But then they’d fail, and her disappointment, her grief, mapped to his silent, shameful relief. And every time, they shared the silence. Gail would climb under the covers and lay very still, and Jon would leave his banjo and guitar in their rack. Silence became their soundtrack.

The silence, though, was better than the noise that would follow it. Gail would clean out the attic or rearrange the furniture in the living room or pack the children’s books away yet again. She’d do it loudly, aggressively, angrily. And the racket wouldn’t stop until he was stupid enough to say something—and eventually, he was always stupid enough to say something—usually something hopeful or encouraging even though he knew what that would get him. And then she would scream at him, he’d yell back, they’d fight, and then grow silent again. Every month in the beginning, when her period came, telling them that their efforts had amounted to nothing. Every six months when the sweet peas and prunes bled from her. That’s what she called them—sweet peas and prunes. Three times they endured that nightmare, but each time, things would ease back toward normal when she was ready to try again. He didn’t see any path back to normal this time, though, and he felt no relief. Maya wasn’t a sweet pea or a prune. Maya was their baby. This time, the silence sounded like a scream.

When he was coding or playing banjo, he could always imagine what would come next. It didn’t always turn out exactly the way he expected, and the details were never sharp and clear, but he could always feel the general shape of it. He couldn’t imagine Gail handing the baby to Paige, and they couldn’t pack Maya into a basket and leave her on the doorstep with her things like a fairy tale in reverse. So that meant he’d be the one to hand her over. He could see the shape of that only too clearly, and the edges of that cut sharp. He couldn’t fathom the rest of it, though. Their lives after Maya remained unmapped. He couldn’t imagine what they would say, where they would stand, or how they would find each other. Not just the next day, but the next week and the next month and the next year. All of it a blank. Nothing.

Jon drained the last of the gin. He thought about pouring another, but if the noise came tonight, he couldn’t afford to be drunk. He turned off the monitor and pushed himself up from the chair. When he opened their bedroom door, the small lamp on the dresser glowed, and Gail was curled up on her edge of the bed, facing the window. Jon went to the bassinet and leaned into it, inhaling the Milk Duds. Maya’s breath came even and quiet. Her head was turned to the side, and her fingers curled into a tiny fist. Jon kissed his own fingers and touched them lightly to her cheek.

He turned off the lamp, stripped to his boxers and T-shirt, and climbed into bed. Gail didn’t stir, but she was awake, of course. Jon felt the need to say something, but with every moment that passed, words seemed more futile. Gail shifted, but only to pull the covers higher up over her face. There were no not-wrong words left. They lay there in silence for a long time. The words dignity and respect rattled around his brain. He shifted to Gail’s side of the bed and wrapped his arms around her. He needed to hold her to feel solid, to bear the silence. He kissed the back of her head and nuzzled his face into her hair. She murmured something that he couldn’t quite make out.

“What was that?” he asked.

Her voice, when she spoke again, was loud and brittle. “I said don’t touch me.”

Jon froze for a moment, struggling to process what she said, what she meant. Finally, he rolled back to his side of the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He lay still, unable to see the shape of anything, forced to endure the scream of the silence.