Before He Envies

“Thanks,” Ellington said from beside her, half asleep. “You’re awesome.”

“I don’t feel like it. But thanks.”

She settled down, getting her head comfortable on the pillow. She had her eyes closed for about five seconds before Kevin started wailing again. She shot up in bed and let out a little moan. She bit it back, though, worried that it might turn into a bout of weeping. She was tired and, worst of all, she was experiencing her first toxic thoughts about her child.

“Again?” Ellington said, snapping the word out like a curse. He got to his feet, nearly stumbling out of the bed, and marched to the bassinet.

“I’ll get him,” Mackenzie said.

“No…you’ve been up with him four times already. And I know…I woke up for each and every one of those times.”

She did not know why (probably the lack of sleep, she thought idly), but this comment pissed her off. She practically lunged out of bed to beat him to the wailing baby. She rammed her shoulder into him a little harder than necessary to be considered playful. As she picked Kevin up, she said: “Oh, I’m sorry. Did he wake you?”

“Mac, you know what I mean.”

“I do. But Jesus, you could be helping more.”

“I have to get up early tomorrow,” he said. “I can’t just sit…”

“Oh God, please finish that sentence.”

“No. I’m sorry. I just…”

“Get back in bed,” Mackenzie snapped. “Kevin and I are fine.”

“Mac…”

“Shut up. Get back in bed and sleep.”

“I can’t.”

“Is the baby too noisy? Go to the couch, then!”

“Mac, you—”

“Go!”

She was crying now, holding Kevin to her as she settled back into bed. He was still wailing, slightly in pain from the reflux. She knew she’d have to hold him upright again and it made her want to cry even harder. But she did her best to hold it back as Ellington stormed out of the room. He was muttering something under his breath and she was glad she couldn’t hear it. She was looking for an excuse to explode on him, to berate him and, honestly, just to get out some of her frustration.

She sat back against the headboard holding little Kevin as still and upright as possible, wondering if her life would ever be the same.

***

Somehow, despite the late-night arguments and lack of sleep, it took less than a week for their new family to slip into a groove. It took some trial and error for Mackenzie and Ellington to figure it out, but after that first week of the reflux issues, it all seemed to go well. When the meds knocked the worst of the reflux out, it was easier to manage it. Kevin would cry, Ellington would get him out of the crib and change his diaper, and then Mackenzie would nurse him. He was sleeping well for a baby, about three or four hours at a stretch for the first few weeks following the reflux, and wasn’t very fussy at all.

It was Kevin, though, who started to open their eyes to just how broken the families they had come from were. Ellington’s mother came by two days after they got home and stayed for about two hours. Mackenzie had been polite enough, hanging around until she realized it would be an opportune time for a break. She went to the bedroom to sneak in a nap while Kevin was preoccupied with his father and grandmother, but Mackenzie was not able to sleep. She listed to the conversation between Ellington and his mother, surprised that there seemed to be some attempt at reconciliation. Mrs. Nancy Ellington left the apartment about two hours later, and even through the bedroom door, Mackenzie could feel some of the remaining tension between them.

Still, she’d left a gift for Kevin in her wake and had even asked about Ellington’s father—a subject she almost always tried to avoid.

Ellington’s father never even bothered to come by. Ellington made a FaceTime call to him and though they chatted for about an hour and a few tears even came to his father’s eyes, there were no immediate plans for him to come see his grandson. He’d started his own life long ago, a new life without any of his original family. And that, apparently, was how he wanted it to stay. Sure, he’d made a sweeping financial gesture last year in regards to trying to pay for their wedding (a gift they eventually denied), but that had been help from a distance. He was currently living in London with Wife Number Three and was apparently swamped with work.

As for Mackenzie, while her thoughts did eventually turn to her mother and sister—her only surviving family—the idea of getting in touch with them was a horrifying one. She knew where her mother was living and, with a little help from the bureau, she supposed she could even get her number. Stephanie, her younger sister, would probably be a little harder to track down. As Stephanie was never one to stay in a place for very long, Mackenzie had no idea where her sister might be these days.

Sadly, she found that she was okay with that. Yes, she thought her mother deserved to see her first grandchild, but that would mean opening up the scars that she had closed up a little over a year ago when she had finally closed the case of her father’s murder. In closing that case, she had also closed the door on that part of her past—including the terrible relationship she’d always had with her mother.

It was odd just how much she thought about her mother now that she had a child of her own. Whenever she held Kevin, she’d remind herself of how distant her mother had been even before her father’s murder. She swore that Kevin would always know that his mother loved him, that she would never let anything—not Ellington, not work, not her own personal issues—come before him.

It was this very thing that was on her mind on the twelfth night after they had brought Kevin home. She had just finished nursing Kevin for his late-night feeding—which had started to fall somewhere between one thirty and two in the morning. Ellington was coming back into the room from having placed Kevin in his crib in the next room over. It had once been an office where they had stored all of their miscellaneous bureau paperwork and personal items but had easily become a nursery.

“Why are you still awake?” he asked, grumbling into his pillow as he lay back down.

“Do you think we’ll be good parents?” she asked.

He propped his head up sleepily and shrugged. “I think so. I mean, I know you will. But me…I imagine I’ll push him way too hard when it comes to youth sports. Something my dad never did for me that I always feel I missed out on.”

“I’m being serious.”

“I figured. Why do you ask?”

“Because our own families are so messed up. How do we know how to raise a child the right way if we have such horrible experiences to draw from?”

“I figure we’ll just take note of everything our parents did wrong and don’t do any of it.”

He reached out in the dark and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. She honestly wanted him to wrap her up in his arms and spoon her, but she wasn’t fully healed up from the surgery just yet.

They lay there next to one another, equally exhausted and excited for their lives going forward, until sleep took them both, one right behind the other.

***

Mackenzie found herself walking through rows of corn again. The stalks were so high that she could not see the tops of them. The ears of corn themselves, like old yellow teeth poking through rotted gums, peeked out into the night. Each ear was easily three feet long; the corn and the stalks on which they grew were ridiculously big, making her feel like an insect.

Somewhere up ahead a baby was crying. Not just a baby, but her baby. Already, she could recognize the tones and pitches of little Kevin’s wails.

Mackenzie took off through the rows of corn. She was slapped in the face, the stalks and leaves drawing blood a little too easily. By the time she reached the end of the row she was currently in, her face was covered in blood. She could taste it in her mouth and see it dripping from her chin down to her shirt.

At the end of the row, she stopped. Ahead of her was wide open land, nothing but dirt, dead grass, and the horizon. Yet, in the middle of it, a small structure—one she knew well.

It was the house she had grown up in. It was where the crying was coming from.

Mackenzie ran to the house, her legs moving as the corn was still attached to her and trying to draw her back out into the field.

She ran harder, realizing that the stitching around her abdomen had torn open. When she reached the porch to the house, blood from the wound was running down her legs, pooling on porch steps.

The front door was closed but she could still hear that wailing. Her baby, inside, screaming. She opened the door and it opened easily. Nothing squeaked or screeched, the age of the house not a factor. Before she even stepped inside, she saw Kevin.

Sitting in the middle of a barren living room—the same living room she had spent so much of her time in as a child—was a single rocking chair. Her mother sat in it, holding Kevin and rocking him softly.

Her mother, Patricia White, looked up at her, looking much younger than the last time Mackenzie had seen her. She smiled at Mackenzie, her eyes bloodshot and somehow alien.