Nestled soundly against the soft breast of his mother, a baby boy of rich cream-colored skin with curly tufts of blonde hair and oceanic blue eyes crooned sleepily as his mother swayed back and forth to the rhythm of a slow-moving mobile that hung cartoonish giraffes and zebras and elephants from the ceiling. A few minutes passed until the boy’s eyelids became too heavy for him to stay awake and curiously watch his mother’s face as she hummed gently to herself and to her child. She kissed his forehead, a forehead so small and new that her lips nearly took up its entirety, and laid her son among the plush pillows and stuffed animals that decorated his crib.
She crept over the many blocks and rattles and plastic colored things that cluttered the big circular rug in the center of the child’s room so that she could pass through the bedroom door with as little disturbance as possible. The hallway outside was dark, only lit by the moon’s blueish hues that filtered in through the slits in the window blinds, and it took her a fumbling moment or two to accustom her sight to the strange sort of lightness that always existed in dark places.
Every night around this time, she followed a similar routine, humming and swaying with her baby boy until the day’s tasking endeavors of toys and cartoons and naps and pureed apples and carrots finally caught up with him and he grew weary from the busy schedule of a baby. She would then slither through the nightfall that blanketed her home, sink into the enormous sectional in her living room, turn the television on at a volume no higher than four, and fall asleep with one eyeball mindlessly analyzing House Hunters International and one eyeball mindfully glued to a baby monitor. Though her baby did not move, and though there was nothing to watch at all, she had never been more fascinated by any show than she had been by this – the black-and-white image of her son, safe and sound and still.
* * *
Love It or List It had put her to sleep by midnight, but a stir within the sleepy house around two in the morning had reached a fisted palm into her dreams and retrieved her, pulling her back out again into the darkness. Startled at first, she eased when she recognized the familiar shape of her husband on the baby monitor, standing over the crib and staring at the sleeping child. Intrigued, she emerged from the cavernous sectional to take a few wobbly steps toward the hallway and into her baby’s room.
But to her dismay, and to her confusion, when she rested an affectionate hand on her husband’s shoulder, and he turned around to recognize the source of the affection, she found that this was not the familiar shape of her husband, but rather, the similar shape of her husband’s brother. The two spent a brief moment wading in the silence.
“I thought you were Michael,” she spoke softly, tugging her brother-in-law toward the door, away from the crib.
Her brother-in-law said nothing, but only continued to trace her frame with his eyes.
“Bryan, do you know what time it is?” she asked with more force, a solid sound that broke the hold of the home’s silence yet did not break the hold of the baby’s slumber.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No, no, I haven’t. Not this time.”
“Are you telling the truth?”
“Goddammit, yes, Charlotte, I’m telling you the truth.”
“Don’t swear in front of my baby.”
“Your baby?”
She tugged him again, pulling him outside the bedroom door so that they could continue their conversation with less fear of waking the baby.
“Bryan, what are you doing here?”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“Bryan!”
“I said I’m sorry, Charlotte, for fuck’s sake, I’ll leave. I’m not hurting anyone.” His intensity was diminished by the whispering, and both realized that arguing amid the earliest hours of the morning was futile and silly. And of course, she was exhausted, gaining more and more apathy every second she could not return to her sectional and doze off to Property Brothers. So, she turned around and made her way back to the living room where she reclaimed her spot on the couch.
He followed her, as she anticipated he would, but he did not take up a seat on the furniture, instead choosing to stand in the wide door frame between the hallway and the living room. He folded his arms and frowned.
“I had to see him, Charlotte,” he posed as though the living room were full with a committee of some sorts conducted to judge him on a speech or presentation. The sentence came out distorted, breaking pitch, and she could not quite distinguish whether he was telling her something or asking her something.
The darkness settled, having spent enough time with her eyes open and awake. She finally had the full range of her vision to investigate his curious face, a face that studied her just as curiously as a baby would study his mother as she hummed and swayed beneath the slow-moving mobile that hung cartoonish giraffes and zebras and elephants from the ceiling.
She continued to investigate his curious face, his cream-colored skin, his curly tufts of blonde hair, his oceanic blue eyes that seemed to be pulling deep, violent tides inward as she observed him. People say that when the tides pull inward, retreating from the shoreline, a tidal wave is collecting beneath the surface – collecting and collecting and collecting until the water finally rises high into the air and collapses onto the coast.