Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [107]
“It’s you and me, kid,” I said. Rory, of course, didn’t answer.
I took the elevator down to the ground floor. Manuel was waiting at the curb. I hefted the car seat inside, sighing with relief when I set it down. The baby barely weighed ten pounds, and the seat couldn’t weigh much more, but carrying it felt like having a lead bowling ball shackled to my wrist. It took me a minute to loop the seat belt through the back of the car seat and click it shut. As soon as we started moving, Rory’s eyes opened and she smacked her lips together, a move that I’d already figured out was a prelude to crying. I found the bottle of breast milk, shook it, uncapped it, and plugged it into her mouth. My phone rang, and I pulled it out of my purse, still hoping that maybe it was my mother, who’d come to her senses and was calling to say she’d come home.
It wasn’t my mother. It was Annie.
“Sorry to bother you,” she said as Rory batted the bottle out of her mouth. “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“We’re fine,” I said. As if to disprove me, Rory started to wail. I popped the bottle between her lips again, but Rory turned her head. The nipple stabbed her in the cheek. Milk leaked out, pooling in the crease of her neck. I tried to wipe it away with my sleeve as the bottle fell out of the car seat and onto the floor, just out of my reach.
“Did the milk come this morning?”
“I’m not sure. We had an appointment. I got a box yesterday...”
Rory was turning an alarming shade of purple. Her mouth was open, but no sound was coming out, even though she was shaking with what I guessed was indignation. Was this normal? As soon as I got off the phone I could go online to the websites I’d bookmarked, look up crying and shaking and purple and see what the experts had to say. “Can you hold on for just a moment?”
I put the phone down on top of the baby, bent, grabbed the bottle, and popped it back in her mouth. This time, she started sucking. I exhaled, realizing that I was sweating. I wiped my forehead against my shoulder and used one hand to keep the bottle in the baby’s mouth and the other to bring the phone back to my ear. “Okay. I’m back. Sorry about that.”
Annie sounded faintly amused. “Listen. I know you’ve got a baby nurse, but I’d be happy to come up and help out for a few days. It would save a lot on the cost of shipping my milk.”
Honestly, I did not care about how much the milk-shipping was costing. God knows I’d never see the bill. But the idea of another set of hands, hands belonging to the woman who’d carried Rory for nine months and might, theoretically, have some idea of what she wanted when she started shaking and turning purple, sounded wonderful. “How soon can you be here?” I asked.
“Tonight?” she asked.
“Perfect,” I said, and hung up before she could change her mind.
Tia met me in the lobby, where she wrinkled her nose and diagnosed the problem. “I think she pooped.”
“Ah.” Upstairs, the mess was startling, both in color and in quantity. I stood by the nursery door, trying not to cringe, as Tia wiped off Rory’s legs and bottom, applied diaper cream, fastened a fresh diaper in place, and put the baby into a fresh outfit. Her formerly peony-pink pants were a yellow-brown ruin; even the car seat had gotten splattered. Tia whisked everything away and, somehow, I ended up in the rocking chair, with the baby in my arms. When she fell asleep I sat there, too terrified to move, until Tia came back and eased the baby into the wicker bassinet.
Five hours later, Annie arrived. For someone who’d just given birth, she looked remarkably normal, in khaki cargo pants and a T-shirt and sneakers, with a wheeled suitcase in one hand, a cooler balanced on top of it, and her breast pump packed in a carrying case and slung over her shoulder. By