Nita named her son Vijay, meaning victory, because she sensed this child would need to persevere through much, given the life she had built around them. In India she’d fought to give her daughter an unconventional French name, but now that she could name her child anything she wanted, she had opted for a name from her home country. Mathieu found it exotic and had always despised how generic his name was in France, so it was no trouble to convince him to go with an Indian name.
The baby’s cries filled the room in the middle of the night and forced Nita and Mathieu awake. Mathieu groaned and rolled over, covering his ears. “Can you deal with him?”
Nita knew there was no point in arguing. The novelty of fatherhood had already worn off for Mathieu by the time Vijay had turned a year old. Nita rolled out of bed and made her way to the crib that occupied the space in the living room that had once served as their art studio. Dried paintbrushes had been thrown into a box in the corner, and neither of them had bothered cleaning them since Vijay had been born. The child had sucked the energy out of them, and there was none left to carry out their creative passions.
Nita picked up Vijay and held him close to her chest, swaying from side to side to coax him back to sleep.
“It’s okay, beta,” she said, using the same term of affection she had used with Sophie and her parents had used with her.
Vijay continued to wail, an impressive sound coming from his tiny mouth, his eyelids clenched tightly and showing no signs of relenting. She paced around the room, murmuring to him, but he was inconsolable. After a few minutes, she saw Mathieu standing in the doorway of their bedroom, his hair disheveled from his head being against the pillow.
“Can’t you shut him up?” he asked groggily.
Nita glared at him. “If I could do that, don’t you think I would have by now?”
“It seems like something is wrong with him. He cries way too much.”
“He’s a baby.”
“Yes, but this doesn’t seem normal even for a baby.”
She sighed. “Of course it is.”
“How would you know?” he spat out at her. “You’ve had the same amount of time with babies as I’ve had.”
She turned her back to him, pretending she was adjusting her grip on Vijay. “I just do.”
“There has to be a way to shut him up,” Mathieu said again.
Nita kept pacing around the room, exaggeratedly bouncing her step to calm her son. “You were the one who wanted children in the first place.”
Mathieu began to retreat to the bedroom. “Just give him a bottle or something so he can’t fuss that much. I need some sleep.”
Nita rolled her eyes, knowing Mathieu was going to self-medicate again by taking some morphine to help him sleep. It had become a ritual for him and, occasionally, for her.
Nita looked at the writhing, screaming child in her arms as she paced around their small apartment. She would have traded anything for Rajiv and the servants who had helped her care for Sophie. Doing everything on her own was so challenging, especially with Mathieu sinking back into one of his funks, during which he would stay in bed for days on end, or, if Vijay was too loud, leave in the middle of the night without a word as to where he went, only to return a few days later, unshaven and unkempt. Sometimes he said he went to Simon’s, but Nita suspected that was a lie. They’d seen very little of Simon since the baby had come.
“Please go back to sleep,” she begged the child. “I’m so tired, and I just need to sleep for a few hours. Then we can start this game again.” She dropped onto the couch, cradling the boy in her arms as she rested her head against the back cushion. She closed her eyes, trying to tune out the noise for a few moments, but could not. She unbuttoned her top, hoping that feeding Vijay would calm him down or at least make it difficult for him to scream for a few minutes. She exposed her breast and brought him to it, allowing him to latch on and begin suckling.
Finally, peace at last, she thought while she fed him. She prayed that when he was finished, he would be satisfied enough to return to sleep so she could do the same. After a couple minutes, he began fussing again and turned his face away from her breast. As soon as he had cleared it, he let out another wail.
“I don’t know what you want,” Nita implored him, but he kept going, and she closed her eyes.
A few minutes later she heard Mathieu enter the room. He was wearing jeans and looked restless. She had stopped asking him where he could possibly be going in the middle of the night while she cared for their crying baby.
“When will you be back?” she asked.
He shrugged as he slung his satchel over his shoulder and shuffled out the front door.
“I hope he’s not your father,” she said to the boy whose caramel features did not reveal whether he looked more like Mathieu or Simon. “Please have Simon’s goodness inside of you,” she said as she cradled the screaming child.
Nita tried to rock Vijay, but she was exhausted. Maybe she should have listened to Dao and taken care of her pregnancy when she’d had the chance. Then she could have gone back to India with Rajiv and returned to her old, comfortable life. It was not as if she were pursuing her painting anymore. She couldn’t remember the last time she had held a brush in her hand. Most of the art Mathieu sold at the stall now wasn’t even theirs, and it was work produced by friends or Simon’s or Julien’s students, and Nita and Mathieu kept only a small portion of the sales as a commission. It was partly why they were so broke all the time.
When Mathieu returned home two days later, his eyes had bags underneath them and his face was dotted with whiskers poking through his skin. Nita was washing bottles while Vijay slept in his crib. She shushed Mathieu the second he opened the door, pointing to the sleeping child. He nodded and motioned for her to follow him to the bedroom. He produced a paper sack from his satchel and dumped the contents onto the bed. A spoon, a needle, a lighter, and some heroin.
“I thought you could use some sleep,” he said.
She had tried heroin once before with him, and it had been the best sleep she had ever had. Half a day later she felt like she had risen from the dead, in the best way possible. Not even the baby’s cries had gotten through her slumber.
Her exhausted body quivered at the thought of peaceful sleep. “Who’s going to take care of Vijay when he wakes up?”
“How long has he been asleep?”
Nita closed her eyes to think. “Maybe twenty minutes.”
“He will be asleep for a while, then. We should be fine.”
Nita was not so sure, but she couldn’t turn down the prospect of rest. “Just a little,” she said, lying on the bed while Mathieu filled a syringe and held it up to his face and flicked it a couple times to make sure there were no air bubbles. She closed her eyes, having always been afraid of needles, and let Mathieu adjust her to expose the vein in her elbow crease. She felt a pinch as the needle pierced her but knew the pain would be worth it when she was resting. She felt pleasure take over her body, like being wrapped in a warm towel after stepping out of the shower, while the drugs worked through her body. Her mouth became dry, but her limbs felt too heavy to move, and she had no energy to get up and find water. The drowsiness set in, and her thoughts and worries about Vijay and everything else melted into the background as a small smile spread across her face. She was going to be free . . . even if only for a few hours.