She found what she’d both wanted to find and feared finding. Pale blue walls; an old, weathered rocking chair in the corner; and a white, spindled crib with a swaddled baby boy inside. He was lying on his back with one hand worked free and a tiny fist inserted into his mouth, where his gums worked vigorously against his knuckles. Like all babies, his cheeks were full, and his eyes, even though they were dark, were glimmering with light. Black hair had begun to fill out across his small head, and his skin, which was the same tone as Janelle’s, was smooth and crying out to be touched. Aside from her own son, who, strangely, had not crossed her mind in this moment yet was always on her mind, this child was the most beautiful thing Colleen had ever seen.
She found herself pulled across the room as if she were floating, until she stood by the crib in such proximity to the baby that she couldn’t help but reach a finger down into the crib and allow his wet, warm fingers to wrap around it. It was as if she’d taken a hit of some powerful drug; her body felt alive and awake, perfectly attuned to life and all its attendant hopes and limitless possibilities. Which is why, later, when she would look back on this moment, Colleen would be shocked to realize that she had not heard her father open the front door to step outside to talk to Mr. Bellamy. Nor had she heard Janelle stand from her chair and walk down the hallway and into her son’s room, where she would find a woman, a stranger she’d only just met, standing in the middle of the room and reaching down into the crib and taking her child’s hand without permission.
Who did I think I was? Colleen would ask herself later. That question must have been similar to the one Janelle asked herself in that moment, but the words she chose—“Is he awake?”—were not a direct indictment of Colleen’s trespass, but the tone Janelle wrapped around those words certainly was, and Colleen flinched when she heard the woman’s voice.
She pulled her finger out of the baby’s grip, her hand recoiling back toward her body as if the crib were a tank of murky water and an alligator had just emerged from its depths and snapped at her. The sudden movement scared the baby, and he began to cry. Colleen’s body spun toward Janelle where she stood in the doorway, and Colleen saw that she had already set out across the room, her eyes locked on her baby. Colleen stepped away from the crib, and Janelle leaned over the side and scooped the baby from the mattress.
“I’m so sorry,” Colleen said. For all of it, she wanted to add. For sneaking into the room, for touching Janelle’s child, for making him cry.
“It’s okay,” Janelle whispered, but Colleen didn’t know if Janelle was talking to her or the baby.
“I didn’t mean to scare him,” Colleen said. “I shouldn’t even have come in here.”
“It’s okay,” Janelle said again, this time clearly speaking to Colleen. Janelle bounced the baby in her arms and made her way toward the rocking chair, where she sat down and lowered the straps on her dress and bra and then raised the baby to her breast. He began to nurse.
The intimacy of the scene pained Colleen, and her own breasts began to ache as if remembering a sensation she had never experienced. She thought her heart was going to explode with grief. She was embarrassed to know that she had made the baby cry, and even more embarrassed to witness—aside from birth itself—the most private and maternal moment a woman can share with her child. She turned toward the door.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ll give you some privacy.”
“Wait,” Janelle said. “Stay. Your dad’s talking to my father-in-law. It may be a while.”
Colleen turned around, and Janelle gestured toward the matching wooden ottoman that sat in front of the rocker. It had a tan cushion resting on top of it. Colleen slid the ottoman away from the rocker to give herself more space to sit, and then she settled herself on it, her knees close together, her fingers interlocked in the middle of her thighs.
The baby continued to nurse, his eyes open and scanning what he could see of the room from his position, his left arm raised and grasping absentmindedly at the air. Colleen had never been this close to a woman who was breastfeeding a baby, and she tried to look at everything in the room aside from Janelle’s exposed breast and the nipple the baby worked in his mouth.
“He’s just absolutely beautiful,” Colleen said.
“Thank you,” Janelle said.
“What’s his name?”
“R.J.,” Janelle said. “Rodney James, or Rodney Junior. R.J.”
Colleen nodded, not taking her eyes from the baby’s face. “How old is he?”
“A little over five months,” Janelle said.
Colleen was unable to control her mind as it flipped through the Brazelton book. She wanted to tell Janelle that by now R.J. knew her well enough to read her emotions, that he could understand the grief or hope or fear in her face. But the baby had closed his eyes while nursing, and Colleen watched him instead, wondering at the images and thoughts that flashed behind his eyelids. Was she the first person who’d ever scared him? Had anyone else ever made him cry?
The baby’s arm continued to move through the air. Janelle touched it with her free hand, closed her fingers around it, and brought it close to her body. She kept her eyes on his face. “This one looks just like his daddy,” she said. She sighed, and then she freed her hand from the baby’s grip and wiped the tears from the baby’s cheeks. “But he cries just like his mommy.” Then, perhaps fearing that she’d said something too personal or given too much of herself away, Janelle looked up at Colleen and smiled as if to reset the moment. “Will you tell me something about him?” she asked. “You said you were friends with Rodney in high school.”
“Yes,” Colleen said.
“What was he like back then?”
“I’m sure he was the same as when you knew him,” Colleen said. “It hasn’t been that long since we were all in high school.” But as she said it, she recalled the yearbook photo of Rodney she’d seen two nights earlier, and she combed back through her memories, searching for one that would reveal something about Rodney that Janelle did not already know.
Her mind settled on a face that was not Rodney’s, and sharp, tactile memories and sensations of smell and sound washed over her as wholly as if the experiences had been lived just moments before. The face she recalled belonged to a boy named Billy O’Grady. They had all been in the tenth grade together and were probably only fifteen or sixteen years old, but when Colleen thought of Billy O’Grady’s face in that moment she recalled the face of someone who looked like a middle-aged man, all sharp angles and sunken cheeks, tawny skin and a fluff of white-blond hair that seemed impossibly bright. She could not recall ever seeing Billy smile or speak, but somehow she knew his teeth had been crooked and misshapen, his accent thick, nearly unintelligible with its deep, twangy country resonance.
“There was a boy we were in school with in the tenth grade,” Colleen said. She turned and gazed out the nursery’s window as if the glass opened up to time itself, the dense trees lining the backyard less real than the memory she recalled. “Everyone made fun of him because he was poor and his clothes looked dirty, and we— Everyone called him a terrible name.”