Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 108905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
Neil had clearly been thinking along those same lines. He lowered Olivia into her crib and started her mobile spinning, then said softly, “I feel guilty, every time I feed her, or get up with her in the night. It means Emma isn’t here. I’m not supposed to be doing the midnight check-ins, Emma and Michael are. And the guilt is just…”
He stopped and looked down, and I saw a tear fall. I put my arms around him, not knowing what else to do. He returned my embrace, his arms closing around me hard.
After the week we’d had, we’d gotten really good at holding each other up.
When he straightened and wiped his eyes, I felt like I had to say something to make him smile. “Maybe this isn’t the right time to bring it up, but you do look real, real sexy holding a baby.”
He snorted. “Yes, well, try to remember that when I’m covered in baby sick.”
Maybe it was gruesome, to be joking when we’d just that morning been at Emma and Michael’s funeral, but being near Olivia made everything seem a little more hopeful.
Right now, hope was the only thing we had to keep us together.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The weeks following the funeral were the type of roller coaster that breaks down and firemen have to come to the amusement park to help the riders safely walk down from the top. There were days when Neil was a wreck, obviously. There were days when I was a wreck. But having Olivia there meant neither of us could be a wreck at the same time, and that seemed, if not healthy, at least convenient.
I’d closed up my home office; my Long Island staff now either telecommuted or regular commuted, and I wasn’t making the trip into the city as much, anymore. Things with me and Deja were…tense. She tried to be understanding, but her patience was wearing thin. We’d started the magazine together, and now, she was basically running the show on her own, while I was working just when I felt like it.
To assuage my guilt, I paid out-of-pocket for her and six of our staffers to go and cover Paris Fashion Week. They even took the private jet.
The truth was, if I’d been worried about juggling work and family when the magazine had first started, it was ten times worse, now. I’d never had to care for an infant before. Beyond changing Olivia’s diaper, feeding her an occasional bottle, and keeping her from rolling off furniture, I had no clue what I was doing. Even all the young cousins who had always been around my grandparents’ house when I was little hadn’t prepared me for the sheer panic of being totally in charge of another human life.
The first few weeks were heartbreaking. Any time anyone would open the kitchen door or enter a room, Olivia’s little head would whip around to see who it was. To see if Emma or Michael were coming back. She cried more almost every night, and Neil would stay up with her, walking circles around the nursery or rocking her. He talked to her and read her picture books, and that usually worked to calm her down. More than once, I’d woken up to hear Olivia grunting and whining while Neil cooed, “Look, Olivia. See the kanína?” which I assumed was Icelandic for rabbit, since her favorite book seemed to be Pat the Bunny.
Watching Neil with Olivia, how he spoke to her, how he would point out things I would never think to explain to a baby, only drove home how insufficient my skills were.
“See?” he said to her one day as we stood in the kitchen. “See what Sophie is doing? Hot.”
“Thanks,” I said, automatically. Then, “Oh. You’re talking about the stove.”
“I could be talking about both.” He winked at me. Then, to reiterate, he pointed at the stove and said gently, “Hot. Ouch.”
“This is why I’m glad we didn’t have kids of our own. They would all be dead because I wouldn’t think of stuff like, ‘hey, don’t touch the stove.’” I lifted the baggie of breast milk from the boiling water. Case in point, I’d tried to microwave the donor milk once. Neil caught me just in time and explained patiently about microwaves and hot spots.
At six months old, Emma had introduced some solids into Olivia’s diet, but since her parents’ deaths, Olivia had been less and less interested in real food. She still took a bottle—and would, Neil assured me, for a while—but other things about her were regressing, too. She was almost nine months old, and aging in reverse. She’d started to crawl before, but now, she just rolled over. She barely even sat up, anymore. The pediatrician had warned us to expect that after such a big emotional trauma, but it still freaked me out. Was it something we were doing? Could we prevent it if we worked harder?