And Baby Makes Three
The mom and the boy are locked in a tiny bathroom together. The dad is at work. The bathroom door is big enough to walk through. The window big enough to climb through. How did she get here?
The boy is on the floor vrooming and occasionally wee-oo-ing his trucks, a tiny red fire engine, his favourite, and a miniature police car. One in each thick, pudgy hand, the knuckles buried so far beneath puff it’s a wonder his hands work. The ambulance, his second favourite, completes the set but is in the living room. He can focus only on what’s in front of him. It’s probably age-appropriate but might be a coping mechanism.
What would her boy have obsessed about before this era of trucks, axles, wheels? Hooves? Feet? Rocks? Would he be still? Placid and content? Would his brain instead allocate space to understanding and articulating his needs? His feelings? So she wouldn’t have to always be the one to untangle them, leaving no room for her own.
The boy loves to share small spaces with his mamma, vehicles in hand. His body feels right; his belly is full, the craggy-sharp points of his new molars have stopped stretching against red, irritated gums. The lump on his head has dulled to a minor irritant. Though he’s late for his nap, he’s coping. If he could, the boy would tell her he’s sleepy but will be okay. He doesn’t like to frustrate her, but he can’t even sort out hunger from pain, up from down.
A day seems long, but the boy’s rhythms aren’t flexible. Food must be consumed within minutes of waking. A fresh diaper and new outfit can only be tolerated right after eating. Outside time must follow shortly after, or there will be no nap. If there’s no nap, though this is a contradiction, a kern, he’ll be too tired to sleep at night. Besides, if the mom doesn’t go outside each day, she might suffocate; the pieces of her before mom-ness might dissipate, irretrievable.
At breakfast, the boy demanded “me do it” and though usually she can spoon the first few bites in, fuel to do the rest himself, today she was slow. The porridge nauseating. The boy found his plastic spoon uncooperative, and his orbiting limbs enraged him. Flinging themselves sideways, his arms launched the porridge, where it overturned on the far carpet, filling in gaps between threads of the wool-polyester blend the mom and dad had compromised on. Yesterday, that might have made the boy laugh, but today it made him howl.
The boy’s face was red and sweaty. Maybe teething? Maybe a real fever she should deal with? She unclipped the high chair straps to collect and assess her boy. She thought they could still ride it out, but in the flailing, his open palm smacked her unprotected face. She knew his brain couldn’t mean anything by it, but in the moment of shock, of offence, she let her guard down. He pushed off her shoulders with his strong little arms and off her hips with his strong little legs and flung himself backwards starfish style toward the easy-to-clean tile floor of the kitchen. His heavy head landed first with a crack. His body followed with a thump.
His eyes remained wide. He didn’t move. Or cry. When he finally took a deep breath and began to wail, she almost laughed she was so relieved, but her body shook from head to toe.
Now they are in the bathroom, which is the safest place because it’s tiny and has a lock. His breath smells sweet, like milk. The boy is vrooming his car over her legs, up her arm, which still wears drying clumps of cereal, and she lies all the way down on the bath mat to be a better road.
The road, for a bit, closes its eyes. As long as she can feel the boy at her side, she knows he’s safe and will not catch a digit in the shower door or climb to where her razors are, and already the medications and caustic chemicals have been well secured.
The road is remembering a time from before, and the road and maybe the firetruck are driving up a freeway and taking an off-ramp to the lake, where there is blue sky and a beach and it’s hushed except for birds chirping. When the truck goes silent and stops moving, the road quietly says “vroom vroom” and then the police car or the firetruck “vroom” back, and she knows where the boy is and what he’s doing without even opening her eyes while she waits for him to lie down beside her and go to sleep. And though the schedule has gone to shit, she knows from the way the light shines through the frosted window between her and nature, between her and what-if, that she still has a bit of time left before she has to get the house cleaned up. How did she get here?
The dad is pulling into the driveway early; he’s had a crap day. He’s starving because he forgot his lunch and refused to pay twice as much at the canteen, because if they don’t get ahead financially he will have no freedom and will need to do this every day for the rest of his life instead of what he thought he’d be doing at this age. He hates his job but puts up with it because he loves his wife and kid, and it fills him up to know they’re safe and fed because of him. He’s come home early from work by mutual agreement between him and the boss, and he’s not sure, but neither is the boss yet, whether he’ll even be welcome back at work tomorrow. There is no sign of dinner anywhere, which is basically the only thing she has to do each day. And the place is a disaster. How did he even get here?
The cars begin to wee-oo instead of vroom, but the bathroom door is still locked. The mom stiffens but remains a road.
It’s not the dad’s goddamn fault, because all these trucks and blocks and train tracks and dirty dishes are like noise coming at him, and his stomach is growling, and it’s in his face every day and tomorrow and tomorrow, and he’s been trying so hard, but it will never be good enough. He’s doing all this for her, and she doesn’t even ever want to be with him, says she’s been touched enough all day long, but it’s only because she’s overly focused on that kid, and does she think he can’t see the closed bathroom door and no sign of either of them, and he’s told her this before, that boy is old enough to be on his own while she’s in the goddam bathroom, and for fuck’s sake he’s going to haul that kid out for once and for all. He’s had enough. The coddling has gone on long enough under his roof.
And that’s before he puts every kilo of his sock-footed weight on a fucking toy ambulance which hurts like hell.
The dad. The mom. The boy. How did they all get here?
The boy hears noises outside the locked bathroom door and feels two or three things at once and it’s overwhelming and makes him want to bury the firetruck and the police car and himself underneath his mom, and his little brain is just about to remember that he likes the ambulance more than the police car and almost forms the thought the ambulance might make him feel better, but he can’t sort it all out by himself so he looks to the mom for an answer and she smiles at him with her mouth and her eyes, and his heart soars and that’s all he needs.
There’s so much rage outside the locked door it seeps underneath, and they’re all exchanging the same air. The boy, the mom, the dad.
The fetus is just a tiny bunch of collected cells. It doesn’t look like anything, just a clump of determined little cells. It has no feelings at all. It has no brain. Just an egg that felt the rhythm of nature despite the daily pills, until one day, or maybe it was two days in a row, there was a break, and the egg was able to follow the pull of its life path more than the push of the pills and snuck through and became part of a bigger thing, and now it’s a blastocyst attached to a rich nurturing wall of life and is burying in tight. Four weeks in and the 300 cells or so are connecting through electrical impulses, coordinating themselves into a rhythm, ka-snap, ka-snap, ka-snap. Just an electrical pushing and pulling. That’s all.
The dad and the mom. The dad and the boy and the mom. The boy and the mom.
The house is swollen with feelings, and the mom is having trouble managing them all. It’s a weight. She could crawl out the window and cut that weight in half.
Andrea Bishop lives in Vancouver, Canada. Her flash and short pieces appear in Grain, Orca, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She recently completed a collection of short stories and is working on a novel. Andrea’s a morning person who loves spreadsheets, oceans, forests, dogs, and quests. She welcomes visitors at andreabishop.ca and dialogue at Twitter @_AndreaBishop.
