Chapter 19: The Night Shift

Ben's POV

At three in the morning I learned that a five-pound person can be louder than a courtroom.

He had been fed at midnight and again at one-thirty.

Now he wanted something else, and nobody could tell me what.

I stood in Hannah's dark hall with him against my shoulder.

I bounced, and I whispered, and he screamed.

Upstairs, behind the door at the end of the landing, Hannah was asleep.

I had sent her there at ten.

She had argued for an hour.

"Go to bed," I had said at last. "I have two hands and a phone."

"You'll do something wrong."

"Then I'll learn."

She had gone up, and I had stayed down on the couch.

She had asked me on Friday to stay after, and I had decided she meant stay near.

The rest I was not going to presume.

The baby gulped, hiccuped and howled again.

"All right," I told him. "Talk to me."

He did not.

I carried him into the kitchen and warmed the bottle she had left in the fridge.

I tested it on the inside of my wrist, the way she had shown me at eight o'clock.

He took it fast, with his eyes squeezed shut.

Then the house went quiet.

I sat on a stool at the counter with his weight in the crook of my arm.

His eyes drifted half shut.

His fist lay open on my sleeve.

I looked at that fist for a long time.

My wife used to say I took everything as a deposition.

She was right about that, and she was right about her illness.

I had read every paper I could find, and learned the names of every drug.

I had done it so I would not have to sit at the head of her bed and look at her face.

Near the end she had said, "Ben, you're allowed to just be here."

I had said I was.

I had not been.

I took my wallet out of my pocket with my free hand.

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