I sat on the edge of the bed in the paper gown that kept sliding off my shoulder, holding a manila folder fat enough to stand on its own. Every brochure had a picture of a baby on it. Soft watercolor babies, sleeping babies, babies latched onto smiling women whose hair was brushed. I fanned them out on the blanket the way you'd look for a name card at a wedding, turning each one over - checking the back. Nothing had my name on it.
Forty-One Empty Squares
The grout between the tiles had a crack shaped like a river delta and I had been looking at it long enough to name the tributaries. The baby monitor sat on the back of the toilet making its white noise, a sound like a television tuned to nothing, and the green light blinked. My phone was on the floor beside my knee, face up, and there were three texts from my mother that I could see without accessing it - the previews ending in question marks. I put one hand flat on the tile, which was cold, and felt the cold move up my wrist, and left my hand there. Standing was a door I kept not opening.
He found it by unfolding things, the half-sheet inside the folder inside the bag nobody had touched since the hospital - and he read the number out loud once while he dialed, like a man reading an address to himself. The phone was warm from his hand when he set it on the tile beside mine. She said my name - not the way a recording says it, not clipped, but the way someone says it when they already know you've been on the floor a while and aren't surprised and aren't in a hurry. I put my other hand flat on the tile so both hands were cold.
The Bathroom Floor at Two A.M.
The memory book had a pale yellow cover with a giraffe on it, and I was looking for the envelope with the first haircut inside when my fingers found the half-sheet behind the pocket - smoothed flat the way you'd press a letter you meant to keep. The number was still legible, the ink slightly feathered where it had been folded and unfolded, and someone had underlined it - one clean line - in the same red marker that had bled through to September's cat. I didn't remember doing that. I sat on the floor of the closet with the book open across my knees and the half-sheet between two fingers and the baby's first lock of hair in its little glassine envelope on top of everything, and outside the door I could hear him running the water, the same sound - the same sink. I put the half-sheet back exactly where I'd found it, behind the pocket, and closed the giraffe cover, and left it on the shelf where it had always been.
The pediatrician's nurse called on a Thursday to confirm the two-month appointment, and I wrote it in the cat calendar in blue pen - pressing hard, and while I had the pen in my hand I stood there for a moment looking at the other squares, the empty ones, all the ones with nothing written in them at all. There were seven voicemails on my phone I hadn't listened to, their little red badge sitting there - and I kept meaning to, and instead I learned that the crack in the bathroom grout had a name - I had started calling it the Platte - and that the one that branched off to the left of it had no name yet because I hadn't decided. She brought a casserole with foil crimped tight over the top and stood at the door and said the baby looked so good, and I held him out a little so she could see, and she touched his cheek and said how good, and I said yes - and she said call me if you need anything, holding her car keys, already turning, and I said I'll and closed the door and the casserole sat on the counter and I stood next to it for a while without taking the foil off. I found a sticky note inside the folder - not the half-sheet, a different paper - smaller, lavender, with a name and an extension written in someone's round nurse handwriting - and I photographed it with my phone because I was afraid of losing it, and then I put the folder back in the bag and the bag back in the closet, and the photograph stayed in my camera roll between a picture of his feet and a picture of the ceiling I must have taken by accident.
The two-month appointment was for the baby - and I knew this because every question the pediatrician asked had the baby in it, his weight and his latch and his soft spot, and I sat in the chair against the wall with my hair in a rubber band I'd found in the same drawer as the dead batteries, and no one looked at my hands, which were shaking in a way that had become normal to me - a new kind of normal I had no word for. On the way home I stopped at the gas station because the light had been on for two days, and I stood at the pump and a woman walked out of the mart with a coffee and a scratch ticket and she looked at me the way people sometimes look at a thing that has gotten slightly wrong without knowing how, and I looked back at the numbers spinning on the pump face until the handle clicked off. I had the lavender sticky note in my coat pocket - I'd moved it there that morning without deciding to, the way you carry a stone - and I put my hand in and touched it twice at the gas station, once before I got back in the car and once in the parking lot at home - sitting with the engine off, not going in. The baby was asleep in the mirror. I kept the car running for the heat.
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