Chapter 7: The Shape of Distance
By the end of the first month the distance had acquired a routine.
Aaron left for work early and returned after the girls were fed. He performed the visible tasks of fatherhood—bath time logistics, the occasional bottle when I asked, the photograph sent to his parents with a caption that gave nothing away—but the long, unguarded holding never returned. When Samuel cried in another room, Aaron’s head turned toward the sound and then away again, as if waiting to see whether the cry would resolve without him. Most of the time I reached the baby first. Most of the time he let me.
I stopped asking him to try harder. The asking had become another way of managing his feelings, and I had less and less interest in that labor. Samuel needed milk, sleep, clean clothes, and the steady presence of someone who did not experience his face as a problem to be solved. I could provide those things. Aaron’s recovery, if it was coming, would have to find its own schedule.
The girls noticed. Children always do.
Elise began inserting herself between Aaron and the baby with a seriousness that would have been comical if it had not been so precisely aimed. She wanted to “help hold the baby for Daddy” and then did not pass him over. Claire asked, in the blunt way of a five-year-old, why Daddy’s smiles were smaller now. I said Daddy was tired from having five children. She looked at me as if she had been offered a brochure instead of an answer. May and June simply followed the heat in the room; they climbed into my lap more often and treated Aaron with the polite caution of small animals who have sensed a shift in the weather.
One evening after the girls were in bed, Aaron stood in the doorway of the living room and watched me feed Samuel.
“My mother wants to come this weekend,” he said. “She wants to meet him.”
“She’s welcome. The guest room is ready.”
“She’ll expect to see me holding him. Being involved.”
May you like
“Then be involved. Or tell her the truth about why you’re not. I’m not going to stage a version of this family for her comfort.”
He lingered a moment longer, as if waiting for the old soft landing I had always provided when his disappointment needed padding. I kept my eyes on Samuel’s face and did not supply it. Eventually the doorway emptied. The distance settled back into its familiar shape—Aaron in one part of the house, the baby and I in another, the girls moving between us like careful diplomats who had not been given a map.
