I thought about it on the drive back to Concord. I thought about it the next morning when Bo woke me at 6 with his specific insistent sound. The one I had already memorized the way you memorize a piece of music you want to be able to carry everywhere. I made his bottle and sat in the nursing chair in the early light and thought, “Here is what is real. This the weight of him in my arms. The smell of the top of his head. The way the winter sun comes into this room at this particular angle every morning as if it is doing it deliberately just for us.”
Everything else had already begun to recede. The divorce, Prescott’s face in the groundskeeper’s cottage, Charlene’s careful warmth that was never really warm, the long months of making myself small enough to fit inside someone’s else’s life and calling it love. It was receding the way the tide recedes, leaving the beach clean and flat and ready.
One morning in early May, I took B to the public garden in his stroller. The swan boats were already out, and the willows had their new green on, and the walking paths were full of people moving at the particular pace of people who have nowhere they urgently need to be. B was awake and alert, turning his head toward every sound, reaching one small fist toward nothing in particular, the way babies do, as if the whole world were something he intended to grasp.
Eventually, when he got around to it, a woman stopped to look at him, the uncomplicated way strangers stopped to look at babies.
“How old?” she asked.
“Four months,” I said.
“He’s beautiful,” she said, and smiled and moved on.
I stood there for a moment in the May morning with my hand on the stroller handle, the city moving around me in its ordinary, purposeful way. I thought about the orange line, the damp smell, the 40 cents worth of loose coins mixed in with the bills. The moment I had looked out that window and watched my own car drive away, I thought, “Look how far.”
Then I pushed the stroller forward down the long path around the pond through the trailing willow light into whatever was next. It was mine. All of it. The foundation, the future, the small person in the stroller who was already looking around like he owned the place. I let him. He did.
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Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.