Chapter 8 Why She Cannot Sleep

Chapter 8 Why She Cannot Sleep
Saturday.
Maya’s alarm did not go off at five forty five on saturdays.
On saturdays it went off at six fifteen because the dry cleaner was closed and the rideshare shift did not start until noon and that extra thirty minutes was the closest thing she had to sleeping in. she had learned not to call it sleeping in because calling it sleeping in required comparing it to something and the comparison was not useful. six fifteen was what she had. she took it.
except this saturday she was awake at five forty.
not because of Eli, he was still asleep, she could hear him through the monitor, the slow easy breathing of a child with no alarm and no particular agenda. not because of anything external. just awake. eyes open in the dark with the particular quality of wakefulness that told her immediately and without room for negotiation that going back to sleep was not going to be an option.
she lay there.
she looks at the ceiling. she had looked at this ceiling on a lot of nights. nights when Eli was sick and she was listening for every sound through the monitor. nights when the money math would not resolve itself no matter how many times she ran it. nights when she lay perfectly still and felt the weight of everything pressing down from above.
tonight the weight was different.
not lighter exactly. just a different shape.
she lay there and tried to identify what was keeping her awake, without much surprise, Marcus.
not Nate. Marcus.
it happened sometimes like this some small thing would shift during the day, some conversation or observation that was not directly about Marcus but that somehow created the conditions for him to appear in her thoughts at night. last night it had been Nate saying I just wanted there to be enough. those words in the dark of her bedroom had done something, had opened a door she kept carefully closed most of the time, and behind the door, the way it always was, was Marcus.
she looked at the ceiling.
she thought about him the way she always thought about him at five in the morning, not with the managed daytime version of the thoughts, the brief clinical assessments she allowed herself while she was busy with other things. at five in the morning the thoughts came unmanaged. they came in the order they chose and she could not do anything except lie there and let them move through.

She had met Marcus Webb at twenty five.
not in a remarkable way. no dramatic story. he was a friend of a friend at a birthday party in a bar on the North Side, tall, easy going, the kind of person who made a room feel warmer just by being comfortable in it. she had not been looking for anyone. she had been between jobs and saving money and focused on getting a better position at the company she was working for at the time. she was not in the market for a person.
he had asked for her number and she had given it without thinking too hard about it because he seemed simple and uncomplicated and at twenty five she had still believed that simple and uncomplicated were reliable qualities in a person.
they had been together for a year and a half before she understood that simple and uncomplicated were not qualities Marcus possessed. they were qualities he performed. underneath the performance was a man who was good at beginnings and poor at continuations, who loved the version of things that came easily and lost interest in the version that required staying.
she had not known that about him. she had thought she knew him.
that was the thing she lay in the dark thinking about most, not the abandonment, not the child support papers that went nowhere, not the forwarding address in Denver. those things hurt in ways she had catalogued and understood. The thing that still had an edge to it, even now, even after fourteen months, was that she had not known. she had been inside a relationship for a year and a half and she had not known who she was inside it with.
that was the thing that made her careful.
that was the thing that made her count the dollars and keep her own counsel and build the wall and maintain the wall and check the wall regularly to make sure it was still standing.
because she had stopped checking once.
and look what happened.

she found out she was pregnant on a tuesday morning in september.
She was eight weeks along. she had been tired for weeks and had assign it to the new job she had started in august, a better position, better pay, the kind of job she had been working toward for two years. she had been running on four hours of sleep most nights and she had been stressed and she had not been paying attention.
She bought the test on her lunch break. She took it in the work bathroom with her hand pressed flat against the stall door and her heart doing something very loud and very fast.
Two lines.
she stood in the bathroom for few minutes. she did not know what she was waiting for. she just stood there with the test in her hand. 
Then she went back to her desk.
she did not tell Marcus that day. she went home and she made dinner and she sat across from him at the kitchen table in the apartment they shared on the West Side and she look at him and she thought we are going to have a baby. she tried the sentence on like a coat. she wanted to see how it fit before she hand it to him.
It fit strange. not bad. just strange. like a coat that was the right size but an unexpected color.
She told him on thursday.
He went very quiet. the kind of quiet that was not thinking, she knew the difference by then. Thinking quiet had a direction to it. this quiet had no direction. it was just still. flat. like a body of water with nothing moving in or out of it.
she watched his face.
he said okay. what do you want to do.
She said i want to keep it.
He said okay.
She had held onto that okay for six months. she had built a whole version of the future on top of it. she had arranged her life around it, the apartment, the savings, the plan for the maternity leave, the conversations about the neighborhood and the school district and whether they needed a bigger place. she had stacked everything on top of that one flat, directionless okay and called it a foundation.
At seven months pregnant she had come home to find half the closet empty.
A note on the kitchen counter. two paragraphs. the first paragraph was about how he was not ready. the second paragraph was about not wanting to hurt her. she had read it standing in the kitchen in her coat with the grocery bags still in her hands and she had thought these two paragraphs are not about me at all. These two paragraphs are entirely about him. every sentence is about what he felt and what he needed and what he could not do. my name appears once.
her name appeared once. in the last line.
i am sorry Maya.
she had folded the note in half. she had put the groceries away. she had sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the folded note and thought very carefully about what she was going to do next. not that evening. not that week. just what was she going to do now that the foundation had turned out to be not a foundation but a performance of one.
she had decided she was going to be fine.
not because she was fine. she was not fine. she was seven months pregnant and alone and frightened in a way that had no clean edges and no bottom she could locate. but she had decide she was going to be fine the way you decide some things, not because they are true yet but because the deciding is the first step toward making them true.
she had called Renee.
she had not cried on the phone. she had stated the facts clearly and briefly and when Renee said i am coming over, she had said no, i am okay, i just needed to say it out loud.
she had needed to say it out loud.
she lay in the dark on a saturday morning fourteen months later and thought about that phrase. just needed to say it out loud. she had said it to Renee the night Marcus left. she had said it or something very close to it, the night she accidentally texted Nate.
some things needed air. some things got heavier the longer you kept them sealed inside the dark.
she had been keeping Marcus sealed inside the dark for fourteen months.

She thought about the child support papers.
She had filed them when Eli was six weeks old. she had done it herself, online, at midnight with Eli on her chest, following the steps methodically the way she followed all steps. she had submitted everything correctly. she had the confirmation email.
she had heard nothing.
At three months she had followed up. at five months she had followed up again. the caseworker she spoke to was kind and overworked and apologetic. the system was slow. these things took time. she should keep her documentation.
She kept her documentation.
at nine months she had called the number in Denver. the number that had been on the note, the forwarding address, the one point of contact Marcus had left behind like a thread she was supposed to pull.
Someone answered who was not Marcus.
A woman’s voice. not unfriendly. just not Marcus.
Maya had said Iam trying to reach Marcus Webb.
The woman had said he moved out about two months ago. i am sorry i do not have a number.
Maya had thanked her. she had ended the call. she had sat in her car in the parking lot of the dry cleaner on her lunch break and looked at the phone in her hand and felt something she could not name not grief exactly, not rage exactly, something that was too tired to be either of those things. something that was just the end of a road. the point past which there was no more road and you had to build or you had to stop and she was not going to stop.
she had gone back inside.
she had not filed any more paperwork.
She had not stopped thinking about it. it came back at nights like this one, not as a plan, not as something she was going to act on, just as the leftover of a thing unfinished. a door that was not closed because she had never been able to find where the joints were.

Eli moved in the next room.
Not waking up just shifting, the small restless movement of deep sleep. she heard it through the monitor and her attention moved toward it automatically the way it always did, the part of her that never fully slept as long as he was sleeping, the part that stayed alert and listening no matter how tired the rest of her was.
He settled.
She let out a breath she had not known she was holding.
she thought about what Nate had said last night. i just wanted there to be enough.
She thought about the formula shelf. the bread in the cabinet. the eggs she had made herself because Mrs. Garza told her to eat something warm. the carefully counted week laid out on the shelf like a plan.
She thought about being seven months pregnant and alone and the way she had put the groceries away before she sat down.
she thought about the note folded in half.
she thought about building fine from nothing.
she had done that. she had genuinely done that. Eli was here. Eli was healthy. Eli was bringing dish towels to Mrs. Garza and pointing at windows and eating chickpeas with complete commitment. she had done that without anyone. without a partner. without support. without the thing she had thought she was going to have when she had looked across a kitchen table at Marcus and thought we are going to have a baby.
She had done it alone and it was real and it was hers.
And yet.
And yet five in the morning on a Saturday came and brought Marcus with it and she lay in the dark and felt the unfinished quality of everything she had not let herself feel during the day.
That was allowed.
She had decided a long time ago that this was allowed. the nights were for the things she could not carry during the day. the days were for carrying. the nights were for putting things down and letting them be as heavy as they were.
So she let it be heavy.
She lay in the dark and let the weight of Marcus and the note and the phone call and the paperwork and the forwarding address and the woman’s voice that was not his be exactly as heavy as it was. she did not try to make it lighter. she did not do the math on it or find the practical angle or turn it into something manageable.
she just let it be.
After a while she did not know how long it shifted slightly.
not gone. just rearranged.
she thought about Eli saying up with his arms raised.
she thought about Mrs. Garza’s door opening and warm air coming out.
she thought about Nate on an office floor trying to understand what she meant about the honest place.
she thought about that is a complete answer.
she thought about fourteen months of getting up and doing it again.
That was real too. all of it was real. the weight and the doing and the Eli and the five forty five and the formula on the shelf and the window with its strip of dark sky. all of it was real and all of it was hers and on balance, she did the kind of accounting that happened only at five in the morning, the accounting that was not about dollars on balance she was not behind.
she was not behind.
she was exactly where fourteen months of hard work had brought her.
she closed her eyes.

Eli woke up at six forty.
she heard him before the monitor picked it up properly, the particular quality of the silence changing, the way it did right before he announced himself. she  was already sitting up when he started his morning conversation with the ceiling.
she got up.
she went to him.
he was on his back looking at the mobile with his arms moving slowly like he was conducting something only he could hear. when he saw her in the doorway his whole face changed. his arms went up.
Up.
“Up”, she agreed.
she picked him up and held him against her chest and stood there in his small room for a moment his warm weight, his hands patting her shoulder, the smell of him which was just Eli, which was just the smell of everything she had decided to build her life around.
“Good morning”, she said into the top of his head.
he patted her shoulder again.
“i know,” she said. “Breakfast. Give me thirty seconds”.
she carried him to the kitchen.

She made the oatmeal.
she cut the banana.
she stood at the window with her tea and watched the saturday morning sky which was slightly different from the weekday morning sky softer somehow, or maybe she just looked at it differently on saturdays, with the extra thirty minutes allowing her eyes to be less functional and more present.
She thought about whether to text Nate.
it was early. it was saturday. she did not know his schedule on weekends and she had never asked. during the week she had a reasonable sense of his day, the board meetings, the calls, the late evenings. weekends she had no picture of. she did not know if he worked weekends. she suspected he did. he had the quality of someone who had spent so long working that the distinction between weekdays and weekends had become theoretical.
she did not text him.
she gave Eli his breakfast.
she watched him eat with his usual dedication.
she drank her tea.
she thought about Marcus one more time, briefly, in the daylight version, the managed version. she thought about the child support papers in the folder in the drawer under the kitchen counter. she thought about whether there was a next step she had not taken yet.
she thought about it for few minutes. then she put it away in the daytime box where she kept these things and closed the lid and went to wash Eli’s bowl.
One thing at a time.
Today’s thing was the rideshare shift at noon. today’s thing was getting through saturday. today’s thing was making sure Eli had lunch before she dropped him at Mrs. Garza’s and making sure she had enough petrol in the car and making sure the work batches were queued for tonight.
that was today’s thing.
she got Eli out of his chair.
she cleaned the tray.
she started the day.

She did not text Nate until eight thirty that evening.
she had finished her rideshare shift, nine rides, a reasonable saturday and collected Eli and made dinner and done the bath and the elephant book and the crib and the standing at the rail watching him breathe. she had eaten her own dinner. she had made the eggs again because there were two left and they needed to be used.
she sat at the kitchen table with her phone.
she thought about what she wanted to say.
she thought about five in the morning and Marcus and the note folded in half and the woman on the phone in Denver and the fourteen months of getting up and doing it again.
she thought about the fact that she had not told Nate any of it.
she thought about the fact that she wanted to.
Not all of it. not tonight. but some of it. she wanted to put some of it down in the place that had started to feel like the place where things could be put down. not because it would change anything. not because he could do anything about it. just because it needed air. some things got heavier the longer you kept them sealed.
she typed slowly.
can i ask you something.
his reply came quickly. it was saturday evening and she had wondered if he would even be available and he replied in under a minute.
yes.
Do you think it is possible to know someone for a long time and still not really know them.
she sent it. she looked at it after it was sent and wondered if it was too abstract. too much the five in the morning version of a thought and not enough the daytime version.
The dots appeared.
Yes, he said. i think it is entirely possible. i think some people are very good at being known on the surface.
what does that look like.
it looks like knowing someone. it feels like knowing someone. until something happens that reveals the distance between what they showed you and what was actually there.
Maya read that carefully.
has that happened to you.
a pause.
yes.
she thought about Claire. she thought about a man who chose a company over a wedding date and whether that was a man who had shown his fiancée his surface or whether that was a man who had shown her everything and it had simply not been enough.
she thought about Marcus and the kitchen table and the okay that had no foundation under it.
me too, she typed. a while ago. i thought i knew someone and i was wrong about the most important parts.
what happened.
she thought about how much to say.
he left, she typed. when i was seven months pregnant. i thought we were building something and he thought he was waiting to see if he still wanted to.
she sent it before the daytime version of herself could stop her.
the dots appeared immediately and stayed for a long time.
Then
i am sorry. that is….A pause. the dots disappeared. came back. i do not have the right word for what that is. i am just sorry.
she read that.
he had not said the things people usually said. he had not said that is terrible, that is awful, what a horrible person. he had said i do not have the right word and I am sorry. he had acknowledged the limit of language and apologized inside it.
she sat with that.
it was a long time ago now, she typed. fourteen months. Eli is here and he is everything so it is hard to wish it went differently.
you can grieve the way it happened without wishing he was not here.
she stopped.
she read that sentence.
she read it again.
she had never heard it said that way before. she had never been given that specific permission, the permission to hold both things at the same time. to grieve the way it happened. to wish she had been treated differently. to wish she had known the truth about who she was building with. without it meaning she wished Eli did not exist. without it negating any of what she had.
those were two different things.
she had never let herself hold them as two different things.
her chest did something complicated.
i have never thought about it that way, she typed. her hands were slightly less steady than usual. she noticed that. she kept typing. i always put them together. like being angry about how it happened meant i did not love what came from it.
They are separate things, he said. he failed you in a way that had nothing to do with Eli.
she put the phone down on the table.
she picked the phone back up.
how did you know to say that, she typed.
a long pause.
i have spent a long time being told that my choices hurt people. it took me longer than it should have to understand that the person i hurt and my reasons for making the choice are two separate things. being sorry for one does not cancel the other.
she thought about Claire and the IPO and the wedding date.
she thought about a man standing at a window calling his evening nothing.
she thought about the fact that he had arrived at that understanding the hard way, the fourteen months kind of way, and that it had made him able to give it to her on a saturday night when she had woken up at five forty thinking about a note folded in half.
Thank you, she typed.
you have been carrying that alone for a long time.
i have been carrying most things alone for a long time.
i know.
she looked at those two words.
does it get easier, she typed. the carrying.
a pause. she appreciated that he did not answer immediately. that he took the question seriously.
i think you get stronger, he finally said. i am not sure the weight changes. but you change around it.
she sat with that in her quiet kitchen on a Saturday night with Eli asleep in the next room and the city doing its late weekend business outside the window.
that is a very honest answer.
you asked an honest question.
i woke up at five this morning thinking about all of this, she admitted. i did not plan to tell you any of it.
i am glad you did.
why.
because you have been carrying it for fourteen months and it was time it had somewhere to go.
she read that.
she read it again.
something in her chest went very quiet in the way things went quiet when they had been loud for a long time and someone finally gave them permission to rest.
Goodnight Nate, she typed.
Goodnight Maya. get some sleep.
i will try.
you will, he said. you are better at the hard things than you think.
she put the phone down.
she sat in the kitchen for another minute. just sitting. just being in the quiet. just letting the things she had said have a little air around them before she sealed them back up.
she thought about the note folded in half. she thought about the woman on the phone in Denver. she thought about putting the groceries away first.
she thought about the fact that she had told all of it to a stranger at eight thirty on a saturday night and felt, at the end of it, not emptied out or exposed or foolish but lighter. genuinely lighter.
the same lighter she had felt the very first night.
just bigger now. more specific. more real.
she turned the kitchen light off.
she went to check on Eli.
he was perfect.
she went to bed.
she did not wake up until the alarm at six fifteen.
and when she woke up the ceiling was the same ceiling it always was but the weight that had been pressing down from it at five in the morning the day before had shifted. not gone. just rearranged into something that had a little more air in it.
she got up.
she made the oatmeal.
she started Sunday.