No pain. Pressure, yes, but not the stinging pain she’d felt before. She watched as Sean’s jaw worked, up and down, his cheek filling out. Then a pause. Then a swallow.
‘Yes,’ Audra whispered. ‘That’s it, little man. That’s how you do it.’
Tears rolled across her cheek into her hair.
‘Good boy,’ she said.
Over the next hour, Sean drank his fill. Even when Audra turned to her other side, moved him to the other breast, he latched on again, kept suckling, and she giggled with joy, the heat from her husband’s hand forgotten.
When Sean was done, almost passed out from gorging, Audra poured the cup of expressed milk down the kitchen sink and brought her son to the bedroom. She swaddled him in a clean muslin cloth, and he barely stirred as she lowered him into the crib by her bed. The bedclothes swallowed her up, the pillow drawing her head down into its cool embrace. She closed her eyes and knew nothing until sunlight through the bedroom window touched her face.
Audra dragged herself upright, untangled her limbs from the sheets. She checked the clock by the bed: just past six in the morning. How long had she been asleep? Seven hours at least. She reached for the crib, looked inside, found it empty.
‘Sean?’
She had felt fear before in her life. Those times she hid from her father, hearing his heavy footsteps on the stairs as he came looking for her, his belt in his hand. Or the time she had gotten stuck on a climbing frame, couldn’t find a way down, and no one was around to help her. But this – this was different. This was a cold dagger in her chest, twisting at her core.
Audra threw the sheets off and ran for the door, her bare feet slapping on the varnished floorboards. She pulled the bedroom door open, out into the hall, calling her son’s name.
Margaret and Patrick looked up at her as she burst into the living room. Smiling. Why were they smiling?
Then she saw Sean in Margaret’s arms. The teat of a bottle in his mouth. His cheeks bulging as he sucked, exhaling from his nose after every swallow.
‘What is that?’ Audra asked, pointing.
‘It’s formula,’ Margaret said, her smile widening. ‘Look at him go. Such a hungry boy.’
‘Mom brought it over during the night,’ Patrick said as if it was a tremendous kindness. ‘It’s his second feed. He’s been belting it down.’
‘I couldn’t bear to hear him cry like that,’ Margaret said. ‘Not when there’s a Duane Reade right around the corner. Did you know you can get it ready-made now? In a carton? Just like orange juice.’
Audra’s hand went to her breast. She still felt her son there, the warmth of him.
‘Why did you do that?’ she asked.
‘It was no trouble,’ Margaret said. ‘Like I said, the drugstore’s right there, it’s so easy to make up. You just put it in the microwave and—’
‘Why did you do that?’
Sean flinched at the sound of her scream. The smiles left Patrick’s and Margaret’s faces. They stared up at her.
‘I want to feed him,’ Audra said.
‘If it means that much to you,’ Margaret said, taking the bottle from Sean’s mouth, holding it out to her. ‘Here, go ahead.’
‘No!’ Audra clutched at her breasts. ‘I want to feed him. Me.’
Margaret turned the corners of her lips down in distaste. ‘Really, I don’t see what’s wrong with—’
‘Give him to me,’ Audra said as she crossed the room, her hands outstretched.
Margaret stood and said, ‘All right. But remember, your baby’s health is more important than your pride.’
Audra took Sean from her, gathered him in close as he snuffled and mewled.
‘I’d like you to leave now,’ she said.
Patrick shot up from the couch, his mouth open, but Margaret waved at him to be quiet. ‘It’s all right, dear, she’s bound to be emotional. The first weeks are always the hardest.’
As she walked to the door to the hall, Audra said, ‘I think you should know something.’
Margaret stopped, turned to her with a raised eyebrow.
‘Last night, your son hit me.’
Margaret looked to Patrick, who looked at his feet. ‘It’s hard on the father too, but he shouldn’t have done that. Though I imagine you deserved it.’
She left the room, silence in her wake until Patrick spoke, his voice quivery and wet.
‘Don’t ever do anything like that again,’ he said.
‘Or what?’
‘What happens between us stays between us,’ he said.
‘I’m going to put Sean down for a sleep,’ Audra said. ‘I’m going to take a shower, then I’m going to pack.’
‘You have nowhere to go,’ Patrick said.
‘I have friends.’
‘What friends?’ Patrick asked. ‘When was the last time you saw any of those artsy shitbags?’
‘Don’t talk about them like that.’
Sean stirred in her arms, agitated by her rising anger.
‘Whatever, when was the last time you saw one of them?’
When Audra couldn’t think of the answer to his question, she turned and left the room, went to their bedroom, and closed the door. She swaddled Sean once more and went to the en suite bathroom. With the door open, she showered, her tears melding with the hot water, flushed away into the drain. A cold feeling in her gut as she accepted that Patrick was right: she had nowhere to go. He had never wanted to be around her friends when they were dating, and she had drifted away from them, quietly pulled from their orbits and into his.
Once she’d dried off, she wrapped her dressing gown around her and lay on the bed, watching Sean through the bars of his crib. Listened to his breathing, allowed herself to be carried away by it.
Hours later, he woke, hungry again. Audra lifted him from the crib, brought him back to the bed, where she offered him her breast once more.
He refused it, and she wept bitter tears of defeat.
Even so, she tried again through the day. And still he squirmed and fussed, his lips slipping away from her. The screeching returned, that drill bit boring into her head. The small cups of expressed milk did not satisfy him, most of it spilled and wasted. She caught glimpses of Patrick watching her from doorways, saying nothing, and she knew what he was waiting for.
At ten o’clock that night, twenty-four hours after the first and last time that Sean would ever drink from her breast, Audra went to the cupboard by the fridge and took down one of the small cartons of formula. As easy as Margaret had said. Just put it in the bottle, heat it in the microwave. Simple as that.
She sat on the couch, Sean gulping at formula, nothing but a dry hollowness inside her. Patrick came to her then, sat down beside her. He put an arm around her shoulders, kissed her hair.
‘It’s for the best,’ he said. ‘For you and for him.’
Audra had no strength left to argue.
16
DANNY LEE WATCHED the rolling news as he worked out in his living room. He raised the pair of twenty-pound dumbbells from his thighs to his shoulders and back again, keeping his breath steady, not rushing the lift or the drop, letting his biceps do the work. Ten reps in a set, thirty seconds between sets.
That image of the woman launching herself at the sheriff, over and over. Nothing new had emerged through the afternoon into the evening, yet he kept watching.
He moved on to lateral lifts, swapping to twelve-pound weights. Sweat-drenched hair fell into his eyes, and he shook it away. On the television, a detective from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Criminal Investigations Division, talked about search parties and aerial scans. The picture changed to a police helicopter circling over a desert road, then teams of uniformed men picking through the scrub and the rocks and the cacti, two highway patrolmen hunched over a map that was spread across a cruiser’s hood.
Then a photograph of the woman, a mug shot, her face reading fear and bewilderment. The woman had a history, the anchor explained, of addiction. Booze and prescription drugs, an overdose two years ago. Destroyed her marriage. And Children’s Services had been on her back recently, trying to get the children signed over to the husband. So she had put the kids in the car and taken off. Four days later, she’d made it as far as Arizona.