The Crooked Branch by Jeanine Cummins Page B

village. They tackle the weekly events schedule like a military campaign, and she reports back with precision.
    “Oh, and I have to run, too,” she says, possibly tapping her watch in the Florida sunshine. “I don’t want to be late for my luncheon! It’s candied ham on Tuesdays!”
    “Okay, Mom,” I say, wondering if she knows that I can
hear
when the other line beeps in. I know she’s ditching me so she can talk to somebody else instead, but I guess I can’t blame her. I would ditch her, too, if there was candied ham on the line.
    Sometimes, after she hangs up, I stay on the line and listen to the dial tone, and then the please-hang-up lady. Just to depress myself, really, to face the harsh buzz of my mother’s absence and feel sorry for myself. But today I don’t need extra self-pity—I’m full up. So I turn off the phone and stay on the front steps wishing I had a friend who lived nearby, wishing I still smoked, to give my poor nails a reprieve from my biting. I try not to cry, but the tears are jammed up tight in the back of my throat. I blink.
    When neighbors walk past with their dogs or their children, I give them my hopeful smile, which, in New York, is code for
I’m demented, you should probably cross the street in case I try to speak to you.
Why can’t someone just smile back? I wish we’d never bought this house from my parents. We should’ve stayed in Manhattan. I’m not cut out for this outer-borough life, for motherhood.
    “I wish I never had a baby.”
    •   •   •
    It’s not true, that wish. I don’t know why I said that thing out loud—it’s just another symptom that I’m coming undone. I mean, it’s at least ninety-three percent completely untrue. I love Emma. More than anything. I love her in a way that is so acute that it makes me physically aware of my heart beating inside me, the vessels carrying blood out to my fingers and toes, the milk swelling in my breasts. I love her so much that her breath can bring tears to my eyes. So here is my real confession: all that love? That vast and powerful, terrifying love? I don’t know if it’s enough. I don’t know if I love her the way I’m supposed to. Because I miss my old life. A lot. My apartment, my job, my firm and reasonably sized breasts. I miss romance and coffee and television. I really miss television.
    I catch up on
The Price Is Right
while Emma sleeps, because I’ve made the decision that there won’t be any television while she’s awake, which feels like enough of a sacrifice to make me a good mother all by itself. Taking television away from an already lonely, isolated person is like robbing a tired swimmer of her life preserver. I am a martyr. I watch Drew Carey wistfully, heroically. He’s good, but I long for the spaying and neutering of the Bob Barker days.
    After nap time and feeding, I strap Emma into her car seat, and the car seat into the stroller. I check all the straps twice, because I have an irrational fear that the stroller will get struck by a car, and Emma will come flying out of it like a Hail Mary pass to the end zone. In fact, that is only one of
many
awful fantasies I have every day, every hour, like a freaky horror show in my mind: Emma’s stroller rolling into traffic while I bend at an intersection to tie my shoe; me passing out from exhaustion while I bathe her, Emma’s little head slipping under the water, bubbles coming up; Emma pulling her blanket up over her face in the bouncy seat while I shower, unaware of her suffocating just beyond the curtain. Sometimes I even imagine that I can see a hand on the monitor, someone standing over her crib. The terror that seizes me is so paralyzing that I have to stop what I’m doing and go to her, to reassure myself that she breathes, she lives.
    I check her straps again, tuck her blanket under her chin, and set off walking the streets of Queens, the graveyard borough. This is where I grew up, where I was determined to return and raise my