“The Afterbirth”

Dad looked at Mom. Mom looked at baby. Baby looked at nothing because babies are blind. We could have sworn she saw us though. Her eyes flitted around the room. ‘So this is what all the fuss was about,’ Juliet thought.

Juliet still hadn’t cried when the nurses took her for tests. We had gotten a non-crying baby. What luck.

We went to our new room. There was dried blood on the shower floor. And on the toilet. That’s where I made the first call.

“Mom,” I said.

“Ahhhhhhh!” my Mom yelled.

“Mom,” I heard Melissa say in the other room.

“Ahhhhhhh!” I heard Melissa’s Mom yell.

When nurses brought Juliet back, she had on a bracelet and an anklet. Her anklet said she was Juliet. Her bracelet said she was Lewis, a baby boy. We looked at her and weren’t sure. We compared her to our pictures. We checked for her vagina. She was no baby boy.

The Bubbies fluttered into our room. They both claimed that Juliet looked like us when we were babies. Juliet slept through it all. They wondered about the color of her eyes. We wondered if she was Lewis, and if Lewis was a hermaphrodite.

As the sun went down, Juliet had slept for the better of ten hours. We had asked the nurses if we should wake her. They laughed, one after another.

The Bubbies came back with dinner and baby pictures of Melissa and me. My Mom also brought one of herself. At the very least, she explained, Juliet looked like she did, from the top of the mouth up. We all examined her tiny toe nails and tiny eyelashes. Melissa hoped they’d get longer, in time.

Hours passed. The trickle of nurses slowed. Juliet was bundled head to toe in pink and light blue. She slept in her bin between Melissa’s bed and my chair. Melissa and I hadn’t slept in over a day, and now we were afraid. But exhaustion trumps fear. Around midnight, 30 hours after Melissa had gone into labor, our eyes shut.

And Juliet’s opened. Our luck ran out. She screamed. I picked her up and she stopped. I put her down and she started again.

“We can’t give in to her every whim,” I said. “It sets bad precedent.”

“You can’t spoil a baby,” Melissa said. “It’s impossible.”

Hours passed. Juliet cried. We picked her up, and she stopped. We put her down, and she started again.

“We’ll take turns,” I said.

“One hour shifts?” Melissa said.

I kissed Melissa’s forehead, then Juliet’s. I cradled Juliet in my lap, and she looked up at me, I could have sworn. She furrowed her brow like something had just occurred to her. As the sun rose, Juliet’s eyes suddenly shut. She hadn’t known about day and night. The morning nurse told us most babies don’t. Moms feel them kicking at night because that’s when they’re awake. The stillness keeps them up. The motion during the day makes them sleepy.

“You have to reverse that,” the nurse said.

We tried to keep Juliet awake all morning, to reverse her. She didn’t want to be reversed. She wanted to reverse us. We couldn’t all get our way. Something would have to give.