The Names

by Florence Knapp

Perhaps, she thinks, because here she sits in the baby’s milk parlor, in bovine suppliance, breasts fed through the gaps of a sleep bra. She wants to pull her flesh from the baby’s mouth. To stand and let him fall from her lap. To let Gordon deal with his namesake’s indignant howls.

She’s spent a lot of time like this recently—viewing herself from above as she moves around the house, changing nappies, ironing Gordon’s shirts, cooking for his parents. Almost as though it’s someone else doing these things. Only with Maia does she occasionally feel herself reinhabiting her body.

She suspects that, to be a good parent, she must pack away the mothering part of herself into a box and gently close the lid on it.

Would you lay down your life for your child? the world silently asks. Yes, she’s done this. But she hadn’t known there would be a second reckoning, where this would eventually mean laying down the arms of motherhood: caution, foreseeing, checking, reminding, nurturing, openly caring. Because a switch has been tripped, and rather than keeping the child safe, if left in sight, her love might implode. Might overwhelm him. So, she must seek to diminish her own presence in Bear’s mind, make space for others to move into the foreground. What will be left of her then? she wonders, and immediately chastises herself for the thought.

Mehri has always treated parenting like she’s cooking a big warming pan of something: a pinch of that, a pinch of this, she’s sure it will turn out fine in the end. Cora’s own approach has always felt more like baking a cake: carefully measuring out ingredients and trying not to ruin everything. She admires Mehri’s way.

“Do you have to be so passive in your own life all the time? I’m trying to tell you something—to give you a chance—and you can’t even hear it. You can only think about how I’m saying it.”

He was not his father. He’d thought he walked a narrow line, at any moment ready to tip over into likeness. But the line wasn’t narrow after all. It was a great, uncrossable chasm. Julian could never be like him. Even if he allowed his anger to unfurl—raised his voice in an argument—he would never be capable of the cruelties his father had inflicted. Not even close. He could finally see that now.

“Dishes: before bed or the morning after?” “Oh, God, before. But I’ll leave wine glasses; they’re best done sober.”

When the coroner’s report comes, they learn she’d lived with a hole in the heart. That she probably never knew, but that, still, it is a miracle she lived to see eighty-eight. And they wonder again at what she gave to them. How she lived for them, and because of them. And in spite of everything.

And Julian smiles and picks up the pace again, because, yes, he wants to live a big and fearless life. He wants to argue because they have something worth saving. He wants to kick a skirting board in protest, and for both of them to laugh at his stubbed toes and petulance, because neither of them is scared. Because he is nothing like his father and these things will not unleash a monster hidden deep inside. Instead, he is love, and fury, and sorrow, and euphoria, and all the things that will make their story continue together.