Fall Back Down When I Die by Joe Wilkins

Author:Joe Wilkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

Maddy had been born in June, a summer of drought, the days hot and curtained with hard, white light, the nights hot as well, though more bearable, save for the hour after sunset, when mosquitoes swarmed. Even for the heat, the first two weeks had been an exhausting delight, as she and Kevin passed this tiny red-faced baby girl back and forth, reading to her, cooing at her, spending nearly every minute, waking and sleeping, together. The three of them.

But then Kevin ran out of vacation and had to go back to work. As if on cue, Maddy’s colic—the fussiness before bed, after naps—cranked up another notch. At first, the baby swing was enough. Gillian would turn it on high, and Maddy would nap in there for twenty blessed minutes, enough time for her to shower or make a phone call or just have a cup of coffee and collect herself. When that quit working, Gillian discovered the only way she could get her daughter to sleep was by holding her, bouncing her, walking with her. She would swaddle Maddy and tie her to her chest with a sheet, then take off for the river—which by then had dried to a chain of fetid pools, a few carp thrashing in the still water, scaling themselves on the rocks—and the jounce of her walk would eventually put Maddy out.

Grasshoppers flung themselves through the dry grass. The seconds cracked and ticked. The bleached sear of them always on her back, in her scorched lungs. Soon she’d be sweating, Maddy a hot, wet stone at her chest. After fifteen minutes of hard walking, she’d loop back, hoping Maddy wouldn’t wake until she made it to the house, where she could sit in a chair to nurse her. Sometimes she timed it right. Other times, before she made it home, Maddy would begin to wail. She’d lift her head away from Gillian’s chest, hold a moment, scream, then slam herself back down, the little slit of her lips like a wound. Once, tired, hot, half a mile from the house and half out of her mind from her daughter’s piercing squall, Gillian pulled Maddy from the sheet, tore off the swaddle, and just set her on the ground, on the shaling mud and river gravel, as if she were a red, raging fish, and stood there and cried.

She had thought motherhood would be easier for her. She’d been a teacher for ten years, had worked with all kinds of kids, even been named teacher of the year in her district in Alpine, and she and Kevin weren’t like so many other couples they knew. He cooked dinner all the time, and when it came to fixing a broken toilet flapper or rewiring a lamp, she was the handier one. They had spent years traveling, hiking and fishing and exploring, the two of them, always in it together. She thought all this would somehow matter, that motherhood wouldn’t look on her the same way it

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