Chapter 29 The First Week

The first week with Lily was a beautiful, exhausting, life-altering blur of feeding and changing and rocking and the profound, humbling discovery that a creature weighing less than a bag of groceries could command an entire household with a single cry. Maya slept in fragments, two hours here, forty minutes there, waking at every sound with the kind of instinctive alertness she had once reserved for a perfectly framed shot. Julian slept even less, hovering over the bassinet at all hours, convinced that Lily might stop breathing if he looked away for even a moment. I checked her, Maya said at three in the morning, finding him standing over the bassinet for the fifth time that night. I know, Julian said. I am checking her again. She is fine. She is perfect. She is asleep. Yes, Julian said. I am checking her anyway. Maya wrapped her arms around him from behind, her chin on his shoulder, and watched their daughter sleep, her tiny fists curled by her face, her lips pursed in a frown that was already, unmistakably, her father's. Okay, Maya said. I will check her too. And they stood there together in the dark, the two of them, guarding the small, perfect miracle they had made, until Lily woke and demanded to be fed and they started the whole dance again. The village arrived in force. Beatrice appeared the morning after they came home with a casserole, a list of pediatricians, and a schedule of visits that she had already coordinated with Maya's mother over the phone, because, as she explained, the two grandmothers had agreed on a rotation so that Maya and Julian would never be without help and never be overwhelmed by too much of it at once. It was terrifying, the efficiency. It was also, Maya had to admit, the most loved she had ever felt. Richard came to visit on the third day, bearing a teddy bear the size of a small dog and the kind of helpless, unguarded expression that Maya had never imagined she would see on his face. He held Lily with the careful reverence of a man handling a priceless artifact, and Lily, who had a gift for disarming people, grabbed his finger and held it, and Richard's composure cracked completely. He sat there for an hour, talking to her in a low voice about stocks and investments and the importance of compound interest, which was probably the strangest bedtime story ever told, and Lily listened with the grave attention of a baby who understood nothing and approved of everything. He is going to spoil her rotten, Julian said, watching from the doorway. Maya smiled. He is going to teach her the family business. Julian winced. Same thing. Priya stayed for five days, which she called a working visit, and which consisted of her holding Lily for most of the daylight hours while narrating the baby's every facial expression in a running commentary that Maya recorded on her phone because it was too good to lose. She has your forehead, Priya announced on day two. And Julian's chin. And she just did something with her eyebrow that I have never seen a human being do. She is going to be a star. The practical gifts arrived by mail. Diapers by the case. A rocking chair that Julian assembled in forty minutes, which was a personal record and which he attributed, with great pride, to the crib experience. And a card from Dana, Maya's assistant, with a message that made Maya cry: The studio is running itself. It is not. But we have it handled. Take care of that little one. We will see you when you are ready. Maya read the card three times, her eyes stinging, and realized, with a start, that she was not afraid. She had spent her entire adult life afraid of what would happen if she stopped working, if she slowed down, if she let someone else hold the camera for a while. And now here she was, holding her daughter instead, and the studio had not collapsed. The world had not ended. She had simply added a new kind of love to her life, and everything else had rearranged itself around it. --- On the sixth day, Maya attempted her first family portrait. She set up her tripod in the living room, positioned the camera, and handed Lily to Julian with the air of a director blocking a scene. You sit there, she said. And you look at me. And you both smile. Julian sat. Lily, who had been fed and changed and was in an excellent mood, looked at her mother with the solemn concentration of a tiny philosopher. Perfect, Maya said. She pressed the shutter. The camera flashed. Lily screamed. Maya laughed and tried again. Lily screamed again. Julian was laughing so hard he was shaking, which made the image blur, which made Lily scream louder, which made Maya set the camera down and cover her face with her hands, laughing until her stomach hurt. I cannot do this, she said. I have photographed three hundred weddings. I have photographed babies in baskets and babies in flower pots and babies suspended in midair by their happy, trusting parents. And I cannot photograph my own daughter. Julian handed Lily to her, took the camera, and said, softly, Let me. Maya settled on the couch with Lily on her chest, her face turned toward the window, the winter light soft and gray through the glass. Julian raised the camera and pressed the shutter, and the click was the only sound in the room. He showed her the image. Maya looked at it for a long moment. It was her, mid-laugh, her head tilted, her hand cradling the back of Lily's head, and Lily, her tiny face peaceful, her fist pressed against her mother's heart. It was the most beautiful photograph she had ever seen. Julian, she said. This is. I know, he said. You looked exactly like that when I met you. Like you could not believe you were allowed to be happy. And now you are. Maya kissed him, slow and sweet and entirely sincere, and Lily, between them, made a small, satisfied sound, as if she approved. That night, Maya found an email waiting in her inbox from a magazine called Modern Motherhood, asking if she would be interested in being featured in a story about working mothers who had built careers around the families they loved. Maya read it twice, then set her phone down on the nightstand and looked at Lily, asleep in her bassinet, her face peaceful and perfect in the dim light. She thought about the woman who had answered the Hendersons' email with her heart in her throat, who had believed that she had to choose, that she could either have a career or a life, that love and ambition could not exist in the same frame. And she thought about how wrong that woman had been. Julian came to bed, sliding in beside her, his arm around her waist. What are you thinking about? he asked. A magazine, Maya said. They want to write about me. About working mothers. Julian propped himself up on one elbow. That is incredible. Maya looked at him, at her husband, at the life they had built from a lie and a weekend and the kind of love that had refused to be fake. I am going to say yes, she said. Good, Julian said. Because I already told them you would. Maya laughed, and Lily stirred in her bassinet, and Julian reached over to soothe her, his hand resting on her small chest, and Maya watched them, her husband and her daughter, and felt the quiet, overwhelming certainty that she could do this, that they could do this, that there was no version of her life anymore that was not also theirs. We made a person, she said softly. We did, Julian agreed. And we are going to be so good at this. Maya smiled and closed her eyes, her hand finding his in the dark, and let herself believe it. ---