April 11th: A Wondering Smile
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Tonal Tuesday – Dreamy – The tone is pensive, introspective, possibly quixotic. Why are we wistfully wondering?
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There was a point beyond tired. A bone-deep, soul-sucking exhaustion that grabbed at every part of her and hauled her down; her eyes gritty and swollen, refusing to stay open. She was pretty sure she'd started drooling, and even her eyelashes felt sleepy. It was beyond tired, and she didn't even know what day it was anymore or if there were still days or if she'd been sucked into a vortex of doing nothing but being tits on legs for the voracious appetites of three relentless mouths.
Well, two relentless mouths, and Tristan. Who ate about as much as his father did, to her horror.
"Has he nursed?" she meant to say, but instead made a kind of guh noise and floated off into her head somewhere. Sprawled on the bed with a clock ticking nearby and the birds outside screaming awake the early morning, Cary had woken up screeching and brought the other two to life with her. I'll feed them, Emily had said, and now she wasn't sure where she was or what was happening.
Maybe Spencer replied. Maybe he didn't. Emily might not have said anything at all. Instead, she closed her eyes and… just drifted. Drifted past that point of bone-deep tired and into a wistful kind of nothingness where she was distantly aware of Spencer's heartbeat by her ear, his warm body along her left side as he cradled her upright. Slightly more aware of the slight weights of a baby on either side of her body, propped by pillows and nursing happily with soft little sounds of satisfaction. At one point, she might have heard a piping voice calling Mommy. And she drifted.
When she opened her eyes, feeling more dead than alive, there was only one baby on her chest. Fast asleep and snoring with her little mouth open, the red bracelet on her wrist declared that it was Clary. Emily blinked. Counted twice, just to be sure, wondered if she hallucinated giving birth to three babies—trying to move upright answered that question as the barely healed C-section scar twinged painfully—and then turned her head to the steady presence of Spencer at her side.
His voice rumbled softly. Even in this blurry confusion of not being quite sure if she was awake or this was a dream, she could hear him. Reciting some complicated psychological theory to stay awake, his voice rough and hoarse. And then she blinked and the room was lighter and there was one more in their crowded bed.
"Tilt the bottle a little more, that's right," Spencer was saying, and Emily's breath caught as Livy obeyed. "See. There we go."
"He's hungry," Livy giggled, and Spencer shifted around with Cary now in his arms. "Look at him eat. He's gonna get big."
"Yeah he is," said Spencer, and smiled. Emily watched that smile. It was dreamy, half-asleep, more than a little impractical.
And even if it was a dream, she fell a little more in love with him in that moment.