The Ascent

The Ascent

Chapter One

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Present day

Theo wants to move Lucy upstairs to the third-floor room, but it’s not ready yet. It was probably someone’s office before we moved in, the walls hunter green, dotted with small nail holes. The thick white paint on the dormer windows cracks in places, old layers exposed. The house is a hundred and fifty years old, a Philadelphia rowhome, and there is lead in the paint, the pipes, everywhere. She’s not going to get lead poisoning, Theo says every time I mention it. It’s not like she’ll be roaming the room licking things. She’ll be stuck in her crib.

He raises the issue again this morning. Lucy squeezes a banana in her fist, smashes it against her tray. I sit beside her, watching. I am so tired that my vision blurs when I turn my head too fast, a sharp pain building in my right temple. She still only sleeps for two-hour stretches, and she needs to be held and rocked and soothed for half an hour every time she wakes.

“She gets up all the time because she smells you,” Theo says. He is pacing the kitchen, looking for something. He lifts a stack of mail and scans the counter. “She knows you’re right there. She’d sleep better if she were upstairs.”

“You’d sleep better, you mean,” I say. Theo sleeps downstairs but claims he still wakes whenever she does. He can hear her crying, my footsteps as I cross our room, back and forth. He’s already folded his sheet neatly this morning, placed it in the corner of the couch, his pillow resting on top.

He stops moving and shoots me a look that says that’s not fair. “We’d all sleep better,” he says. “You can’t keep this up, either. It’s not healthy.”

“I’m fine.”

Theo spots his phone on the table behind Lucy’s pink-and-turquoise stuffed turtle and grabs it. “I was sleep trained at four months, and I turned out okay. My mom said—”

My chest constricts. I set my coffee down, harder than I mean to. “I don’t want to do that.”

Theo blinks and looks away, which he thinks doesn’t count as rolling his eyes. He tops off his thermos of coffee and sits beside me.

“What do you have planned for today?” he asks. He likes it when I have a plan, when there is order and structure to our day.

“We’ve got our moms’ group this morning,” I say, and he nods in approval.

“You should see if some of the other moms want to meet up for playdates. Or even drinks sometime. Moms’ night out.”

The tightness is returning.

“Maybe,” I say.

“Fey and Niko want to get drinks after work.” Friends of his from law school. “I’m sure my mom could watch Lucy if you want to come.”

“You have fun,” I say. “I don’t mind staying home.” Fey and Niko and Theo mostly gossip about people I don’t know or care about: old classmates, colleagues, judges. Fey went to a large law firm after graduation, Niko works in-house for a start-up, and Theo became a public defender, but all three of them still inhabit a shared world that feels foreign to me.

“I just think you could use some time with other adults.”

“I’m fine. Really.”

Lucy has eaten some of her banana, and the rest is on her face and beneath her high chair. She claps her hands together, more, and I stand to get her another. Theo is still watching me, frowning, like he’s trying to make sense of me. I’ve been catching him looking at me that way with growing frequency: leaning in the archway between our kitchen and family room, studying me as I count out blocks for Lucy or bounce her stuffed turtle toward her on the rug. It’s like he’s realized he had me all wrong. Like he’s asking himself: Who is this person in my house?

“I can get the banana,” he says, and I hold it up, already done. I peel it, break it into pieces for Lucy.

“Do you want to take a shower before I head in to work?” he asks.

“That’s okay.”

“Lee,” he says, impatient. “It’s fine. Go shower.”

I hesitate. Lucy cries if I leave the room without her, a high-pitched, desperate howl.

“Go,” he says. “I can watch her for five minutes. She’s my kid, too.”

I go, because this is something we are “working on,” and I really am trying to be better, but her cries follow me up the stairs. I turn on the shower, but it doesn’t help. I can hear her even with the water running, and the sound cuts through me, a physical pain. Theo isn’t doing enough to soothe her. He isn’t reassuring her that I’m right upstairs, or telling her I’ll be back soon. He’s probably not even holding her. I shower as fast as I can, dry myself and dress hastily, and rush back.

Lucy has stopped crying, but only because she has tired herself out. She is whimpering now, her breathing erratic and hitched, and Theo is smiling, pleased with how things have gone.

“See?” he says, handing her back to me. “Isn’t that better?”

He gives Lucy a kiss on the top of her head and squeezes my shoulder. “I love you,” he says, but the look he gives me—pointed and intentional—makes it feel like a message for someone else. The person I was before Lucy, who he knows is still in there, somewhere, waiting to break free.

“I love you, too,” I say.

He leaves, the door clicking shut behind him. At first, his absence is a relief. But then it’s quiet, Lucy looking up at me, the digital clock switching from seven forty-two to seven forty-three. Now it’s just me and Lucy, the full day stretching out before us.

“All right, sweet girl,” I say. Lucy smiles and reaches for my face, her hand gummy. “Let’s get you changed.”

And so the day begins.

Lucy watches me from the family room rug—Theo’s mother’s rug, which she “gave” to us but still inspects discreetly when she comes over for our weekly dinner. Lucy is just learning how to sit; she is bolstered by a pillow and leaning on her turtle for support. I pack the stroller, checking and double-checking to make sure we have all the things we need. A blanket for nursing cover, diapers, a spare outfit. The baby carrier, just in case. My phone. My keys. My wallet. For the past seven months, my thoughts have been a series of checklists, routinized procedure, the steps I must take to get from point A to point B. I do not sleep. If something isn’t on one of my checklists, it doesn’t get done.

My phone buzzes. A text from Theo.

Niko and Fey are going to come over instead. They’ll bring food!

I sigh, but respond to the text with a thumbs-up, then drop the phone into the basket beneath the stroller. Theo means well. He’s trying to include me. He thinks it would help if I made mom friends, if I arranged coffee dates to “stay in touch” with my co-workers at the Academy of Natural Sciences. He hopes that if I take regular showers, and change out of my sweatpants, and spend increasingly long increments of time away from Lucy, I’ll emerge on the other side of this fog, my old self again.

Theo doesn’t know about my family.

I told him on an early date, drinking old-fashioneds out of a thermos on the steps of the art museum, that I don’t know who my father is. That my mother is a hippie, a little self-involved. I told him I went to live with my aunt when I was a teenager and haven’t spoken to my mother in a long time. “Estranged” was the word I used, and it felt good rolling off my tongue, like I could fix the separation whenever I wanted. As soon as I decided it was time.

That must be so hard, Theo said, his eyes glassy and sympathetic.

It’s fine, I said, brushing it off. It’s just how it is.

We had late-into-the-night conversations about cutting off a parent, about setting boundaries, about forgiveness, and there was never a good time to tell him those conversations were based on a part-fiction. So now he thinks what I’m experiencing—postpartum depression, he’s decided, neat and clinical—is a phase, a hormonal imbalance, something to manage and correct and get through.

I have experienced this before, and it is not depression. It is an untethering. But that’s not something Theo will understand.

“Ready, sweet girl?” I ask Lucy.

We walk, navigating the uneven sidewalks, driven up by tree roots. I put in my earphones and settle into the back-and-forth of two podcast hosts discussing the highs and lows of parenting. One has preschoolers and the other has kids in middle and high school, and their struggles—the negotiations, the school politics, the iPads and phones and friends exerting questionable influence—seem so foreign. I can’t imagine Lucy as a toddler, an eight-year-old, a preteen, and sometimes my inability to do so makes me uncomfortable, like Lucy isn’t meant to reach those ages. I have that thought again now, and I push it aside.