Lena is up with the baby already.

I turn over on the couch, where I’ve curled into one corner. In the middle of the night, I didn’t have the energy to move Lena’s laptop. Instead, I just slept around it.

The couch smells like dried-up white wine in one spot, something I never realized until I started sleeping here. We must have spilled it a long time ago. We haven’t had wine in the house for two years, since before the IVF, before the cycle-coded calendar in the kitchen and the evenings we’d giggled and clinked together the matching self-insemination syringes.

Cheers! We’d said.

I squint into the living room, listening for the baby’s whimper as I look at the time. It’s 5:30, which feels like a blessing. Four hours of sleep. I’m sure Lena got less.

The baby sounds rise and fall, closer. Under them, I hear Lena’s slow footsteps padding down the hallway. There’s a sear of guilt as I consider, split-second, whether to pretend to be asleep still. But then they’re here in the room.

“Good morning, mama,” Lena murmurs, more to the baby than to me.

“Good morning, mama,” I say back, smiling.

As always, when the baby is actually here, in front of me, with her tiny wiggling shrimp fingers and her face squashed up in the huge effort of crying or gurgling or smiling, I melt.

What’s happening to me? I’d said to the delivery nurse, when I felt my eyes overflow all at once, nothing like the crying I was used to.

Welcome to parenthood, she’d said. It felt practiced, tailored to the bewildered men she was used to seeing in the delivery room. Not to me, who could have been in Lena’s place if it had gone that way.

“I’m going to make some decaf,” Lena whispers to me. The baby is settling into her chest, little face slack over the edge of the wrap Lena wears to hold her close, to be one being. “Will you do the bottles?”

I nod and roll out of the throw blanket that I’ve gotten used to sleeping under. Lena sways toward the kitchen, her soft hums keeping the baby quiet. As I turn to fold the throw—a semblance of the normal, neither of us want to talk about how I’ve been sleeping out here—I see them.

Four wet shapes on the floor in front of the coffee table.

Smudged half-circles I can only see because thin light through the living room window catches them.

I gaze around the room, trying to identify the source. My face feels slack with sleep and confusion. Maybe I spilled a glass of water as I moved the coffee table in the night, half-awake? But, no, it rests on modern, square legs. Too heavy for me to have shoved it semi-conscious, and the wrong shape to leave those marks. And there is no glass of water.

“Did you move the crib last night?” I whisper to Lena when I’m in the kitchen, rinsing bottle rings as she clicks on the coffeemaker.

She frowns at me over her shoulder.

“From our room?” she asks.

It stings to hear her say our room. It is ours, but I’m on the couch now and she’s with the baby. I wonder if that’s what she means, even by accident: her room and the baby’s room. Ours.

“Yeah,” I say. “It looks like something got moved in front of the coffee table.”

“What do you mean?”

“Marks on the floor,” I say. “Did we spill something?”

Lena shakes her head in the same gentle cadence that she approaches every movement, now. Back and forth, quiet and smooth. Serene. I feel like I can’t keep up with it.

“Maybe we have a leak,” she says, handing me a mug.

The baby makes a quiet little sound and a fist emerges from her onesie to curl toward Lena’s hair. I take a sip. Decaf coffee tastes the same as regular, to me.

It takes almost until evening for me to remember to check the living room ceiling. The baby is restless today, a continuation of last night. Lena tries to open her laptop for the third time only for the baby to wake and squeal again.

“I thought you were on maternity leave,” I say, trying to tease gently. I worry it comes out shrill.

“Just a couple of emails,” she whispers, reaching for a bottle as she pulls the baby into her arms, balancing the open computer.

“They should know better than to email you,” I say. “Let me take her.”

Lena hesitates a millisecond too long.

“Thanks.”

The baby is always warmer than I remember. Even though I touch her dozens of times a day—when Lena showers, when she wants to change her clothes or stretch her arms–it’s as though my skin forgets. And my nose forgets her smell, which up close is overpowering, the raw scent of brand-new flesh, of being completely alive. I kiss her forehead and try to ignore how immediately she returns to fussing in my arms. I whisk her away into the kitchen to defrost the 4pm bottle. I try to replicate Lena’s soft sway as I walk and it feels clumsy in my hips.

Lena takes a half hour to frown over her laptop. The baby, meanwhile, naps fitfully in my tired arms. I don’t know what to call it when, dozing, she turns her sucking mouth to my breast. I know that I scowl and then turn red, ashamed.

When Lena joins us, a thin crease has appeared between her eyebrows. It’s the face of the old Lena, the Lena who would stride through the front door promptly at six, who would lean in to kiss me at my desk, who would regale me with complaints about her coworkers over dinner, to my delight.

Her reading glasses are still on, giving her eyes a slight distortion that makes me love her with such violence I’m surprised at myself. I lean over the baby’s head.

“You’re so beautiful,” I whisper.

Lena rolls her eyes.

“Never prettier than when I’m wearing nipple guards,” she says.

But she kisses me anyway, lingering in a way that weakens every joint in my body. Her mouth tastes like the syrupy tea our doula gave her. I watch the crease smooth itself as she nestles the baby onto her shoulder. And then they both are gone.

The new Lena, born with the baby, floats on something I can’t see, a buoyancy in her movements that gently bobs her away from the shore, out of reach.

I pull out the stepladder and haul it to the living room.

The ceiling is dusty. Cobwebs form tracery against the stucco. I find several things I need to do—fix a piece of crown molding that’s coming loose, replace the batteries in a smoke detector, repaint—but I don’t find a leak. I even check around the casing of the ceiling fan’s motor, wiping lint from its blades which falls like snow. But the ceiling is unblemished, and there are no signs that anything has dripped through it and onto the floor.

From the stepladder, I can barely see the smeared shapes, but when I climb back down, the light hits them again. Four sloppy curves, evenly spaced. They’re not water stains, I realize, or not just water. They’re greasy, like oil wiped by a rag. One of them is crusted with a thin rind of mud, as though tracked in and left there, but there is nothing in any other direction.

I sweep up the lint and spray down the smears with cleaner. When I come back with a handful of paper towels, I can’t even see them anymore.

That night, I make soup for Lena with as many beans and vegetables as I can. My body feels hollow from lack of sleep, and I can only imagine the wear on hers. It’s hard not to compare how I think I’d do in her place.

There were pros and cons for each of us, but we’d agreed it was lucky that Lena had conceived instead of me. Her company’s maternity leave was generous, whereas my freelance work was spotty at best. And so that was the reason we clung to, along with little things: the year difference in our ages, Lena’s family a few hours closer than mine. But we both knew the real reason: that she was better at hard things.

It was my hands that had gone numb as she pushed through the tenth hour of labor, and it was me that the nurse handed a cup of juice to, saying I looked pale.

When dinnertime comes, Lena doesn’t eat the soup because the baby can only settle when she’s bounced on tiptoes. I offer, half-joking, to feed Lena spoonfuls as she bobs.

“I’ll get a bowl in a bit, when she’s down,” she whispers. “Smells amazing.”

Much later that night, I awake in a panic.

Before my eyes are open, I’m thrashing to get my legs untangled from the couch throw. The baby has screamed louder than I’ve ever heard her, and my heart pounds in my throat. But as I struggle to sit up on the couch, I realize the house is silent. I stiffen and wait for the next round of cries. I listen for Lena. But all I hear is the soft click and hum of the refrigerator’s compressor and the faraway whir of the white noise machine that Lena plays for the baby. I must have dreamed the scream.

I blink into the dark living room, waiting for my breath and pulse to calm, trying to make out the bleary shapes around me.

And then, one shifts.

Just slightly. An adjustment. The rise of a spine with a breath.

I do not move.

I know I am mistaken. I must be. My eyes dart to the curtains that I forgot to pull closed all the way, so that they billow in the air from the vent. When my eyes slide back, the shape has resolved itself—a heaped blanket with one of the baby’s slings sprawled on top of it—and I’m alone.

I squint at the heap through my lashes, trying to recreate what I thought I’d seen. But it stays gone, the objects insensate. They do not breathe again.

I fall back asleep. It takes a long time. The baby sleeps through the night.

“You can always just get her flowers,” my mother says through the phone.

I am loitering in the detergent aisle. We don’t need detergent, but I’ve already put the fruit Lena asked for and all the other things on the list into the cart, and the conversation doesn’t feel finished.

“They’re nice,” she’s saying, almost defensive. “It’s a cliché for a reason. That’s what your father did, and I always loved them. Keep it simple.”

“That’s true,” I say, trying to remember Lena’s favorites. Lilies? “I guess… I don’t know, for her first Mother’s Day I want it to be special.”

“Sweetheart, you’re going to do this every year. Next year with a toddler, and then the macaroni art starts to come home from preschool and that’ll be better than anything you could buy her.”

She’s doing something in the kitchen. I can hear cabinets opening and banging shut. I picture her pinching her cell phone between her shoulder and ear, like I’m doing.

“Bottles every four hours, still?” Mom asks.

“She slept almost seven hours last night,” I say proudly, like I’m supposed to. My mother is excited to hear this.

“Isn’t it so sad when one stage is over?” she says. “You miss it, even though you couldn’t wait to be done.”

Mom promises to text me a website that has the kind of lilies she remembers Lena ordering for our wedding.

“And get yourself something, sweetie,” she adds. “You’re a mom, now, too.”

When I get home, Lena is asleep on the armchair with her feet up on the coffee table, the baby napping on her chest. They’re beautiful together, matching in soft beige without meaning to, dappled in the afternoon light. I feel for my phone to take a picture. Something to send to my mother, though I realize it’ll mean keeping the picture myself. I don’t think about that. One of the grocery bags rustles in my hands and Lena opens an eye.

“How’s the world?” she murmurs.

“You’re not missing anything,” I whisper, snap a picture, hit send.

I stare at the ceiling fan. Dim light filters in through the curtains from the street lamp. A shred of lint that I missed hangs off of one of the blades.

I had promised myself, locking eyes with my reflection as I brushed my teeth, that I wouldn’t check the time. I remember the deep breathing exercises I’d learned from an online video years ago, and resolve to try them instead, letting breath fill my lungs and press against my taut diaphragm. Hold for a moment. Then out in a hiss. The video had dissolved into slow-motion footage of waves crashing against sand, and I close my eyes, trying to picture them as I breathe in and out.

As I slide into sleep, the sound of my breath twists and doubles into a sound like the rush of water at the edge of my consciousness, filling the room.

In the morning, my hands are still clasped to my ribcage where I’d placed them to measure my breaths in. On the floor, the prints, greasy and caked with thicker mud, are back.

“Have I ever sleepwalked?” I ask Lena.

I’m picking up each of my shoes, looking for grime. She’s feeding the baby in bed, a curved pillow wrapped around her like a cloud. She looks up at me and I see the bliss drop from her expression slightly.

“No,” she says. “Why?”

“These marks keep showing up on the floor,” I say. “It’s not a leak. I checked.”

Lena shakes her head slowly.

“Maybe you tracked something in when you shopped yesterday?” she said. “I bet we’re just too tired to notice. Things are going to fall by the wayside for a while.”

I nod, but I don’t agree. She doesn’t seem tired at all. She is doing so much. The least I can do is keep the house together.

“I’m going to mop again,” I say. “Do you need anything?”

She smiles at me, looks down at the baby who swallows softly and grips the bottle in her tiny fist.

“I’m all set.”

The marks on the floor are clearer. This time, before I spray them down and fill the mop bucket, I examine their shape. They are heavy on one side and delicate on the other, as though whatever made them was leaning off-kilter. And there are small splits down the center of each that remind me of something I can’t place right away.

When I’m filling the mop bucket, I remember the summer in my early teens that I spent at a wilderness camp, where we earned points for correctly identifying animal tracks from a chart. Graceful crescents for whitetail deer, skinny cat-paws for red fox, cloven lobes for bison.

I stare at the prints now, bottle of cleanser in hand, blinking. In the split-seconds between my eyes opening and closing, I try to conjure whatever creature I imagine leaving these tracks. Do I see afterimages shimmer behind my closed eyes? Gnarled legs, jet-black and dripping, thick-knuckled and long. I know I am imagining them, but they are clearer than anything I’ve imagined before. Images shift and warp in my mind, usually. These stay. I close my eyes as long as I dare. A few seconds, and then my pounding heart forces them open. I spray the floor down again and leave the mop there.

At five, I take out the package of frozen ravioli, but I forget it on the counter. When the washing machine chimes, I gasp and realize I’ve been sitting on the couch for almost an hour. I rush to switch the laundry and start a pot of water boiling before Lena and the baby wake up from their nap.

When Lena comes in, her hair is tied back in a bun, her glasses pushed to her forehead, and her phone in her hand. The baby is wriggling in her sling.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she says. She doesn’t whisper. She’s right there.

“What?”

“I swear,” she says, “They can’t do anything.”

Pacing with the baby as I chop an onion for sauce, Lena details the disaster unfolding at her workplace. The someone or someones assigned to cover Lena’s HR management role in her absence have fumbled their jobs so badly that a former employee has filed a lawsuit, throwing the company into crisis.

“Unbelievable,” I sneer, gleeful. The gossip feels precious, the laughter between us at others’ expense a balm. I’ve missed this more than I can bear.

“But,” she grins, “You’ll never guess what else.”

I widen my eyes. I am her audience and my attention on her is rapt.

“They offered me half-time to help organize everything for the lawyers. They’ll pay me for full-time, plus overtime, plus they’ll grant me additional leave.”

Lena caresses the baby and talks on about the timeline of the suit, the benefit to her resume, the validation that she is indispensable to the company. I smile approvingly. I ignore the heat in my face and the spikes in my throat.

“It does mean,” she says, “That I’ll need to leave the baby with you while I’m at work for a few weeks. Just a couple hours a day. I hope that’s okay. They’re offering so much money. It has to be worth it.”

I nod vigorously, blinking water from my eyes. I wince at the tang of onion and the taste of salt.

“Of course,” I say, and then the lie tumbles from my lips. “What could be better than more time with my favorite person?”

That Wednesday, the house sounds different.

Lena is up early, and all the lights in the kitchen are on. The radio reports the news, and she pulls out the stepladder to get the regular coffee pods out of a cabinet.

“I pumped already,” she says, winking. “There’s more than enough milk in the fridge for today.”

She pours coffee into a tumbler, grabs her keys, and is gone.

The baby frowns up at me from her bouncer, squinting in the bright light.

From the kitchen, I can see the tracks on the floor in the living room, in front of the coffee table.

The baby cries almost all day. I do not go into the living room. The prints are still there that night.

I sleep with my arms folded around my head, covering my ears. All night, I keep waking to the sound of something very loud, but very far away, a crushing roar like a waterfall.

At dawn, I peer under my forearm and think that I see an eye, huge and black, glistening and soaked.

I do not breathe until Lena bustles in to hand me the baby and kiss me as she breezes out the door.

Nothing is there when I look back.

“Have a good day,” I whisper, but the door is already closed.

Today the baby screams at me nonstop as I try to give her a bath. I give up, shaking and sobbing, and pat her down with baby wipes while she howls. Her little face contorts and turns red, then nearly purple. I back away.

“I’m sorry,” I plead. “Please, I’m so sorry.”

She purses her lips when I try to give her a bottle, later. She kicks me when I change her. I’m sweating through my clothes by the time Lena comes home.

She takes the baby from me without a word.

I scrub the living room floor until my cuticles bleed. The tracks do not disappear.

The baby cries throughout the night, and I lose count of how many times I hear Lena get up to soothe her after the first dozen.

It is darker than usual, and I realize that the streetlight has gone out. I stare across the living room and do not flinch when it appears.

All of it.

Skinny, contorted legs lead up to a body twisted with jutting bones, at once heavy and emaciated. An angular head with one bleary eye that sees nothing and another that gazes at me, shining, wet, and huge. Whether the thing drips with water or some greasy tar I can’t tell, but the whole of it is a smear, dribbling down limbs to the floor below, as if oozing from the pores beneath the thick, dark fur.

The baby’s cries echo down the hall and the creature opens its blurry mouth. Water gushes out, more and faster than can be possible, as though draining an entire sea. I am drenched, and it is not cold but boiling and salty, and it blisters my skin and the raw flesh of my throat as it pours over me in waves. I feel pieces of myself dissolve and then I wake up for real, gasping as I wipe thick sweat from my eyes.

I rush to check on the baby, but Lena already has her.

It is the weekend, and Lena shakes her head at me as I stumble into the kitchen well after ten.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I overslept.”

“You look terrible,” she says. She feels my forehead with the back of her palm. “You’re warm.”

Panicked, I fumble for a face mask from the junk drawer, but Lena waves it off.

“You’re probably just run down,” she says. “I can’t imagine how hard it is to take care of her all on your own.”

She points me into the bedroom with strict instructions to take acetaminophen and rest. When I lie down, the bed smells like Lena, but it is not familiar at all.

I am small in my fever dreams, shrunk down to half size or less. I wander around our house for what feels like hours, dream-time stretched out and disjointed. I’m looking for someone, but not for Lena, and I can’t figure out who it is. When I call out, I find my mouth doesn’t form words, and my voice sounds absurd. Our house bobs up and down as though it is floating on a river. I hear the roar of water everywhere.

On Sunday afternoon, my fever breaks. Lena brings me a plate of leftovers from the takeout she has ordered.

“We miss you,” she says. She’s not carrying the baby. Sensible, in case I’m contagious. I wrap my arms around her and squeeze her tight.

On Monday, Lena lingers in the kitchen, her keys in hand.

“You’re sure you’re okay with her?” she says. “You’re feeling up to it?”

“Of course,” I say, smiling. I’m bouncing the baby, who wiggles in her sling in my arms.

“Call me if you need anything.”

I walk around the house all day with the baby wrapped tight against me. I get the laundry done, then re-organize the kitchen and clean the bathroom. Whenever I walk through the living room, the creature stares at me and drips.

My mother calls, and I pinch the phone between my ear and shoulder as I throw silverware into the dishwasher.

“Sweetie, what’s wrong with the baby?” she asks, alarmed.

I hadn’t realized she was crying. I drop a handful of spoons and get a bottle out of the fridge.

“Gosh,” my mother says, more to herself than to me. “She sounds like how you did when you were that age. Blood-curdling, that’s what your father used to call it, when you cried.”

I don’t know what to say. The baby whimpers a little as she sucks down the bottle of milk, as if she’s angry with me.

“It’s so hard at this age,” my mother continues. “But it’s really not forever, sweetheart. You’ve just got to get through the first year, really.”

I don’t know what time it is. I can’t even think past the next hour.

“You know,” my mother says, “I sometimes used to run the faucet in the sink and turn the shower on at the same time when I couldn’t get you to settle down.”

My breath catches.

“Something about the noise of running water seemed to help,” she says, and then laughs. “Or maybe it was just that I couldn’t hear you and Lord knows I needed that little break sometimes.”

I don’t register what else she says. I’m running water over the dishes in the sink, and it’s deafening. The sound is all around me, and then it concentrates in the living room, drawing me to it. I drop my phone and it splashes on the floor.

The creature turns toward me. Its mouth is open down to its knees.

Lena is shaking me. With a sting, I feel her slap across my face.

“What?” I shriek, “What?”

“Where is the baby?” she screams, her face flushed with rage. “What’s wrong with you?”

“She’s—” I flounder, looking around frantically. “She’s here—”

I’m soaking from head to toe, my hair dripping into my face and onto the living room floor.

Lena has left the front door open and I hear her crashing through rooms down the hall.

“Why?” she screams, “Why is she in the bathroom by herself?”

I don’t hear what she says next, so I don’t know where it is that she says she is going with the baby, who she has wrapped in a towel and is hugging close while she throws things into the diaper bag and clutches her keys. I can only hear the roar of water. I feel the look she gives me though—heartbreak, sorrow—like a knife to my stomach.

I turn to the creature as the door slams behind them.

It looks back at me, eyes streaming. I hear something, now. Beneath the water’s roar, I hear the whimper at last, a little cry of terror and anguish. It’s been there the whole time, an urgent pull. Please.

I open my arms.

“Come here,” I whisper.

It climbs into my embrace, its sickly legs trailing down into the pool of water beneath us. It is light and fragile, and I feel the tiny warmth within it, the fluttering of its heartbeat. I smell the wet scent of its skin. It trembles against my collarbone.

“It’s all right,” I whisper. I rock gently back and forth. I move to the couch, and we nestle as one into the soft cushions. I find a blanket and dry us both.

“I’ve got you,” I say, over and over. “I’ve got you.”