…not exactly the empathy that she had been hoping for.
Once Akemi had bolted down some lunch, she dried Kaleo off and put a fresh diaper on him, then nursed him to sleep.
She successfully transferred him into his travel crib just in time for a business meeting, even though all she really wanted to do was get some sleep herself.
But she had worked hard to get this company’s attention. If she landed this deal, she could earn enough money for a flight to Hawaii with a one-minute video.
She bolted down the leftovers that she had cobbled together, then quickly wiped her face when the call came through.
“Akemi! Hi!” The woman on the other end looked pristine and polished.
Akemi tried to remember the last time she had washed her hair. It was hard to get a full shower in when Kaleo was wailing at the injustice of being imprisoned in his crib in the next room.
Two more people blinked into the virtual meeting room, and Akemi focused on showing up to the call as her brightest self. She talked about how much she loved their carrier – and chose not to mention how Kaleo had absolutely refused to be strapped into it for the past three weeks. The suits on the other end ofthe call were equally complementary about her latest reels.
Akemi had just about closed the deal when a shatteringcrashresounded from the kitchen.
She jumped up without even excusing herself and raced to see what had happened.
A belated wail from Kaleo filled the silence as she rounded the corner to a horrifying scene: her baby sitting in the middle of the small kitchen, surrounded by broken glass.
Akemi hurried to scoop him up and hissed with pain when a small shard bit into her bare foot.
She stood in one place as she inspected her wailing, frightened baby. Miraculously, he was unharmed.
It looked like he’d pulled a glass pitcher down from a low shelf, and it had shattered.
He pulled at her shirt, and she nursed him to calm him down. Gingerly, she picked her way back across the tile floor. The cut on her foot spilled a bright trail of blood as she walked.
“Sorry about that.” She slipped back into the call carefully, so that just her face showed on her section of the screen.
“Is everything alright?” the blonde woman asked, looking concerned.
“Fine,” Akemi said with a wry smile. She pressed one foot on top of the other to stanch the bleeding. “My toddler gave me a scare. Apparently he’s found a way to climb out of his crib. He’s never done that before.”
“I know what that’s like.” The blonde shook her head, but her smile was friendly. “I’ve got a climber too.”
“I apologize for the interruption.” It was a fight to keep her voice steady. Adrenaline coursed through her body; her heart still beat twice as fast as usual.
“Hey, we get it,” said one of the men. “We’re parents too.”
She managed to wrap up the call on a positive note, and then she went to bandage up her foot. As soon as she got the bandage on, she jumped up and grabbed Kaleo, who was heading towards their death trap of a kitchen.
“You donotwant to go in there right now,” she told him.
He screamed his dissent and arched his back, trying to escape.
Akemi put him into his crib. “Can you just stay in there for a minute while I clean up?”
He climbed right back out again.
“Right.” She let out a heavy breath and grabbed one of her carriers.
It took a few minutes to wrestle him into it, and he screamed in her ear for all of the fifteen minutes that it took to clean up the broken glass.
First she swept, and then she crawled around on her hands and knees with a paper towel, hunting down every last glittering shard. All with Kaleo on her back – and he was getting heavier by the day.
When that was finally done, she released him from the carrier – now soaked with pee – and his stupid useless diaper too. Switching brands every time she changed location was a recipe for disaster – blowouts galore, and one rash so bad that it had sent her to the local urgent care, where she trailed her baby around the waiting room for three hours and then went back and forth with a doctor via a translation app with middling success.
