“Don’t call Graham,” she said, but it was so muffled Landon felt the need to clarify.
“Call Graham.”
“Don’t,”she said. “Would you just walk me home? It worked last time.”
“Oh,” Landon said. “Yeah, of course. Toward New Town?” Spending time with Rose was the name of the game, but the walkto Graham’s flat would take him about as far away from his hostel as anywhere in the city could. He would do it anyway, of course. He would do anything for her.
“Too far,” she said, grabbing another fist full of tissues. “Walk me to my place on Holyrood. It’s close by.”
Landon knew the place: 39 Holyrood Road, flat 5B. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, yeah.” He held out his arm for her, and she took it, a bit of blood seeping into the blue of his long-sleeved shirt.
“I feel a little dizzy,” she said, and corroborated the statement by tripping over her feet. Landon slipped an arm around her waist without thinking.
“I have to warn you that if you faint, I’m going to call an ambulance.”
Rose giggled. “That’s fine,” she said. “They’ve got subsidized health care here. When all’s said and done, it probably won’t be much more than a cab ride.” Despite the cold, her body was warm, comforting, and just as soft as he remembered. It felt dangerous to be this close to her. “You know your way to Holyrood by now?” she asked. “It’s not far from the Cowgate. Just keep your eye on Arthur’s Seat and you’ll find it.”
“You’re talking like you’re absolutely going to pass out on me.”
“Less talking, more walking!” Rose laughed as blood seeped through the tissue.
Landon ignored the creeping feeling that he was in far deeper than he realized and tried to forget anything other than how good it felt to hold her. It’s what Jamie would have done.
Chapter Twenty-Two
When Rose was pregnant, their friends with kids had tried their best to prepare them for all the ways their lives would change. “You won’t be you, anymore,” they’d emphasized over beer, wine, and charcuterie boards. “And there’s no going back. Once you’re a parent, that’s it. Boom, poof! Your life is different. You are different. You’re a mom. You’re a dad.” As the beer and wine flowed, the advice turned increasingly fatalistic. “You won’t have a moment of peace,” they’d said. “And you can forget about your marriage, or at least your sex life, until they hit double digits. You will argue over the dumbest things. You might even hate each other a little. It’s a phase, though. You’ve got to remember that every bit of it is a phase.” Another glass in, and the advice tempered with hints of romanticism. “You’ve never felt love like this,” they’d said. “There’s nothing on earth like it. All of a sudden, your heart is going to be walking around outside your body. It is the most rewarding thing you’ll ever do. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without them.”
Some of it turned out to be true; stale advice doesn’t spread so widely without a kernel of truth. But all of it assumed a birth that conformed to one of many standard scripts. None of it accountedfor a brush with death. And at night, when the wind howled and trees scratched at the windows, and Rose was truly honest with herself, she knew it had been much more than a close call: She’d seen and felt things that tested the limits of human understanding. The kind of things that made her consider taking Cordelia to a different church every Sunday, searching for the God who had spared her at the last minute.
No, there was no advice that could account for what Rose had experienced and Landon had witnessed. If a script existed for them to follow, it was buried beneath such a heavy layer of unprocessed fear and pain that the words might as well have been written in a dead language. In some ways, the job of taking care of a newborn was the perfect antidote. “What does she need?” they asked themselves in twenty-minute increments: a diaper change, to work through gas, to eat, to sleep. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
In their first weeks at home, Landon asked Rose that same question—What do you need?—at increasingly shorter intervals, desperate to be able to do something tangible to show Rose he could take care of her. “I’m fine,” she’d say. “I need you to change her diaper,” or “burp her,” or “give her a bottle.” The baby required every ounce of their shared focus, so there were a hundred things Rose could say to turn his attention away from her and onto the newborn. But the truth was, Rose worried if Landon looked at her too long and too close, he would see she was broken. When she held her child, she didn’t feel the way all the books had promised she would: overcome with love, swimming in the kind of contentment that makes life feel worth living. When she held her child, she felt the kinds of unpleasant emotions usually reserved for life’s worst moments: anxiety, fear, and, worst of all, indifference. Then came the shame, no matter the unpleasant emotion that precededit. She was so, so ashamed. Why wasn’t she more connected? She had survived so that she could dothis.
Ten weeks after Rose and Landon brought Cordelia home, Poppy invited them to spend the weekend on Cape Cod. It was a yearly tradition Rose had expected she and Landon would skip, especially since Poppy had a standing invitation to make a fuss over Cordelia at their house—one she had taken them up on several times already. But Rose had been closed off like a clam, she and Landon on opposite night shifts with the baby, bleary-eyed and often short-tempered during the day. Landon did not know that to protect Rose would have meant saying no. He was so taken by the idea of sharing this new phase of their lives with the people they loved that, instead of confirming with Rose whether she felt the weekend was something she could handle, he asked Poppy if there might be room for Conor and Bill that year, too. And Poppy, eager to do anything in her power to make Rose happy, obliged. What could Rose say, then, that would not give herself away?
On the car ride there, Rose sat in the back with Cordelia. She stared at her daughter—her button nose, spiky brown hair, and murky eyes—and wondered if she was becoming what she had most feared: her mother. Because the thought was simply one in a long line of distressing thoughts, it did not scare her as much as it might have if it had intruded on joy. She said hello to the thought and tucked it away so that it could gnaw at her later, when the night was dark and she was alone.
“I can’t believe we’re really doing this,” Landon said from the front seat, turning his head slightly but not taking his eyes off the road.
“Me neither,” Rose said truthfully.
“Conor and Bill aren’t going to know what to do withthemselves around her. I mean, she’s just perfect. It doesn’t matter how tired I am. I wake up every morning and can’t believe she’s mine. Can you even believe she’s yours?”
At least she has a father who’s like something out of a fairy tale, Rose thought. “I can’t believe it.”
“A baby on the beach, can you imagine? I’ve always pictured us with a baby on the beach.”
Had there been a version of Rose who had imagined that, too? There must have. But the woman in the car sitting beside the perfect baby did not picture anything.
“I can’t believe this is our first year on Cape Cod as a little family. You, me, and Cordelia,” he said.
Rose felt they had been a little family for a long time now, from the moment they’d been proclaimed husband and wife, but a combination of exhaustion and apathy inspired her to keep that to herself. “Could you watch the road, please?” Landon turned his head back and gripped the steering wheel tighter.
“You’re right,” he said. “Can’t be too safe. Not with such precious cargo.”
Rose stared at Cordelia again. Her eyes were shut now, and she was whimpering in her sleep.You love her, Rose reminded herself.You love her, you love her, you love her.She closed her eyes, too. Maybe a change of scenery was all that she needed. Maybe there would be something medicinal about the salt and the sand that would help wake her up. The thought made her feel good. Better than she had in ten weeks. It felt so good to hope.
Sitting beside a body of water—any body of water—had once been a time-honored way for Rose to decompress. Landon set the chairs out early, before the sun was up, and she followed behindwith Cordelia in her arms, sinking her toes in the sand and hoping to feel even a fraction of what she once had when standing at the edge of the ocean. The breeze was warm and sticky, but the sand held the night’s chill, cooling the bottoms of their feet. Landon guarded Rose’s coffee mug while she nursed Cordelia and passed it back into her waiting hand when the baby dozed off on her chest, lulled to sleep by the predictability of crashing waves. Rose looked out toward the horizon and begged herself to feel something.
