Page 10 of Single Pucking Orc

Everything after the crib went poorly.

It began with a grizzle around seven. He had been prepared for a grizzle. Mildred had sent him home with a written copy of Charlie’s routine, and he had studied the sheet with more concentration than he’d given some playbooks.

Six ounces. He could make six ounces. He measured the water, added the correct amount of formula, and shook the bottle. He tested it on his wrist and got nothing, because his wrist was orc-hide and had stopped a slapshot in the third period two weeks ago. Then he sat on the couch with Charlie tucked against him and offered it to her.

She drank an ounce and a half. Then she turned her head away.

“Okay.” He checked Mildred’s sheet. “Not hungry. We can work with not hungry.”

Twenty minutes later, Charlie started crying properly. He offered the bottle again. She rejected it with a full-body recoil, as though he’d handed her a live eel.

Somewhere in the feeding disaster he’d detected a smell, and detection led, inevitably, to investigation. He’d laid her on the play mat and opened the diaper the way a male opens a package that might be a bomb. The situation was worse than the intelligence had suggested. He’d used, by conservative estimate, nineteen wipes. He needed three attempts to get the tabs even, but the diaper remained attached when he picked her up, which seemed like the important part.

She kept crying. He walked her around the house and that worked for approximately seven minutes. She went soft and heavy against his chest, her cheek warm beneath his chin. He paced slowly through the living room, past the pink play mat, the pink bags, the pink blankets, and the giant saucer thing. The stuffed unicorn watched him from the armchair.

He’d gone too far with the pink. He could admit that now. But at the store, girl had been one of perhaps six facts he possessed about his daughter, and he’d apparently felt compelled to shop accordingly.

Charlie’s breathing slowed, and he stopped moving. Nothing happened. Carefully, he lowered himself towards the couch. The leather made the faintest whisper beneath his weight, and her eyes opened.

“Oh, come on.”

Her face crumpled. He stood up again.

By eight-thirty he had reconstructed the evening as a series of engagements, none of which he was exactly losing but none of which he appeared capable of winning. The feeding had failed. The diaper had been changed twice, the second time unnecessarily because he’d run out of ideas and it was one of the things he now knew how to do. The rocking worked only as long as he continued rocking. The crib was apparently an instrument of torture.

He’d followed the instructions. He’d turned the lights down. He’d made sure her diaper was clean and tucked her into the sleep sack before putting her on her back in the empty crib. He stood there with one hand resting lightly on her belly, because she’d seemed to like that. For one glorious moment, she’d stared up at him in silence.

Then her chin went, and she screamed like he’d dropped her in a lake.

“Okay—okay, no, we’re not doing the crib, message received.” He scooped her back up and the screaming downshifted to a hiccupping, wounded whimper. He stood there holding her against his chest, and for a whole minute, it was fine. She fit into the crook of his arm like she’d been fitted there by a machinist. Her tiny hand found his beard and gripped it, and the tugging hurt in a way he decided he liked. Her breathing slowed, and he thought, There. Got it. What was everybody so worried about.

Then the crying started again.

By ten, the crying had become a cycle. She would settle for five minutes, sometimes ten, and he would begin to believe he had finally solved the problem. Then she would start again, more exhausted and more furious than before.

He stood in the middle of his living room and realized something about himself that he did not enjoy.

He was scared.

Not the fun kind. Not the drop-of-the-puck kind. He was scared in a way that made his enormous capable hands feel like oven mitts, because she was so small and she was so upset and he could not fix it and what if it was him. What if there was something wrong and he was too stupid to see it. What if she was sick, or hurt, or hungry in a way he’d misread. What if the reason a baby screamed for three hours in a house full of pink was that the baby knew that the male holding her had no idea what he was doing and never would.

Do you even know how to take care of a baby?

“I’ve got you,” he said, and his voice cracked. That scared him worse than anything, because Rognar Stonebreaker’s voice did not crack. “Hey. Hey, Charlie. I’ve got you. I do. I swear I do.”

She screamed.

Orc hearing was no help at all. It had never once been a disadvantage before. He could pick a linemate’s voice out of a full arena. He could hear a stick lift behind him with his back turned. Right now, he could hear every catch and hitch in Charlie’s breathing from four inches away, and each one went through his skull like a blade.

Underneath the fear was the protective instinct that had flared in the attorney’s office. Now it was pacing around inside him, demanding that he find whatever was hurting her and remove it from the world. It didn’t seem to understand that there was nothing to fight.

“Okay,” he murmured, shifting Charlie higher against his shoulder. “I know. I know.”

She cried harder. He got her into the sling because his arms were beginning to ache and because it left him a free hand. Then he stood in his kitchen and read. His phone lay on the counter with nine tabs open. One said prolonged crying could be caused by overtiredness. Another listed teething. A third said gas. A fourth had an alarming list of reasons to seek immediate medical care, and he checked every one of them twice.

No fever. Breathing normal despite the crying. No rash. No vomiting. Nothing visibly swollen or injured. Mildred’s notes said Charlie had eaten normally earlier in the afternoon, although she’d taken considerably less than usual since coming home with him.

A message board informed him that he should simply let her cry it out. He closed that tab with enough force to make the screen shake.