Easy to lose track of a lot of things. He disappeared to feed Emma and Cara explored the kitchen. Found potatoes, a jar of preserved green beans, some salt pork, flour, sugar, a precious tin of cinnamon. Enough for something. Enough to mark the day as different from the ones that came before or after.
While her hands worked peeling, chopping familiar motions that required no thought, her eyes wandered the room. The photograph on the mantle drew her attention the way wounds draw fingers irresistibly painfully a woman holding a newborn. Dark hair, tired smile, luminous with new mother joy. The date carved into the wooden frame. May 14th, 1885.
6 months ago, Emma was 6 months old. Carara's hand stillilled on the potato. The math was simple and devastating. Jonathan found her standing there, knife forgotten, staring at the photograph. She heard him stop in the doorway, felt his presence without turning.
"Her name was Mary," he said quietly. "She didn't even get to hold Emma, not while she was alive. " They put the baby in her arms after, but his voice fractured. She couldn't feel it. Cara turned to face him. His eyes were dry but ancient, carrying weight no young father should bear.
"I'm sorry," she said. The words felt pathetically inadequate. She'd heard them a thousand times herself. "I know you understand. " He crossed his arms, a defensive gesture. "I can see it.
Whatever you lost, it's written all over you. " Outside, the storm pressed against the house like something trying to get in. Or maybe something trying to keep them sealed together. Two wounded creatures trapped in close quarters with an infant who needed them both. "The potatoes won't peel themselves," Cara said finally because there was nothing else to say. Jonathan nodded, picked up a knife, stood beside her at the counter.
They worked in silence, shoulders almost touching, and let the storm do the talking. The language of care. The second day found its own rhythm. Cara woke before dawn to Emma's fussing and made it to the bedroom before Jonathan fully emerged from sleep. She changed the wet diaper with hands that remembered how, warmed a bottle, settled into the rocking chair by the fire to feed the baby while first light turned the frost on the windows to diamonds.
Jonathan found them there an hour later, stopped in the doorway. Something crossed his face. Relief, guilt, longing, loss too quick for Cara to name before he shuddered it away. You didn't have to do that, he said. I know.
You should have woken me. You needed sleep more than I needed to be woken. He couldn't argue with that. Dark circles under his eyes had lightened slightly, just from one uninterrupted stretch. Cara wondered how long it had been since he'd slept more than 2 hours at a time.
They fell into division without discussion. Cara handled the morning feeding, the midday bathing. The fussy hour before sunset when Emma seemed determined to cry at the unfairness of existence. Jonathan chopped wood, hauled water, kept the fire burning, tended to Cara's mare in the barn, but he kept finding reasons to be in the house. Through the frostedged window, he watched Cara bathe Emma in the basin.
Steam rose around them both. Carara's sleeves were pushed past her elbows, her hair coming loose from its pins. And she was singing that same low melody she'd hummed the first night. Emma splashed. Small hands grabbed its soap bubbles.
And then something Jonathan hadn't heard in weeks. His daughter laughed. The sound cracked something open in his chest. Cara looked up, saw him watching through the window, and smiled. Not a full smile, something tentative and fragile, but real.
That evening, they prepared supper together, moving around each other in the small kitchen with an ease that should have taken years to develop, not two days. She handed him the salt before he asked for it. He moved the kettle off the heat just as she reached for it. "You've done this before," he said. The baby things, the house things, all of it.
Carara's hands slowed on the bread she was slicing. I was married for 4 years. Spent most of it hoping. She set down the knife. The last few months.