The primal squeal was either salt on the cruel wound of reality or it was part of her delusional mind—Danielle was too tired to know which. In any case, the automaton that she'd become forced her out of bed and down the hall, back toward the nursery, where she was sure she'd literally just left the voracious gremlin. Blinking bleary-eyed into the crib, the woman let pass several seconds while each squawk cut through to her very marrow. Surely some nerve in her brain was going to burst. She'd have an aneurysm. What exactly was an aneurysm? Not nerves, something else—oh, she didn't know what it was, but the unremitting, strident howls of the infant were surely going to give her one. How long had it been? These hours were interminable, and yet she knew how short they were, too, had been through too many nights-turned-days without getting anything close to sleep, and the paranoia that accumulated with each passing moment was more real than the daytime haze that was sure to follow.

At last her conscience won (though it took some time to surface), and she bent to pick up the bawling thing. What did it want? To be fed, again? It'd just nursed, hadn't it? Or did it want to be held? Yet holding it, pacing, cradling, cooing, was dangerous. Danielle was beyond tired, hardly human any more. Her eyes drooped, her arms slackened, the room faded—oh God! Had she almost dropped the baby? She had to sit. To find a chair . . . the rocker. The rocker was wooden and old and incredibly uncomfortable, easier not to fall asleep in. Because she couldn't fall asleep, not while holding the baby.

But sitting had its own problems. The infant was sure sitting meant feeding, apparently, and its quarter-sized hole-of-a-mouth gaped expectantly at the air; its little claws snatched at the collar of the woman's flimsy tanktop. She'd give in; she'd have to give in.

As tired as she was, Danielle cringed at she thought of the agony nursing would bring. Every time the baby clamped down, she was sure it'd been replaced by a piranha. The pain that shot through her scabbed nipples literally curled her toes. Nobody had told her how much this would hurt, how she'd have to bite her lips to keep from crying, how she'd crack and bleed, how she'd live in a ridiculous fear of feedings rather than cherish the bond breastfeeding was supposed to form. Still, the infant wouldn't stop unless she satisfied it, so in trepidation, she pulled back her nursing bra and exposed her breast to the baby. Her hands shook as it latched on; she tightened her entire body to endure the pain, which was nearly unbearable until her nipple numbed to the prolonged suction.

Four weeks—less than four weeks. It hadn't even been a month, yet, and she was beginning to lose her mind. Everyone else made it look so easy, having a baby. Why, plenty of people had them, hundreds of thousands of people, and they were always talking about them, always showering the world with their photos, always going on about the bliss and the cuteness and, yes, the struggles as well but still . . . she hadn't thought it would be this bad. Surely at some point the joy would begin to outweigh the suffering, wouldn't it?

And she was thirty-five. A grown woman who'd very willingly, very consciously made a choice—that was the worst part of it all. Sure she'd never get married, Danielle had done what many single working women approaching middle age did and requested a donor. She'd pored through applications and essays of anonymous men and undergone genetic testing and IUI (fertility was never her problem—it had always been lack of interest in a partner), and very quickly, poof! She'd become pregnant. With pregnancy came a hundred perks she'd never known existed, not least of which were the sympathetic and supportive smiles of other women, the new sense of camaraderie she'd immediately been made privy to. There was a world she'd never known, before, one in which scores of women suddenly became her friends, her sisters-in-arms, where anywhere she went, there was a woman who would congratulate her, who'd ask when the baby was due, who'd gleefully prod at names or gender, who'd discuss every detail of her own pregnancies and deliveries and children (often in far too much detail). Doors would be opened; seats would be offered; compliments ("you're glowing!" "you look fantastic for being thirty weeks!" "I can't even tell you're pregnant from behind! The baby's all front!") would be showered. In spite of the occasional rude negligence or off-putting comment, Danielle had been healthy and happy throughout her entire pregnancy. Even the end, where she'd struggled just to move around the house, had been easy enough in comparison to this—this hell she now suffered.

No one had told her. It'd all been crumbs of reality coated in excitement, the difficulty of becoming a new parent either brushed aside in willful mendacity (it's her turn now, she'll find out, she imagined the others whispering behind her back) or incomprehensibly forgotten by the well-wishers. Either way, she was angry about it, but her absolute exhaustion prevented her from feeling it too keenly.

Danielle's hand went to the back of the infant's head, the dark hair soft across its velvety scalp. The pain was tolerable for the moment, so she sat back against the rocking chair and fought sleep while the baby fed. How had Helen done this three times? Once with two of them! God, how had Helen done it once and then kept at it? If Danielle made it through this, there was no way she'd ever forget, no way she'd go back for another. Surely that was why Joanna had adopted, and Anjulie had stopped at one.

Anjulie! Danielle's thoughts traveled back, back, to a time when she'd been sixteen, and her friend had turned up pregnant. High school pregnancies weren't unheard of, but the fact that the pregnant girl been Anjulie? After all they'd been through, it'd somehow seemed a fitting punishment. And besides, they hadn't really been friends anymore, at that point. She'd thought Anjulie was weak, a complete fake, and she'd distanced herself from her, as they all had. But now, experiencing the pain and loneliness of being a new mother, a deep shame worked its way through her gut. Anjulie had done this all alone, at sixteen! And no one had treated her kindly. No one. Regardless of what had happened when they were kids, Danielle would never have treated Anjulie in such a way if she'd known what she knew now, the utter bleak, life-derailing despair of dealing with an infant. Even the actual birthing had been easier, and Danielle had been in labor for almost twenty hours only to have it all result in a forceps delivery and an episiotomy and physical pain unlike any she'd ever experienced, but she would've gladly taken a second dose if it would've spared her the current soul-sucking, dehumanizing state of the walking dead.

Oh, she wouldn't go back in time to help Anjulie, even if she felt terrible about the ostracism, now; no, literally nothing could convince her to return to her teenaged years. They'd been so marred by everything that had happened with Emily, the occurrence itself, and the confusion, and the accusations, and the darkness that followed. She could see it from her twenty-two years' distance, though she couldn't see it then: Anjulie had been confused and afraid, just as all of them had, and promiscuity had just been her way of dealing with the void.

Danielle hoped Anjulie was happy, wherever she was. And she hoped the same for Joanna. She hadn't seen either of them in years, since they'd graduated high school and gone their own ways. She herself had gotten the hell out of the Midwest, moved to the East Coast and never looked back. Only now, for the first time in years, was she experiencing a bizarre magnetism toward her past, and she had the loneliness, the hollowness, to thank for it. She'd not felt this way so strongly since Emily had gone.

She'd call Helen, that was what she'd do, because she had to do something. The women at work would tell her she'd done it to herself, would feign consolation while hardly concealing their sanctimony. But Helen had four of her own. She had to be able to offer empathy and advice. It'd been a few years since she and Helen had stopped talking semi-regularly, but Danielle still followed her friend's social media, and the frequent candid posts of smiling and laughing and silly children had been part of the reason Danielle had gone off and done this to herself. Helen had made it look so desirable, so easy.

The infant had stopped sucking, she realized. That constant pulling, its stinging pain morphed to a dull throb, had ebbed. The one window in the nursery emitted a creamy blue light through its slatted blinds, burnishing the matching set of high-end furniture in a pearlescent haze. The crib and the chiffarobe, the changing table and the baby-safe shelving unit—all of it so perfectly organized, so cloyingly impeccable. Danielle stared at nothing in particular as with her bare feet she pressed against the floor and moved the chair methodically back and forth, back and forth, listening to the creak of the wood. Somehow, she felt more awake than she should. Perhaps she was getting a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth (who was counting, anymore?)) wind.

Rising, the woman wafted from the nursery, her thin robe catching a non-existent draft behind her. She kept the infant in her arms though did what she'd been taught and stuck her pinky into the corner of the thing's mouth, broke the suction between its lips and her skin, and pulled it away. She didn't even bother to look at it as she moved silently down the hall and into the kitchen, flipped on one of the lights, just kept her left arm crooked horizontal at her chest, propping the baby up. As she strode to the sink, Danielle absently placed her load on the marble island, sliding it toward the middle near the fruit basket. She didn't worry about it rolling off or being upset. Why, it wasn't even making noise, and she was tired—so, so tired.

Turning her back on the infant, she twisted on the warm water and watched it stream from the faucet into the drain. There was something hypnotic in its purity, its simplicity, and she stared as if she were confused about what she was even doing there. After a moment, Danielle put out her hands, cupped the water, and drew it to her face. She soaked a towel and padded it along her collar and breast. Realizing her top was still down and that she was leaking onto her now-damp shirt, she pulled her nursing bra up over her swollen breast and then looked back to the infant, which hadn't made any sound. Its silence didn't surprise her, not quite. There was something wrong with it; that, she knew somehow, innately. It wasn't what it was supposed to be, but she was far too exhausted to really care.

And yet . . .

The baby lay like a doll on the cold, green-flecked countertop, its arms and legs limp, its head turned to one side, away from Danielle so she couldn't see its face. The infant wore only a diaper and a white T-shirt, and it was quite frail, so it was easy to see there was no movement in its tummy, no rising and falling indicating it made any attempt to fill its little lungs.

A pang of guilt shot through Danielle, managing to cut through the cloud of weariness consuming her, and she reached a damp hand toward the thing, rested her palm on its stomach, and turned the infant toward her only to find that what should've been its face was gone, simply gone. There was nothing but a black hole where its nose and eyes and mouth should've been, all of it having entirely caved in.

Gasping, Danielle's entire body jerked, and she found suddenly she was in her rocking chair, in the blue-dusted nursery, everything quiet around her. A quick glance at her lap and she saw the baby on her knees, alive and sleeping but beginning to slide off, so she snapped it back up into her arms and against her chest, where it stirred but miraculously didn't wake.

For several moments, Danielle sat and listened to herself inhale and exhale. The nightmare—it'd felt so real; she turned the baby away from her chest more than once just to establish its features were as they were supposed to be and, of course, they were. Relief mingled with an unease that was stubbornly unwilling to fade. When had she fallen asleep? She didn't even know. She'd been rocking the baby, feeding it, and then . . . at some point, she'd gotten up and moved . . . but she hadn't. That'd been a dream. It'd felt so real, so seamless, so liquid . . . a hallucination, maybe? Was she so tired that she was becoming delirious? But the face—that hole—it'd been so disturbing—

She couldn't think of it. There was no purpose. Danielle rose and gently, ever so cautiously placed the baby on its back in its crib, where it wriggled for a tense moment before settling. The nursery, the hall, her own bedroom felt off after what she'd just imagined; eerie things seemed to hover, to wait in the very air. But the sight of her disheveled bed was too welcoming to ignore, and she climbed in as gingerly as she'd laid down the baby, her own body still sore in so many places.

Not a minute had passed—hardly long enough for her to be grateful—before another squall broke the peace, and Danielle burst into abject tears.