in response to “Mockingbird” by Len Kuntz

The other evening she found me hunched in the corner next to the crib, practicing nursery songs for when the baby arrives, only she said I was like a zombie, unresponsive to her voice, not blinking, staring into the dark as if something, or someone, was there. This was the third time she’d found me like this, lost in myself, quiet in some part of the lower level of our house. She’d wake with a full bladder and find the bed empty and then pad downstairs to find me waiting for something I couldn’t remember.

“Are you stressed about the baby?” she asked. We were in the living room now, with ice cream sandwiches. I held mine in both hands to melt the ice cream, so that it oozed through the holes in the cookie. All this junk food was new to us, from the pregnancy. In her first few months Rachel had laid hard into comfort food, naturally, but she’d been sad with guilt so I’d joined her, ordering desserts after meals and bringing pies home with our groceries. A little ring of flab had grown around my hips, and I’d worked outward on my belt by two holes, and sometimes unfastened my pants on the drive to work. If Rachel didn’t have this baby soon I was going to have to buy new clothes.

“I’m not stressed at all,” I said, which was true. The living room was warm with lamp light, and in the pauses when we didn’t talk the only noise was the soft squish of our chewing. “We should enjoy this. Pretty soon we’ll be up at this time and it’ll be crying, toys everywhere.”

“Socks all over the place,” she said.

Rachel went upstairs but I hung back and ate another ice cream sandwich. I imagined my dreams all sugary, my blood thick and my belly churning in the deep of night.

She found me again later in the week. I was in a drive-through dream, in a car that wasn’t really my car, outside a burger restaurant that didn’t even really exist, and then I was in the kitchen, crouching by the oven with my reflection looking back at me from the glass plating on the front. Rachel stood by the refrigerator looking more impatient than surprised.

“You shouldn’t be awake,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, and turned, and went to the stairs. I took peanut butter and jelly from a cupboard and worked at the jars’ lids. My hands were still loose from sleep but I made everything work and toasted the bread and then leaned against the sink with crumbs falling down my face. The stairs creaked and Rachel was there, had never even gone up. “You don’t need to be eating,” she said. “Maybe it’s the food.”

When I finished the sandwich, we went up and laid down and the heater whooshed air down onto us and I imagined the sugar in my teeth, rotting my molars down to the roots. I decided to get things in order, to start running as soon as the weather changed, to eat nothing but fruit and rice and meat, to leave my candy money in the car’s ashtray when I got to work the next day.

And I did. I visited the vending machine only for yogurt and at home I baked chicken and zucchini slices. The food felt solid in my mouth and in my belly and I slept through the night, through Rachel waking to pee, for a week, and then it came on me again, the sleep trance. I dreamt I was lost in a cold waste, making my way toward dark mountains, and then I was on my back with the night sky open overhead, and the skeletal hands of the backyard trees toward each other.

I leaned up a little and saw the door to the house closed. I looked for Rachel in the snow but she wasn’t there. My legs were warm, almost hot, and when I tried to sit up they were clumsy with sleep. I fell back and listened to the muffled crunch of powder and imagined our daughter out here, in a year or two, stretched out to make a snow angel.