Paradise Loft Ch. 09

“Baby Lu / Baby Lu is a magic bairn / with his unicorn… “

Little Jenni is delighted by the baby. It’s the first time she’s ever been around one. Then again, she’s only existed for a few months. Little Jenni makes more frequent appearances and her sweet, happy demeanor belies the stress her adult self must be starting to feel.

Unfortunately, both the new mother and baby need supervision for this reason. Evie is around a lot to help because she does see Lucien as her grandchild. Lucien’s industrial-style nursery has gradually taken on the warm textures and colors of a witch’s dwelling. Mark never had anything growing up so thought nothing of a spartan nursery for a baby. He is more concerned with keeping Lu healthy and safe, but Grandma brings the talisman mobiles and handcrafted dolls. Over and over, she teaches little Jenni all the things adult Jenni knows: How to change him and feed him his bottle, bathe him and dress him in his tiny clothes.

“You’re good at that,” Evie says warmly. Jenni’s holding Lu and singing one of her freestyle songs in her canary-like voice. It’s her singing that’s alerted the family to when Lucien likes something; he’s still a silent baby, but flails his arms and kicks when she sings. They assume it’s pleasure because Little Jenni’s mellifluous voice is the sound of pure affection and how could a baby not like that?

“He’s so cute! I just love him so much!” He’s actually a slightly odd-looking baby. He looks like his father, so will be a beautiful adult, but it will take a while for him to grow into his scowly, feline looks.

“He loves you, too.”

“Evie?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Will I have a baby when I’m grown up?”

“I think you will. Just like him.”

“Where did he come from, Evie?”

“From the stork, honey. That’s a magical bird with great big wings. He brought him to your Daddy.”

The nice thing about dealing with a permanent six-year-old is that you can tell them whatever bullshit will satisfy their curiosity without worry about filling their mind with nonsense that won’t serve them well later in life.

Jenni frowns. “Did Daddy want him?”

“Well, I don’t think he needed another child because he’s got you. But he loves him very much now that he’s here.”

The girl looks pleased with that answer. Jealousy has been averted.

This is Mark’s night to come home late. He stays later at the museum to catch up on whatever didn’t get finished that week and to kill time before his NA meeting. This particular meeting on Friday night is bigger and more to his taste than some of the smaller, depressing ones. Not that addicts need a special day of the week to make bad choices, but Friday night in the city has an energy and people flock to this meeting to ward off the lure of what the city may have to offer. Innocent drinks with friends could lead to some sketchy afterparty hours later with a needle in the arm. So, this meeting has an almost festive vibe because it’s the substitution for more dangerous recreation. It attracts mostly artists and musicians, other creatives, hippies, punks, eccentrics, misfits. The coffee is better.

Mark made the mistake of telling Jenni it’s a good place for people watching. She’s insecure about him going. Not jealous, because it would be insane to feel jealous of people coping with the hell of addiction, but she fears he’ll meet someone cooler than her who gets him in a way she can’t. Since relationships must have boundaries, Jenni decides this is one area of his life that can be off-limits to her. If her husband was feeling the urge to pick up again, then that was between him and the Devil. He has a shrink and the NA crowd. She also doesn’t want to get into it with him because then it will come out that family life isn’t making her happy either and that unspoken truth makes her blood run cold without making it real in a conversation.

“Hey, Darlin.’ Hey, Evie. How’s your evening?” Mark asks when he returns to the loft. Evie’s in heaven, holding Lu. Jenni’s on the blue velveteen sofa with her, but her body is angled away. She looks miles away. When Mark kisses her, her lips are slack. She looks at him vaguely, like she sees him but that it doesn’t register he’s been gone all day. Usually, he’s greeted with a passionate tongue. When she’s turned little, she nearly knocks him down when she flies to him. It seems he’s caught her in a transitional state in which she’s not quite either of them.

Mark sits down and brushes off the underwhelming greeting. He looks at his son, izmir escort who has just discovered he can fit his hand through Evie’s stretched earlobe. He looks so fascinated by this, Mark can tell that if he could smile, he’d be doing so now. The shiny brass tunnels Evie wears today have captivated him and he grabs on.

“Hey, hey, buddy, Grandma’s not a toy,” Mark says in his baby-pitched rasp. Evie grins at how sweet his voice can become when he talks to his baby.

“Sometimes she is,” she comments in a saucy tone. Mark chuckles as he uncurls impossibly tiny fingers from her earlobe.

“It’s weird how strong he is,” Mark says, accepting the baby onto his chest and taking a big inhalation of new baby scent. “How did he do tonight?”

“Oh, he’s great. He ate lots and lots, so he’ll need to be changed soon.”

“I’m so glad about his appetite. If he didn’t eat well, I’d really worry about him.”

“I think he’s going to be just fine. You might have to learn sign language at some point.”

“That would be cool. I always meant to, just never did. I can say ‘Go eat a dick,’ but that ain’t come up yet.”

Jenni stands up, looks around like she forgot where she’s going, then walks to the bathroom without a word.

“What’s goin’ on there? Is she okay?” Mark whispers.

“I think so. She’s been little most of the day. I’ve never seen her come out of it before, so figured it made her a little out of it. She did ask where Lucien came from and I said it was the stork.”

“Good thinking. She probably won’t remember, but I’ll back you up if she mentions it. Did a stork bring ya, Lu? Nah, I made this,” Mark coos.

“As I recall, it was Jenni who was as big as a house for months,” Evie chides him. “But you helped. He certainly looks like you.”

“Yeah, poor guy.”

“How was your meeting, hon?”

Mark reaches into his pocket and produces a medallion. “Time equals miracles. Recovery equals life,” Evie reads aloud. “Oh, Mark!”

“Two years,” he says without emotion.

“When Jenni sees this she’ll be so proud of you!”

He shakes his head. “We don’t talk too much about this. I think my addiction makes her uncomfortable.”

Evie glances over her shoulder toward the still-closed bathroom curtain. “Mark, she’s your partner. She should support you. It’s her job.”

“She does, in her way, just by lovin’ me every day. I don’t think she likes me goin’ to meetings. It worries her to think of me surrounded by addicts. I can see how it might seem like a bad idea to some people. She just don’t understand fellowship. I don’t blame her for that; she’s been alone her whole life, don’t trust people. This… bein’ with me, Freddy, you and Jasper, havin’ a kid… she’s still adjustin’ to it all, even though she loves us.”

“That’s a very unselfish attitude,” Evie says, still ruffled.

Mark threads the coin through his large fingers, then makes it disappear. “Well, that’s one of the things they teach: Empathy. Besides, I’m not perfect either. How many women would stick around after finding her boyfriend in bed with his best friend?”

Evie chuckles. “I never knew about that.”

“You know, with all this talk on TV about ‘devil’s triangles,’ Jenni joked she wanted to play a drinkin’ game. That’s what she says now when she wants us both to take her to bed,” Mark says with a gleam in his light eye.

“That whole thing just makes my blood boil. I should have been there protesting with my sisters.”

“Well, we’ve needed ya here. We’re so grateful to have you here to help us. When he’s a little bigger, you can take him to his first protest.”

“He can tell his senator to eat a dick,” Evie laughs.

There is a cheerful knock at the front door. That would be Michael, Evie’s ride. They’re off to a late night play party at IDEAL. “Come in,” Mark yells.

Michael doesn’t even have to dress up to look impressive. He’s always dressy, with his lean black-clothed silhouette and Dia de los Muertos face. He’s shaved his fair hair to look more otherworldly. “Hi guys,” he says in his oddly ordinary voice. He extends his hands and opens and closes long, illustrated fingers. “Gimme, gimme,” he laughs.

“Sure. Wanna go to Uncle Michael?” Mark says as he lifts Lu up to sniff his butt. “He’s still good.” He hands him over to the picture of Death.

Michael is one of those people who loses his mind and his dignity around little babies. He makes goofy faces and babbles in baby talk. Lucien flails his arms excitedly. “Uh-oh. adana escort Does that mean I’m freaking him out?”

“We think that means he’s happy, actually. He likes you.”

Michael shifts his weight side to side, rocking the baby. “Can we just stay here and do this instead?” he jokes to Evie.

“Nope! I’m ready for grown-up activities.” Jenni has still not emerged. “Bye, Jenni!” Evie calls across the loft. No reply.

“I’d better go check on her,” Mark says, cutting Michael’s baby time short. “You understand.”

“Go, go,” Evie says.

“Have fun you two. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Mark says.

“I’ll take that as a challenge,” Michael replies with his double grin of real and inked teeth.

Mark locks up behind them and hurries to his wife. He finds her on the toilet lid with her face in her hands.

“Oh god, baby. What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

Jenni raises her head with closed eyes. Tears squeeze through her lashes. When she sees the look on Mark’s face, him holding their child, she starts to cry in earnest.

“Daddy… I’m depressed. It’s not like before… it’s w-worse. This is p-postpartum depression. I’m so sorry. I feel s-s-so scared,” she weeps.

Mark knows his wife has been depressed since childhood. It crippled her at times and fucked up her life. He’s never heard her say it scared her. The way she feels scares her, and that terrifies him.

“I’m callin’ Dr. Mori right now,” he says. Jenni can’t argue with the Daddy tone.

By this hour of the evening, Dr. Mori is lit, but she sobers up enough to make an appointment for Monday morning. She really is an excellent shrink during office hours.

“Mark, can you be with her until then?”

“I won’t let her outta my sight.”

“I don’t think you should. Postpartum depression is a serious psychiatric illness. She’s a danger to herself.”

“I’ll watch her. I hardly sleep anyway.”

Mark realizes he’s been carrying Lu around like a sack of potatoes and lays him in his crib. He returns to Jenni and leads her back to the couch so they can talk properly.

“You don’t have to suffer. You’ll go on Monday, get on some meds and ya won’t be scared no more. I’m glad you told me, baby girl.”

“But Daddy, if I go on meds I can’t feed my baby.” She starts to cry again.

“So, he’ll eat formula. Babies do. I know you want everything perfect for him, but he needs his mama more. He needs you alive. I can’t live without ya, either.”

Jenni’s eyes go wide at the realization that things are, in fact, that bad. Mark wasn’t one to sugarcoat serious matters. She knew she was scared and now knows it’s because she could die from this.

“Here. Got something for ya.” Mark hands her the two-year medallion.

“From the meeting. I know you don’t like to talk about that, but I need ya to know why I go. I go for you. And for Lucien. I was feelin’ so good, like I wasn’t even an addict and when I realized that, it scared the fuck outta me. What if I let my guard down and find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time? What if I have a bad day and think just once will be all right? I need to go at least once a week to remind myself I’m an addict and I need to listen to other people talk about how they slip up. I hear stories about people who lost things they can never ever get back, the most precious things in life.”

“I thought being married to me made you want to use again.”

“You thought that? It makes me wanna make sure I never screw this up, never hurt my family. When I talk to people at the meetings, I talk about you.”

“Really?” she sniffles.

“Yes, baby. When I disappeared, people who used to know me assumed I was usin’ again. Kind of pissed me off, but that’s usually the case. I tell ’em I’m married now, with a baby, and I came back because I got people I can’t hurt like that. I know it don’t make sense to you, but I want you to understand if ya can.”

He closes his hand around hers to ask her to accept the coin.

“This is the nicest thing you ever gave me. Other than Lu, of course.”

She gets up to walk over to her drafting table, where she places it in the compartment for her treasures. When she returns, she gives him the kind of kiss he deserved when he got home. “We’re both going to be okay,” she says, smiling through her tears.

“We will.”

They cuddle for a while. Then Jenni changes Lu and nurses him while Mark makes them a late dinner of veggie nuggets and mixed greens.

“Where adıyaman escort is Freddy?” Jenni asks.

Mark cracks up. “Shit. I forgot all about my husband. I don’t know actually.”

“Maybe he’ll show up when he’s hungry,” she says, adjusting her tits in her nursing bra.

“Heh heh.”

“Can I show him your chip? He’s going to be so proud of you, Daddy.”

“Sure, baby,” Mark says, blushing a little. Maybe he liked it better when she took no interest in NA.

They sit at the kitchen table and eat by candlelight with juice in wine glasses like little kids pretending to be fancy grown-ups.

“You know,” Mark says, “if the meds don’t make you feel better after a while, we can go to Plan B.”

Unlike the rest of the world, their “Plan B” means another pregnancy.

“You would want that? Still?”

“Course I do. If you do. I mean, we can’t keep ya pregnant forever because the kids will pile up, but for now… I want him to have brothers and sisters.”

“I want that, too. I looked into it, a little. I’m supposed to wait at least six months after the C-section.”

Mark grins across the table at her. “You researched it already?”

“I just wanted to check, Daddy. Of course, that rule goes out the window if you’re older and in a hurry to have more babies while you can or you have ‘other reasons’ for back to back pregnancies. I think my sanity counts as an ‘other reason,’ I suppose.”

“I think it’s a pretty good reason. We’ll get ya checked out by the baby doctor, see what she says. You do seem pretty healed up to me,” he says.

Now it’s her turn to blush. She pushes a chickenless nugget around in some ketchup. Jenni has been trying to outrun the creeping depression with athletic use of his body. Being a man, he didn’t notice that might be a sign something was going wrong with her. Their online audience was in favor of it, too.

“I feel fine physically. It’s my brain that’s gone downhill fast.”

“One way or another, we’ll get you back to how you felt carrying Lu. Whatever it takes. This is the best time of our lives. I’m not ready to surrender that.”

“My fighter,” Jenni sighs.

“Damn right.”

She cleans up and Mark goes to check on Lu, who sleeps with his hands balled in little fists beside his scowling face. “Guess you’re a fighter, too.”

When they go to bed, neither of them suggests putting the camera on. They are closer than they were this morning and want to show that to each other, not the whole world. Mark lights some candles and they revel in fucking face to face, which they’d badly missed during her months as big as a house.

They decide to stop protecting each other from themselves. There are times for boundaries, times to see one’s mate as a separate, autonomous being that contains unshareable experiences. Tonight is not one of those times.

Without a conscious intention, their souls have decided to meet unguarded and merge. It happens as effortlessly as if they’d been working all this time to prevent it from happening. It’s more like they stopped doing something than trying anything new. Then, they aren’t husband and wife, Dom and sub, Daddy and his little girl, not even people with names and all their doubt and fear obliterates in an ethereal white light.

Neither can speak afterward because it’s not over and they are still both nothing but together. All they are is One and nothing else. As Mark’s thoughts return to something resembling normal consciousness, he realizes something about himself. He never completely believed that anything could feel better than heroin. Sure, there were things that were worth more, but he lived in mourning almost that he’d never know that freedom from pain as completely ever again. The white light had illuminated that deep-hidden secret and burned it to ashes. Opiates were now just one earthly pleasure among many. He knows how to get to real ecstasy now. When he married Jenni and told her his soul lived in her body, he’d meant that, but even he didn’t know what he meant. He’s just experienced it for himself in every cell and feels brand new on a molecular level. It’s trippy.

His wife is knocked out in a way that makes him feel smug. He hops up from their bed feeling like he’s lost half his body weight and saunters to Lu’s crib. The baby is awake, waiting patiently to be noticed. From the sleepy eyes, Mark can tell he’s just woken up.

Mark picks him up. “Mama woke ya with her screamin’, didn’t she?”

He puts a dry diaper on him and dresses him in a warmer onesie, then carries him over to the living area, feeling like a young god as he goes. He sprawls on the couch with his son on his chest and channel surfs a while. There is only so much spiritual growth one guy can take in an evening.