My hands were still cold from holding the phone when I pulled that curtain back.
I need to back up, because you have to understand how far gone I was by that point. Three weeks with a newborn does something to your brain. You stop being a whole person. You become a machine that feeds and rocks and shushes and prays for sleep that comes in cruel little pieces. Ninety minutes here. Forty minutes there. And in between, you sit in the dark and you start to lose the thread of who you used to be.
That was me the morning I stood in Kevin’s doorway begging.
I hadn’t showered in three days. My hair was in a knot so old it had basically become part of my skull. There was spit-up on my shoulder that I’d stopped noticing. And Theo was strapped to my chest in that carrier because I couldn’t put him down, couldn’t leave him alone in the apartment even for the two minutes it took to walk up one flight of stairs.
I want to tell you I was calm and rational when I knocked on Kevin’s door. I wasn’t. I was shaking. But I was trying so hard to be reasonable, because that’s what you do. You tell yourself people are basically good. You tell yourself if you just explain the situation clearly enough, they’ll understand.
“It wakes him,” I said. “It happens at the same time every day. Around ten in the morning and around two in the afternoon.”
“I clean at those times,” Kevin said.
He was maybe thirty-five. Athletic build, expensive-looking headphones hanging around his neck, the kind of guy who clearly had nowhere he needed to be and all the time in the world to not be there.
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