Free Remember Mia by Alexandra Burt Page A

if you care to know.” He raised his voice then; I felt him dropping the façade, becoming real. “We have perfectly adequate health insurance. But you insisted on all those specialists that weren’t covered. And I get it, you know I get it. You were worried. But you didn’t stop there, either, did you? Even after Mia was born, you continued . . .”
    I could tell he was looking for words, looking to put a name to my madness. Am I even mad? Was there such a thing as a little bit crazy? A lick of mad? I worried about Mia. I still do. Every waking minute.
    “You’ve been feeding that dragon ever since, haven’t you?”
    I chuckled. Nice analogy.
Feeding the dragon?
But what about our daughter? I knew what he was going to say. But what kind—
    “You started taking a perfectly healthy baby from doctor to doctor. And that’s not normal.”
    Normal?
What kind of mother would I be, Jack, if I didn’t try to help my child? What kind of mother would I be?
    “There’s something wrong with her. She cries too much. Don’t you get that?” My accusation seemed to trigger additional resentment on his part and, as always, Mia’s excessive crying was just a figment of my imagination.
    “There’s nothing wrong with her,
nothing.
The fact that you can’t handle a baby doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with
her.
You’ve been taking Mia from doctor to doctor and they all tell you the same thing. A colic, she’ll grow out of it. You can’t continue to insist on all these tests that make no sense. I’ve been allowing you to do this for the longest time but I need you to stop this madness.”
    Jack stared at me for a long time. Then he took a step back. His voice was calm but his neck was covered in blotches.
    “I don’t know what to do but I can’t allow you to go on like this.”
    Jack’s mind was not prepared to wrap itself around such an unwelcome emotion as this:
he didn’t know what do
. Jack was too rational to accept chaos. He had been trying to put me back together but now he realized he was finally out of options.
    His decision to get married because I was pregnant had backfired on him. Not only was I not keeping up my end of the bargain, but at the same time I kept him from fulfilling his. There was work to be done, lots of work. An infinite workload of case files, preparing witnesses, and interviews. And even though he was exhausted, I knew that the pressures of his job felt perversely comfortable to him compared to what awaited him at home every night. I threw my head back and burst into an overly animated gesture of joy.
    “This whole marriage was a mistake. Come on, Jack, this is yourway out.” You shattered into a couple of pieces, Jack put you back together again. Even four, six, or ten, with enough glue he could make you right. When
I
shattered, the pieces were too many to count. It wasn’t even a matter of how many, but how much. Like sand. Uncountable. And when Jack felt backed into a corner, he reacted.
    He walked toward me as if to grab me. “Just listen to yourself . . . you’re irrational. You follow me to work, you come to my office, embarrass me? I don’t know what’s going on, but you need help.”
    I just stared at him as I watched him pause just long enough to shake his head. Then his voice turned to ice.
    “I find you here, in my closet, while Mia is screaming her head off. Does that strike you as rational?”
    Mia stirred, her little hands reaching for something invisible, sounds of distress escaping her lips. Jack’s eyes were darting left and right. When he finally spoke, his voice was down to a whisper.
    “I no longer trust you with my daughter. This stops tonight.” He kept switching Mia from one arm to the other while she was growing visibly upset. Tears started to well up in her eyes and short of a bottle nothing was going to calm her down. “Estelle, this can’t go on any longer. Why can’t you just—”
    “Just what? Be normal? Is that what you want me to