Four days after the miscarriage, a basket arrived on the back porch. Emily ignored it at first, shuffling around to drag out the trash, looking above when she filled the bird feeders. But soon, a cry startled her.
She picked up the vessel. Inside, a pair of sapphire eyes peered back.
“I’ve found a baby,” she told her husband.
The man sat on his workbench, tinkering with broken clocks. All he saw was an empty basket, but his wife smiled as she spoke. He was not opposed to playing pretend to stoke the fires of her happiness.
The next day, instead of baking oatmeal or walking in the yard to watch her birds eat, Emily coiled around the basket, singing.
“What should we name her?” she asked, beads of sweat pearled above her lip.
“We’ll decide another day,” the man said nervously, glancing inside only to be met with an empty rattan weave.
Overnight, Emily refused to leave the spare bedroom, now nursery. She rocked her basket, naming the blue eyes and rosy cheeks and upturned nose Brigid, like her great grandmother.
In the morning the man tinkered again, the doors to his workshop open so he could keep an eye on his wife.
Emily fed the baby who had grown a mouth. She crushed bananas, spooning yellow mush into the puckered pink gap. The baby cooed. Emily felt her own stomach grow.
She brought the basket to the yard, introducing Brigid to the birds who flocked to see the little miracle.
The man spied the spectacle from his window, except he saw no baby. No birds. For a moment, he didn’t recognize his wife, whose hair was wild. Whose nightgown was torn, threaded with twigs.
“You ought to hold the baby,” Emily said, breathless, when she returned.
But he no longer wanted to pretend. He wanted his wife back, and so he spoke firmly. He figured just as his hands forced the clock dials to move, he could press her back into the shape he remembered.
“There is no baby in the basket.” He wasn’t unkind, but he was certain, which was worse than being cruel.
She sobbed, so loud his nerves split at the ends, cracking like porcelain.
“There is no baby. There is no baby. There is no baby,” he howled to drown her out.
Emily wrapped herself and the basket in a woolen coat. She hissed, letting all her disappointment escape into the air like a curse. The clocks in his workshop would never keep time. The birds outside would peck his fingertips. The oatmeal would never plump, dry grain like sand in a desert.
As she dashed across the threshold where she’d found the baby, he gripped the doorframe, suddenly weak. His heart quivered beneath his ribs, the way a leaf trembles overcome by wind.
He did not hear the door slam.
He did not hear his own breath, trapped in his throat.
He only heard a baby crying in its mother’s arms.
