Before He Envies

by Blake Pierce

  It was during this stretch of time that Mackenzie started to think about her mother. On the second night after being instructed to hold Kevin upright after feeding, Mackenzie wondered if her own mother had dealt with anything like this. Mackenzie wondered what sort of baby she had been.

  She’d probably like to see her granddaughter, Mackenzie thought.

  But that was a terrifying concept. The idea of calling her mother just to say hello was bad enough. But then throw in a surprise granddaughter, and that would be chaotic.

  She felt Kevin squirming against her, trying to get comfortable. Mackenzie checked the bedside clock and saw that she’d had him upright for a little over twenty minutes. He seemed to have dozed off on her shoulder, so she crept over to the bassinet and placed him inside of it. He was swaddled and looked quite comfortable and she took a final look at him before returning to bed.

  “Thanks,” Ellington said from beside her, half asleep. “You’re awesome.”

  “I don’t feel like it. But thanks.”

  She settled down, getting her head comfortable on the pillow. She had her eyes closed for about five seconds before Kevin started wailing again. She shot up in bed and let out a little moan. She bit it back, though, worried that it might turn into a bout of weeping. She was tired and, worst of all, she was experiencing her first toxic thoughts about her child.

  “Again?” Ellington said, snapping the word out like a curse. He got to his feet, nearly stumbling out of the bed, and marched to the bassinet.

  “I’ll get him,” Mackenzie said.

  “No…you’ve been up with him four times already. And I know…I woke up for each and every one of those times.”

  She did not know why (probably the lack of sleep, she thought idly), but this comment pissed her off. She practically lunged out of bed to beat him to the wailing baby. She rammed her shoulder into him a little harder than necessary to be considered playful. As she picked Kevin up, she said: “Oh, I’m sorry. Did he wake you?”

  “Mac, you know what I mean.”

  “I do. But Jesus, you could be helping more.”

  “I have to get up early tomorrow,” he said. “I can’t just sit…”

  “Oh God, please finish that sentence.”

  “No. I’m sorry. I just…”

  “Get back in bed,” Mackenzie snapped. “Kevin and I are fine.”

  “Mac…”

  “Shut up. Get back in bed and sleep.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Is the baby too noisy? Go to the couch, then!”

  “Mac, you—”

  “Go!”

  She was crying now, holding Kevin to her as she settled back into bed. He was still wailing, slightly in pain from the reflux. She knew she’d have to hold him upright again and it made her want to cry even harder. But she did her best to hold it back as Ellington stormed out of the room. He was muttering something under his breath and she was glad she couldn’t hear it. She was looking for an excuse to explode on him, to berate him and, honestly, just to get out some of her frustration.

  She sat back against the headboard holding little Kevin as still and upright as possible, wondering if her life would ever be the same.

  ***

  Somehow, despite the late-night arguments and lack of sleep, it took less than a week for their new family to slip into a groove. It took some trial and error for Mackenzie and Ellington to figure it out, but after that first week of the reflux issues, it all seemed to go well. When the meds knocked the worst of the reflux out, it was easier to manage it. Kevin would cry, Ellington would get him out of the crib and change his diaper, and then Mackenzie would nurse him. He was sleeping well for a baby, about three or four hours at a stretch for the first few weeks following the reflux, and wasn’t very fussy at all.

  It was Kevin, though, who started to open their eyes to just how broken the families they had come from were. Ellington’s mother came by two days after they got home and stayed for about two hours. Mackenzie had been polite enough, hanging around until she realized it would be an opportune time for a break. She went to the bedroom to sneak in a nap while Kevin was preoccupied with his father and grandmother, but Mackenzie was not able to sleep. She listed to the conversation between Ellington and his mother, surprised that there seemed to be some attempt at reconciliation. Mrs. Nancy Ellington left the apartment about two hours later, and even through the bedroom door, Mackenzie could feel some of the remaining tension between them.

  Still, she’d left a gift for Kevin in her wake and had even asked about Ellington’s father—a subject she almost always tried to avoid.

  Ellington’s father never even bothered to come by. Ellington made a FaceTime call to him and though they chatted for about an hour and a few tears even came to his father’s eyes, there were no immediate plans for him to come see his grandson. He’d started his own life long ago, a new life without any of his original family. And that, apparently, was how he wanted it to stay. Sure, he’d made a sweeping financial gesture last year in regards to trying to pay for their wedding (a gift they eventually denied), but that had been help from a distance. He was currently living in London with Wife Number Three and was apparently swamped with work.

  As for Mackenzie, while her thoughts did eventually turn to her mother and sister—her only surviving family—the idea of getting in touch with them was a horrifying one. She knew where her mother was living and, with a little help from the bureau, she supposed she could even get her number. Stephanie, her younger sister, would probably be a little harder to track down. As Stephanie was never one to stay in a place for very long, Mackenzie had no idea where her sister might be these days.

  Sadly, she found that she was okay with that. Yes, she thought her mother deserved to see her first grandchild, but that would mean opening up the scars that she had closed up a little over a year ago when she had finally closed the case of her father’s murder. In closing that case, she had also closed the door on that part of her past—including the terrible relationship she’d always had with her mother.

  It was odd just how much she thought about her mother now that she had a child of her own. Whenever she held Kevin, she’d remind herself of how distant her mother had been even before her father’s murder. She swore that Kevin would always know that his mother loved him, that she would never let anything—not Ellington, not work, not her own personal issues—come before him.

  It was this very thing that was on her mind on the twelfth night after they had brought Kevin home. She had just finished nursing Kevin for his late-night feeding—which had started to fall somewhere between one thirty and two in the morning. Ellington was coming back into the room from having placed Kevin in his crib in the next room over. It had once been an office where they had stored all of their miscellaneous bureau paperwork and personal items but had easily become a nursery.

  “Why are you still awake?” he asked, grumbling into his pillow as he lay back down.

  “Do you think we’ll be good parents?” she asked.

  He propped his head up sleepily and shrugged. “I think so. I mean, I know you will. But me…I imagine I’ll push him way too hard when it comes to youth sports. Something my dad never did for me that I always feel I missed out on.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “I figured. Why do you ask?”

  “Because our own families are so messed up. How do we know how to raise a child the right way if we have such horrible experiences to draw from?”

  “I figure we’ll just take note of everything our parents did wrong and don’t do any of it.”

  He reached out in the dark and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. She honestly wanted him to wrap her up in his arms and spoon her, but she wasn’t fully healed up from the surgery just yet.

  They lay there next to one another, equally exhausted and excited for their lives going forward, until sleep took them both, one right behind the other.

  ***

  Mackenzie found herself
walking through rows of corn again. The stalks were so high that she could not see the tops of them. The ears of corn themselves, like old yellow teeth poking through rotted gums, peeked out into the night. Each ear was easily three feet long; the corn and the stalks on which they grew were ridiculously big, making her feel like an insect.

  Somewhere up ahead a baby was crying. Not just a baby, but her baby. Already, she could recognize the tones and pitches of little Kevin’s wails.

  Mackenzie took off through the rows of corn. She was slapped in the face, the stalks and leaves drawing blood a little too easily. By the time she reached the end of the row she was currently in, her face was covered in blood. She could taste it in her mouth and see it dripping from her chin down to her shirt.

  At the end of the row, she stopped. Ahead of her was wide open land, nothing but dirt, dead grass, and the horizon. Yet, in the middle of it, a small structure—one she knew well.

  It was the house she had grown up in. It was where the crying was coming from.

  Mackenzie ran to the house, her legs moving as the corn was still attached to her and trying to draw her back out into the field.

  She ran harder, realizing that the stitching around her abdomen had torn open. When she reached the porch to the house, blood from the wound was running down her legs, pooling on porch steps.

  The front door was closed but she could still hear that wailing. Her baby, inside, screaming. She opened the door and it opened easily. Nothing squeaked or screeched, the age of the house not a factor. Before she even stepped inside, she saw Kevin.

  Sitting in the middle of a barren living room—the same living room she had spent so much of her time in as a child—was a single rocking chair. Her mother sat in it, holding Kevin and rocking him softly.

  Her mother, Patricia White, looked up at her, looking much younger than the last time Mackenzie had seen her. She smiled at Mackenzie, her eyes bloodshot and somehow alien.

  “You did good, Mackenzie. But did you really think you could keep him from me? Why would you want to, anyway? Was I that bad? Was I?”

  Mackenzie opened her mouth to say something, to demand that her mother hand over the baby. But when she opened her mouth, all that came out was corn silk and dirt, falling from her mouth to the floor.

  All the while, her mother smiled and held Kevin close to her, nuzzling him to her breast.

  Mackenzie sat up in bed, a scream pushing behind her lips.

  “Jesus, Mac…are you okay?”

  Ellington was standing at the doorway to the bedroom. He was dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of jogging shorts, an indication that he had been working out in his little space in the guest bedroom.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Just a bad dream. A very bad dream.”

  She then glanced at the clock and saw that it was almost eight in the morning. Somehow, Ellington had allowed her to sleep in; Kevin had been waking up around five or six for his first feeding.

  “Has he not woken up yet?” Mackenzie asked.

  “No, he did. I used one of the bags of frozen milk. I know you wanted to save them up, but I figured I’d let you sleep in.”

  “You’re amazing,” she said, sinking back into the bed.

  “And don’t you forget it. Now go back to sleep. I’ll bring him to you when he needs to be changed again. Fair deal?”

  She made an mmm sound as she drifted off to sleep again. For a moment, there were still ghost images of the nightmare in her head but she pushed them away with thoughts of her loving husband and a baby boy who would be happy to see her when he woke up.

  ***

  After a month, Ellington went back to work. Director McGrath had promised that he would get no in-depth or intense cases while he had a baby and nursing mother at home. More than that, McGrath was also quite lenient in terms of hours. There were a few days when Ellington left at eight in the morning and returned back home as early as three that afternoon.

  When Ellington started going back to work, Mackenzie truly started to feel like a mother. She missed Ellington’s help very much on those first days, but there was something special about being alone with Kevin. She came to know his schedule and quirks a bit better. And although most of her days involved sitting on the couch to heal while binging shows on Netflix, she still felt the connection between them growing.

  But Mackenzie had never been one to sit around aimlessly. She felt guilty for her Netflix binges after a week or so. She used that time to instead start reading true crime stories. She utilized online book resources as well as podcasts, trying to keep her mind active by figuring out the answers to these real-life cases before the narrative reached the conclusion.

  She visited the doctor twice in those first six weeks to ensure that the scar from the C-section was healing properly. While the doctors beamed over how quickly she was healing, they still stressed that a return to normalcy so soon could cause setbacks. They warned against something as common as even bending over to pick something up from the floor that had any significant weight to it.

  It was the first time in her life that Mackenzie had ever truly felt like an invalid. It did not sit well with her, but she had Kevin to focus on. She had to keep him happy and healthy. She had to keep him on a schedule and, as she and Ellington had planned during the pregnancy, she also had to prepare for separating from him when it came time for him to start daycare. They had found a reputable in-home daycare and already had a spot reserved. While the provider cared for children as young as two months old, Mackenzie and Ellington had decided not to put him into care until five or six months. The spot they had reserved opened just after Kevin tuned six months, giving Mackenzie plenty of time to feel comfortable with not only Kevin’s own development, but to prepare herself for the separation.

  So she had no problem waiting to heal so long as she had Kevin there with her. While she did not resent Ellington for returning to work, she did find herself wishing he could be there during the day from time to time. He was missing all of Kevin’s smiles, all of the cute little mannerisms he was developing, the coos and the variety of baby sounds.

  As Kevin started to hit milestone after milestone, the idea of daycare began to loom larger in her mind. And with it, the idea of returning to work. The thought of it excited her but when she looked into her son’s eyes, she did not know if she could live a life of running into danger, a gun on her hip and uncertainty at every corner. It seemed almost irresponsible for both her and Ellington to work such dangerous jobs.

  The prospect of returning to work—to the bureau and anything remotely dangerous—became less and less appealing as she grew closer to her son. In fact, by the time the doctor cleared her for light exercise a little shy of three months, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go back to the FBI at all.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

  Bryce sat on the edge of the rock face, his feet dangling out into the open air. The sun was setting, casting a series of golds and bright oranges that flared into red closer to the horizon. He massaged his hands and thought of his father. His climbing gear was behind him, stowed away and ready for the next adventure. He had a hike of about a mile and a half before he’d return to his car—making a total of about six miles he had covered on foot—but for now, he wasn’t even thinking about his car.

  He wasn’t thinking of his car, his home, or his new bride. His father had died one year ago today and they had scattered his ashes here, right off the southern edge of Logan’s View. His father had died seven months before Bryce had gotten married and just a week shy of what would have been his fifty-first birthday.

  It was right here, on the southern face of Logan’s View, that Bryce and his father had celebrated Bryce’s first full scale of the view. Bryce had known that it wasn’t considered that difficult of a climb, though it certainly had been for his seventeen-year-old self that, to that point in his life, had only scaled much smaller rock faces further out in Grand Teton National Park.

  Hones
tly, Bryce didn’t see what was so special about this place. He wasn’t sure why his father had requested his ashes be buried at this site. It had required Bryce and his mother to park down at the general use lot a mile and a half away from where he now sat—where, a little less than a year ago, they had scattered his father’s ashes. Sure, the sunset was pretty and all, but there were lots of scenic views along the park.

  “Well, I came back up, Dad,” Bryce said. “I’ve been climbing here and there, but nothing as brutal as the stuff you did.”

  Bryce smiled at that, thinking of the picture he had been given shortly after his father’s funeral. His father had tried Everest but had busted his ankle after only a day and a half of climbing. He’d climbed glaciers in Alaska and numerous unnamed rock formations all throughout the American deserts. The man was like a legend in Bryce’s mind and that’s the way he intended to keep it.

  He looked out at the sunset, sure that his father would have enjoyed it. Though, honestly, with all of the sunsets he’d seen from different vantage points in his climbing years, this one was likely just a generic one.

  Bryce sighed, noticing that the tears weren’t coming as they usually did. Life was slowly starting to feel more natural without his dad. He still mourned, sure, but he was moving on. He got to his feet and turned to pick up the backpack with his climbing gear. He stopped short, though, alarmed at the sight of someone standing directly behind him.

  “Sorry to startle you,” the man standing less than three feet away from him said.

  How the hell did I not hear him? Bryce wondered. He must have been moving very quietly…and on purpose. Why was he trying to sneak up on me? To rob me? To take my equipment?

  “No worries,” Bryce said, choosing to ignore the man. He looked to be in his early thirties, with a thin growth of beard covering his chin and a thin beanie-style stocking cap covering his head.