In the Blood by Lisa Unger Page A

feedings?”
    “Of course,” he says. “Of course.”
    And for me, a low-dose antidepressant, the decision to go to formula and stop breast-feeding—which was already on the table because the baby was gaining weight too slowly.
    Another failure for me: drugs during labor, emergency C-section, colic, unable to nurse beyond two months. No wondermy baby hates me. I have failed him in every single way and he’s not even three months old.
    In the mirror, there’s no trace of the happy pregnant person I was. My ripe bosom, my glowing hair, my round belly—it’s all gone flat. I am dull and deflated, abandoned by life and joy and expectancy. I am flabby and gray.
    I have started taking the pills and I pray that everyone is right, that I have been sabotaged by my own brain chemicals. And that the little blue pill is going to put things right again.
    “All the hard stuff just goes away—the pain, the stress, the sleep deprivation,” my mom soothed in the car. “You just don’t remember any of it later on.”
    Please, please, please, let them all be right. Let it be me. Let there be something wrong with me. Something normal that can be fixed quickly and easily. Please let there be something wrong with me, and let it not be something wrong with him.

8
    Luke was waiting for me on the porch when I arrived. A light snow had started to fall, and I’d wiped out twice on the slick roads. I was going to need a ride home from Luke’s mom. He was sitting on the porch swing, emitting a sullen and self-pitying energy.
    “You’re late,” he said as I swung off my bike. My pants were ripped, and my knee was bleeding from the second fall.
    “She left you?” I said. A red Volvo usually dropped him off, waiting in the street until I opened the door. Whoever it was, a slight woman with a wild frizz of red hair, she’d never gotten out of the car. Her name and phone number were scribbled on the chalkboard in the kitchen. But it was not information I had committed to memory.
    “She didn’t wait,” he said. “By the time I realized that you weren’t there, she was gone.”
    “You have a key,” I said, climbing the steps.
    He pumped his legs lightly and the swing emitted an irritating squeak as it moved back and forth. Something about the noise, about his pouty face, sent a skein of irritation through me. What a baby.
    “I was afraid to go in alone,” he said. I didn’t buy it. I’d been spending time with Luke for about three weeks. He was lots of things—a scaredy-cat wasn’t one of them.
    “Afraid of what?” I asked. I stood in front of him and gave him a light tap on his foot with my toe.
    He shrugged and looked up at me. His eyes were a little damp but he wasn’t crying.
    “I just didn’t want to be alone in there.”
    I remembered coming home from school alone when I was a kid. Occasionally, I had to let myself in, make my own snack, and do my homework until my mother came back from wherever she was. When the school day had gone well, it was heaven. I’d eat anything I wanted, lie on the couch and watch television, giddy with my own personal freedom.
    But when the day had been bad—if I’d done poorly on a test, or been bullied in gym class, which I often was, or if there had been some “incident,” or I hadn’t eaten my lunch because of some kind of cafeteria torture, I’d hate that empty house. I’d hate the way it echoed and was dark when I entered. I hated how no lights were on, and nothing was cooking in the kitchen, no music, no television sound. No mom to metabolize the events of the day.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “For real.”
    I held the door open for him, and he walked inside. He went straight up to his room, where I knew he’d drop his backpack and change his clothes. And I made his snack—apples and graham crackers with peanut butter and a glass of milk. My hands were shaking as the knife sank into the white flesh of the apple. I was trying to keep it all at bay—Beck, my father. But I