Chapter Text
thinkin’ ’bout her everyday
on my mind, atypical way
are you a life force?
and it’s so easy
to be blinded by the light
to feel lonely in the night
and it’s blowin’ in the breeze, babe
i got dust in my eyes
and rust in my mind
i’ll be home come next spring
won’t you say you love me later
by and by
— caamp, “by and by”
—
if we had a daughter
i’d watch and could not save her
— paris paloma, “labour”
i.
The baby’s fontanelles are the most terrifying fucking things Shiv has ever seen.
No human being, especially not one so small, should possess such stark vulnerability. Shiv feels almost embarrassed by it, by proxy. It seems like it would be so easy to do irreparable damage. She could probably pierce brain matter with her fingernail. The baby’s pulse thrums in those soft spots as though her heart is right at the surface of her body, unguarded. It’s obscene.
“She needs a hat,” Shiv says. She doesn’t recognize her own voice, all scratchy like rocks have been tumbled through her throat.
The nurse who is reading Shiv’s blood pressure smiles — too kindly, the sort of smile Shiv would bare her teeth at, if she wasn’t so exhausted, if she couldn’t physically see her child’s heartbeat with her naked eyes.
“Your body heat will regulate her temperature,” she says, in that soft sing-song people apparently use around newborns. “It’s good for you to smell her — it’s a hormonal thing.”
A tear rolls down Shiv’s cheek, catching in the corner of her mouth. She does curl back her lips, then. “She needs,” she repeats, low and theoretically menacing, except she’s crying, breath hitching in her chest, “a hat.”
Tom’s hand lands on her shoulder, squeezing gently. She almost shrugs him off, but then he’s touching the baby, too, on the back of her delicate neck. God, Shiv could break her so easily, without ever meaning to. Shiv knows strategy, Shiv knows slide decks, Shiv knows how to smile with just the right hint of promise. She doesn’t know shit about this, and yet no one in this hospital seems to have noticed. Everyone is just taking it as obvious that she should be holding the baby.
“Be careful,” she growls at Tom, watching as his thumb brushes the baby’s tiny seashell of an ear.
“Okay, honey,” he says, soft and even. She wants to lick up the salty tears lingering on her upper lip and spit them in his face. He takes his hand off the baby, and Shiv hears herself make an indistinct sound, half sigh and half sob. Tom kisses the place on her forehead where strands of her hair have stuck to her skin. “We’ll get her a hat.”
The hat is small and grey and pink. It has cartoon sheep, loosely sketched, dancing across it.
Shiv’s not sure if it makes things better or worse.
Her daughter is born on the eleventh of April, sliced out of Shiv’s body at 8:04 a.m., right on schedule.
“Here’s your girl,” Dr. Hasford announces from the other side of the medical drape, and she holds up a slimy, squalling being for Shiv to see.
Tom is holding Shiv’s hand more tightly than she is holding his, even though she is the one whose innards are being tugged at. He looks ridiculous in his gown and hair net and shoe covers, hospital blue all over. His eyes go dewy at the sight of the baby and he looks at Shiv like —
Like Paris. It makes her mouth tug sharply to one side, and she closes her eyes, escaping the bright surgical lights.
Tom holds the baby first, of course, since Shiv is somewhat incapacitated. The baby is very tiny against his giant body, cradled so carefully in his arms.
“Oh, hello,” he murmurs to her, like they’re the only two people on earth.
Then he sinks down onto the stool by Shiv’s head, and holds the bundle of baby out toward her. “Say hi to your mom,” he says, his voice thick.
Shiv reaches out. Her hand is trembling but all of her is trembling; it’s the drugs. She crooks the tip of her index finger into the soft receiving blanket, pulling it down just a little so she can see the baby’s entire face.
The baby opens just one bleary eye, only halfway, but it’s enough for her to see Shiv, for Shiv to feel herself being seen.
She thinks, momentarily, that her obstetrician has reached too far up the cavity of her body, and squeezed a hand around her heart.
They name the baby Lenora. Rose, Wambsgans, and Roy follow that name on the birth registration, in that order, no hyphens.
Lenora is Shiv’s version of a compromise. Tom loved Adelaide, and after she smacked that down with a veto he got ridiculously attached to Eloise, and then his version of compromise was Eleanor. Shiv couldn’t make herself like it. It reminded her too much of other people, felt like it should have had Roosevelt or of Aquitaine tacked after it.
“We’re already saddling this kid with so much,” she’d told Tom. She was heavily pregnant and aching with it, all of her puffy and engorged, and Tom was treating her like he had a few lightyears ago, flitting rapidly between fear and adoration, like volleying a barb back at her could puncture the amniotic sac and sent her straight into labour.
So she offered Lenora. It had the same bones as Eleanor, the same meaning, without all the fucking history.
“I think it’s beautiful,” was what Tom said in the end, and Shiv couldn’t quite tell if he was lying and couldn’t quite be bothered to give it much thought either way, but — no. He wasn’t. He was looking at her like what he’d said was I think you’re beautiful and Shiv was feeding his legacy from her bloodstream. He’d kissed her and Shiv fell asleep twenty minutes later, using him as a body pillow, some stupid cooking show muted on the TV and their daughter slamming feet against her ribs like she intended to do real damage.
So: Lenora.
Connor comes to the hospital with Willa and a gigantic pink teddy bear. He looks genuinely thrilled, shaking Tom’s hand and saying, “Shivvy, baby, you did it!” like he has any sweet idea of what Shiv and her poor stretched-out body have been through in the past thirty-nine weeks.
“Mm,” Shiv says, tucking her hair behind her ears, hoping that her appearance isn’t doing away with whatever shreds remain of her dignity.
Connor slips his arm around her shoulders in a half-hug and kisses the top of her head. “You doing okay, honey?”
Her throat swells and she nods beneath his chin. Connor has always loved her so simply, without reservation, even when she’s been an ass to him. Shiv thinks that’s how she’s supposed to love her kid, so she should probably figure out how he does it in the next five to ten seconds. She says, “Mm-hm. Just sore or whatever.”
“Well, you’re a champ,” says Connor, handing Shiv the pink monstrosity. “Isn’t she a champion, Willa?“
Willa nods, giving Shiv a sincere smile from the foot of the bed, though her eyebrows are drawn together. “A champion,” she agrees. “I can’t imagine.”
Shiv snorts, and then immediately feels sort of shitty about it. She looks at Tom and catches the end of a little smirk on his mouth. He takes the teddy bear and sets it on a chair.
“Oh, look at her,” Connor says from above the bassinet. “Shiv.” He glances at her, and she’s horrified to see that he looks like he’s about to cry. “She’s beautiful.”
“Seven pounds, two ounces,” Tom reports. “Ten fingers. Ten toes.”
“Lenora,” Shiv offers softly. It still feels like something they had no right to choose, like her daughter should’ve been able to announce her own name upon arrival.
“Lenora,” Connor repeats. He reaches his hands out toward the baby. “May I — ?”
Shiv finds herself looking at Tom again, as if he’ll know the right answer. The last time she chose between yes and no, it blew her life to pieces.
“Sure?” Tom suggests, quietly.
Shiv shifts to sit up a bit straighter, and winces when everything south of her shoulders screams in protest. “You have to support her neck,” she says, too quickly. “And her head has — ”
“I know, Shiv,” Connor says, gathering the baby into his arms. He’s chuckling, but it’s not unkind. “I held you when you were this big. Didn’t drop you. I don’t think.”
“You’re not fucking funny,” Shiv says, but she can see that he’s holding Lenora properly, her head nestled in the crook of his arm, and she feels less like she’s going to have to dive across the room and tear her stitches in the process.
“Lenora,” Connor murmurs, rocking the baby, staring down at her as though she’s made of stars. She feels to Shiv more like a solar eclipse, terrifying to look at straight-on. “Hello, beautiful girl. Hello. Welcome to America.”
It’s a relief, for Shiv, to feel her face screw into its why-is-Connor-like-this expression. It’s something she knows how to feel, a path she’s walked more times than she can count. “And, uh, the world?” she suggests.
“The universe,” Willa supplies.
Shiv leans back into the pillows behind her. “Don’t indoctrinate my baby, Con.”
He’s still gazing at Lenora like she’s a miracle. One of the baby’s fists has escaped her swaddle, and Connor touches her teeny fingers. “Oh, Shiv,” he says. “Pop would be so proud.”
Shiv’s eyes well up immediately. She can feel her mouth collapse. When she asks, “You think so?” she means for it to sound casual and careless, an idle curiousity. It sounds instead like the most desperate question anyone has ever asked. A tear rolls down her cheek, and Tom floats closer.
“It’s a fucking — ” Shiv shakes her head, waves a hand through the air, pinches the bridge of her nose. “Hormone crash.”
Connor is looking at her gently, like she is the brand new person, the one whose existence is so fresh it almost isn’t real. “Of course,” he says. “Of course.”
Shiv ducks her head, hiding her face in one hand. A sob keeps catching in her chest, over and over again, demanding to be released.
“Hey,” Tom says. His hand curls around the back of her neck. “Shiv. Honey. Hey. Come here, come on.” He uses the pressure of his hand to pull her to him, and Shiv lets herself go. “It’s okay,” he murmurs to her, like he did in an empty conference room several months ago, lights off, California sun bleeding in through the window. It’s a lie now as much as it was a lie then, but just like then, she presses her face into him, into his solid familiarity.
“It’s alright,” Tom murmurs to her, like they don’t have a mercilessly broken marriage and violently whole baby. She wonders if he wraps his hands around the firm, buttery armrests of Logan Roy’s chair the same way he wraps his hands around the soft, sore places of Logan Roy’s daughter.
Across the room, in Connor’s hold, Lenora releases a piercing wail.
Shiv wakes from an unsatisfying nap, just barely tucked beneath the cloak of slumber, lost in a blurry and disorienting dream — she’s in the Hamptons with her brothers, at the edge of the ocean, and Ken is eating a comically large lollipop while Roman hops over waves; Rome keeps saying the sharks will get you, they’ll smell it, blood in the water, blood in the water and Kendall keeps holding the lollipop so high that the circle of it obstructs the sun, and Shiv is yelling I’m not even on my fucking period! even though she is red and wet between her thighs, and give it to me, Ken, it’s mine, you took mine! as she reaches and reaches and reaches, unable to grasp what she wants — to see Tom seated in a chair, shirtless, the baby curled against his chest and a blanket printed with butterflies laid over them both.
Lenora’s little cheek is smushed against his skin, her mouth puckered and sucking at nothing as she sleeps. Tom has his hand tucked under her bottom and his lips at the crown of her head.
“Sleep more,” he says, when he sees Shiv stirring. “She’s out.”
“Yeah.” She lifts an eyebrow half-heartedly. “I see that.”
He raises an eyebrow back at her, but there’s something almost sheepish in his smile. “Skin to skin,” he explains. “Nurse, uh, suggested it.”
Shiv swallows, and because she is not a petulant child, she does not demand he give her the baby. Because she is trying to be something resembling a good wife, she does not point out that she and Lenora are hardly divorced from being a singular being, and that there is no way Tom’s skin can compare to the body that housed and grew her. She swallows a second time, despite her dry mouth, and says, “She looks comfortable.”
Tom nods, gaze dropping down to the baby. “She’s — ” He pauses. “God. She’s perfect.” He looks up at Shiv, eyelashes damp with unshed tears. “Isn’t she?”
Shiv aches from the inside out. It throbs through her stitches, creates pressure behind her eyes. She wishes she could conceive of a universe where this happened and it was just happy, just fucking uncomplicated, just Shiv and the man she married and the child they made together on some boring night, dinner and the news on TV and missionary sex.
“Of course she is,” she whispers, so quiet that she wonders if Tom can even hear her.
“Siobhan.” His eyes are so full. She wonders if he’ll ever tell her even half of the things he’s thinking. “Thank you.” His voice cracks between the words.
She looks him over. Lenora, nestled against him, is the very thing he kept saying he wanted, he needed, couldn’t they just pull the goalie — fucking Minnesota — and see?
He never thanked her for her vote at the board meeting. For what she allowed him to have, by denying it to her brother. He was never grateful like he is right now, across hospital tile and under butterfly blanket. He can see what she has given him, and what she could have withheld.
Shiv thinks she could ask him for Waystar right now. She could ask him to saw off Matsson’s dick with a blunt butter knife and deliver it to her on a bed of roses. She could tell him to throw his watches in the sink and listen to them crunch in the garbage disposal. She could demand anything, and he would bend to her, maybe even deeper than he ever has before, forehead on the ground, suppliant.
She nods at him across the room, across Lenora’s small body, seven pounds of revelation, and says, “Uh-huh.”
Roman comes to the hospital with a gigantic, obnoxious bouquet of helium balloons. There are three hearts, a monstrous looking unicorn, a smiling tiger, and an alien, all tied together with thick white ribbon.
“Hey,” he says, after punching the balloons through the doorway and releasing them so that they float up and attach themselves to the ceiling. His voice is quiet, like nighttimes in their childhood, their father’s voice bellowing far away and Shiv whisper-whining about Roman hogging all the blankets.
Shiv winces in the direction of the bright, shiny balloons. “Hey.”
“You, uh, okay?” He’s nervous, she realizes, rocking back on his heels, hands jammed into his pockets.
“Are you?” she asks. “Thought you were fucking…finding yourself in Bolivia.”
“Yeah, well.” He shoots her a smile, sharp and brimming with irony. He hasn’t even so much as looked in Tom’s direction, and Shiv’s husband gets the hint, stepping out of the room with his phone already pressed to his ear, very fucking important businessman. “Family first, Siobhan,” Roman says, and jams his heel noisily against the door once it’s closed behind Tom.
“Roman,” she says, scowling. “Be quiet, you’re going to wake her.”
“Ah.” He glances over at the bassinet. “Wouldn’t want to disturb the demon spawn.” A beat, during which Shiv barely has time to narrow her eyes and open her mouth, and then he says, “Sorry. The little princess. Heir to the rotten kingdom.”
“That’s not what she is,” Shiv says, evenly, but she feels it hotly, burning inside her. The baby — Lenora — is a person, or so she’s told herself, over and over again. A person. Not a pawn.
“Uh-huh.” Roman rubs a hand over his jaw. The scar above his eye is silvery now, barely visible, but still easy for Shiv’s gaze to find, to bump against and linger over. “You okay?” he asks again, eyeing her like she just walked out of burning wreckage. “You need, like, a stiff drink? Or vaginoplasty?”
“Fuck off, Rome,” Shiv sighs. It feels good to say. “You’re so fucking — I had a c-section, you idiot.”
“So just the drink, then?” He peers over at the bassinet.
“You can go closer, you know,” Shiv says mildly. “She doesn’t — well, she does kind of bite. But I don’t think she’ll do it to you.”
“Gunning for those bitey bragging rights already, huh?” Roman takes slow steps with a strange little bounce, like he’s lunging into each of them, propelling himself forward. “Enterprising little thing. Like your father.”
“Fuck off,” Shiv says again, this time in the way that doesn’t feel good, low and fierce with warning.
Rome laughs and lifts his hands, assuming an overdramatic and insincere apologetic expression. “She’s been annoyed with me for thirty-five years,” he says toward the bassinet. “You know, when she was a baby, she actually — ” Abruptly, he shuts up, looking down at the baby.
Shiv jams her hands into the mattress of the hospital bed on either side of her, trying to leverage her body upward so she can see Lenora. It hurts like hell, sucks the air out of her lungs so that she’s breathless when she says, “What’s wrong? What happened?”
A part of her is expecting Roman to mock her for this display of maternal concern. Another part of her expects him to announce that he can see the horns sprouting out of her daughter’s forehead, or spy the shape of a cloven hoof beneath the swaddle. But none of her is expecting what he does, which is to just say, simply, “Holy shit.”
“What?” Shiv demands. “Ro, I swear to god — ”
He waves a hand in her direction. It makes sort of a vague shape in the air, no discernible meaning. “It’s okay. I think. I mean — breathing. It — she’s definitely breathing. And, you know. Asleep.”
“So then what — ”
“She’s — ” Roman stops, swallows. His voice drops lower, hushed, when he says, “She’s really fucking small.” He turns his face toward her, and she sees her brother like she did in her dream, small boy shadowed by the swell of a big wave. “Holy shit, Shiv.”
Something cracks in Shiv’s chest, oozing between her ribs, probably leaking into her breasts, seeping into her milk. She moves her hands into her lap, tension releasing from her arms. Finally, fucking finally, someone else is looking at the baby and seeing the abject terror of her.
“I know,” she says — or croaks, really, if she’s being honest about the sound of it.
Roman looks at her for another beat, like they are still the children they once were, huddled into bed together using one another as insurance policies against monsters and kidnappers, elbows knocking. Then he looks back at the baby.
He scrapes the back of his wrist across both of his eyes. “She have a name?”
“Lenora.”
“Lenora,” he repeats, testing it out. With a derisive edge, he adds, “Wambsgans?”
“Please,” Shiv scoffs. She says it like she’s tossing something into the air from her mouth, chin tipping up in disdain. Rome flashes her a grin, a quick thing that makes her own lips twitch.
“Lenora Roy,” he says. He curls the fingers of his left hand around the edge of the bassinet. Through the plastic, Shiv sees his fingertips stray toward Lenora but never make contact. “L. R.” He glances at her again. “For dad?”
She shrugs. Tom had never seemed to register it, but in some ways — “Yeah. I guess. For dad.”
He nods. His head is tipped down, toward Lenora, but his back is straight, his shoulders relaxed. Shiv finds herself looking at his chest the same way she’s been looking at her daughter’s, searching for a pattern in inhales and exhales, thinking of the depth of the circles beneath her brother’s eyes, he made me breathe funny.
She’s about to ask if he wants to hold the baby, even though she knows his answer will be no and she’s kind of glad of it, but then he’s asking, yet again, “Shiv — you okay?”
She wonders what he thinks she’s going to say. Fuck no, Roman. I’m not okay. Slice off my hospital bracelet, fly me out of the country, hide me in the Alps. I haven’t been okay in months, and I don’t think you have either. “Yeah, Rome. I’m okay.”
The hospital releases them after four days. Dr. Hasford says Shiv’s incision is healing nicely, says her bleeding looks normal, says Shiv should be just fine and here is how often she can take acetaminophen. The pediatrician is happy with Lenora’s head shape and heart rate and bilirubin levels.
“Healthy mom, healthy baby!” the nurse says brightly, like it’s a victory, like Shiv should be so happy, having accomplished the task set out by her biology and lived to tell the tale.
Instead, she feels like she’s vibrating out of her skin. She stands next to the bassinet and watches Lenora squirm around with something icy running down her spine. “They’re just — ” Her stomach is still round and wrong, her sense of herself still filtered through a funhouse mirror. “They’re just going to let us take her?”
Tom looks up from his cell phone and blinks at her. He locks his screen and pockets the phone. “Well, she’s — she’s our daughter.”
“I know she’s our fucking daughter, Tom,” Shiv says tightly. Len is awake, gazing up at them curiously, and she wonders fleetingly if she’s not supposed to swear around the baby. “But she’s so — ” Fragile is the only word that her mind supplies. “We — we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”
He steps closer to her but doesn’t touch her. “Joanne’s already at the apartment,” he reminds her. Their nanny, thoroughly vetted and thoroughly interviewed and thoroughly NDA’d. “If there’s anything…you’re not sure about, I’m sure she — ”
“Don’t fucking say that to me,” Shiv says, glaring up at him with enough force that it stings her eyes. “Don’t say that to me like you know shit. Just because I have the uterus, I’m supposed to magically fucking know everything?”
His eyebrows tilt. “Well. I have changed a diaper before. My cousin St — ”
“Yeah, and I’ve sat in your fucking office before,” Shiv snaps. “Sat in that leather chair that makes you feel so important. My feet didn’t even touch the ground. None of it fucking means anything.”
Tom exhales long and slow. “Shiv — ”
“Don’t,” she says, wetly, and turns away so he won’t see her cry. She should’ve asked for a hysterectomy while Dr. Hasford was digging around inside of her. Her body is full of endless betrayals.
“I wasn’t trying to upset you,” Tom says quietly, from behind her. She hates him for that tempered voice, for the things at its roots. The things he wrote down on paper and postmarked and sent across the ocean. She hates the easy way he reaches for them and unearths them from the soil strewn about from all the digging they’ve done at each other.
“Sure,” Shiv says, pressing the knuckles of her index fingers beneath her eyes. “Yeah. I think you just — find it a little hard, to think of me. Lately.”
Her words settle between them. She can hear him swallow. Lenora makes a little coo of a sound, a reminder of what else exists in the places they clash.
“That’s not fair, Shiv,” Tom says.
She doesn’t really care if it’s fair. She’s not sure fair exists, and if it does, it sure as fuck has never shown its face over the course of her life. But then she looks at Lenora, and Lenora is looking at her with something perceptive in her minuscule expression, like even in her blurry monochrome baby-eyes view of the world, she can see that her mother is crying.
I’m sorry, Shiv thinks, as Lenora begins to grizzle, but it’s not something she can say. What she can say, looking at her baby daughter: “No. It isn’t fair.”
Tom sets the car seat down as if both Lenora and the seat are made of glass. Precious cargo. He gives Mondale one of the baby’s blankets to introduce him to her scent. He darts into the bedroom and changes his clothes while Joanne gushes to Shiv about how beautiful Lenora is and Shiv awkwardly drinks a glass of water in her own fucking kitchen. And then Tom presses a cautious kiss to Shiv’s cheek, squeezes Lenora’s toes, and goes to a meeting.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Shiv says. “Is that…”
“Of course!” Joanne says. “Of course, go.” She unbuckles Lenora with expert hands. “I’ve got her.”
Shiv finds that she can’t watch as Joanne lifts Lenora and brings the baby in against her chest. She finishes her glass of water instead.
And then she goes to her bedroom, takes off all her clothes — disposable underwear, humiliatingly, included — and steps into the shower. She turns up the water pressure until it hurts her nipples and her incision if she doesn’t twist her body just the right way.
She stays there for over an hour, steam rising, as if she’s not someone’s mother.
Breastfeeding fucking hurts. That’s the reason, in the end, that Shiv sticks with it.
It’s sort of accidental, at first. They have cupboards stocked with European formula. But when they were in the hospital, Lenora nuzzled into Shiv’s breast and found a nipple of her own volition, some primal instinct that superseded them both. She allowed it — what else was she going to do, exactly, yank the baby off her body unceremoniously like the mother she still suspects Tom is fearing she’ll be? No. She let Lenora have colostrum, the stuff the stupid book she read referred to as liquid gold. That which is precious is — well. It’s her daughter’s birthright.
Eight hours later, she was bleeding. The lactation consultant, sotto voce and pastel shirt, did not quite manage to hide her wince on seeing Shiv’s mangled breasts. You’re just learning each other, she said, while Tom hovered awkwardly on the other side of the room, buzzing phone in a limp hand. Shiv thought, you have no fucking idea.
She does not like to admit defeat. It’s her father’s blood that leaks from her body.
There are visits from two more lactation consultants at their home, both highly recommended by Joanne and her nanny network. Shiv despises them both, the way they coo at her baby. It keeps hurting. Her milk runs pink.
But it doesn’t feel wrong. The pain. It feels deserved. Shiv tips her head back against the overstuffed rocking chair and closes her eyes against tears and says oh, fuck under her breath at her daughter’s unaligned latch, her weirdly sharp baby gums, her insistent suckling. She runs her thumb back and forth over the wispy hair on Lenora’s head, her delicate skull. She thinks, yes. She thinks go ahead, my darling. Lenora has already waged war on her body, head to toe, from the hair that abandons her head in clumps in the shower to the stretch marks on her fucking ankles. But still, she thinks, tear me apart, do it now; find vengeance for everything I’ll do to you.
The fourth lactation consultant has a brisk, no-nonsense attitude, her voice sharp syllables that seem to make the plethora of teddy bears in the nursery tremble. She practically manhandles Shiv and Lenora into bed together, opens Lenora mouth, squeezes Shiv’s breast, and — it’s better.
Tom goes to meetings. And more meetings. And then some more meetings. He flies to California for an overnight, and tells Shiv about it with something funny in his voice, like he’s expecting her to tell him he can’t, or maybe like he’s expecting to have to remind her that he’s ass-kissed his way into freedom of choice.
She says nothing, so he says, “Get some sleep, yeah, Shiv?” and she keeps saying nothing.
Shiv floats around the apartment feeling superfluous. Joanne does the burping and the bum-wiping, the rocking, the snot-sucking, the tummy time. She talks to Lenora in a bright, musical tone that chafes at Shiv’s skin.
When it’s time to feed Lenora, Shiv takes her into the bedroom, lays the baby down right in the middle of the California king. She looks very small, but significant, like the dot of a capital in the midst of an expansive nation on a map. Shiv sinks onto the bed next to her, Lenora’s mouth open and waiting. Shiv props her elbow sharply into the pillow under her head, watches her daughter eat, and relishes the almost-silence.
Lenora almost always falls asleep at her breast, latch going slack but mouth still fixed to Shiv’s body. Shiv traces the shape of her baby’s cheekbone and jaw with the tip of her pinkie finger.
“I love you,” she practices saying, her breath blowing through Len’s dark fuzz of hair. It’s cowardly. It probably doesn’t count for much, if the recipient is milk drunk and sleeping.
Joanne says, “You could nap, Siobhan. We’re all good here. Belly full.” Shiv wonders if she’s acting on Tom’s orders, contemplates firing her, and instead grabs a banana and wanders to her bedroom, because what the fuck else is she going to do?
She eats the banana, tosses the peel onto Tom’s nightstand, and gets under the duvet. Her bedroom smells like milk and metal and the tangy, disgusting indignity of postpartum night sweats. She closes her eyes, but her sleep is never restorative. Some ridiculous part of her brain refuses to relinquish consciousness, always on alert for Lenora’s cries. It doesn’t not care that it’s the twenty-first century or that Shiv has Joanne and her pile of glowing references. It’s attuned, for better or worse, to the baby her body built.
“Fuck off,” Shiv whispers into the room, late-night-dark at 1:00 p.m. thanks to the blackout curtains. Her brain conjures up a phantom cry from somewhere down the hallway. Tears spill from her eyes and roll down her temples, called by gravity, wetting her ears and her pillowcase.
Len has newborn eyes for the first couple weeks of her life, that indistinguishable universal shade, a bluey grey, like two storm clouds caught under her pale eyebrows. Shiv waits impatiently for her eyes to lighten, to find their way to a clear blue, her eyes or Tom’s or some impossible in-between.
But they don’t. Instead, they grow darker, blue fading altogether. They turn into a soft, light brown, speckled with amber. Flecks of gold leaf. Captured stars.
“Who would’ve guessed?” Tom murmurs, gazing at Lenora’s face. He is holding her against his shoulder, their faces close together. Len’s eyes are big and full of wonder. She does not see what Shiv sees, sweat splotches beneath the arms of Tom’s dress shirt and his hairline fighting a losing battle against recession.
“It’s possible,” Shiv says, harder than she means to, like she’s throwing something piercing, her namesake, in his direction. “I Googled it.”
Tom gives her an exhausted look.
She can’t help how it sparks at something in her. She remembers, from the shape of his mouth, what she was like before she was a milk factory, a wife, a scheming sister, a fucking accessory in everyone else’s story. “I mean, go ahead,” she says with sour, pursed lips. “Swab the inside of your fucking cheek. I’ll do hers.” She makes her eyes all big, as big as their baby’s. “Oh my god, Tom. Do you not trust me?”
He sighs, so heavy Lenora makes a little sound in response, her face tucked into his neck. “I didn’t say shit, Siobhan.”
“You can, though. You can say whatever shit you want.” She drags her eyes all the way down his body and all the way up again, keeping her expression good and bored. “Big man. CEO.”
Tom sighs again, like speaking to her is the hardest thing he’s done all day. Heat flames up her neck, onto her cheeks. “I know she’s my daughter.”
“Oh, yeah?” Shiv leans forward in her corner of the sofa, elbows on her knees. Her incision protests, but she ignores it. “How do you know?“
He rests his cheek against Lenora’s head. She’s drifting toward sleep, curled into him like a comma, the pause that separates them. “She has my ears,” he says, matter-of-fact. “And my nailbeds.”
Shiv’s mouth is just crooking up to release a laugh when he continues, still in that easy tone like he’s giving budget forecasts, “And she has your brother’s eyes.”
She doesn’t speak to her husband for three days, and she does not, doesnotdoesnotdoesnot, think of Kendall. Not even with Lenora’s eyes glowing up at her in an otherwise lightless room on the wrong side of midnight, searching Shiv out like beacons.
Shiv’s whole body is in a constant state of efflux. She spends a lot of time in the shower, where she can pretend that’s not the case, weeping eyes and leaking breasts and gooey incision and bleeding cunt — all of it washed away.
Wrapped in a plush white towel, she sits at the edge of her bed, careless of bloodstains. It is patently stupid, pressing on the phone symbol beneath Caroline Collingwood on her cell, childish in a way Shiv never allows herself, but she does it anyway. She feels like her body is running away from her, rivulets of Shiv Roy seeping through Manhattan streets, red white yellow, a girlish gush brimming over, so full it turns empty and disappears unnoticed into sewer drains. She wants — maybe even needs — someone to tell her how to hold herself in.
“Darling,” her mother’s unhurried voice greets. “What a pleasant surprise.”
Shiv’s sense of regret is immediate. Her breasts are full to the point of aching. “Hi, Mom.”
“You haven’t sent a picture in days.”
She was unaware that her mother was so invested in the photos of Len she’s been sending. Caroline tends to reply after several hours have passed, usually when Shiv is trying to sleep, always with Lovely. “Yeah, well, I’ve been busy, Mom. You know. Parenting.”
“Ah, yes, parenting. That glamorous vocation.” She pauses long enough to sip something. “And, Siobhan? How is it treating you?”
“Great,” Shiv says. “Fantastic.”
“Mm.” Another sip. “She doesn’t favour you much, does she?”
Shiv holds a sigh back, clenching her teeth around it. “She’s a baby. She looks like a baby.”
“You always looked like your father’s people,” Caroline muses.
“Right.”
They’re quiet together, mother and daughter. Shiv tries to imagine herself, as a baby, in Caroline’s arms. She can’t do it. She can’t imagine herself as small as Len, and she can’t imagine her mother’s body, all angles, mired in the softness Shiv can’t seem to escape.
But she knows it happened. Even if she can’t conjure it, it’s the truth. It’s their history.
“Shall we get on with whatever argument you’ve called me to have, dear?” Caroline proposes, her voice almost gentle.
Shiv scowls, that petulant adolescent scowl that her mother draws out of her like no one else can. Her towel is wet beneath her. “You really do think the best of me, Mom, huh?”
“Oh, come now, Siobhan. It’s just that I know you.”
“You don’t,” Shiv counters, fighting against a dramatic edge of hysteria that’s trying to creep into her words. “That’s — that’s the whole of it. You don’t.”
“Alright,” her mother says, mild. “I don’t. I don’t know you at all, and it’s all my fault, of course. Learned about your engagement from an e-mail. Confronted with your…expectant condition at your father’s funeral. A text message regarding my granddaughter’s birth. But I’m the villain in all of it. Of course.”
Shiv knows better, by now, than to point out that these are all examples from her adult life, and that she had a whole childhood before that, a childhood that her mother might have chosen to partake in. She says, “You told me I wouldn’t be a good mother.”
“Siobhan,” her mother scolds. There is a note of genuine surprise in it. “I did no such thing. I told you to call me if you needed anything. That I’d come.”
“Not in Bimini,” Shiv sighs. “In Italy. At your fucking…bachelorette. You told me I’d made the right choice. Not to have children.”
“Well, how was I to know you’d — ” Caroline sighs, sips. “I said it was a good choice. Not that you’d be terrible. Of course you’re not terrible.”
“Just like you’re not?” Shiv asks, snide. “It was fucking implied.”
“This is what you’re upset about? I’m your mother, Siobhan, not a soothsayer. You’re wonderful. I’m sure you’re wonderful.”
“How the fuck would I be wonderful?” Shiv thinks she can hear Lenora crying, or maybe her mind is being inventive again. Either way, her milk lets down. She holds the towel more firmly against her chest. “Where would I have learned to be wonderful?”
Caroline makes a tsking sound. She does not rise to meet Shiv’s damning question, does not submit to interrogation. “You’ve always been a quick study, haven’t you, darling?”
Shiv thinks of the earliest years of her life, quite literally grasping at her mother’s skirts. She thinks of Caroline’s hand firm between her shoulder blades, steering her away. She thinks of that telltale flash in her mother’s eyes when she’d start a sentence with Daddy said. And she thinks of her mother, a polished jewel on display in houses that Logan dropped into and stepped out of like they were only corridors in his life. She thinks of hot tears on her face, Daddy, you just got here and her mother telling her to stop carrying on and then later, much later, her mother’s hand soft on her shoulder while she practiced Beethoven on ivory keys, Caroline’s wedding rings cool and somehow heavy as her hand ran down Shiv’s arm.
She blurts, “How did you — ”
The question dies in her throat. How did you do it? How did you live like this? How did you fall asleep? How did you love me? How did you let me go? How did you watch me love him like he pulled the sun into the sky each morning? How did you forget to warn me? How did you make your choices, and what do you make of mine?
“Siobhan?” her mother asks.
“I — ” Shiv shakes her head. Her eyes are prickling, her cheeks are wet. Everything inside of her is determined to be out. “I have to go, baby’s hungry.” She clenches her jaw and manages, just barely, “Bye.”
Their night nanny brings Lenora to Shiv, tiptoeing as if her express purpose isn’t to wake Shiv up, at eleven and two and five. Shiv rolls onto her side, pushes the blankets down to her hips — can only fucking imagine the shape her mother’s eyebrows would make if she accidentally suffocated her child — and unclasps her nursing bra.
Lenora is always fussy and greedy, mouth open as she roots. She is too small and too determined to grow to see hunger as weakness. It’s kind of admirable, actually, the way she takes what she wants. Her neediness is raw, but it is also unyielding. She never hesitates.
Tom still sleeps in their bed most nights, which means that he also wakes to Priya whispering about it being time for the baby to feed. In the daytime, Shiv is often snappy with him about this. Isn’t he very fucking important? Doesn’t he have more meetings than hours in the day? How will he maintain his energy, doesn’t he have a working lunch, deep throating Matsson in her father’s old office? And Tom will look at her with that implacable face he’s perfected lately, affect flattened right out of it save for the mild raising of one eyebrow, and say, “Hm.”
At night, though, it does feel different. There is a tenderness, safe in the dark, unexamined. The three of them nestled together — it feels animal-old, something Shiv’s bones have known before. They are bound together by DNA and gravity, by the tangled echoes of the death knell of Waystar and Lenora’s first-ever deep-lung wail. She does not mind when Tom runs a gentle knuckle over the baby’s back; she does not even mind when he stretches his arm out across the top of her pillow and plays with her hair. Len snuffles and sucks at her breasts and Tom’s fingers tug carefully through tangles, and Shiv doesn’t mind.
Sometimes he is the one who scoops Lenora up when she’s had her fill, instead of texting Priya. “Shh, little Lennie, little one, little baby,” he croons on the way out of the room. Shiv’s breasts leak onto their percale sheets, leaving wet splotches that will turn into fatty stains. She rolls over so that when Tom returns he’s left with damp cotton and silence.
Rava calls. Shiv is sitting at the dining table eating the middle out of a decadent, over-sweet cinnamon roll. She’s ravenously hungry, basically every minute of the day, and craving sugar. She looks at her ex-sister-in-law’s name on the screen of her phone and nausea creeps up her throat. Her mouth tastes like a memory that doesn’t belong to her, a little boy all knobby-kneed and eager-eyed, eating a sundae and a promise in Bridgehampton. She spits out her mouthful.
“Hi,” she answers. She has to force her sticky lips apart to get the word out.
“Hi, Shiv,” says Rava. She sounds — cautious. But not devastated. “How are you? How…are things going?”
“Oh,” Shiv says. She swallows down bile and sugar, relief washing over her so forcefully that for a moment she can’t feel anything else. She shoves her plate away. “Good. Good. You know, it’s…life-changing, and all that.” She grimaces and presses a thumb into her eye socket, against her orbital bone. “Lenora’s great. We got the flowers. Thank you.”
“Of course,” Rava says. “I’m so happy for you.” She pauses. “And Tom.”
Shiv exhales, sharp, through her nose. “And Tom,” she agrees, with just a hint of contempt. “We’re all so happy for Tom.”
Rava doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. Shiv pokes at the corpse of her cinnamon roll with her fork.
“Sophie‘s so excited to have a cousin,” is what Rava finally says to fill the air. “I’m sure you’re all still settling in as a family, but the kids and I would love to meet Lenora, when you’re ready.”
“Yeah,” Shiv says, and then more softly, “Yeah, that would be really nice.” It’s been months and months since she’s seen her niece and nephew, and despite everything, Rava is still family. It’s not lost on her that Tom, wanting to try for a baby, was all too aware of this, too. These are the ties that bind, for better or worse and then worst of all.
“Great,” Rava says. “That’s great.”
They spend several more minutes on the phone, a small talk game of chicken. Neither of them can wrap their mouths around Kendall’s name, it seems, so they hang up without a mention of him.
Shiv abandons her half-eaten snack and takes another shower.
She cannot, for the life of her, for all the determination and stubbornness in her body, stop crying. She’s starting to feel like a cuckoo clock, like you could set your watch by her, abrupt sob-fest every hour on the hour. She thinks she cries more than her literal baby. She thinks she’s crying more than she ever has in her life.
Tom goes to California for another night and she cries thinking of him sleeping in the bed at the apartment where they last made love before everything went to whole new levels of heaven and hell. She cries when Mondale follows her into the kitchen, nosing at her knees, because she knows that he’s always known she didn’t really want him. She cries in Lenora’s room, facing the closet, because she’s found a onesie-and-pants set printed with roses that reminds her of a dress she’d loved when she was very young, and because it makes her think of her father’s sister, and then it makes her think of her father, and then it makes her think of her brother.
Joanne freezes when she walks in, Lenora in her arms. She looks at Shiv as though Shiv is an animal escaped from a cage. “Oh! I didn’t…know you were in here.”
Shiv swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I was just…” She looks down at the outfit she’s holding, on its small satin hanger. “Organizing.”
“Oh!” Joanne’s discomfort is palpable. “Oh, that’s, um, great! She’ll probably grow out of newborn size in a couple weeks… you’re tall, aren’t you, sweet girl?”
Lenora whines in response. Shiv turns to look at them, and the baby lists to one side in Joanne’s hold, toward one of the nanny’s shoulders, pitching herself as best she can in Shiv’s direction. Shiv’s heart wrenches.
“Yeah,” Joanne says warmly to Len. “Yeah, that’s mama! Come on, let’s get you — ”
Shiv reaches out. “Hey, Len,” she says softly. She scoops the baby out of Joanne’s arms and into her own. “Hey,” she murmurs, right by Lenora’s ear. She kisses the sweet shell of it and breathes her daughter in. “I’ve got her for a minute,” she tells Joanne.
“I was just going to change her,” Joanne says. “She had quite the spit-up.”
“She’s fine,” Shiv says, moving out of the room without looking back. “You’re fine, yeah?” she asks Len. The baby is busy nuzzling her face into Shiv’s shoulder. “Yeah. We’re fine.”
Lenora begins to mouth at Shiv’s skin, and then sucks, hard enough that it could be bruising if given enough time. She starts to fuss, quietly now, but Shiv recognizes that Lenora will need very little encouragement to escalate into a higher pitch.
“Okay,” she says, rubbing her hand over her baby’s back in small, slow circles. “Okay. Fuck,” she adds on half a laugh when Lenora tries to latch onto her chin. It’s not technically time for Len to eat, but whatever. “Okay,” Shiv breathes, and she leans back against the wall in the hallway and sinks down slowly until her ass hits the floor, keeping her daughter held close and steady. “I’m here. It’s okay.”
Careful not to jostle Len too much, she manages to get one arm out of the sleeve of her t-shirt and unhook one side of her nursing bra. She shifts Lenora into the cradle of her arms and guides her in.
It hurts, like it used to. They only ever really got the hang of this laying down together, and now it makes Shiv hiss in a breath between her teeth. “Fucking ouch,” she whispers, as Lenora gulps and swallows. She’s going to be bleeding by the time the baby is done, most likely. But that’s okay. They’re okay.
She holds her baby and leans her head against the wall. She thinks about California again, and the unflattering sunglasses Tom is probably wearing right at this moment. She remembers Kendall’s stupid sunflower seeds, and the way Roman was always kissing her hello and goodbye and sometimes just because, and the mifepristone pills that sat next to the sink in her en suite bathroom for two weeks, never touched. She thinks about her choices; she thinks about her family.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers to Lenora, as her skin cracks open. “I’m really fucking sorry.”