Here She Lies

work in the prison so that Lexy could drink the real thing at day care.
    “It’s just that I want her to stick with breast milk for a while longer,” I said. “It’s so much better for her and she’s still so young.”
    “What about supplementing with formula? Wouldn’t that free you up a bit?”
    Dreaded formula, full of artificial additives. Julie,not being a mother herself, couldn’t have realized what she was asking of me, how every bit of mommy-baby attachment I relinquished would be a loss. And yet maybe she had a point. Lexy had been fed on mama’s milk (pure gold) for nearly half a year. Was it time for more flexibility? It would be a matter of training my milk ducts not to produce milk every day at a certain time. The idea of formula saddened me a little, but things were changing now. I had to be strong.
    “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it, but gradually.”
    “And maybe we should start her on solid food, too. She seems kind of hungry.”
    Hungry? I resented that a little. “Maybe it would be easier if I just took her with me.”
    “Right. And bring her to the orientation at the hospital? Not exactly professional.”
    “You could come with me to New York, Jules. It could be fun.”
    “I have some work things coming up — nothing I can’t do with Lexy around, but I have to be here. Anyway, we’d be pretty cramped in Dad’s old apartment, don’t you think? Just leave Lexy at home with me—”
    “But you have so much work—”
    “Not that much. Don’t worry! I want to take care of her. It’ll be fine .”
    So it was settled. I mean really settled: I was going, alone; and Lexy would gradually be weaned to bottles and solids. I thought it seemed like a lot to ask of my baby all at once, especially after being separated from her daddy and her home, but Julie seemed so confident.
    On the way home, passing through Great Barrington,we caught the local cell phone store before it closed at seven. Julie bought herself a new phone — slender and pink — and signed me on to her service, getting me a lesser phone that was still a considerable upgrade from what I was used to. After, she pulled the car up to Brooks Pharmacy so I could run in and buy four new plastic bottles, silicone nipples and a can of formula. Then, as the sun set along a spectrum of vibrant, dying color, and the green mountains grew dark and shadowy around us, we headed back to the house.
    The days passed in a modest kind of peacefulness, a respite from upheavals and traumatic events. The street out front washed clean with two more rains. Thomas Soiffer seemed to vanish like a puff of smoke, and with it the murder investigation, news of which appeared in the papers with less and less frequency. We went on with our lives; what else could we do?
    Julie and I fell into routines. I would sit alone in the Yellow Room at appointed times, pumping milk from my breasts and freezing it in plastic bags, every few days omitting a pumping, retraining and literally downsizing my breasts (though they still managed to reach near-explosive proportions if I didn’t get to the pump on time). Lexy was started first on a mix of breast milk and formula once a day, then one full bottle of formula a day, then two. Julie worked at odd hours, making and taking phone calls, hammering information out of and into her computer, but as always she directed her energies with admirable focus and seemed to have plenty of time to spend with Lexy. Which was good: our plan, for my baby’s comfort and happiness when I was away in New York, seemed to beworking. Lexy was adjusting beautifully to the bottle-breast trade-off between look-alike mommies.
    Sometimes, when Julie fed and napped Lexy, I skedaddled, haunting the house and grounds with my camera, capturing the final traces of Zara Moklas’s evaporation and documenting my family’s daily life. Sometimes I went to the gym, where I grunted and groaned myself in the direction of something close to my previous and Julie’s current form. Sometimes I ran errands. I was getting to know the town, shopping for groceries at Price Chopper, gathering fresh fruits and vegetables at Taft Farms and joining the local fashion aficionados to troll the designer racks at Gatsby’s — where, on Thursday, I broke down and bought matching tie-dyed hoodie sweatshirts, silkscreened on the front with a seated Buddha, for we three Milliken females. It was an indulgence, but we deserved it; our little tribe had come a long way