Read The Ten-Year Nap for Free Online Page B

The garbage overflowed, the baby confused day with night, and anyone in her right mind would have wanted to run from that place and return to the sharp corners and fragrant tang of the office climate, with its industrial carpet and stuttering fluorescent lights that forced you awake in the morning like a flask of ammonia passed under the nose.
    But a new mother was not in her right mind. Something overcame her, and her entire purpose was to save that baby , as though she were a superhero flying with arms outstretched through the metropolitan sky. Even a quick trip to the Korean market for yogurt and juice was interminable, and Amy ran the three short blocks back to The Rivermere. She could not leave Mason yet; she loved him too much for that. But neither could she turn him over to some woman from Jamaica or Guyana or Mount Olympus. She could not turn him over to the kindest, softest woman in the world; even a gigantic, gelatinous, floating human breast would not be good enough. She was the only one who could rescue him; their marrow matched, and everyone else’s was imperfect. She was the sole donor, and he drank straight from her tap. The hush of the office and the seduction of all the briefs and the clients and the conferences were worth nothing to her now.
    Amy had observed the way lawyers treated other lawyers who had recently returned from maternity leave: They didn’t hide their impatience or their occasional distaste. She’d seen a jangled new mother on the phone with a pediatrician right before a meeting, whispering tightly into the receiver, “Last night his fever was 100.1, and before I left for work this morning it was down to 99.9, but our sitter just told me it’s back up again and that he’s crying a lot….” The other people in the room glanced at their watches, and someone came to the doorway and tried to look casual, smiling in a friendly manner, then mouthed, “Anytime you’re ready.”
    Amy couldn’t become like these women yet. A law firm or a corporation could never give you what your baby did; it didn’t need you or love you. It could never flatter you enough. It didn’t say Amy, you are the one. You were just a tiny cog, and could a cog ever feel gratified? Was a cog ever proud? You were expected to devote your entire self to your job, coming home so late in the evening that you could get only five minutes with your baby, as if he were an overscheduled CEO. If you were going to miss so much of that tender baby-time, then shouldn’t it be for a job that was extraordinary? How, she thought, could you possibly choose a corporate law firm or a company’s soullessness, or even choose its bland products or components—its clients or textiles or pharmaceuticals or automobile air bags—over your baby’s hopeful, open soul? How could you choose any of this over the place on his head where the bones had not yet fully joined or over his puffed little mouth with the outline as beautiful as calligraphy?
    “Please,” she said to Leo, “isn’t there a way I can put it off? Just until the baby is big?”
    “You could go part-time,” he said.
    “That never works. They call it part-time, but that just means it’s nine to six, five days a week, for sixty percent of your salary, instead of having to be available twenty-four hours a day. And very few people with real influence work part-time.”
    So Leo sat down in the study at the Sven desk they’d put together so poorly that the drawers opened at awkward angles. He stayed in the light of the gooseneck lamp for a long time, and finally he walked back out into the living room, where Amy now sat with Mason fastened onto her nipple, as always. It was midnight. She looked up in anticipation, and Leo, in a Rutgers T-shirt and boxers, unshaven and unwashed, said, “Yeah, all right, for a while longer, if they’re okay with extending your leave.”
    “Really? Oh, great. I just wasn’t ready to think about any of that. You are God.”
    “Yes,