"You look shittier today," Jonah prompted as he slid a cup of warm coffee to my table. He was still wearing his apron, so he wasn't off his shift yet.
I glared at him. "Thank you, husband."
It was now Thursday, and I had spent nearly every night trying not to lose my shit. I found it harder and harder to love Daisy like I was supposed to love a baby of mine. I mean, how could I? Normal babies didn't cry like that, and definitely not that loud. Normal babies didn't have that much energy to keep their parents awake every single night. I'd been sleeping very little, catching some rest-eyes on the way school and back while my nights are spent wide awake trying to shush a crying doll.
I didn't even want to know how many times Ms. Bishop almost caught me falling asleep in her class. Thankfully, Jonah had moved his seat so he was sitting next to me during the class, and his responsibility was keeping me awake while still not making any sound that could catch our teacher's attention. During other classes, though, there was no guarantee that I was fully awake.
Daisy was sat on my lap as I took sips of the warm coffee, the caffeine working fast to keep me alert. I was doing another bunch of Chemistry homework and I prayed to god that she wasn't about to start crying anytime soon.
So far, Jonah hadn't experienced what it was like to have a fake baby crying in his arms. He hadn't heard the doll cry once, and that was why he was so calm about all this while I was on the edge of my sanity. I couldn't freaking wait until it was finally his turn to take care of Daisy.
"Can I hold her?" Jonah's quiet voice broke me out of my concentration. I hadn't even realized that he'd been standing there, and not back to his counter. "I've never really held her, so..."
I dropped my pen and took Daisy into my arms, and Jonah reached his arms out. The way he was holding the doll was stiff and awkward, and it was clear that he had no idea what to do with the baby. It made me smile a little bit, the stress I had been feeling dissipating little by little. It could also be the works of the caffeine inside my system that made me feel less stressed out, though.
"Loosen your muscles," I told him. "You're holding her a bit too strained. Position her as comfortable as possible in your arms."
He murmured in response, carefully shifting the doll around in his arms until he got the hang of it.
"You've never held a baby before?"
He shook his head. "Babies kinda scare the shit out of me."
I laughed. "Well I'd rather take care of a real baby than Daisy. No real baby can cry that long."
He glanced at me, taking in the dark bags under my eyes and my slightly messy hair. "I'm sure it's not that bad," he said apprehensively, but he was only trying to convince himself. I just smirked at him. "At least she's not wiggling around. I'd probably drop a real baby."
I held out my hands, gesturing for him to give her back to me. "Go back to your work before she starts crying."
"Wait, Hannah," he said, effectively making me drop the pen I had just started to hold.
That was the first time he called me Hannah. Not Taylors, not Hannah Taylors, but Hannah. I bit my lip and looked up, "Hm?"
"My turn starts in Sunday, right?"
I nodded at him.
"Why don't we..." he paused, shifting in his legs, "why don't we take a walk in the town park with Daisy before I take her home?"
I blinked several times, my brain trying to understand what really it was that he was asking.
Was this his weird way of asking me out?
Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, how the hell did we escalate to this this fast?
Psh. He was so not asking me out. Was he?
I was starting to spiral, and by some miracle I kept my face neutral as I stared back at him.
"It's cold outside," I said, gesturing to the bad weather outside. It had started to get colder and colder, and even though it didn't rain all that much, the temperature had been pretty low. It surely didn't seem to be a great time to take a walk in the park with a baby.
He shrugged. "Then throw on your coat."
I stifled a smile, and then I nodded after a while. "Alright. Sunday it is."
"Great, I'll pick you up Sunday morning," he murmured. "And uh, anyway, I just got a baby strollerâmy neighbor's letting me borrow it."
"Awesome," I told him. He cast me another glance before nodding and going back behind the counter.
Once my back was turned to him, I looked down at Daisy, grinning at the permanent smile on her face.
"Guess what, baby girl," I cooed quietly as I poked her cheeks, making sure that no one could hear what I was saying but the two of us, "mommy's got a date with your daddy!"
Yeah, it felt weird to say it out loud, but it was awesome.
[]
"Oh my god, Daisy," I moaned, rolling over on my bed. It was five p.m. in a very wet, very rainy Saturday, and for the first time since the fake baby came into my life, I could finally catch some sleep...
Until thirty seconds ago, when she decided that two hours of good sleep for me was more than enough.
"You couldn't cry when I was actually wide awake watching Gossip Girl reruns, huh, Daisy?" I grunted as I dragged myself out of my bed. "What did I do to you? Why do you hate me so much?"
But she obviously didn't care about my complaining, because she kept crying and screaming for attention. I checked her feet first thing, and sure enough, it was blinking. I sighed and immediately changed her supposedly dirty diaper, exchanging it with the other diaper from her bag.
Her cries immediately ended once her diaper was changed, and I sighed in relief. At this rate, I wouldn't be able to fall back asleep no matter how much I wanted to.
So I dragged myself downstairs, to the living room where my little brother was building something with his lego pieces while simultaneously doing his math homework.
Yeah, that's my brother for you.
I rubbed my eyes tiredly, plopping myself into the couch. Cole looked up when he saw me and grinned, pointing at his lego.
"What's that?" I asked curiously.
"I'm building the New York City skyline," he announced. "The tall buildings and stuff. Isn't this cool?"
"It sure is." I smiled at him in amusement. "You go, Cole."
He was about to continue with his building, until his forehead scrunched as he looked at me. He frowned. "Daisy's been a trouble, huh?"
He and Daisy apparently had become acquaintances now. He accepted her as the newest temporary member in the family, and even offered if she needed to get fed. I never let him play with her, though, just in case. Everything could literally happen in Cole's hands.
The one thing he didn't approve of her presence was the lack of sleep that I got every night. It became more noticeable how restless I'd gotten each day, and apparently, my little brother didn't like it that much.
I sighed and nodded. "She won't let me sleep. How come you and mom and dad never wake up at night when she's screaming?"
"Sometimes I wake up," he admitted, shrugging. "But then I sleep again. It's not hard, I just block out the sound."
"Easy for you. You're not sleeping right next to her," I said, flicking him in the nose. He scowled at meâhe hated when people touched his nose. "And I have to make the cries stop. I can't just block it out."
"Your friend will take her tomorrow, right?" he asked, and I nodded. "Relax, Hannah. It's just one more day."
I nodded at him with a smile. "Right. Just one more day."
Just one more day and I wouldn't be the one feeling the torture.
[]
For the first time ever, I was glad that Daisy's cries woke me up that midnight.
I was half-distracted as I changed her diaper, fed her, burped her, and rocked her to sleep, my movements all stiff and robotic. My mind wouldn't let me forget the nightmare I'd been having just before the doll's machinated scream jolted me out of my slumber.
It could just be the lack of sleep, though, that caused the nightmare to come. I hadn't had these nightmares for almost a month, and apparently my tired state of mind decided that it would be cool to dig up the dirt and ruin my sleep even more with the nightmares.
Daisy's cries slowly subsided as I shushed and rocked her in my arms, my eyes slowly drooping and my mind unable to form a coherent thought. I put her back to the crib and lay on my bed, facing up the ceiling as my mind raced with endless thoughts.
I glanced at the clock and saw that it was five in the morning, which meant that I had had about seven good hours of sleep, which was noticeably longer than usual. It didn't mean that I wasn't still tired, though, but just like every other time I'd awaken from a bad dream, it took forever for me to fall back asleep, and sometimes I didn't at all.
The nightmare consisted of the same, boring scene that had replayed in my mind countless times for the past, I don't know, three or four years, I think. It had always started out the same: I was driving alone in the middle of the night, and then someone would appear, sitting in the passenger seat, and then suddenly a horrible thing happened.
It was the horrible thing that changed each time I had that nightmare. Sometimes it would be a truck coming out from nowhere crashing into the car. Sometimes it would be that someone turning into a monster and attacking me. But most of the time, the horrible thing would happen when I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that the face staring back at me wasn't me, but the monster; most of the times, I was the ugly monster. It always ended up with a car crash, though, no matter what, and usually I would wake up before I even found out if I was dead or alive after the crash.
Daisy's cries tonight had just cut off my nightmare, right when I was about to turn into a ruthless vampire and suck the blood out of the stranger in the passenger seat.
It was a bizarre dream and yet it didn't make it any less scary. These dreams always left me breathless and exhausted once I'd woken up. Like now, for example. My chest was hurting a little bit because my heart didn't know how to slow down, and I had long lines of sweat running down all over my body. I let out a long breath before deciding to take a brisk shower in the middle of the night to freshen myself up.
After wrapping myself with numerous layers of blankets on the bed, I managed to catch about another two hours of sleep before my alarm woke me up. Daisy was still "sleeping" in her crib, thankfully, so I just changed into a more presentable attire because Jonah was coming to pick us up in a few hours.
Thankfully, when I glanced out of the window, all traces of the bad weather from yesterday were mostly gone. It was only the lack of the bright sunshine and the cold breeze, but it didn't seem like it was about to rain anytime soon.
I changed Daisy's pajamas into a warmer outfit that the bag had provided for a "cold day out". Apparently, she also sensed temperature, and I had to make sure she wasn't "freezing" or "burning", which meant I had to dress her up accordingly.
At around nine, a sound of a horn signaled Jonah's arrival. I took the fake baby with me and we both went downstairs.
"Mom, I'm going out," I said to Mom, who was making some food. The boys in the family were late sleepers, so we usually had brunch in Sundays instead of breakfast.
"This early? With who?"
"Jonah," I told her, kissing her on the cheek before bolting out of the kitchen. "Bye, mom!"
"What about breakfast?" she called out.
"I'll probably eat breakfast out with him!" I yelled back, closing the front door behind me.
Jonah was waiting outside of his car, and he opened the door to the backseat of the car, revealing a baby car seat ready there.
"It comes with the stroller," he said rather sheepishly. I smiled at him and carefully put Daisy into the car seat, strapping her so she wouldn't fall. Then I walked around the car and got into the passenger's seat.
Before he started the car, he took a glance at me and slightly frowned. "You look worse than yesterday."
I shrugged at him. "It was a bad night."
"Daisy?"
I shook my head. "Nah, not just her. It was just a bad night in general."
"Maybe you should just get some rest instead of going out?" he offered quietly, hesitantly. "Maybe this is a bad idea."
I turned my head to him and smiled reassuringly. "Don't worry, I'm fine. Let's just have a fun-ish day out with Daisy, alright?" I said cheerfully, and he hesitantly nodded.
"Alright. Let's go."