E was flattening them in ways that would never bake correctly, too thick on one side, too thin in the middle, but I didn’t mention this. I only tried to fix them up a little once she put them down on the tray, saying all the time of course how nice they looked. How perfect. How much Daddy would love them. I was sweating a little bit, just at my hairline.

B began to cry in the other room. It was maybe ten o’clock and the cookies weren’t finished and I was still alone in the apartment with the children. Children who should have been in bed. Children who would in the morning be so tired, who would not sleep well at all. Who would not sleep perhaps all night because of this, because of me letting them stay up so late.

My heart began to get out from under me. E was pressing on me, standing on my foot, her elbow digging into all the places I was still fat from having B, all the places that would never be the same.

I can’t breathe! Suddenly I was shouting this, I can’t breathe! Well, I really couldn’t. I tried to make it a game, grabbing at my neck and making my eyes big but E had snapped back into herself and was watching me like she sometimes does, when she turns her eyes into ponds, liquid murky things, filled with frogs. Sometimes everything was like this and I couldn’t be calm.

I left the cookies on the counter and took E to bed. Telling her all the time what a good girl she was, how much I loved her. Wishing I could calm my face down a bit, relax my jaw. I could feel my teeth almost turning to powder in my mouth I was biting down that hard. E held my hand delicately as I led her into her room and tucked her into bed. She was so far away from me, her eyes like tiny pinpricks of light. Christmas lights on a fishing boat when I was already deep underwater. I kissed her forehead and told her I loved her but I had to wipe the spot where my cheek had touched hers because I was sweating so much that it left a mark.

B was screaming now but I couldn’t make myself go to him even though we were all supposed to be so quiet. I jumped in the shower with my clothes still on. Sometimes that sort of thing helped, like jumping as high as you could five times when no one was looking or pinching the inside of your legs or screaming into a pillow. The water was good. It was cold and it brought me back to myself. I could be calm.

I peeled my clothes off and left them in the bottom of the shower, wrapped a towel around my puckered-up supermarket chicken skin and went to pull on another pair of sweatpants, an old T-shirt. B was quiet now and this made me, of course, feel much worse and I ran to him and picked him up and told him I loved him I loved him I loved him even though he was almost now asleep and I was only bothering him. I slipped my nipple into his mouth and he obliged me by sucking a bit before falling back asleep and leaving me.