Blues in the Night by Rochelle Krich Page A

His voice was bitter with anguish and self-recrimination. “Max was colicky and fussy. Lenore was nervous and weepy. She wasn’t eating, she couldn’t sleep. She was tired and listless, and little things would set her off. She’d stay in bed except for getting up to check on Max, which was all the time. She kept asking me if I thought he was okay, did he seem normal.”
    I remembered my sister Edie’s wildly fluctuating moods after her second child was born. Laughing one minute, sobbing the next. But that had lasted only a few days.
    “I figured most mothers go through that, you know?” Saunders said, turning to face me, and I found myself nodding in sympathy. “Having a baby is an adjustment, and it takes longer for some women to get into a routine that works. I thought Lenore was tired because of the sleepless nights. And she didn’t have a support system. We’d moved to Santa Barbara just before the baby was born. In retrospect, the timing was a mistake. Her mother and mine were in L.A., and I was setting up an office in Santa Barbara, but I had to be in L.A. quite a lot. I know now I should have been home more, but I thought I was doing what I could. I hired a full-time housekeeper. I offered to hire the nurse we’d had the first few weeks after Max was born. We all thought it was a good idea—me, my mother, Lenore’s mother. Lenore refused. She accused me of doubting her ability to mother her own child. She insisted she was feeling better every day, stronger, more confident.”
    Saunders stopped, and I made no move to prompt him.
    “I realized later there were things she didn’t tell me. She didn’t want me to worry. She wanted to prove she could do it. But she wasn’t herself. She was a different person, not the woman I’d married. Then one Thursday . . .”
    His jaw worked hard, and tears formed in his eyes. “Max was two months old. I came home from work late, around ten o’clock. Lenore was in the glider in the darkened nursery, rocking the baby. She was cradling him in her arms, singing to him, and she didn’t seem to be aware that I’d entered. I stood there for a minute or so watching her. I didn’t want to disturb her. They looked so sweet, my wife and my son.” The tears were streaming down his face now. He wiped them with his broad fingers.
    “I called her name softly, not wanting to wake the baby if he was sleeping. When she didn’t look up, I walked over to her. Her eyes were closed, and so were Max’s, and I thought they’d both fallen asleep. When I bent down to take the baby and put him in his crib, she opened her eyes.
    “ ‘Max is sleeping,’ she said. ‘He was crying and crying, and I was so worried, but he’s going to be okay now. He’s sleeping.’
    “I offered to put him in his crib, but she held him closer to her breast. ‘If you wake him, he’ll cry,’ she said. I reached a hand to stroke his cheek. It felt cold, but I still didn’t realize anything was wrong, because the only light was coming from the hallway, and I couldn’t see his color, which was a bluish gray.
    “ ‘If you fall asleep you might drop him,’ I told her. Again I bent down to lift him. Again Lenore resisted, but I pried Max from her arms. And that was when I noticed that there was something wrong with the angle of his head.”
    Saunders removed a tissue from his jacket pocket and blew his nose. “According to the autopsy findings, Lenore shook Max so violently that she broke his neck. She said that he’d been crying continuously for several days, that nothing she’d done had soothed him, that she’d sensed that his cry wasn’t the same, that he wasn’t the same, but when she’d asked me, I hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual. She said she realized this time why he sounded different. A voice told her there was something inside him—” Saunders stopped and sighed deeply before continuing. “There was something terrible inside him, and it was going to get stronger and stronger,