It was a strange shard of jealousy that had her looking away with another bite of unforgiving guilt. She was always guilty now. Always, always guilty of everything she felt. Feelings that were unusual and not the same as the rest of the world.
There was a distance between them all, a wall that they'd placed willingly. She realised that as they spoke to her in words, still flowering with love but all clean and sweet. Their speech was controlled and no longer freed with a baby in their midst.
Rumiko was a fucking cock block in their relationship.
She knew where the issue stemmed from. They didn't want Rumiko learning anything bad, but the problem was that crude cursing was a great part of their personality. And lewd exchanges were their ways of showing love to her. With Rumiko stuck to Amber as if she were a damn cow at a fucking farm, it too meant that she was warded off from their private worlds.
It meant that they'd become strangers.
She'd scowled at the thought, dreadfully hot feelings bubbling in her too cold chest. A dichotomy of emotions, a mixture of feelings. She stamped it all down, swallowed them like a sour pill.
Her mind drifted in and out as they spoke of exhilaration and stardom, of beautiful light waves and gorgeous dreams. With all the energy she could muster from what remained in the bits and pieces of her soul, Amber had smiled and clapped to their happiness, just as supportive as always.
And just as okay.
How much jealousy did she have to hide? She didn't know. But the bitterness coiled in her throat and flooded her tongue, sour and ripe. She wanted the escape that they had, yearned for the ability to leave her house and away from life.
She wanted to be free.
But she couldn't be.
Through her exhaustion, she told herself: things will get better. Rumiko will grow out of it, and soon the concert would end. Lies. Lies. Lies. Things did not get better with time; it only grew worst as her soulmates were thrust into the realm of a seemingly never-ending tour.
The venue only grew further from the house they'd rented for her, and thus the hours her soulmates spent away from her only grew over time. Weeks later she found herself without them for days; alone, with strangers roaming her space.
It was house in name, but a jail in truth.
She couldn't follow them because she was stuck with the baby. She couldn't eat what she wanted to because she was her baby's milk supply. She couldn't even take a walk outside for a breath of fresh air because according to old wives' tales her and her baby would die the moment they stepped out of the building for anything that wasn't emergency.
She couldn't leave. She couldn't eat. And she couldn't fucking sleep.
And she was in a world of fucking pain from everything.
Her soulmates insisted that she had help at night at the very least, which she received much more graciously now that she'd been given a taste of caring for a colic baby on her own. At night, she spent glorious hours as far away from the baby as she could, huddled in her bed unable to move, and unable to breathe.
Despite the noise cancelling headphones and the sound of the rain in her ears all she heard was the ringing screams of her child down the hall nestled in the arms of a stranger. The phantom sound never stopped, the anxiety continued, and the dread that arrived whenever the nannies left was so thick and so full that it left her stranded in a puddle of her own tears.
She was almost psychotic. There were moments of twitchy outbursts where she would bounce her child twice as hard and two times as fast. She would stare at the clock as she paced in circles, a familiar rhythm that she too used to.
Then she would mentally count down the seconds until the nanny came and she could be freed from her child. Once freed, she would crawl into her bed and scream into her pillowcase, then curl into a ball and cry for too long.
How disgusting.
How dreadful.
What a shitty mother Rumiko had.
Still, she hated it. She termed it the exchange, and she didn't know which part she hated more: the act of giving her child to a stranger or the act of receiving her child from said stranger.
Sometimes she prayed that the nannies would steal Rumiko from her. But of course, no one would with a baby like hers, it had taken more money just to keep them in the job. No one could truly enjoy Rumiko's presence. That much was true, which made her feel a little bit better about herself because it meant that Amber wasn't crazy for hating her baby.
But there were some days Amber wept when they took Rumiko from her, it felt worse when the baby stopped crying the moment she left Amber's arms. And good fucking God Amber felt as if she were the damn problem. Everyone loved Rumiko except Amber and Rumiko seemed to know that.
Maybe, there was something wrong with Amber.
Those thoughts would flicker through her head and then she would slam them out with a hard and heavy fist. No. There was nothing wrong with her. But there was something wrong with Rumiko. So she took her baby out one day to the children's hospital in a taxi that she'd called.
The sun had been blinding, too hot and too harsh for her eyes. It'd beaten down, horribly bright and disgustingly warm. Her child continued to scream bloody murder in the car, so loud that even the driver gave her death glares when they'd stopped at traffic. She accepted them with a hunched back and a bitten down sob, the soft shushing that left her lips were as pointless as the pacifier she tried to use on Rumiko.
In the lobby her child continued to scream, on and on she went, her voice rising and falling like a baby straight out of a horror film. She seemed determined to use her lungs in a space so filled with people. And in return, said people parted from Amber as if she were emitting the worst smell in their entire lives. Their nose had scrunched in utter detest and loath for her baby.
They looked at her as if it were her damned fault that the baby was crying, shot stares upon her body as if to say that she had to shut her baby up or die. Then the pity would swallow those glares as they noted her appearance; ruined and bedraggled as if she hadn't bathed in weeks. Then the youthful embarrassment that shone red and shiny on her cheeks, her horror so stark all could tell that she longed for an earthquake to swallow her up.
She exaggerated her condition. But Amber truly didn't remember when she'd last had a decent shower that wasn't on the verge of racing out of the room to let her personal little demon drink from her body. Being presentable wasn't part of the plan when she had to abandon everything for her baby in desperate panic.
Nor did she remember if she'd even worn proper clothes out to the hospital because she was just so damn tired. Were the clothes four days old and stained with baby shit? She didn't know. She didn't care. Did she even have a bra on? Who knows? Who cares? Who gives a flying fuck?
She almost bit the hand off an elderly woman who offered to calm Rumiko in a snappish 'you-fucking-suck' voice, afraid for her baby's safety and her own sanity. She got mad at the nurse when they told her she had to wait a mere ten minutes. The snarled out 'fucking please help me' wasn't well received and the collective gasp from people that snooped behind her was a stab through her fleshy chest.
In response, she'd cowered into herself muttering out apologies as she tried to get her baby to shut up. They allowed her to skip the queue only because Rumiko was disturbing everyone in the hospital, and Amber was a nuisance that needed to go.
Then the doctor arrived. He was smug and proud, neck deep in his experience and so-called abilities. For a moment, Amber had hoped to God that he could be her saviour with magic skills that he could teach her to calm Rumiko into the sweet, innocent little baby that everyone else seemed to have.
The proper baby, the none demonic baby. The baby that actually slept.
Rumiko was falsely quiet when he tried new techniques and massages on her body. And when she started to shriek the panic began to reveal itself on his balding head; an oily sheen of sweat that had him furrowing his brows in deeper alarm.
The answer was medicine; drugs to fucking force her baby to sleep. She lied; it was just medicine to tackle stomach problems they assumed her child was experiencing. Amber was just mad at everything, and she was ready to do anything to get her baby to shut up.
She was angry. She was always, always angry. Angry, sad and numb. And angry.
Your baby seems to be in pain, the doctor had explained, coaxing Rumiko into a position that he claimed mimicked the womb. She looks like she has some problems with perhaps reflux, maybe torticollis.
According to him, the arched back and the struggling reaction were supposed to be signs of discomfort in her oesophagus. Rumiko's head was supposedly all knotted up from her inability to move resulting in a particularly bad kink in her neck.
She's supposed to settle down if I hold her this way.
He'd interrogated her with more questions on her baby. Amber had recited the list in her head, checked them all off with the doctor. A full belly of milk, or at least as much as she could give her. Formula was given in case it wasn't enough to feed her. Her diaper was dry, she wasn't cold or hot. She wasn't thirsty. She didn't seem gassy.
She should be asleep. The doctor had said with an almost grimace. How many hours does she spend crying like this?
Sometimes more than seven, Amber'd answered with a defeated sigh.
She'd counted because counting kept her sane. Because counting reminded her that there would be time for sleep eventually, because counting momentarily got rid of the flashes of white behind her eyes and the torture that dissolved her brain and shredded her bones.
Oddly, she found solace in the despair that tinged in the doctor's voice. Rumiko was a problem to solve, which meant that Amber wasn't a bad mom. Rumiko was just a really hard baby. Or at least, that was what Amber repeated to herself. It was her attempts to convince herself that she wasn't a failure of a parent.
Amber was an okay mom.