Gray eyes (freewrite) #9

There had been no prototype, no nothing to teach Cherry how to be a mom. It turned out all those men she'd met and thought of as babies were nothing when compared to the real thing. In the past few years, she really thought she'd learned men. She knew them, how they acted, reacted, what they thought. She'd always said her job was about way more than just sex and with most of her clients, she'd glimpsed the men they were in their day-to-day lives. She thought she had a fair idea why they employed her services.
Yet, here she was now faced with not one, but two men to care for twenty-four seven and she realized she understood nothing of the opposite sex. Luke spent most of his days in silence, unless he was playing with the baby. He refused to say much to her, although she didn't know why. He didn't seem interested in having anything to do with her and soon enough, he announced he'd be going back to work.
Well, not back to work, he'd quit his job and severed his ties when they'd left – something he never failed to remind her. But he would start anew, he'd found the people and he knew the job, which took him out of the house for most of the day, leaving Cherry alone with Jonathan.
Jonathan, like his father was a silent baby. Even at birth, the doctor had told her, he'd just opened his big gray eyes and stared at the world around, like he was taking in the picture.
'Like he'd have to describe it later to someone,' the doctor had said.
Sure enough, he was a strange boy, one she could never get to make a sound or to feed. You would've thought that having a silent baby would be a dream, but it only drove Cherry up the walls. She found herself constantly checking on the baby, for fear he might've died. The silence in their apartment was deafening and she wondered how the baby could stand it, so she'd go to his crib and look in and there he was, lying silent and just looking up at her, like he was waiting for her to say something.

She did, sometimes, she'd speak to her Jonathan, she'd sing songs she'd memorized off cassettes, when she herself was a girl. She didn't know any lullabies and she didn't think the baby minded the words much anyway.
But it got lonely after a while, with the baby not saying a word, not eve a wail, and Luke so rarely home. She didn't know what to do. Staring at the child grew frustrating, she would look in, silently begging him to speak, to cry, to make any sound to let her know she wasn't completely and utterly alone.
'You know, when I was doing it...you know, with them, I used to feel like I wasn't the one in the bed. Like I was someone else, watching from outside of my body. Like I could break away.'
She told Luke this one night, and he listened, unflinching.
'I was so lonely,' and she hopes that maybe she can break through to him, maybe she can get him to hear something, to come back to her.
And he hears, he really does, and he writes all her words down in her head, but he can't make any sense of them. He feels convinced that everything he's done to her, including the baby, have only hurt her in the end. He is not able of making her happy, he feels, and it breaks his heart.
'And now, I feel...I, there's no one to talk to, Luke, baby, there's no one here. All day, I just stare at him and I don't see anyone else...I...'
See, he thinks, you ruined her life. There's nowhere she can go now, nothing she can do or say to change the facts. And all because of him.
He can not speak. If he says another word, he will only doom her further. He can not. He must not.

Jonathan watches, nestled in his crib, as the woman screams at the man. He can hear with perfect clarity every word that comes out of the woman's mouth, yet he can tell the man does not. He seems to have blocked out the outside world. How very strange, the baby thinks. Maybe it's kinda like when he lay in the woman's tummy, then he could only hear muffled sounds, like the man's hearing now, maybe. Then too, it felt as if the outside world was blocked.
Only then, it was the man screaming at the woman.
Jonathan, awake in his crib, yet utterly ignored, opens his mouth, as if to speak. Yet, no words come out, no sounds. It feels criminal to add one more note, even the slightest whisper, to this monstrous cacophony.