All this time you imagine that the worst thing that could happen is that the baby will die. You can touch your hand to the suffering, just as sure as you are able to reach out from the bed to clasp the monitor, and you find it isn’t unimaginable at all. The magnitude of pain would match the magnitude of love. You worry that, if the unspeakable happened, at some point, when your grief was waning, or when it'd only just begun, you would speak up to say: I’m relieved. And now, in the instant you've thought it, you know that it’ll be even more your fault if the baby does die, that you alone could cause the world to end just by imagining the end of the world. Then one night, while your husband is on a business trip you get dizzy, faint. You know this scenario, your child dying of thirst or hunger, working himself up to a paroxysm of sobs. Patting at your limp body, pulling your hair in the way that always makes you cry out and snatch his hand then laugh, too loudly, to cover it, and instead finding that you are not there. The fear that he will curl up next to you before he goes, or will wander, free and alone, and then terrified and alone, and fall down, get hurt. Be found curled and carved by the door, lonesome and limp, a small foundered animal. But the mind veers to a new alternative. All those horrors happening just as you pictured them: your baby patting and climbing over you. Slipping and bumping his lip on the ground, and when you don’t respond to his tears, scaling up to screams, hands yanking at your hair, unhappy drool soaking his shirt. This time, the safeguards are in place: the security camera kicks on and records the baby’s extended session of tears, sends a push alert to your husband, as it has done throughout the day. He is at a bar with his coworkers—the rarest of new parent outings—and has plans to call you later. But he feels an inkling, an intuition, whatever it is, this quantum thread connecting your family through the universe, so he texts you now, and when you don’t respond he is moving, excusing himself from the table with a wave of his phone, and stepping outside to call, leaning back on the brick of the building, looking out at cars passing on the street. When you don’t answer he hangs up, no voicemail, scans Twitter, and turns to reach for the door before stopping and leaning back again to open the security camera app, maybe the echo of your anxieties in his head, and when it loads he can hear the baby wailing. He watches him crawl into the view of the camera, sit back, look around, start to crawl, sit, look, flap his arms, wail. Your husband waits for you to come onto the screen to fetch and soothe him, as you always do, sooner or later, when you are done in the bathroom or the kitchen or in the laundry room, everywhere the baby isn’t allowed to be. And your husband is feeling a bit of annoyance, anger even, when the baby seems to look up at the camera and whimper, not an expression of frustration, but real sadness, an almost resigned sound, and it is only then that he notices your foot, unnatural and unmoving, in the bottom left of the screen. This next bit—you ought to be happy—happens fast. He calls you again, a begging feeling, and the moment your phone pauses before it clicks to voicemail he ends the call and dials his sister's number, and then, sister not answering, her fiancée, who hands her the phone, and your husband directs her to leave immediately, now, please don’t take the dog out, don’t dry your hair, you need to get in the car (his sister being something of a dallier) and then, of course, only then and with extreme anguish does he realize he hasn’t called 911. But he has made the right choice after all—and maybe he senses the string has been cut—because you can’t be saved, but the baby can, by his aunt who arrives just as the paramedics are about to kick in the door—what if the baby is behind it?—but no, your sister-in-law's key is in the lock and the baby is across the room, his head laid on your still back, your husband is headed to the airport, and now the baby is being soothed by another woman, another mother, in a long line of mothers who will all love him but will not be you. That's it. You die young, too young, but your baby lives. This is the possibility that you had not truly allowed, but there he is. Learning words, taking steps, going to school, getting into trouble, all in a dimension where you cannot see it. This is the worst thing, you realize, and know the selfishness of it. The desire to be present for your son’s whole life, or at least the lion’s share, of him knowing who you are, outweighing somehow the also very real desire that he will outlive you. The agony of being reduced to a single, dull sentence, shared when he is in his twenties, staying up late talking to some new lover, saying, “I never really knew my mom," his hand resting on a thigh, saying, “she died when I was a baby.” Whatever pain that remains is a dull edge, more conceptual than concrete. It hurts not to have a mother, but it doesn’t particularly hurt him not to have you. This, you realize now, is the big joke of parenthood—this overwhelming, unrequited bullshit. So, you reach again for the monitor, let your thumb run over the baby's pixeled face and rest there on his stomach as you wait for it to rise and fall in the dark.

Stephanie Devine's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Nano, Louisiana Literature, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Austin Review, Joyland, Pembroke Magazine, Cheap Pop, Atticus Review, Fiction Southeast, Treehouse, and Glassworks Magazine. Born in Pittsburgh, she lives in Atlanta with her husband and son.