The Baby Monitor Knew His Name

We moved into the apartment when our son was four months old. It was a good deal in an old building, high ceilings, thick walls, the kind of place that has had a hundred families pass through it.

The baby monitor was new, digital, its own private channel. For the first month it did what it was supposed to: a little static, the sound of him breathing, the occasional cry that sent one of us stumbling down the hall.

Then it started catching a voice. Faint at first, under the static, a woman speaking too low to make out. We assumed we were picking up a neighbour on a similar device and thought little of it. But the night it said his name, clearly, in a warm and patient tone — "there now, there now" and then his name — my wife and I both sat straight up in bed. We had not put his name on the mailbox. We had told no one in the building yet. There was no way a stranger on a crossed signal could have known it.