I Watched You From the Window Before I Came

The nursery was originally green. That matters. We painted it green in the eighth month, decided it looked like a hospital, and repainted it yellow over one exhausting weekend — my husband in his ruined university hoodie, me crying once for no reason and eating cold noodles on the floor. No photos of that weekend exist. Everyone advised us against decorating fatigue, so we never mentioned it; it became one of those private married-people footnotes.

Our daughter was born five weeks later. When she was four, apropos of a puddle, she said: 'When I was in the waiting window I saw you make my room the wrong colour and then fix it.'

I did the parental poker face and asked what the waiting window was. She explained with the weary patience of a customs official: before you come, you wait at the window, and you can watch your family, but only sometimes, 'when they're being loud about you.' She saw the green — 'yucky, like soup' — and Daddy's 'broken jumper,' and Mummy 'eating worms on the floor and leak-crying.' Cold noodles. On the floor. Leak-crying is the most accurate description of that day anyone has produced.

She added, as a throwaway, the part that keeps this from being merely uncanny: there had been 'another window next to mine, but that baby's family stopped being loud, so he went back to sleep.' My sister-in-law's pregnancy, that same season, ended quietly at eleven weeks. Our daughter has never been told. There is no telling a four-year-old that; there was no telling anyone — they hadn't announced.

She's older now and says she remembers only 'a warm window' the way you remember an airport. But she has never once called the nursery yellow. She calls it 'fixed.'

We repainted it last year. She approved the colour first. We didn't discuss why we asked.