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.

I went to his room. He was awake, not crying, lying there looking up at the corner above his crib and smiling, reaching his little hands up at nothing I could see. The monitor in my hand said "there now" one more time, close and clear, and then went back to plain static.

We packed the monitor away and moved his crib into our room. He is a happy, healthy toddler now. But sometimes he still looks up at the corner of a room, in a new apartment, in a new city, and waves at something, and I have to leave the room until it passes.