I was smiling through my wet face on the frozen screen showing the video of Bomi’s first smile. Jiho’s words—that I had cried more than Bomi that day—wouldn’t leave my ears. My mouth on the screen was stretched wide open, but I was watching with my lips pressed tightly together.
There was a new file in the recording list. I could hear my voice, but I had no memory of making the recording.
Jiho looked down at my hands.
“Want to watch a little more together?”
Amid Bomi’s cries, my voice was mixed in: “I get to choose, right?” I couldn’t say that in front of Jiho. Instead of opening the recording, I opened the baby journal app.
Jiho didn’t press me. He kept his hands on his lap and waited for me to speak. A pale smear of formula from the evening feeding remained on the back of his hand. That patience was even harder to endure.
“I’ll just look at this a little longer, then I’ll go to bed.”
From the bedroom, Bomi let out a long breath. We both looked toward the door. Jiho squeezed my shoulder once and stood.
“If Bomi starts tossing and turning again, I’ll check on her first. You stay here.”
He went into the bedroom. Only Bomi, wearing a sleep sack, lay in the crib. Jiho lowered himself onto his own blanket spread out beside it. He left the door open just wide enough for a palm to fit through.
When I dimmed the living room lights, only the phone on the dining table illuminated my face. Whenever the refrigerator started humming, I lifted my head, afraid Bomi’s breathing was being drowned out. From the bedroom, Jiho signaled with his fingers that everything was okay. At least tonight, it didn’t have to be me who sprang up first.
When Jiho turned over, the blanket rustled. My shoulders stiffened at the small sound before relaxing only after I confirmed it was his back. No matter what I searched for at the table, time in the bedroom wouldn’t stop for me.
At the end of the table sat the barley tea I’d left unfinished that evening. When I picked it up, it was already cold, and moisture from the bottom spread across my palm. I set it down without managing even a sip and put my pen to a blank page in the baby journal app.
When I rubbed my palm against my pajamas, I smelled the formula that had clung to me all night. The damp mark remained.
Beside the cup lay one of Bomi’s socks, turned inside out. I straightened the fabric stretched into the shape of toes and set it down beside the paper.
The recording had been created at 1:48 a.m., and Bomi didn’t fall asleep until much later. Even after sleeping past her usual sleep cycle, she kept sleeping. My grip tightened around the pen, smearing the last digit.
An unfamiliar sentence remained in the browser’s recent search history.
`A place that puts your baby to sleep for you instead of waking every 40 minutes`
The beginning resembled phrases I’d typed dozens of times over the past few months. My eyes stopped at “a place that puts your baby to sleep for you.” I tilted my phone toward the table, out of sight from the bedroom.
All I had wanted was to sleep for a long stretch, just once. Yet that sentence was in my search history.
Every dawn, I searched similar phrases. Sleep regression in a hundred-day-old baby, why babies wake when you put them down, a baby who sleeps only in her mother’s arms. Whenever a feeding ended, I swiped across the screen with one hand while my other arm supported Bomi’s back. If she started crying before I could finish reading even a few lines of an answer, the phone would die on my stomach. The sentences from those nights remained in my fingers before they remained in my memory. But I had never looked for a place where I could leave Bomi’s sleep to someone else. At least, that was how I remembered myself.
On the gray, dead link to a parenting community, only two preview lines remained.
`If your baby can’t sleep for too long, there’s a place that only answers at dawn.`
The post had already been deleted, and the last line of the comment notification was cut off halfway through.
`If you get a text, don’t reply. Just follow the directions written there……`
The trace of the deleted post remained smeared across the screen. How exhausted had I been that day, to trust some sentence?
My eyes lingered on the comment’s “text.” The map screen I’d saved the previous afternoon showed an old shopping arcade not far from home. One unit between a laundromat and a real estate office had no business name. A saved marker was attached to it. My vision blurred for a moment.
The text contained the same address I’d seen on the map. There was no sender number, so I couldn’t reply or call. What I wanted to know now wasn’t who had sent it, but what I had been planning to do there.
`Estimated arrival time: 1:44 a.m.`
`The main entrance is closed.`
`Bring the stroller in through the rear ramp.`
It didn’t say to leave Bomi with them. It instructed me to push the stroller there myself.
The three letters in “stroller” stood out with unusual clarity. The folded rain cover beside the shoe cabinet and the rabbit rattle hanging from the handle came to me one after another. The text was so specific, as if someone had looked into our entryway.
The shop next to the address was a laundromat. It was a little over a ten-minute walk from home.
The entryway was fewer than ten steps from the dining table. If I had taken out the stroller that day, I would have passed the side where Jiho was lying and opened the shoe cabinet. I couldn’t remember what I’d packed. All that remained in my palm was the thickness of the stroller handle.
From the bedroom, Bomi let out a brief whimper.
Jiho and I both rose at the same time. Jiho reached the crib first. He slipped his hand inside the rail and slowly stroked Bomi’s chest.
“It’s okay. Daddy’s here.”
Bomi didn’t open her eyes. Her curled fingers spread once, then went still again. Jiho looked back at me.
“I’ve got her.”
Jiho’s hand moved over Bomi’s chest in the same rhythm. My own hand followed that rhythm twice on the table, then stopped.
Jiho’s back was curved as he leaned over in the bedroom. Each time Bomi steadied her breathing, the wrinkles in his T-shirt loosened a little. Jiho brushed the back of his hand once over her forehead. Bomi’s pursed lips relaxed, and a thin breath slipped out. I kept one hand on the edge of the table and merely nodded.
Back at the table, I slid the lit phone under the baby journal app. Through the dampened edge of the paper, the screen’s glow and the last characters of the address showed faintly. The pulse in my palm wouldn’t settle. I copied the last sentence of the text into the baby journal app.
`Your choice will be confirmed only once.`
I couldn’t write anything beneath it.
I put my earbuds back in. Holding my breath, I rewound the recording to the beginning.
At first, Bomi’s broken cries overlapped with the sound of fabric brushing against fabric. When the door opened, there was a jolt as if wheels had bumped over a threshold, followed by the brief scrape of a chair. Beneath a low mechanical hum, a woman’s voice was buried. A glass clacked against the table.
The right front wheel squeaked briefly every so often. It was the exact sound Jiho had said needed oiling. Bomi swallowed a breath, then cried three short times. It wasn’t the cry she made when she was hungry or when her diaper was wet. It was the cry she made when a stranger brought their face close to hers. My gaze shifted to the bedroom.
The crying in my earbuds overlapped with the even breathing from the bedroom. When I took out one earbud, the breathing in the present sounded clearer. A moment later, I returned to the crying in the recording.
My fingers curled as if gripping the stroller handle. The inside of my wrist stung.
After rewinding it several times, only one sentence became clear.
“Through the back entrance on the laundromat side…… You made it in safely.”
My breathing grew shallow. The jolt and the woman’s directions to the back entrance matched. I had gone inside with Bomi in the stroller.
A little later, my voice continued.
“If Bomi can just sleep…… I get to choose, right?”
My voice was hoarse, as usual. At one minute and twelve seconds, the sound cut off completely. Only time continued to pass.
I wrote on the paper.
`I asked.`
I picked up the correction tape, then set it back down.
The night deepened.
Bomi shifted in the bedroom. Jiho rose from his blanket first and reached into the crib. Just as I was about to put down my phone, I searched the address from the text again. In the unit between the laundromat and the real estate office, which had been empty during the day, black letters now appeared.
`Night Sleep Exchange`
The last sentence of the text overlapped beneath it.
`Your choice will be confirmed only once.`
From the bedroom, Jiho called my name in a low voice. I didn’t answer. His shadow paused briefly beyond the crack in the door, then turned back toward Bomi. My finger remained motionless over the shop name. I stared at those four words until Bomi’s whimpering subsided.