253I notice when my feet touch down on the grass, that the front door is open. I can see it, hanging open on it's hinges. Then I hear a scream. Her scream, loud and piercing, coming from inside. My heart stops.
The game bag is abandoned on the lawn, and I run as if the gong has sounded and I'm surrounded by career tributes, I run and she screams again.
"Bow," I try to yell her name, but my voice is full of thunder, and it comes out bedraggled, a desperate cry as my feet pound up the stairs. I shouldn't have left this morning, I shouldn't have left her here. Where is Peeta? Where is she?
"Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!"
My breath hitches in my throat as she calls my name, and frantically, I find her in the living room. She's clad in only her cloth diaper, raised high above the air, in Peeta's arms. She screams again, the high pitched squeal morphing into a giggle. She twists out of Peeta's arms and flies toward me, she always greets me this way when I come home.
I wait until she's in my arms, until I can smell her scent for myself and feel her chubby legs around my middle before I let myself think.
She was just playing.
She's safe.
She gets antsy in my arms, and soon squirms out of them too. Peeta gets up from the floor, and I can see him take in my fear.
"Why was the door wide open?" I find myself saying, attempting to catch my breath.
Peeta watches Bow pad up the stairs to her room. "I'm sorry. We were at the bakery earlier-"
"You can't just...leave the door open like that. What am I supposed to think when- when." Getting angry, I close my mouth and turn around. The wild turkey I caught is still on the front lawn, so I go to gather it, slamming the door behind me.
"Goo'night Haymitch." Bow says. She blows a kiss to her left, toward Haymitch's house. "Goo'night Sae." This time she blows a kiss toward town, where Greasy Sae lives.
Every night is this ritual. Bow must bid all her loved ones a good night in order to sleep peacefully. She turns over in her bed, where Peeta is sitting, and lets him brush her dark hair out of her face. "Goodnight, baby," he says.
"Goodnight, baby," I echo. She is so sleepy, she can hardly mumble "Goo'night" to us. By the time we turn out the light, she is off in her own dream world. It's hard to keep my heart from swelling out of my chest when I leave. She looks so much like Peeta, with her cheek sunken into the pillow, eyelids cloaked in thick lashes. Saying goodnight is always hard.
When Peeta and I finally lay our exhausted bodies down, I realize that I haven't spoken to him since this morning. "I freaked out. I'm sorry."
"It's okay. It was stupid of me."
"It's just the door...and you were tickling her, and I thought she was screaming."
"I know." He reaches out for my hand and pulls me tightly against him. We take off out clothes, but I know that we're both too tired to make love. Instead, we sleep curled against each others body heat. Sometimes, it reminds me of the cold nights we spent in the caves, tucked inside the sleeping bag. Like usual, it takes a moment for me to remember that I'm home. That Peeta is my husband, and my daughter is in the next room sleeping.
I close my eyes. I could sleep.
Dr. Quill phones me a week later, and tells me that I'm pregnant again.
"I haven't missed a pill," I say. I can hear him flipping through papers on the other end. Suddenly, the last few weeks make sense. I only let Dr. Quill extract blood from me last week because I had thought that the sickness was the flu, though in hindsight, my body seems the way it was when I was pregnant with Bow. Morning queasiness rocks though me even now.
"There is always a 1% failure rate. Sometimes, these things happen."
"Oh," I say. I had never really considered that I could become pregnant by accident. I had only thought that these things were decisions that we needed to make. Did Peeta want more kids? Of course he did.
The panic is slowly bubbling up under the surface.
"Come in next week for your first checkup, I'll book you in for Tuesday."
"Okay."
Bow is sitting at the kitchen table, working furiously on her umpteenth finger painting. She loves to copy Peeta's work, tracing bulbous petals of primroses and wildflowers with her tiny fingers. She even manages to keep most of the paint on the page.
I touch the place on my abdomen where I know the baby is, and I wonder if it's even possible for me to add this to my life. Every day is a struggle in my mind, a constant stream of questions. Where is Bow? Is she safe? Is she happy? There are days when Peeta can't quite get a grip on things, and he must hide out in the bakery for fear of scaring the baby. There are days when Bow's smile reminds me so much of Prim as a toddler, it paralyzes me to the ground, and mustering the energy to kiss her goodnight it nearly impossible. Those days, I fear that I am like my mother. That nothing will bring me out of that state, even if my child was starving to death.
Now, another life to worry about, another body to care for, another source of constant fear, is growing inside me.
"Moooooomy...puuuuuurple, floweeeeer, roooooses," Bow sings, her head teetering from side and side. She drifts in and out of song when she paints. The other night, I had a dream that a mockingjay was listening to my daughter's songs, and echoing them across the house. I heard Bow's little voice multiplied and projected across the endlessness of my unconscious mind. It was a dream I was grateful for, because waking up, I knew that Bow's voice was not just a figment of my imagination. So often my dreams torment me, but the nights I dream of her are the happiest. I know that Peeta too has these dreams. I wonder what dreams a new baby will bring.
Looking at Bow now, I know that it will work out again.
I sit next to her, dip my finger in her purple paint, and swirl it across a blank page. I wonder if it's another girl, if it's as much like Peeta as Bow is.
"Pretty, Mommy," Bow places an orange finger next to my purple one, and draws circles.
"How would you like to be a big sister, Bow?" I whisper to her.
"Wha's that?" Bow doesn't look up from her painting.
"It means you're going to have a baby brother or sister."
Bow looks up finally, her blue eyes wide and piqued with interest. "Where's she?"
"The baby's in my tummy right now. It will be out soon."
"You eat her, Mommy?" she asks, her eyebrows furrowing.
"No, she's growing in there. Like the flowers."
In the bed, Peeta takes his time kissing all over me. His lips tickle the scars on my breasts, his hands are hot against my swollen belly. He buries his face in the crook of my shoulder as he moves deeper inside me.
When I was pregnant before, I refused to have sex. My body was foreign and wrong, I didn't want Peeta to have any of it.
Peeta says he loves how I look. How full my breasts are, how my hips move when I walk, with the extra weight slowing me. Sometimes he gets hard just looking at me when I'm changing. The past few months have been strange, our hands all over each other. Nearly every night, we toss and turn, and wake up with an urge to make love. I've given into it, no longer caring that my body has been taken over by the baby.
Peeta gasps as my muscles tighten around him, and when it's over he scoops me up and holds me against his chest. I rest my lips against his neck, breathing and tasting him for as long as I can. Sometimes I think I'll die if I can't be near him like this. I wonder how I could have denied us this when Bow was inside me, it seems impossible now. It may just be the hormones.
"Are you hungry?" he asks me when our breathing quiets.
"Yes, but I don't want to be sick," I say. Morning sickness has turned into all-day sickness now. This baby is making it hard to stomach anything.
"I'll bring you bread."
Peeta throws his boxers on and I watch him leave, hear him open Bow's door to check on her, and hear him slip down the stairs in little thuds. While he's gone, I feel the baby move inside me. The feeling is one that I'm sure I will never be able to understand and accept, no matter how prepared we make ourselves for it's arrival. The old familiar fear of failure, that we will fail, because our children are alive and kicking and needing us always.
Peeta comes back with the only thing I've been able to eat for the past few weeks, rye bread and berry jam.
Eating the warm bread, the baby stops kicking me. I feel faintly glad for it, glad that we can end our hunger.