A Distance of a Thousand Feet

We were sitting in the living room drinking wine and congratulating ourselves on getting the baby down in less than an hour when we heard a non-baby sound come from the monitor. It wasn't a gurgle or a squeal, or even a cry. It was a groan, long and low. An adult sound, or maybe a wild animal if Animal Planet was to be believed. We didn't stop to think about it or make a plan, we headed straight for the nursery and threw open the door, expecting to see something terrible and ready for a fight. We put our hands up in the boxer stance we learned at Cardio-Kick, as if that would be enough to prevent a kidnapping or scare off a burglar. But there was nothing to fight. The room was still. The baby was asleep in his crib, his breathing and coos too soft to pick up on the monitor. We scanned the room for possible dangers like bear parents in the wild. Everything was in its place, the windows were closed, the closet still empty. The ceiling fan whirred almost silently above us. Then we heard it again—a distinct moan. It didn't come from the baby; the moan was coming from the monitor.

We turned off the receiver we'd carried in with us. Stepped closer to the base on the table next to the crib, leaned in. There was heavy breathing like teenagers used to do over the telephone before caller ID was invented, then more moaning. It was the kind of moan that was hard to pin down; the line between pain, and perhaps danger, and someone in ecstasy was thin and blurry. We unplugged the monitor from the wall and left the nursery door open. We pulled the pillows from the sofa and piled them on the floor just outside the baby's room, grabbed the wine and snacks and a roll of paper towels. We could celebrate our good parenting skills in the hallway.

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Even on the nights the monitor worked properly and only gave us the sound of our baby breathing in bed, we couldn't stop wondering where the moan had come from, or who. We had to keep looking. The monitor had a range up to one thousand feet, but that was the base to the parent units—how far away we could wander and still consider ourselves parenting. One of the parenting forums on the internet said that interference with the Wi-Fi was common, especially since we weren't willing to cut the landline and give up our cordless phone—we wanted to be like every other house in the established neighborhood, that was half the point of moving up and fitting in. We saw the problem for ourselves when we brought the monitor into the living room and held it next to the modem. The picture on the TV blinked out and the laptop wouldn't hold an internet connection. But there was no moaning. No sounds at all. Until later when we put the baby down for the night.

We'd rubbed his back and sh-sh-sh'd him into a shallow sleep, enough to creep out of the room on the tips of our toes and shut the door behind us. One of us still had our hand on the knob when we heard something again. It wasn't a moan; someone was whispering. A woman's voice, gravely, yet light and airy—like Mariah Carey was in the room with us. We went back into the nursery and stood in front of the monitor. The woman spoke fast, her words were breathy, as if the voice were trapped inside the monitor with her mouth pressed up against the speaker; the words hit the air and shattered into unrecognizable shards. It was hard to piece together, but it was something about love. She loved someone, needed them, couldn't wait to be near them; the words were meant for their ears—not ours. It wasn't danger or crime we were overhearing, like...