By Jenny Rothstein 
 
The sound that woke me wasn't crying.

It was silence.

I sat up so fast that the room tilted, my heart already sprinting before my brain had clocked in for the day.

The baby monitor glowed green on the nightstand.

Eleven-month-old Henry was asleep in his crib, a motionless lump on the grainy screen.

But where was the other one?

I threw off the covers and stood, catching myself on the dresser when my legs remembered they hadn't slept in four days.

The other baby.

Where had I put the other baby?

I checked the bassinet first, even though we'd stopped using it months ago.

Empty, obviously, because I wasn't a monster who would leave a baby in a bassinet we'd shoved into the corner and covered with burp cloths.

I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed.

Dust bunnies.

A single sock.

No baby.

The closet.

Had I put the baby in the closet?

That seemed wrong, but everything seemed wrong at 3 a.m. when you haven't experienced REM sleep since you saw two lines on that stick.

I opened the closet door and stared at my pre-pregnancy jeans, which stared back at me with quiet judgment.

No baby.

I was walking toward the bathroom when my husband, David, made a sound like a confused walrus.

"What's happening?"

"I can't find the other baby," I whispered.

He propped himself up on one elbow, squinting at me in the dark.

"What other baby?"

"The other one. The second one."

I was already scanning the bathroom, checking behind the shower curtain like a horror movie protagonist who hadn't learned anything from the first two acts.

"Meg."

David's voice had that careful tone.

The one he used when I'd put the remote in the refrigerator or tried to pay for drive-through coffee with my library card.

"Meg, we have one baby."

I stopped.

My hand was still on the shower curtain.

"What?"

"We have one baby. Henry. He's in his crib. There is no other baby."

I stood there, dripping shower water onto my feet because apparently I'd turned the faucet on at some point.

The math wasn't mathing.

I had been so sure.

I could picture the other baby.

A girl, maybe.

Bigger than Henry, but not by much.

She had his nose.

She was wearing the yellow onesie with the ducks on it, which, now that I thought about it, Henry had spit up on yesterday and I'd thrown in the wash.

"I had a dream," I said slowly.

The realization was creeping in like dawn through bad curtains.

"I had a dream that we had twins."

David flopped back onto his pillow.

"We don't have twins."

"I know that now."

"We have one baby. One single baby. Who is asleep. Which means we could also be asleep."

I turned off the faucet.

My heart was still pounding, but the panic was fading, replaced by something worse: the full-body embarrassment of a person who has just torn apart her house looking for an imaginary infant.

I walked back to the bed and sat on the edge.

David reached over and patted my leg in the dark.

"How long were you looking?"

"I don't know. Five minutes?"

"Did you check the closet?"

"Yes."

"The bathroom?"

"Obviously."

"Under the bed?"

I didn't answer.

He started laughing.

It was a quiet laugh, the kind you do when you're trying not to wake a baby, but his shoulders were shaking.

"It's not funny," I said.

"It's a little funny."

"I thought I lost our daughter."

"We don't have a daughter."

"I know that now," I said again, and then I was laughing too.

It came out weird and hiccupy, half-laugh and half-sob, the kind of sound that would concern anyone who hadn't spent the last eleven months in the parenting trenches.

But David had.

He pulled me back down onto the bed and wrapped an arm around me, and we lay there in the dark, giggling like idiots.

"I really thought she was real," I whispered.

"Dream babies are like that."

"She had his nose."

"Cute."

"She was wearing the duck onesie."

"Classic choice."

I closed my eyes.

The dream was already fading, the details going soft at the edges.

But I could still feel the fear.

The absolute certainty that I had failed.

That somewhere in this house, a baby was waiting for me to remember she existed.

"This is what sleep deprivation does," I said.

"This is what babies do."

"Same thing."

David yawned.

"Go back to sleep. I'll get him if he wakes up."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. You need to rest. You've had a big night."

I elbowed him.

He laughed again.

On the monitor, Henry shifted, one small arm flinging up and then settling.

One baby.

My baby.

The only baby.

I watched his chest rise and fall in the green glow.

In a few hours, he'd wake up screaming for milk.

In a few months, he'd be walking, and I'd have a whole new set of things to worry about.

But right now, in this moment, he was asleep.

And I could be asleep too.

I closed my eyes.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, the dream daughter waved goodbye.

She wasn't offended.

She understood.

She was, after all, a figment of my imagination.

And even imaginary babies know that moms are doing their best.