31. Baby, Baby
BABY, BABY
LUCY
Isit down on the edge of the tub and look at the test.
Then, I look out the window, which shows a square of Nashville sky, the hard bright blue of a spring day.
I put my hand on my stomach.
It’s too early for anything to be there yet. I know that. It’s barely a fact, and still, my hand goes there the way it went there before, the same instinct, the same automatic gesture of a woman acknowledging something that is happening in the private room of herself.
I let out a long exhale.
And what I feel—and I take careful inventory, because I want to know, I want to be honest with myself about what this is—it’s not entirely fear. There is some fear, a responsible amount, the kind that says you know what this can cost, and you remember what happened, and be careful with this.
I acknowledge it. I give it its due.
But underneath it, larger and quieter and more certain:
Joy.
Real joy, the kind that doesn’t ask permission, the kind that arrives before you can decide how to feel, the kind your body knows before your brain has signed off on it.
I have to tell Fox.
But the fear, small as it may be, makes me not tell him.
I take two days to carry it by myself, to let it be mine before it becomes ours, to walk around with this private, enormous truth and get used to the weight of it.
“What’s going on?” Dina clocks it immediately at the diner.
“Nothing is going on.”
“Lucy.”
I wave a hand at her. “Not talking about it”—I growl at her when she rolls her eyes—“yet. I need time.”
By day two, I’m feeling guilty. It feels like I’m pretending to have amnesia again. I sit in our garden close to the fig tree that he still waters even though I don’t ask him to.
“Hey.” I put my hand on my stomach. “I don’t know how to do this. Any of it. But I’m going to figure it out.” I breathe. “So just—“
Stay.
I don’t say it out loud. I think it, completely, with everything I have.
This time stay.
On the third day, when I’m bursting at the seams to tell him, we eat a quiet dinner and then sit on the porch to enjoy the spring evening. I sit in one armchair, he in the other.
“Lucy,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Spit it out, sweetheart.”
I swallow.
His eyes drop to my hand, which is at my stomach, where it apparently went without my permission again, and when they come back to my face, I know he knows.
“I’m…I’m…” I’m scared to say it in case what happened last time happens again.
“Tell me,” he insists.
Tears fill my eyes. He takes my hand in his.
“How do you know?” I ask him.
“You keep touching your stomach, and you’re eating toast in the mornings. And you have the same look you had the first time. Like you’re holding something wonderful in both hands.”
I lick my lips and pick up my courage. “I’m pregnant.”
He breathes like it’s become real now for him, too, because I said it.
“Okay,” he says.
This is our new okay. The one that means what it says all the way through.
“Are you—” I start.
“Yes,” he says, before I finish.
“I haven’t said what I was going to ask.”
“The answer is yes,” he asserts. “I’m incandescently happy.”
“Me, too. But I’m also terrified,” I confess. “I need you to know that. I’m happy—I’m, I’m so—” My voice trembles. “I’m so happy, Fox. But I’m also terrified.”
“I know.” He comes to me, lifts me gently, and settles into the armchair with me in his lap. “Me, too.”
“You don’t look terrified.”
“I’m doing the thing.” He strokes my hair. “Where I don’t show it. Old habit. Working on it.”
Then, when I hide my face in his chest and let myself crumble, he holds me.
“We’re going to be okay,” he soothes. “I promise, this time nothing bad is going to happen. Our baby is going to be beautiful, just like you, and loved by both of us.”
He keeps saying it in different ways, and finally, I start to believe him.
“This is going to be an amazing time in our lives, sweetheart.”
I sniffle. “Okay.”
He kisses me.
In the garden, in the spring evening, under the fig tree that I planted and he kept alive, he kisses me—not urgently but with the calm confidence of a man who knows he has me—through good times and bad.
When he pulls back, he is smiling.
His phone beeps, and he grins widely as he sees whatever message has come through.
“Let’s go inside. I have something for you.”
I stand up, and he puts his arm around me, leading me in.
I gasp as I go through the open French doors and see people. My parents. Milo and Tess and their kids, the youngest one with a tooth that has grown back in since I last saw him.
Dina, who is crying.
Percy, who has a bouquet of flowers in his hand.
I stop in the doorway.
I look at Fox. “What? How?”
“I texted them while you were crying your guts out,” he tells me with great satisfaction.
“You planned this?”
“A couple of days ago, when I found the pregnancy test in the bathroom trash,” he explains smugly, but I can see the slight uncertainty, the human thing beneath his alpha thing, and it makes me love him unreasonably more.
“And, it hasn’t been easy to plan this since you didn’t want to tell anyone,” Dina quips and walks up to me. She hugs me tight. “Congratulations!”
Then my mother and father and Milo and Tess, even the kids, and lastly Percy, who hands me the flowers.
“I’m going to be the Godfather,” he announces.
This is not like the last time when we decided to get married, quietly and without pomp and show. No, this is something we are doing with the people who matter most to us here, and not because I’m pregnant.
What if I lose the baby? What if—
“Stop it.” Fox kisses my temple. “Good things are going to happen.”
Then he looks around the room and at me. “Sweetheart, I wanted to do this with everyone who matters to you and us here.”
I smile because he’s repeating the words I just said to myself. We’re so in sync these days, it’s embracing.
He reaches into his pocket and takes out a ring—not the ring he gave me at the courthouse, not the practical, chosen-in-a-hurry ring that I wear because I must.
This is new.
Chosen with care and time, and the specific knowledge of a person rather than the general knowledge of a jewelry store.
“I want to marry you again.” He goes on one knee like we’re in the movies.
“I want to do the whole thing. With your family and your best friend and the dress you actually get to plan and the dinner wherever you want and all of it.” He looks at me.
“I want to marry my wife. Properly. Like she deserved the first time.”
My mother lets out a sob, and my father has his arm around her. He’s smiling. They all are. As am I.
I look at the ring.
I look at Fox.
“You’re very sure of yourself,” I tease.
“I’m sure of you,” he counters, holding the ring and my gaze with equal steadiness. “Lucy Vidal Bennett, will you marry me? Again?”
I laugh out loud—in our house with my hand on my stomach and my family and best friend with me, and the man I love holding a ring and looking at me like I’m the most important person in his life.
“Okay.”
He slides the ring onto my finger.
Then everyone is talking over everyone.
There are hugs and kisses, and our home becomes a space of celebration with champagne and cake—because this was planned, because while I cried in his arms, he’d already set this up and let everyone know to show up.
How can I not love a man who knows me so well, who wants me so much, who gives me the space I need without pushing me to deal with things I need time to deal with?
Later—much later, when the family has gone, Dina has cried herself out and gone back to the restaurant, Percy has shaken Fox’s hand in the way that contains a whole conversation, and the house is quiet—and we are in bed, he talks to our baby.
I am on my back, and he’s leaning against his elbow, looking at me, his hand on my stomach. He leans closer to my stomach and kisses it.
“Hey,” he whispers. “I’m your dad. I don’t really know how to do this. I’ve never done it before.” He looks up at me for a moment, and his face is open and unguarded. Then he looks back down at my belly. “But I’m going to figure it out. I promise.” He pauses. “So just—”
Stay, we both think.
Stay.