Chapter 63
NAOMI
Well, now I seem like the bad guy.
But I’m not the bad guy. I’m really not. If anyone heard the whole story, they would know that everything I did, I did for Teddy. My son.
Yes, I stole Veronica’s baby. Although to be fair, I didn’t know it was her baby.
The first time I ever saw Teddy, he was in a car.
I had driven down to visit my mother in St. Louis, and I had pulled over at a rest stop for gas.
I saw that old dented car near the gas station, and I thought maybe it was broken down.
I pulled over to offer help, because that’s the sort of nice person I am.
A man was passed out in the driver’s seat. And next to him in the passenger seat, there was what looked like a bunch of drug paraphernalia. Not that I know about such things, because I don’t do drugs. But this man obviously did.
I nearly walked on by, but then I heard the baby wailing.
I crept closer and discovered that in the back seat, there was an infant strapped into a car seat. A tiny little thing, probably only a couple of weeks old. And the newborn baby was screaming his head off, his tiny face scarlet as his body shook with the ferocity of each holler.
I was not a mother. I had always wanted to be, but a few years back, I was diagnosed with severe endometriosis.
That was the reason my menstrual cycles were always so uncomfortable.
I carried around the fertility crystals, moonstone and aventurine, for over a year as I tried to get pregnant with donor sperm, but surprisingly, nothing happened.
My doctor eventually told me that without surgery, it was unlikely I would ever be able to conceive.
And even with surgery, my chances were low.
So I was blown away by the rush of maternal affection for this helpless little infant. It felt like…fate.
I tried the door to the car, and to my surprise, it was unlocked.
I opened the door and unstrapped the tiny baby from the car seat.
Immediately, the screams subsided. I stuck my index finger in his mouth, and he started to suckle happily.
In a few seconds, he would probably realize he wasn’t getting any milk from my finger, and the crying would resume.
I had to get this baby some food.
I made a split-second decision. This baby was in danger. I couldn’t possibly just leave him with this drugged-out junkie. I had to save him.
The man in the front was too out of it to even notice me freeing the car seat from the back. I took both the baby and the car seat, and then I moved them to the back of my own car. Then I got back on the road and kept driving until I got to my mother’s house.
Suffice it to say, my mother was surprised when I showed up at her house with a newborn baby.
I told her that I had been keeping the pregnancy a secret, but I’m not sure if she believed me, since I hardly looked like I had just given birth, and my breasts were not producing any milk.
And she especially must have been suspicious when I told her about how I needed her help to get a birth certificate.
But she went out and bought formula, and she also dug out my old bassinet from the attic.
“Now on that birth certificate,” she said to me. “Who do you want to list as the father?”
“There is no father.”
“Of course there’s a father. Don’t you know basic biology, Naomi?”
The father was a junkie that I found passed out in his car. For all I knew, he was dead. I had been scouring the internet for news reports about a missing baby, but there was nothing. Nobody even seemed to care that he was taken.
“The father isn’t involved,” I told her.
“Well, who is it?”
I had to come up with a name. So I thought back to the one boyfriend I had in the last year that my mother actually seemed to approve of. “His name is Jeremy Roth,” I said. “You know, the investment banker.”
My mother looked at me with newfound respect. “Oh. Well, why don’t you tell him about it?”
Jeremy and I had dated for a few months, which was probably even longer than it should have lasted. He had been nice enough when he ended things, but he could do a lot better than a woman pushing forty who was living paycheck to paycheck, and he knew it.
Anyway, I couldn’t tell him about the baby, because it wasn’t actually his, and the first thing a man like Jeremy would do would be to demand a paternity test. We never had unprotected sex even once. He was very careful.
“Don’t be a fool,” my mother scolded me. “That man could give this baby a great life. Don’t you want that for your son?”
I did want that.
We named the baby Theodore, after my own biological father. And in the end, I let my mother insert Jeremy’s name on the birth certificate. But it wasn’t until I went back up to the city that I made the decision to approach him.