Chapter 5 Victoria
Everything’s okay,” Dr. Waldman announced, covering the distance between the door of Victoria’s hospital room and her bedside in four efficient strides.
Sitting up in her hospital bed, Victoria watched Ace leap to his feet, his face rearranging itself from a tight mask of concern to a slightly more relaxed state.
Victoria realized she was having a similar physiological response: muscles slackening when she hadn’t noticed they were tensed.
“I’m not having a miscarriage?” Victoria asked. “Because when I Googled—”
“Never Google,” Dr. Waldman advised. “You’ll self-diagnose with five different conditions, and if you’re pregnant, the first is—”
“Preeclampsia? Toxoplasmosis? Molar pregnancy? Obstetric cholestasis?” Victoria filled in. Ace’s head whipped over to her, his eyebrows shooting up with surprise.
“Your baby is fine,” Dr. Waldman reassured Victoria, smoothing her white doctor’s coat, which was still crisp despite the late hour.
“And my wife? What happened?” Ace said.
“Most likely a subchorionic hematoma,” Dr. Waldman said.
“At least that doesn’t sound terrifying,” Ace replied facetiously.
Behind him, there was a pain-assessment-tool poster to help patients communicate their level of discomfort via a series of exaggerated cartoon faces.
Ace frowned, resembling the orange grumpy face in the middle. Moderately severe pain.
“In layman’s terms,” Dr. Waldman continued, “it means bleeding from one of the membranes that surround the embryo.”
“What?” Ace cried.
“I know it sounds scary, but this should resolve on its own,” Dr. Waldman said. Victoria tried to relax and gave Ace a look to suggest he attempt the same.
“Thank God.” Ace sat back down next to Victoria in the visitor’s chair that was pulled as close as possible next to her bed.
“I guess we overreacted,” Victoria said, feeling a little silly for bolting to the hospital and for having Dr. Waldman’s after-hours service page the doctor with a request (it admittedly came across as more of a panicked demand) for her to meet them there as soon as possible.
“Not at all,” Dr. Waldman said. “I’m sure the internet told you that there are unfortunately much more worrisome reasons for bleeding, especially with a geriatric pregnancy. It’s important that we ruled them out.”
“And you did, definitively?” Ace asked, a twinge of hysteria creeping back into his voice. “All of them?”
“Baby and mother are both fine,” Dr. Waldman confirmed. She pulled out her iPad, scrolled through Victoria’s chart, then looked up at them. “Since you’re here, would you like to know the gender?”
Victoria and Ace locked eyes. At the same time, they said, “Yes.” Ace clutched Victoria’s hand between his palms.
“It’s a boy,” Dr. Waldman told them.
Ace exclaimed, then started sobbing. Victoria’s head swam, and suddenly, all the reasons she had decided to try for a baby crystallized before her: the recurring dreams about a towheaded toddler with a stubborn cowlick or wayward pigtails; visions of Ace teaching a tiny person how to ride a bike, running behind the wheels until wobbles segued into triumph—the nebulous but still vivid sense of a person Victoria had begun to conjure up before that should have been possible, as if the act of imagining a child was itself a critical part of bringing him or her into existence.
“I’m just glad the baby’s okay,” Ace blubbered. “And you’re okay. We’re all okay…”
“It makes it more real, doesn’t it?” Dr. Waldman said, smiling. Down the hall, beyond a closed door, an alarm went off, faint but persistent.
Victoria nodded. “I didn’t expect that.” But it was undeniable: The assignment of gender, no matter which one, transformed an embryo from an amorphous idea into a distinct entity. A baby.
“I’m going to give you two a moment while I fill out your release forms,” Dr. Waldman said, and excused herself.
Victoria had never fully appreciated her concierge doctor’s expertise and attentiveness until she and Ace were speeding to the nearest hospital with their hearts in their throats. If the scare was some sort of test—you want this baby, bitch?—it had worked.
When they had started trying, Victoria had urged Ace to temper his expectations, even going so far as to supply him with gloomy statistics and unsettling medical jargon, but his hope was like the Olympic flame.
And then, it was rewarded. Despite Victoria’s warnings and all the data working against them, it was absurdly easy for a forty-three-year-old woman and sixty-year-old man to get pregnant.
Naturally, no less! It was like a cosmic joke.
Since their fertility limbo had only lasted two months, it didn’t allow ample time for Victoria’s ambivalence to resolve itself.
She turned to her husband, the puddle. “Are you glad it’s a boy? A little you.”
“I’m just so happy he’s okay,” Ace said between tears. “Obviously, all I wanted was a healthy child…”
Victoria traced the lines of her husband’s handsome face with her gaze, trying to imagine it duplicated in an infant.
“It’s not about whether we’re having a boy or girl,” Ace added. “It’s that I’m doing it with you. You’re it, Victoria. Ever since I first laid eyes on you.”
“You mean when I rejected you without looking up?”
Ace laughed, the tears finally subsiding. “Okay, maybe I fell for you right after that. You’re my person. And now you’re the person who’s going to make me a father.”
They kissed, then leaned their foreheads against each other’s. “We’re doing this,” Victoria said.
“It’s happening,” Ace answered. “My heir is being brought into the world, at long last.”
“Ace Junior?” she joked.
“Yes! A.J.!”
Victoria pretended to gag. “Over my dead body.”
Ace’s mouth turned down. “Too soon,” he said.
“Ace, I’m okay. Are you?” she said, gesturing around.
Ace allowed himself a long, steady exhale. When he was a teenager, his mother had died slowly and painfully of ovarian cancer. Hospitals brought up a lot for him.
“I am,” Ace said, taking her hands in his again. Victoria gazed into the face she knew so well she could draw it from memory. “We’re doing this,” she repeated, letting him know that it was finally beginning to sink in. “You and me…and the baby.”
You and me and the baby.
The words ran like a refrain through Victoria’s head as a nurse brought in the discharge paperwork and they thanked Dr. Waldman for rushing over to take care of them, pocketing pamphlets about maternal health.
Ace treated Victoria like a Ming vase even after she had been cleared from the mandatory wheelchair ride to the hospital’s perimeter, insisting that she take his arm for the three steps to the car, gingerly depositing her in the passenger seat, and then driving at the literal speed limit the entire way home, even though everyone was honking at them.
Victoria was touched, so she didn’t remark on how Ace had adopted the pace of an elderly snail.
Sometimes marriage meant going thirty-five miles per hour.
They arrived home after midnight, bone-tired from the ordeal, and headed straight for their bedroom.
Everything looked the same since they left the room a few hours and a different world ago, like the space had been hermetically sealed in their absence.
Victoria and Ace peeled off their clothes, which didn’t quite remove the lingering antiseptic scent of the hospital.
Ace sniffed his armpit, nostrils curling, but confessed, “I’m too tired. Let’s shower in the morning?”
Victoria agreed. She was weary but also strangely wired. In the chaos of the evening, she had all but pushed the day’s earlier events out of her mind, but now she remembered—and commented—that she had to confront them at work the next day.
“You’re not actually thinking of going to the office tomorrow?” Ace asked as they both walked into the bathroom to give their teeth a quick brush.
“You heard Dr. Waldman. The baby and I are both fine,” Victoria said.
“You need to rest!”
“If I call in sick, which I have never done, it’s only going to make everything worse,” Victoria said between brushes.
Ace tucked Victoria under the covers as if ensuring her comfort would also translate into her—and the baby’s—health and safety.
Then he lay down beside her and was fast asleep less than thirty seconds after his head hit the pillow.
Victoria peered over at him. She knew that her husband had been deeply affected by the scare, but he was also peacefully comatose.
Unlike Victoria. She slipped out of bed carefully so she wouldn’t disturb Ace, but he didn’t stir.
Victoria threw on slippers and padded out of their bedroom, gazing around their house like she was seeing it for the first time, but really it was that she was looking at it through a new lens.
Children hadn’t been on the radar when they’d bought the house, a modern Spanish-style home perched on a leafy promontory off Coldwater Canyon.
This house, the first house where she had cared about things like crown moldings, would get messy and marked with the stamp of a child, its chevron-patterned hardwood floors scuffed by toys, the White Heron baseboards striped with crayons when no one was looking.
It would experience a different iteration of Victoria and Ace as they made the leap from a twosome able to abuse their freedom and luxuriate in selfishness if they so chose to parents.
They would soon share one primary goal—raising a human—with all the attendant changes, responsibilities, and sacrifices this monolithic shift entailed.