Chapter 18
Celeste
Saylor holds the door for me at the clinic, and for a moment I just stand there on the sidewalk, looking up at the building like I’m about to walk into a cathedral.
It’s not a cathedral. It’s a four-story medical building in Midtown East with a Starbucks on the ground floor and a parking garage that smells like exhaust and orange peels for some reason.
But what’s inside, on the third floor, behind a reception desk and an ultrasound machine, is the closest thing to sacred that I’ve encountered since Whitney’s funeral.
Today we see the baby.
Not in the abstract. Not in legal documents or custody filings or the imagined version I’ve been sketching in my head for weeks, the girl with Whit’s red curls reaching for books on Montessori shelves. Today we see the actual baby. On a screen. In real time. Moving.
My hand finds Saylor’s as we walk through the lobby.
Not for appearances. Only because we’re that nauseating couple that likes to hold hands now.
He threads his fingers through mine and squeezes once, and the squeeze says everything his mouth doesn’t: I’m here.
This is real. We’re doing this together.
In the elevator, he’s quiet. Unusually quiet for a man who once fabricated a bathroom emergency at a funeral.
He’s wearing a navy button-down that I bought him last week because his flannel and henley collection, while charming in a lumberjack-chic sort of way, is falling apart.
He needed new clothes. I snuck in a few upgrades.
Sue me. He’s still rolled the sleeves to the elbow because Saylor Evans cannot exist in a long-sleeved, collared shirt without modifying it to look casual.
I’ve accepted this about him the way you accept weather.
“Thank you,” he says, as the elevator passes the second floor.
“For what?”
“For letting me be here. For this. You didn’t have to include me.”
“Saylor, you painted the nursery. You wrote ‘you are so loved’ on the wall. You built the new crib and installed a baby monitor. You even bought Dreft.”
“It’s safer detergent for the baby’s skin.”
“On what planet do you think I would not include you?”
He looks at the floor. The humble version of him, the one that still can’t quite believe he’s allowed to want things. “I just know this is your thing. Yours and Whit’s. I don’t want to overstep.”
“You’re not overstepping. You’re standing exactly where I want you to stand.” I squeeze his hand. “Besides, someone has to drive me home afterward because I’ll probably be crying too hard to see the road. I could accidentally drive off a bridge.”
“Yeah…you’re only a terrible driver when you’re crying. Sure.”
“Hush, you.”
The third floor is a women’s health practice with soft lighting and abstract art on the walls that’s meant to be calming but does not succeed.
It’s all abstract flowers that are shaped suspiciously like vaginas.
Other than the female anatomy art, the waiting room is all muted tones and cushioned chairs and a water dispenser with cucumber slices floating in it, which I find both soothing and pretentious.
There’s a woman across the room who is approximately eleven months pregnant and reading a magazine with the detached serenity of someone who has moved past anxiety and into acceptance.
She knows it. We know it. She will be pregnant forever.
That baby will grow a beard in her belly.
“Celeste! Saylor!”
Raven is already here.
She’s sitting in the corner chair, the one closest to the outlet because she’s charging her phone.
Even from her chair, the full scope of her belly can’t be hidden.
She is magnificently, undeniably, spectacularly pregnant.
Twenty-five weeks. Her belly is a small planet.
It has its own gravitational field. She’s wearing a floral wrap dress that I sent her from the office two weeks ago along with a care package of maternity clothes.
Raven’s pre-pregnancy wardrobe consisted primarily of crop tops and low-rise jeans, and while I respect her commitment to early-aughts fashion, there are limits to what denim can accommodate.
“You guuuuys.” She stands, which is now a multi-phase operation involving a forward lean, a hand on the armrest, and a small grunt of exertion that she tries to disguise as enthusiasm.
I meet her halfway and hug her carefully, my arms finding the space above and around the belly, which is warm and firm and startlingly alive.
I feel something shift beneath the fabric.
A knee, maybe. An elbow. Some small part of Whitney’s child rearranging herself inside a body that isn’t mine, and the intimacy of that, the proximity to a miracle I have no biological claim to, makes my throat constrict.
I rotate my neck to see Saylor right behind me. “The baby kicked. I felt it.”
“More of a roll,” Raven says. “This is not a baby, it’s an alligator. All day, all night, it rolls. I don’t know what it’s trying to drown, but it’s not working.”
Saylor laughs. “May I?” he asks Raven. She nods like it’s an obvious question and Saylor replaces my hands on Raven’s belly. “Oi, that’s good yeah? Active little thing.”
“It’s good,” I assure him before turning my attention back to Raven. “Look at you.” I beam, holding her at arm’s length. “You’re gorgeous.”
“I’m enormous. I got stuck in a revolving door last week.
An actual revolving door. A security guard had to help me out.
It was deeply humiliating and also kind of hilarious.
” She looks down at the dress. “Thank you so much for all the clothes, by the way. And the books…which I have most definitely been reading.”
“Have you?”
“Well, I’ve been reading the covers. And some of the chapter titles.
One of them has a pretty cute font.” She grins with the specific charm of a twenty-three-year-old who knows she’s being lovingly managed and doesn’t entirely mind.
“But honestly, the prenatal vitamin guide was actually helpful. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to take them on an empty stomach. That explains a lot of mornings.”
“Raven, please tell me you’ve been eating. What did you have for breakfast?”
She looks at her shoes. “Eggs. Fruit. Quinoa.”
“Mm-hmm. Now, the truth.”
“Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,” she mumbles.
“So you had heartburn for breakfast?”
“It’s a food that I ate in the morning. That’s breakfast by definition.”
“It’s a sodium delivery system disguised as a snack. I’m not asking you to meal prep. I’m asking you to occasionally consume something that grew in the ground, okay?”
“Potatoes grow in the ground. Chips are made of potatoes.”
“Cheetos are made from corn, Raven.”
“Still a vegetable.” She points to Saylor’s chest. “And still not helping.”
“The point is, do you want me to send you some groceries? I can arrange that,” I offer.
“What would I do with groceries?”
“Cook?” Saylor hints, seemingly amused.
Raven laughs, and the sound is bright and young and fearless, like a woman who is growing another human being and treating the experience with the casual competence of someone assembling IKEA furniture.
I’ve never met anyone who wears pregnancy with less pretension.
Raven doesn’t glow. She doesn’t nest. She doesn’t post bump photos with captions about sacred journeys.
She just shows up, does the work, and eats Flamin’ Hot Cheetos for breakfast, and somehow that’s more reassuring than every parenting book on my shelf.
She makes this look so uncomplicated, even though it’s very, very complicated.
“I promise I’ll eat real good. Don’t worry too much. I promise I’m taking care of little blob just fine.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be controlling,” I say.
“You’re not.” Then her gaze shifts. Looking over my shoulder toward the entrance, her expression changes.
Not dramatically. A subtle tightening around the mouth, the way a person’s face adjusts when they spot someone they were hoping wouldn’t show.
“But speaking of controlling,” Raven mutters quietly.
I turn.
Eleanor is walking through the waiting room like she owns the building, which, given the scope of her husband’s former real estate portfolio, she might.
She’s in a cream-colored coat and pearl earrings and her hair is blown out to a volume that suggests she came here directly from a salon, which she probably did.
Eleanor doesn’t go to appointments. She arrives places. She makes appearances.
She looks good. I hate that she looks good. She looks like a woman who has been sleeping well and consulting with an attorney who charges by the hour and winning, or at least believing she’s winning, which for Eleanor has always been the same thing.
“Raven,” I say carefully, without turning back. “Did you invite Eleanor?”
Raven’s voice gets small. “Only because I’m scared of her.
She called the office and asked about the appointment and I didn’t know how to say no.
And she offered to pay for it because this clinic has the 4D ultrasound machine and my insurance only covers the regular one.
I’m sorry. I should have told you but I didn’t want you to not come. ”
“It’s okay.” It’s not okay. But Raven is twenty-three and pregnant and shouldn’t have to navigate the minefield of Eleanor’s emotional warfare. That’s my job. “Don’t worry about it. Go do your thing. I’ll handle this.”
The nurse appears from the hallway, clipboard in hand, and calls Raven’s name. The nurse casts a look at Saylor, then back to Raven’s belly. “Dad, you’re welcome to come back too. We’ll get Mom changed and then you can join for the ultrasound.”