2. Margot
Margot
Anders asks me to come. He asks the next morning while I'm buttering toast I won't eat, and he asks like a man who has thought about it and decided the right answer is to have his wife in the room.
"You don't have to," he says.
"I'm coming."
"I'd like you there."
"I know. That's why I'm coming."
We drive separately in the morning because I have a nine o'clock with the planning office and he has a site visit, and I spend the nine o'clock nodding at a man named Gerald while he explains a setback requirement I could recite in my sleep.
I've got my hand on my stomach under the table the whole time.
Nora's quiet. She's usually quiet in the mornings.
I keep thinking about the sound Anders's voice made when he said she has a baby, the way it went flat in the middle like a board with a crack in it.
Later on, after lunch, I meet him at home at we carpool to his meeting with Becca.
Carpooling to find out if your husband has fathered a baby with his fling is one of the strangest moments of my life so far, the oddity is not lost on me.
We’re polite but hushed in our conversation on the way over.
What is there to talk about when we both have one thing on our mind?
We get to his work and park. He helps me out and we walk inside.
Stenburg Construction's office is a converted bungalow off Route 9 with a gravel lot and a reception desk his office manager, Lorraine, has decorated with a plastic pumpkin every October for nineteen years.
It's September and the pumpkin is already out.
I break away and head to the bathroom to pee for the hundredth time that day and take a moment to ponder how this is going to go.
Will I have to share my husband with another woman?
Will my daughter have to share her father with another child?
I decide whatever happens, I will avoid blaming the baby, and I will give Becca grace because this wasn’t planned.
Anders is waiting for me in his office. He stands up when I come in, which he never does, and he comes around the desk and puts both hands on my face and kisses my forehead and holds there for a second with his eyes closed.
"Whatever happens in here," he says.
"I know."
"I mean it. Whatever it is. You and me."
"I know, Anders."
He smells like sawdust and the soap from the site trailer. I put my hands on his wrists. Nora shifts, low and slow, and I feel him feel it, and for one second it's just the three of us in a room with a plastic pumpkin outside the door, and I think, we're going to be fine.
Becca comes at two.
I don't know what I expected. Someone taller, maybe.
She's small, thin in the way that looks like nerves instead of choice, with dark blond hair pulled back and a gray cardigan that's pilled at the cuffs.
She has a diaper bag over one shoulder and a car seat carrier over the other, and she sets the carrier down on the floor of Anders's office and lifts out a baby and holds him against her chest like he's the only thing in the building that belongs to her.
"This is Milo," she says.
He's eleven months old. He has dark hair that stands up in the back. His eyes are brown and wide-set, and there's something in the shape of his upper lip, a fullness on one side, that I've kissed on Anders's face a thousand times.
My stomach turns over. I keep my face still.
Anders doesn't move from behind the desk, and I see him decide not to, and I'm grateful for it.
"Hi," he says to the baby, in a voice I've only heard him use through my shirt.
Becca sits. I sit. Anders stays standing for a second longer than is natural and then sits too.
She tells it with her eyes on the baby. She was seeing someone else that fall.
Around the same time. A man named Travis who worked at the marina.
She thought Milo was Travis's, because that made sense, because that's who she was with.
Travis was around for the first few months and then wasn't. And lately she'd started looking at Milo and seeing something else.
"I didn't want to blow up your life," she says. "You'd moved on. Then I saw the wedding announcement in the county business journal. The picture from the Harbor Street article." Her eyes flick to my ring and away. "I told myself it wasn't fair to you."
"It's been fourteen months," Anders says.
She starts crying. Not loudly. Her face just gives way, and Milo puts a hand on her chin.
I let it go on for a moment, because she's a woman holding a baby and crying in my husband's office, and I'm not made of stone. Then I say the only useful thing anyone in the room is going to say.
"Get a DNA test."
Becca looks at me as though I've reached across the desk and slapped her.
"I'm not being cruel." I keep my voice level. "It's a cheek swab. It takes a week. If he's Anders's son, he's Anders's son, and he'll be welcome. Our daughter might have a brother." I put a hand on the bump without meaning to. "But nobody in this room should be making decisions on a feeling."
Anders reaches over and takes my hand. He squeezes it hard, once, and I feel the whole of his gratitude in it. He'd been sitting there trying to find a way to say that without sounding like he was pushing her away, and I'd said it for him.
Becca sees the squeeze.
I watch her see it. Something in her face closes and reopens with a different expression behind it, and she smiles at me, small and wet, and says, "Of course. You're right. Of course."
Anders says he'll set it up. He'll pay for it. He'll drive them to the lab if she needs a ride. She nods at all of it and wipes her face with the back of her wrist and bounces Milo a little, and Milo laughs, and Anders's face does something I don't have a word for.
We stand. Becca zips the diaper bag. Anders opens the door.
At the threshold Milo twists around in her arms and reaches one fat hand toward Anders. He makes a sound. It might be "Da." It might be anything. He's eleven months old and he makes sounds at the ceiling fan.
Becca bursts into tears and buries her face in his hair, and Anders stands in the doorway with his hand still in mine.
He doesn't let go.
But I feel it loosen. Just a little. Just enough to notice.
In the truck I don't say anything for six blocks. He drives with one hand and keeps looking at me.
"You were incredible in there," he says finally.
"I asked for a lab test."
"You were kind about it. I couldn't figure out how to be kind about it."
"She was expecting you to be." I look out the window. "She wasn't expecting me at all."
He's quiet. Then: "Mar. If he's mine."
"If he's yours, he's yours. I meant what I said." I turn to him. "I'm not going to punish a baby for existing. That's not who I am and it's not who you married."
"I know."
"So let's get the test. And until we get it, let's not decide anything."
"Okay."
He reaches over and puts his hand on my knee. It's warm. It's the same hand that was on my stomach last night. I put mine over it.
At a red light he says, "He's got the lip. Did you see that? The thing on the one side."
"I saw it."
The light changes. He drives. Neither of us says that I have a photograph of Anders at nine months old on our refrigerator and that I looked at Milo and saw it.
That night I lie in bed and feel Nora turning over inside me, slow, like she's getting comfortable, and I listen to her father breathing next to me and think: this is fine. This is a problem with a lab result at the end of it. I run a company. I've solved worse than this with less.
At some point after midnight his phone lights up on the nightstand. He doesn't wake. I lean over far enough to see it.
A photo. Milo asleep in a crib with a blanket over his legs.
He went right down tonight. Thank you for today.
I put the phone back exactly where it was and lie there in the dark for a long time.