11. Margot
Margot
Milo's first birthday is a Saturday.
I know this because it's on the internet.
Becca has made an event page. There's a bounce house, and a cake from the bakery on Third that does the fondant animals, and a photographer, a real one, with a website.
There's a rented pavilion at the reservoir park.
The event page says Milo turns ONE!!! and underneath that, in smaller letters, Daddy's here for this one with a heart.
Forty-eight people are going.
My mother finds it. She doesn't show me. She shows me because I take the phone out of her hand.
"She couldn't make rent in September," I say.
"I know."
"She couldn't afford a co-pay. Two hundred dollars. He stood in my driveway and sent it."
"I know, sweetheart."
"That cake is three hundred dollars. I must have bought that fucking cake."
My mother takes the phone back.
She calls him. I don't ask her to. I hear her from the kitchen, in the voice she used on the school board in 2004.
"Anders. It’s Diane. Is Margot thirty-nine weeks pregnant?
Yes. Is her due date in nine days? Yes. Are you, on Saturday, going to a birthday party at the reservoir for a child whose paternity you have still not confirmed, while your wife is nine days out?
" Pause. "I see." Pause. "No, I understand. It only happens once. Yes. Thank you."
She hangs up.
"He's going," I say. “I knew it.”
"He says it's Milo's first birthday. He says it only happens once."
I sit down on the edge of the bed in my old room. Nora shifts. She's low now, so low that sitting is a negotiation.
I say nothing. There's nothing to say. He's chosen. He's been choosing for two months and I finally left and he's still choosing, and the only thing that's changed is that now I'm not in the room to watch.
The week goes the way the last week of a pregnancy go, I feel heavy. I feel cumbersome. I simultaneously want Nora out of my belly and to never lose the feeling of being pregnant.
I work from my mother's kitchen table because I can't stand my own study and because Vanessa has quietly made it possible, helping me prepare for working from home after Nora arrives. I approve a change order on Harbor Street. I sign a lease. I have a call with clients who don’t need to know that I adjust my belly and roll around to ease the pain in my hip where Nora has lodged her little foot for the time being.
Anders texts once a day. I've unblocked him because of the OB. Just in case. He knows that's why and he doesn't push it.
Thinking about you both.
Let me know if you need anything from the house.
I'm sorry. I know that's not enough.
I don't answer. He doesn't seem to need me to.
Wednesday the OB checks me and says I'm one centimeter dilated and Nora could come tomorrow or in three weeks, which is the most useless sentence in medicine.
I drive home from the appointment with the seat pushed all the way back and the wheel against my stomach. I think about the birth plan in the folder in my suitcase, the one I filled out in August at the island with Anders reading over my shoulder and making jokes about the music.
He's listed as my support person. Line one. I didn't cross it out. I've thought about crossing it out every day and I haven't done it, and I don't know what that means, and I don't want to overthink it.
Thursday he comes to the porch and my mother lets him talk to her through the screen. I'm in the kitchen. I can hear him.
"Is she okay?"
"She's thirty-nine weeks. No woman in the history of the world is okay that far along.”
"Is there anything she needs”?
"She's got everything she needs."
A long pause.
"Diane, when she goes into labor will you please call me?” He sounds desperate and I don’t know how that makes me feel. Nothing has been sorted out in my head yet.
"She has your number,” my mother replies.
"That's not what I mean.”
"I know what you asked. She has your number. Whether she uses it is up to her.”
That night Becca posts a photo of the cake. It's still in the box from the bakery on Third, the lid open, a fondant excavator on top, yellow, with a little number one on the scoop. The caption says Can't wait for tomorrow!!! Daddy picked it out.
My mother finds me looking at it and takes the phone out of my hand for the second time that week.
"Sleep," she says.
I got to bed, unshed tears making the pressure behind my eyes almost unbearable. And I try.
Saturday I wake at six in the morning with a low ache across my back.
It's not new. I've had it on and off for a week. Braxton Hicks, the OB said. Practice contractions. My body getting itself ready for labor. I roll onto my side and it eases and I go back to sleep for an hour.
At eight it's there again. At eight-thirty, I get up and make toast and stand at my mother's counter eating it. At nine-fifteen it wraps around the front like a belt tightening, and I put my mug of caffeine free tea down on the table.
"Mom."
She's in the doorway before I've finished the word.
"How long?” she asks.
"Since six. On and off."
"Sit down."
I sit. She gets her phone out. She times the next one, and it's eleven minutes, and the one after that is nine and a half, and by ten-thirty they're seven minutes apart and I'm holding the edge of the table with both hands and my cold tea is still sitting there.
"Call him," she says.
"No."
"Margot."
"He chose. Let him have his special day with Milo.”
The next one comes. I close my eyes and breathe through it, the way the class taught me, in through the nose and out through the mouth, and when it's over I'm crying and I don't know when I started.
"Give me the phone," I say, suddenly needing my husband. My baby’s father.
I get six rings, then his voicemail, the one where he sounds like he's laughing at something off screen.
I hang up. I call again. Voicemail.
My mother is watching me. I call a third time and I'm about to hang up when it connects.
Music. Kids screaming, the good kind. Someone laughing close to the phone. The sound of a lot of people outdoors on a sunny day.
"Mar? Hey, hang on, it's loud." A door, or a hand over the phone. "Hey. Are you okay? What's going on?"
"Anders."
"I'm here."
"I'm in labor."
Everything on his end stops. I hear it. He's gone somewhere quieter and the music is a wall away and he's breathing.
"Okay. Okay. How far apart?"
"Seven minutes. Since ten-thirty. It started at six."
"Okay." I hear him thinking. I know the sound. It's the sound he makes when a client asks for a Friday delivery on a Wednesday afternoon, he’s planning. "Seven minutes, that's not too bad. She’s the first baby, and the OB said first babies take a while, right? Like twelve hours, she said."
"She said maybe it’s a longer labor.”
"Right. Okay. So." A pause. "We're just about to do the cake. Five minutes, ten tops. Then I'll drive straight to you, I'll be there in twenty, we'll go to the hospital together."
I hear it. I hear all of it.
He's doing the math.
Cake. Photos. Twenty minutes of travel. Twelve hours of labor. He's standing at a pavilion at the reservoir with a fondant cake in front of him and he's calculating whether he can cut it and still make the birth of his daughter.
And then, close to the phone, closer than a wall, a voice I'd know anywhere.
"Anders? He's waiting for you. Everybody's waiting. Come on."
Becca.
She's right there. She's been right there the whole time.
I close my eyes.
"Never mind," I say.
"What? Mar. No. I'm coming, I just?—“
I hang up.
My mother already has her keys.