Chapter 2
In Rhode Island, these words are pronounced exactly the same way—-comma, karma, calmer—-and I generally use all three in the course of a workday.
This morning I arrived late, I have a to--do list a mile long, and I am the on--call person on my team tonight, so I’m already harried when the shadow of a colleague hovers in my doorway.
I don’t bother to look up from my computer screen. “No,” I say reflexively.
Soo--Yun, my communications officer, frowns. “I haven’t even asked you for anything yet.”
“But you’re going to,” I point out.
Soo--Yun is the most tenacious, obstinate member of my team—-able to find her way into any visual or written medium we need to spread information. In this, she’s not unlike the viruses we try to manage.
She sits down uninvited in the chair opposite my messy desk. I surreptitiously slide the bottle of folic acid pills into an open drawer—-my parting gift from the ob--gyn office after today’s appointment. Apparently, I am the only pregnant person who did not know I’m supposed to be taking them.
I have not yet told anyone at the office that I’m pregnant.
I haven’t even told my family.
Jesse and I agreed to wait until the first trimester was safely behind us. It may be superstition from my job, but I firmly believe that if you speak a disaster, you summon it.
“It’s about the plane crash in Philly.”
“No,” I repeat, still typing.
“It’s 60 Minutes,” Soo--Yun says. “So I’m vetoing your no.
In the aftermath of the crash, there’s been renewed interest in emergency preparedness and what we do.
And I don’t have to tell you how valuable it is to have any national press right now about our work and why the public needs it.
Plus, the governor’s an attention whore.
He’ll love the focus on Rhode Island. Maybe enough to even cough up some state budget money when we’re on the chopping block for federal funding. ”
For the first time, I meet her gaze. “The crash happened weeks ago, and it wasn’t in my jurisdiction. Why the hell do they want me?”
“Because most chiefs of emergency prep departments are old white dudes, and you’ll make better TV.”
I sigh. “You get one favor a year,” I say. “This is what you want to use it on?”
Soo--Yun purses her lips. “I would argue that I’m doing you the favor, but we can nitpick later. The reporter’s name is Adelaide, and she’ll be here in an hour.”
“An hour?” I yelp. “Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”
“Because you weren’t here,” she answers, getting to her feet. “And because then you would have had time to back out.” She flutters her hands in a little wave and backs out of my office.
I close my eyes and lean back my head. “Shit,” I mutter.
This morning, Jesse and I were almost late to my first prenatal appointment with Dr. Mantillard because we could not stop arguing.
Since I’d first found out about the pregnancy, Jesse had insisted I needed to back it down a gear at work to protect the baby.
In return, I accused him of stifling me and insisted I wasn’t going to sit home for the next seven months knitting booties.
He said to stop putting words in his mouth.
I said this child had two parents, and if I had to limit the danger of my job, then he had to take nothing but desk assignments for the next eighteen years of this kid’s life.
We drove to the doctor’s office in steaming silence.
The surly receptionist who checked us in and the nurse who took my vitals and drew blood did not seem to notice that we were not speaking to each other.
As we waited in the exam room for the doctor, I finally decided to broker peace.
Jesse was blowing up a rubber glove and tying off the bottom, like a balloon.
He was going to be such a good father, if our marriage survived the pregnancy.
“You know,” I said, “bad things are always going to happen.”
Jesse snorted. “Such an optimist.”
I shifted, rustling the paper beneath me. “I mean it, Jesse.”
“There’s a difference between taking acceptable risks and putting yourself in intentional danger.”
“My whole career is literally about that. And you didn’t mind me doing my job until now,” I pointed out.
“Because now you’re pregnant, Molly.”
“Yes. I’m pregnant. Not dying.”
Jesse’s eyes shuttered, and I realized I used the wrong metaphor.
He was always just one leap away from thinking of his two sisters, one in remission, the other lost to him through a freak accident.
It made me soften a little. Most people who met Jesse considered him a hell--raiser and a wiseass, but they didn’t know him well enough to see that those were just walls he plastered to protect his heart from bruising again.
“You’re not going to be able to keep him safe all the time,” I said gently.
“Her,” Jesse corrected. “And that doesn’t mean I can’t try.”
The door to the exam room opened. “Congratulations,” Dr. Mantillard said.
She was small and birdlike, with hair that frizzed and eternally cold hands.
“You are incontrovertibly pregnant.” She folded her arms. “We’re going to get you set up with monthly check--ins and prenatal vitamins, but have you got any specific questions? ”
“Yes,” I said immediately. “Is there anything I can’t do?”
She gathered several handouts. “Eat oysters,” Dr. Mantillard said, “among other things. No smoking or drinking, naturally—-”
“What about toxins?” I interrupted. “Nerve agents?”
Dr. Mantillard knows what I do for a living. “I’d avoid anthrax even if you weren’t pregnant . . .”
“What about lifting?” Jesse asked, narrowing his eyes. “She drags around a sixty--pound knapsack.”
The doctor shook her head. “Not a great idea.”
I chewed my bottom lip. “What if I split it into two thirty--pound packs?”
Jesse looked at the doctor. “Help.”
Dr. Mantillard’s lips twitched. “It is not uncommon for dads to be overprotective of their wives when they are pregnant.”
“Ha!” I poked Jesse in the side.
“It is also true that sometimes pregnant people are not the best judges of their own safety.”
Jesse smirked at me. “Told you so.”
“Listen to your body,” my doctor said. “It will tell you when you’re overdoing it.”
“Will you tell him I can still drive a forklift?”
Jesse set his jaw. “Will you tell her delegating is not giving up control?”
My doctor’s gaze ping--ponged between us, and then she sighed. “Molly, why don’t you lie down?”
I stretched out on the exam table, looking up at a poster of marine life on the ceiling.
The doctor lifted my sweater and pushed down the elastic waist of my leggings—-I was running out of pants that fit—-then squirted a dollop of gel on my belly.
She lifted the fetal Doppler wand and rubbed it over my skin.
“Just so you know, I do delegate,” I muttered, staring at the illustration of a black sea devil anglerfish, with its weird bioluminescent lure suspended over its own head.
They are deep--sea creatures, but not long ago one had made it to the surface and was filmed by a research boat.
It died shortly after the footage was captured.
Black anglerfish males are tiny, so the way they mate is by fusing themselves—-several at a time—-to the female until she decides she is ready to have offspring.
I bet whoever hung that poster didn’t realize they were being reproductively subversive.
The doctor rolled the wand around, and suddenly, instead of static a whoosh--whoosh--whoosh beat filled the room. My hand moved along the waxy paper of the exam table until it found Jesse’s. “That’s . . . her?”
“Or him,” Dr. Mantillard said. “We’ll know the sex after we get the results of the NIPT test.”
My gaze was fixated on the wand pressed to my abdomen. But Jesse stared at me in awe.
Suddenly, I understood. It wasn’t that Jesse was overly fearful. It was that life is such an unlikely miracle, and he wanted to protect it.
When I’d started dating Jesse, I had asked Evie how you know if you’re in love. Because if he left, she had told me, there’d be a hole in you shaped like him that nobody else could fill.
The doctor turned off the fetal monitor and wiped the gel from my skin. “Everything sounds good,” she said. “Molly, I’ll see you in a month.”
The door closed behind the doctor, and I sat up. Jesse moved so that he was standing between my legs. “Shit just got real,” he said softly.
“It was pretty real when I was throwing up this morning, too.”
He rested his forehead against mine. “I’ll try to lean into acceptable risk,” he offered, an olive branch.
I curled my hand around the nape of his neck. “If I have to use the forklift,” I conceded, “I’ll be extra careful.”
But mitigating danger isn’t the same as eliminating it, and whether Jesse and I wanted to admit this or not, we both knew it was true.
You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck.
You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.
Adelaide McCann is a 60 Minutes journalist known for hard--hitting interviews with Pentagon whistle--blowers and disgraced rappers, and she once allegedly made Elon Musk cry on set—-although the White House scuttled the footage before it could air. She looks perfect when she arrives at our office.
Soo--Yun has hired a makeup artist for me, which means I have a trowel--full of foundation smeared onto my skin that everyone assures me will look perfect on camera.
She makes me wear her own blazer over the top I’d chosen from my closet that morning when I’d not yet known I was going to be interviewed on national television.
The production team has redecorated my spartan office so that most of the real furniture is shoved up against a wall you can’t see on camera, while Adelaide and I sit on upholstered chairs that materialized from I--don’t--know--where. A potted geranium sits on a small table between us.
Where did they get a potted geranium in October?