Chapter 16 The Second Trimester
Lesley
The anatomy scan was on the Friday after our coffee on Tennyson Street, in a dim room at the back of Dr. Kessler’s practice with a reclining chair, a screen mounted on the wall, and a sonographer named Tanya who hummed Fleetwood Mac under her breath while she worked.
Hank was in the waiting room when I arrived, twenty minutes early again, with his coat folded over his lap and his phone nowhere in sight.
He stood when I came in. I’d stopped being surprised by that, and I’d also stopped being annoyed with myself for noticing.
It was simply what he did now. Whether it would still be what he did in six months was a separate question, and I’d decided to let the answer arrive on its own schedule.
The scan took almost forty minutes. Tanya measured everything: the circumference of the baby’s head and the length of her thigh bones, the four chambers of her heart fluttering on the screen, her kidneys and stomach, and her spine, a perfect curve of pale beads.
The baby spent most of the scan with one hand pressed against her face, as though she found the whole procedure a little embarrassing, and at one point she yawned, wide and slow, and Hank laughed out loud and then covered his mouth like he’d been caught talking in church.
“Everything looks exactly the way we want it to,” Tanya said finally. “Growth is right on track. Heart looks great. Dr. Kessler will go over the full report with you, but I’m not seeing anything that concerns me.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding since the fire.
“Did you want to know the sex?” Tanya asked. “Some people like to be surprised.”
I looked at Hank. He’d told me at the coffee shop that it was entirely up to me, and I watched him now, standing by the wall with his hands jammed into his pockets, very carefully not saying a word.
“I want to know,” I said.
Tanya moved the wand, tilted her head at the screen, and smiled. “It’s a girl.”
A girl.
I’d told myself for weeks that I didn’t have a preference, and it turned out that was a lie, because when Tanya said the word, something in my chest opened up so fast and so wide that I started crying before I could stop it.
A girl. A daughter. I thought about my mother in her adobe kitchen in Santa Fe, and my grandmother, whose quilt was folded at the foot of my bed in LoHi, and a small red-haired person I hadn’t met yet who would grow up knowing exactly what she was allowed to ask for.
When I looked at Hank again, he had turned toward the wall. His shoulders were shaking. He was trying very hard to make it quiet.
Tanya discreetly printed three pictures and left us alone for a minute.
“A girl,” Hank said, when he could talk. His voice was wrecked. “Les. We’re having a girl.”
“We are.”
He came over to the chair and crouched beside it, not touching me, just close. He looked at the frozen image on the screen, the small profile with its hand against its cheek. “I’m going to be so bad at braiding hair,” he said.
I laughed, still crying. “You’ll learn. There are YouTube videos.”
“I’ll watch all of them.” He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “Every single one.”
In the parking lot afterward, he held one of the ultrasound pictures by its edges the way he had in November, and he didn’t ask me to breakfast. He’d stopped asking after the coffee on Tennyson Street.
I suspected he’d decided that if there were going to be any more invitations, they needed to come from me.
“Thank you for letting me be there,” he said.
“She’s your daughter too.”
He looked at the picture, and then at me, and I saw the question in his face that he wasn’t going to ask. What happens now? What does this mean for us?
I didn’t have an answer for him. I didn’t have one for myself yet. What I had was a date in May and a two-bedroom condo, and a daughter who was going to arrive whether her parents had figured out their marriage or not.
So I started making plans.
Over the next three weeks, I painted the second bedroom in the condo the palest of the three greens from the paint chips I’d taken off the nursery wall in Washington Park.
Heather and Jo helped, and Jo painted a small, perfect sprig of wildflowers in the corner above where the crib would go, copied from the book Hank had sent for our anniversary.
I didn’t tell Hank where the idea had come from. I didn’t tell anyone.
I put us on the waiting lists for three daycares near my office, because Priya had warned me that the good ones filled up a year in advance.
I researched pediatricians. I bought a used glider from a woman in Arvada who cried a little when she handed it over, because her youngest was starting kindergarten.
And I bought a crib, flat-packed in a box so heavy the delivery man insisted on carrying it up the stairs himself.
I assembled it on a Sunday afternoon with a hex key, a glass of lemonade, and a YouTube tutorial narrated by a cheerful man in Ohio who said “easy peasy” more often than anyone should.
The instructions were a single sheet of wordless diagrams in which a cartoon person with no face fitted Part C into Part F while smiling.
Halfway through, I discovered I’d attached one of the side rails backward, with the drilled holes facing out, and I had to take apart forty minutes of work.
I sat on the floor among the parts and laughed at myself for a while.
Then I read the diagram again, properly this time, the way I’d read a set of shop drawings, and put it back together right.
It took me four hours. When it was done, I tightened every bolt a second time, shook the frame hard with both hands to make sure nothing moved, and sat down on the floor of the nursery to look at it. It was square and solid, and I’d built it. I felt more like myself than I had in months.
And I made an appointment with a family law attorney.
Her name was Marisa Holt, and her office was on the eleventh floor of a building on Seventeenth Street with a view of the Capitol dome. Heather’s cousin had used her in a divorce and said she was fair, fast, and unsentimental, which was exactly what I wanted.
“I’m not filing,” I told her at the start of our consultation. “I don’t know yet if I’m going to. I need to understand what happens if I do, so I’m not making decisions about my daughter in a panic later.”
Marisa nodded as if this were the most reasonable thing she’d heard all week.
Then she asked me a series of plain, practical questions in a plain, practical voice, and wrote down my answers on a yellow pad.
Was there any history of violence in the marriage?
No. Substance abuse? No. Did I have any reason to believe Hank would try to prevent me from seeing my daughter, or take her out of the state?
None at all. Whose health insurance would cover the delivery?
Mine, through the firm. Would Hank be listed as the father on the birth certificate?
“Of course,” I said. “He’s her father.”
Marisa looked up from her pad for a moment.
“You’d be surprised how many people hesitate on that one,” she said.
“Out of anger, usually. It never helps them.” She made a note.
“Honestly, Lesley, this is the easiest kind of consultation I have. Two competent adults, no safety concerns, separate finances, and a mother who wants her child to have a father. Most of what I’m going to tell you is how to keep it that way.
” We spent an hour going through custody arrangements for infants, parenting plans that could change as a child grew, and how Colorado courts looked at breastfeeding, overnight visits, and a father who wanted to be involved.
Then we went through the property questions, which were simpler than they might have been because I had kept my condo and my own accounts and had never once asked Hank to support me.
I walked out of her office with a legal pad full of notes and a strange steadiness in my chest. I wasn’t planning a divorce. I was planning a life that would hold together whether or not there was one.
On the way back to my office, I stopped at a bench in Civic Center Park and made two phone calls.
The first was to Gail, to confirm that the firm’s parental leave policy would let me take the full sixteen weeks I’d put in the project schedule, and to ask whether I could come back part-time for the first month.
She said yes to both before I’d finished asking.
The second was to the daycare at the top of my list, to ask where we stood on the waitlist. Number four, the director told me. Probably a spot by September.
I wrote September on the legal pad under Marisa’s notes, and underlined it, and sat for a minute longer in the cold sun with pigeons circling my feet. Then I went back to work.
Then I texted Hank.
Can you come by the condo on Saturday afternoon? There are some things about the baby I’d like to talk through in person.
He replied in under a minute. Of course. What time?
He arrived at two o’clock exactly. I’d wondered whether he’d bring something, flowers or pastries or a gift for the baby, and he didn’t.
He stood in my doorway in a navy sweater with his hands empty, as though he’d thought about it and decided that arriving with something would make it look like he was trying to earn his way in.
It was the first time he’d been inside the condo since I’d moved back.
I watched him take it in. The high ceilings and the exposed brick.
My grandmother’s quilt on the back of the sofa.
The reading lamp from my side of our bed.
The framed photograph of Heather and me at twenty, sunburned and laughing on a dock at Horsetooth Reservoir.
“It’s nice,” he said. “It feels like you.”
“It’s always felt like me,” I said. “I just forgot for a while.”
He didn’t flinch. He nodded.
I made tea. We sat at the little dining table by the window, and I opened the legal pad and turned it toward him.
I’d expected this to be hard. It was harder than I’d expected.
I walked him through it anyway, calmly and in order, the way I’d walk a client through a construction schedule.
If we separated permanently, I would want the baby with me full-time for the first several months, especially if nursing went well.
He could see her whenever he wanted during that time, as often as every day, at the condo or at his house, with notice.
After six months or so, we’d build toward overnights.
By the time she was a toddler, we’d work toward something close to equal time.
I’d want to share holidays. I’d never, under any circumstances, make it harder for him to be her father.
“I’m telling you this,” I said, “because I think it’s important that you know I’m not going to use her. Whatever happens with us. She’s not a bargaining chip. She’s not a reward, and she’s not a punishment.”
He’d gone very quiet while I talked. His tea sat untouched in front of him. When I finished, he looked down at the legal pad for a long time.
“Have you decided?” he asked finally. His voice was careful. “About us?”
“No.”
“But you went to a lawyer.”
“I went to a lawyer so I’d know what my options were,” I said. “I’m having a baby in May. I’d be irresponsible not to plan for the possibility that her parents end up divorced. I’m preparing for both outcomes. I’m not preparing for one and hoping the other doesn’t happen.”
He nodded slowly. Then he asked, “Can I see her room?”
I hesitated. Then I stood up and led him down the short hall.
He stood in the nursery doorway without going in.
He looked at the pale green walls, the glider by the window, the crib I’d put together myself.
His eyes went to the sprig of wildflowers in the corner above it and stayed there.
I saw him recognize the illustration. I saw him understand what it meant that it was here, on a wall in a room he didn’t live in.
He was frightened. I could see it plainly. For the first time since the hospital, I watched it hit him all the way down that I might actually do this without him. That I’d already built the room.
He didn’t say anything for a long time.
“It’s beautiful,” he said at last. “You did all this yourself?”
“Heather and Jo helped paint. I did the crib.”
“Of course you did.” It came out with something like wonder, and something like grief. He turned to me. “Can I ask something? You can say no.”
“Go ahead.”
“Whatever happens,” he said, “I’d like to set up a room for her at the house too. So she has a place with me. Even if it’s just for daytime at first. I don’t want her to ever feel like she’s visiting.”
I thought about the empty gray bedroom in Washington Park with the tape marks on the wall where my paint chips had been.
“I think that’s a good idea,” I said.
He nodded. He looked at the crib one more time. Then he walked back to the living room, picked up his coat, and thanked me for the tea he hadn’t drunk.
At the door he paused. “Les. Thank you for telling me all of it. Straight. I know it would’ve been easier to just file.”
“It wouldn’t have been easier,” I said. “It would’ve been faster.”
He left. I stood in the nursery doorway where he’d stood, looking at the wildflowers, with my hand on the curve of my stomach and our daughter turning slow somersaults beneath it.