Chapter 23 The Life Without Him
Lesley
By the last week of April, my daughter had opinions about what time I woke up, and her preferred time was five forty.
She announced it every morning with a series of determined kicks just under my right ribs, followed by a slow, rolling stretch that made my whole stomach shift sideways like a wave under a blanket.
At thirty-five weeks, there wasn’t much room left in there.
I’d lie in the gray light for a few minutes with my hand on the spot where her foot seemed to be, and she’d push against my palm, and I’d tell her good morning. Then I’d give up on sleep and get up.
I’d come to love those mornings. I hadn’t expected to.
The condo was quiet at that hour, the city outside still blue and half asleep.
I’d make a cup of decaf and a bowl of oatmeal with too much brown sugar, and I’d sit at the little table by the window and watch the light come up over the downtown skyline.
The pothos on the windowsill had doubled in size since January.
The fiddle-leaf fig Heather had given me for my birthday had put out three new leaves and was plotting a fourth.
On Sunday afternoons I baked, usually something with lemon, because lemon was the one flavor my stomach had never turned against, and I’d bring whatever I made to the office on Monday, where it disappeared by ten.
At seven fifteen I’d put on one of the four maternity dresses that still fit and my most supportive sneakers, and I’d walk to work.
It was a mile and a quarter from my door in LoHi to our office on Wynkoop Street, down the hill, across the Highland pedestrian bridge over the interstate and the Platte, through Commons Park and into LoDo.
My doctor had told me walking was good for me.
I’d have done it anyway. In the mornings the bridge was full of runners and dog walkers and commuters on scooters, and the mountains stood out sharp and white behind me to the west, and the river ran high and brown with the first snowmelt.
A barista at the coffee cart at the foot of the bridge had started having my decaf oat latte ready before I reached the window.
She’d asked last week whether I’d picked a name yet. I’d told her I had a list.
It took me thirty minutes now instead of twenty. I didn’t mind. It was the best part of my day.
The last Tuesday of April was the day the Denver Landmark Preservation Commission voted on the final design for the Union Station hotel expansion.
We’d been working toward it since January.
Three rounds of revisions. Dozens of window studies.
A forty-page report on the historic masonry that Priya had written almost entirely by herself, and which one commissioner had called the most thorough analysis of Beaux-Arts brickwork she’d seen in twenty years of service.
The developer had fought us on half of it.
The commission had fought us on the other half.
I’d sat through meetings so long and so contentious that I’d started keeping a bag of almonds in my purse, the way Hank had told me his mother swore by for heartburn, and eating them one at a time under the table to keep from saying something I’d regret.
Now it came down to a single vote in a hearing room at the Webb Building.
I didn’t present. Priya did. It had been my decision, and Gail had raised her eyebrows at it, and I’d told her that if Priya was going to run the day-to-day while I was on leave, the commission needed to see her as the person in charge.
I sat in the second row with my hands folded on top of my stomach and watched Priya walk the commissioners through the final elevations in her good blazer, her nose ring glinting under the fluorescent lights, her voice steady and clear.
When the commissioner with the silver bob, the same woman who’d told her in February that she had a real feel for masonry, asked a pointed question about the mortar joints on the north facade, Priya answered it without looking at her notes. I felt my face go warm with pride.
The vote was six to one.
In the hallway afterward, Priya hugged me so hard she nearly knocked me over, then jumped back in horror and apologized to my stomach.
Gail took the whole team to lunch at a place on Seventeenth Street and ordered champagne for everyone and sparkling cider for me, and made a toast that was mostly about Priya and partly about me, and ended by saying that the firm had never before approved a project lead’s maternity leave in the project schedule itself, and that she was starting to think it should be standard practice.
I laughed with everyone else. Then I looked around the table at my team, at Priya flushed and grinning, at our new project coordinator, Marcus, who’d been with us three months and had already made himself indispensable, at Gail in her red reading glasses.
I thought, I built this. Not the building.
That would take another three years and several hundred people.
But this team, this project, this afternoon.
I’d built it while living alone in a condo I’d bought at twenty-six, while pregnant, while separated from my husband, while seeing a trauma therapist every Tuesday because a microwave had made me shake.
All of those things had been true at once, and the work had gotten done anyway, right alongside them.
On the walk home that evening, I stopped on the Highland bridge and stood at the railing for a long time, watching the sun go down behind the mountains.
I was happy. I let myself notice it. It was a clean, simple happiness with no one else’s name attached to it, and it was entirely mine.
On Thursday nights, Heather and I went to childbirth class.
It was held in a conference room on the second floor of the hospital where Dr. Kessler delivered, with a circle of yoga mats on the floor and a laminated poster of the stages of labor taped to the whiteboard.
There were six couples and us. The instructor was a cheerful doula named Bev who wore earrings shaped like tiny uteruses and said the word cervix more often than any person I’d ever met.
Heather was, it turned out, the worst possible childbirth class partner. She was a pediatric nurse. She knew everything Bev was about to say before Bev said it, and she couldn’t stop herself from adding footnotes under her breath.
“She’s rounding that number up,” Heather would whisper. “The epidural stats are more nuanced than that.” Or, during the breathing exercises: “Honestly, most people forget all of this by the time they’re at seven centimeters. You’ll mostly be yelling.”
“Heather,” I’d hiss. “Stop it.”
“I’m just saying. I’ll be there. I’ll remember the breathing for you.”
The fourth week, Bev had everyone practice labor positions, and Heather had to kneel behind me on the mat and support my weight while I leaned forward over a birthing ball.
One of the fathers across the circle, a nervous young man with a man bun, kept glancing over at us with an expression of polite curiosity.
“He thinks we’re a couple,” Heather murmured into my ear.
“Let him.”
“Jo’s going to be so jealous.”
I laughed so hard that I lost my balance and slid sideways off the ball, and Heather caught me, and then we were both on the floor of the conference room laughing helplessly while Bev watched us with the tolerant smile of a woman who had seen everything.
Driving home afterward, Heather asked, carefully, “Have you decided about Hank? For the delivery?”
I had. I’d been thinking about it for weeks, and I’d made the decision the way I made most decisions now, alone, at my kitchen table, with a legal pad.
“You’re my support person,” I said. “You’re the one who’s with me through the whole thing. Labor, all of it. That’s you.”
“Okay.” She glanced over. “And Hank?”
“Hank’s her father,” I said. “He should be there when she’s born.
I’ll call him when labor starts, and he can come to the hospital and wait.
When it’s close, he can come into the room.
He can be there when she arrives.” I looked out the window at the passing streetlights.
“I’m not going to take that away from him. Or from her.”
Heather was quiet for a moment. “That seems really fair, Les.”
“I’m trying to be fair.”
“You always are,” she said. “It’s one of the most annoying things about you.”
I texted Hank that night. I laid it out plainly: Heather as my support person for labor, a call to him when it started, the waiting room until it was close, and the room itself for the birth.
His reply came quickly.
Thank you. I’ll be wherever you want me, for as long as you want me there. I’ll keep my phone on me from now until she’s here.
A minute later, another text.
Can I ask what hospital bag stuff you still need? I don’t want to buy anything you haven’t asked for. Just want to know if there’s anything.
I thought about it. I’m good. Heather’s making me a list. But thank you.
Okay. Good night, Les.
That Saturday night, I sat on Heather and Jo’s back porch in Park Hill with my feet up on a cooler and a plate of Jo’s grilled peaches balanced on my stomach, because my lap had disappeared sometime in April.
Tomás had brought a new girlfriend, a potter named Ines, who turned out to have gone to architecture school for a year before she dropped out, and the two of us spent most of the evening arguing cheerfully about whether Denver’s new convention center was brutal or just ugly.
Jo taught Ines to play cribbage and then beat her four games straight.
Heather put on an old Motown record in the kitchen and danced with Moose, who tolerated it.
At some point I laughed so hard at something Tomás said that I had to hold my stomach with both hands, and the baby kicked back in protest, and Ines reached over and asked if she could feel it. I took her hand and put it on the spot. The baby kicked again, obligingly, right into her palm.
“Oh,” Ines said, delighted. “She’s strong.”