CHAPTER 10
LAYNE
The contractions start on a Tuesday, in a meeting about grout.
I’m thirty-five weeks and one day, standing at the sample table in the studio because sitting makes my hips scream, arguing the merits of warm gray over cool gray for the Catskills bathrooms, when it happens — a tightening across my whole belly, hard and wrong and nothing like the practice runs, and I grip the table edge and breathe through it and say “the warm gray, final answer” like nothing happened, because I am a professional.
The second one comes twenty minutes later. The third comes with spotting, and I stop pretending this is a grout problem.
I call Jonas first anyway. Habit is a skeleton. It keeps its shape long after the animal is gone.
It rings out. I call again. It rings out again.
I call Marcus’s line and get his voicemail, and then I sit down slowly on the studio couch with my phone in my lap and I do the arithmetic I can no longer avoid: I don’t know where my husband is tonight, and he doesn’t know I’m calling, and there is no version of this evening where he comes.
Later — much later, after everything — I learn where he was.
An old restaurant in the West Village, one of their places, candlelit and tiny.
Estelle suggested it. She told him it might stir something, and Jonas, who has been chasing fragments like a man down a well chasing light, went.
He sat across from his ex-fiancée in the restaurant where he used to love her, trying to feel something, while his phone buzzed face-down in his jacket and his wife went into labor twenty minutes away.
That’ll be in the ledger, later. For now, Tuesday night, I call the third number on the list, the one I should have called first.
Margot picks up before the second ring.
“Foxhole?” she says.
“Foxhole,” I say. “Contractions. There’s spotting. I need to not do this alone, and Tomás is in Albany.”
“Address. I’m leaving now.” Keys, a door, already. “You hang up and call the doctor’s line while I drive. Don’t you dare take a cab, Layne, I swear to God.”
St. Catherine’s again. Different floor this time, maternity, warm lights and a charge nurse with kind efficiency, and they get me on the monitor and the belt tightens around the bump and there it is, filling the whole room, fast and strong and unconcerned: Elodie’s heartbeat.
I start crying the second I hear it. No warning, no dignity, the sound just goes straight through whatever’s left of my defenses. She’s fine. She’s fine. However bad everything gets above the belt, below it there’s a heartbeat, and it’s hers, and it’s steady.
The nurse on duty turns out to be Dana.
She transferred up to maternity last month — better hours, she says, same disasters — and she walks in doing up her badge and stops dead when she sees the chart.
“Mrs. Palmer.”
“Dana.”
She looks at me, at the monitor, at Margot’s overnight bag, and I can see her doing the whole math of it, the missing husband column, and she doesn’t say a word about any of it.
She just adjusts my belt, checks the printout, and says, “You’ve got the best OB on the floor tonight, and I’m here till seven. That’s the whole news.”
She squeezes my foot through the blanket. It’s the most anyone’s touched me kindly in weeks, and I have to look at the wall for a second.
“Threatened preterm labor,” says Dr. Osei, warm and unflappable, scanning the printout. “Dehydration’s a factor. When did you last eat a full meal? Or sleep more than four hours?”
“I plead the fifth.”
“Mm. The baby’s doing well. You’re the one I’m worried about.” She writes orders. “Fluids, monitoring, rest. If the contractions settle, you go home tomorrow with strict instructions. If they don’t, we have a different conversation.”
Margot arrives at a run, wild-haired, still in court shoes, and takes one look at the monitor and one look at me and says, “Right,” and installs herself in the chair like a bailiff, and holds my hand through the next contraction with a lawyer’s grip.
“Where is he?” she asks, once, in the middle of the night, quiet.
“Don’t.”
“Layne—”
“I know where he is. He’s exactly where he’s been for six weeks. Somewhere in the past, with someone who lives there.” A contraction rises and I ride it, breathing, and when it’s done I finish. “Don’t make me say it out loud tonight. I need the strength for her.”
Margot squeezes my hand and lets it go. She stays the whole night. I pretend to sleep so she’ll rest, and she pretends to rest so I’ll sleep, and Elodie’s heartbeat fills the room like a small, stubborn engine.
Around four, the contractions spike again — three in a row, strong enough to take my breath — and Dr. Osei comes in and watches the strip with her arms folded, and the room tilts toward the other conversation, the one with words like terbutaline and thirty-five weeks is good but we’d rather forty.
I lie there with my hands laced over the bump and I talk to Elodie, silently, the whole time.
Stay. Stay. I’ll handle everything out here, every bit of it, the whole disaster, but you have to stay.
She stays. The fourth contraction doesn’t come. By five the strip is a long smooth plain, and Dr. Osei pats my ankle and says, “Good decision-making, young lady,” and Elodie kicks, offended, and I laugh and cry at the same time, quietly, into the hospital pillow.
It’s the clearest deal I make all year, and I keep my side of it for the rest of my life.
The sky is going gray over the park when the corridor changes.
Jonas comes at six in the morning.
I know because of the weather change — Marcus’s low voice, the nurses shifting, a hallway rearranging itself around money — and then he’s in the doorway, still in last night’s clothes, unshaven, gray with fear.
“Fifty messages,” he says. “My phone was— Layne. I’m sorry. I didn’t—” He’s breathing hard. He ran, some part of it, somewhere. “Is she—”
“She’s fine. Threatened preterm labor. It settled. We go home tomorrow.”
He closes his eyes, and his hand goes flat to the doorframe, and for a moment he looks like every father in every waiting room in history, and I hate how much I love him right then, and then he opens his eyes and ruins it, and I don’t even know yet that he’s going to ruin it.
“Is that—” He gestures at the monitor, where her heartbeat is still printing out its steady ribbon. “Her?”
“Come listen.”
He comes to the bedside slowly and stands there looking at the monitor, at the bump, at me, and the room fills with the sound of his daughter’s heart, and I watch it happen to him.
His face does something I’ve never seen it do, not at the albums, not at the videos, not anywhere in the five lost years’ worth of evidence: it breaks open.
Photographs were a case file. This is a heartbeat.
This is now, in real time, a person, his person, alive inside a stranger he was told to love.
“Oh,” he says. Just that. His hand lifts and hovers over the bump and doesn’t land. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t land it.
“She’s okay,” I say. “She’s right there.”
“Can I—” He gestures at the monitor again.
His hand is shaking, and he sees me see it, and puts it in his pocket.
“Layne. Fifty messages. I don’t— nobody wakes up fifty messages deep and expects good news, and I was in the car reading them backwards, and the whole way here I—” He can’t find the end of it.
He looks at the monitor like it’s a lighthouse.
“Tell me what she weighs. Tell me what happens if she comes now. I don’t know any of it.
I should know all of it, and I don’t know any of it. ”
“Five and a half pounds, maybe six. Thirty-five weeks is good. She’s been rude about my ribs but she’s strong.”
“Six pounds,” he repeats, and sits with it, this man who moves billions, undone by a number you could lift with one hand.
“I can’t—” His voice is rough. “I stood in a restaurant last night trying to remember another woman while you were—” He stops.
Sits down in the visitor chair without being invited, elbows on his knees, staring at the ribbon of heartbeat coming off the printer.
“I’ve been asking everyone what kind of man I was.
Nobody’s answer matches. My mother says I was better before.
The board wants me worse. Estelle—” He shakes his head.
“And then I walk in here and there’s a heartbeat, and none of their answers are any use at all. ”
I don’t say anything. The smart part of me, the Margot part, is very awake.
He looks up at me then, and his eyes are red-rimmed and exhausted and afraid, and I see it coming. I’ve learned this man’s fronts and pressures, and I try to stop it.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I need to ask you something.”
“Jonas. Don’t.”
“Everyone keeps telling me how fast it was. You and me. Eighteen months, married, a baby, a company division, it all happened so fast after Estelle, and last night she said—” He drags a hand through his hair. “I need to hear it from you. How do I know she’s mine?”
The heartbeat fills the silence. Steady. Hers. Unconcerned.
I don’t cry. I don’t shout. I reach over to the rail of the bed and press the nurse call button, and Dana — transferred up last month, because God occasionally files paperwork in my favor — appears in the doorway.
“Yes, Mrs. Palmer?”
“My husband is leaving,” I say, and my voice is so calm it sounds borrowed.
Jonas flinches. Full-body. I watch it land, the word, the one he begged me to stop using, coming out of me now like a door closing, and Dana looks between us and reads the whole room in half a second and moves to the head of the bed, between him and me, quiet and immovable.
“Sir. This way.”
He stands. He doesn’t go. “Layne—”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s the last time I’ll call you that.”
And he goes, because Dana is escorting him and there’s nothing in this room he can fix with money or will or the force of being Jonas Palmer, and at the door he stops and looks back at me with something on his face I can’t read and won’t read, not anymore, not today.
When he’s gone, Margot — who arrived back from the cafeteria with terrible coffee and perfect timing — sets the cup down and says, very carefully, “Okay.”
“Okay,” I say.
“I’m not going to say I told you to keep notes.”
“You just did.”
“I did.” She sits and takes my hand. “You’re having a baby in two weeks, give or take. Where do you want to be when that happens?”
I look at the ceiling. The heartbeat goes on. Elodie, five pounds and change, paying no mortgage, the only person in this whole mess who has never once asked me to prove anything.
“Not there,” I say. “Not the penthouse, not with his mother in the guest room and his ex in the kitchen. I have the lake place. It’s mine. It’s been mine since before him.”
“Then that’s the answer,” Margot says. “When you’re discharged, we get you ready. Quietly, properly, at your pace.”
Tomorrow I go home. The home I choose this time.
I press my palm flat to the bump and Elodie kicks into it, and I press back, our whole conversation, conducted through a wall of me.
Soon, baby, I think. We’re getting out. Soon.