Chapter Thirty-Five Tessa
Chapter Thirty-Five
Tessa
I wake in a panic, unsure of where I am.
The room is too dark to see anything beyond the shapes of the furniture.
My baby. Where’s my baby? I try to bolt up.
My swollen core is too weak even with the binder for support.
I hear a soft murmur. I reach out, my hand hitting something plastic. Her bassinet. She’s here beside me.
I fumble for the bed remote, the IV stinging as I shift my hand.
Once I’ve found it, I can’t locate the button to elevate the bed, so I feel for my phone to use its flashlight, remembering that Gabe still has it.
Now that I’m alert, I hear him snoring. I press a few buttons on the remote until the bed inches up with a motorized creaking I fear might wake the baby. Instead, it wakes Gabe.
His footsteps echo as he heads to turn on the bathroom light, revealing the composition of the room, my baby still in her bassinet.
She’s swaddled, the crown of her head concealed by a blue-and-pink-striped hospital cap, her tiny face exposed, bottom lip sucked in, lids clamped tight.
As an infant, Jasper used to suck in his bottom lip, too, confusing the line of his chin.
I’d forgotten he did that. I’ve forgotten so many things.
As I watch her sleep, I vow not to forget anything.
Gabe walks over, kisses my forehead. Forgetting is easy. Remembering is the hard part. It takes energy. For a moment, I let everything go. The thing about the body, though, is that it has its own instincts. It remembers fear.
Gabe notices me recoil, but he doesn’t back away, just pulls over the room’s only chair and brushes my hair from my face.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Is he mine, Gabe?” I barely manage a whisper. I never found a file for Regina. I want to believe that means she wasn’t my donor, that Gabe would never do this to me.
Gabe’s face betrays no truth other than his concern for me.
“Did you use Regina’s egg on me? With Jasper?”
It sounds paranoid, almost science fiction, wholly unreal. And it is unbelievable. Unbelievable that I have to ask. Unbelievable that he would do this.
He motions for me to be quiet, as though I’ve forgotten that my daughter’s asleep. This just makes me angrier.
“Either you tell me the truth, or I call the nurses right now and get you escorted out. I’ll make sure you never see me or my children again.
” He pulls his hand away, sits quietly beside me, staring at my daughter.
Our daughter. I want to disclaim him, to create a barrier between my children and this monster my husband’s become, but I can’t. Try as I might, she’s his. Ours.
“I’ll tell you,” he whispers. Part of me is still hoping he’ll deny it with a reasonable explanation that doesn’t involve him violating me.
He strokes his cheek, his face impossibly sad.
I want to console him, to embrace him as the man I love, because that’s the man who’s looking at me imploringly.
It’s a lie, though. It was always a lie.
And so I wait. I have nothing to do but wait.
Wait for my body to heal. Wait for my daughter to be hungry again.
Wait for my husband to tell me what he’s done.
My nipples are tender from where my daughter gnawed at them a few hours ago. Everything hurts, especially my heart.
“Knock, knock.” The nurse pushes the door open, smiling as she notices Gabe at my bedside, the image of a doting husband. “How are you feeling?”
I can’t begin to answer that, so I say, “Fine.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you in?”
I can’t begin to answer this either. My incision aches more than stings, so I tell her a seven. Seven will not encourage her to give me drugs that make me groggy. It will not minimize the trauma to my body either.
“You’re up for ibuprofen and hydrocodone. You can take both now, or I can give you one in two hours to split it up?” I opt for the ibuprofen, even though I could use something stronger. My brain needs to stay sharp.
“Let’s see how our little girl is doing.
” The nurse unwraps each layer of swaddle until my daughter feels the cold against her wrinkled skin and screams. Gabe holds my hand.
I shake it free. He raises a cautionary eyebrow at me.
For the moment, my rage is targeted at this perfectly nice nurse, who weighs and changes my baby, carries her to me so I can feed her.
Gabe backs away as the nurse consumes his space, positioning my daughter to my breast. I want to tell her this isn’t my first rodeo.
I don’t need to. My daughter latches like a champ.
“She’s a natural,” the nurse says. Of course she is. She’s mine. I can’t speak to her DNA, but this child feeding off me, with milk she enabled me to produce—this child is mine. Together, we’re iron strong.
“Opal.” I peer down at my daughter. The nurse waits for me to explain.
“Her name’s Opal.” I glance over at Gabe, who appears hurt that I’ve named her without his input.
He knew I wanted to name her after a gemstone, as with Jasper.
We’d discussed Jade, Pearl, Ruby. He didn’t like the roundness of Opal.
I didn’t like the superstition of it, how it’s an omen of bad luck.
It’s a soft stone, capable of breaking. My daughter doesn’t need luck. We don’t need to be hard not to break.
“Opal.” The nurse lifts my daughter from me. She fell asleep while feeding and now flops onto the nurse. “You’re as precious as your name. Is there anything else I can get you?” she asks as she takes Opal back to her bassinet to swaddle her.
Gabe picks at his cuticles as he waits for me to decide whether I’ll ask her to call the police, to have security kick him out.
“We’re fine,” I tell her. More than anything, more than the police or security, I need the truth.
“Get some rest, Mom.”
When Gabe and I are alone again, I dare him to say anything about the name. He’s taken so much of this birth from me. He can’t take this. He can’t take Opal. I won’t let him.
“I’m still waiting for you to explain.”
I can see from his stupefied expression that he’s convinced himself if he evades me for long enough, I’ll let this go. My stare is unwavering as his focus flitters between Opal, his feet, the dark TV, Opal again, anything and everything except me. Finally, he flops onto the couch, resigned.
“It was never going to happen, T.” He braids his fingers and leans toward me, rocking on the edges of his feet.
“I wasn’t planning on . . . it was only a precaution.
After three failed IUIs, I figured I’d have it ready as a backup in case the egg retrieval didn’t work either.
I knew how much you wanted to be a mom, and I couldn’t bear the thought that you might not be able to.
” The remorse in his voice, the conflict across his face—it isn’t regret. It’s pity. He’s actually pitying me.
“Gabe,” I snap. “Is Jasper mine?”
He repositions the chair the nurse moved to my bedside.
This close, I can see the faint scar on his left cheek that he got as a child.
The twitch at the right corner of his mouth that only activates when he’s tired.
I can see all the ways I know him, my husband.
Even the expression on his face, laden with sympathy, is one I recognize and love.
I just didn’t understand how rehearsed it was.
“None of your eggs were viable,” he says.
I think back to waking up at Longevity, foggy headed and nauseated, Gabe stroking my hair. He was this close then, his familiar face, that scar, the relief that washed over me when he told me the procedure had been a success.
“You harvested fourteen eggs. Five were fertilized.” I want to prove him wrong with everything I know to be true about my IVF process. “They weren’t my eggs,” I state. “They were Regina’s.”
He’s stroking my hair now too. I want to tell him to stop, but I crave human contact, even if it comes from Gabe.
“I knew it would break your heart. I’d seen it break so many women’s hearts, and I couldn’t do that to you.”
“But you could impregnate me with your girlfriend’s egg?” Aloud, it sounds even more twisted and sordid than it did in my head.
“My girlfriend? You think me and Reggie—Tessa, I would never cheat on you. Come on, you know that.”
But you would violate me.
Before I can respond, he adds, “Besides, Reggie wasn’t exactly interested in men.”
“Or maybe she wasn’t interested in you.”
He scoffs, the idea of any woman not finding him attractive an impossibility, and I wonder how I ever found his arrogance sexy.
“It wasn’t what I wanted for you, for us. I didn’t have a choice. Not if you wanted to be pregnant.”
“No.” I try to sit up. Despite its torrent of anger, my body is still weak. The compression band doesn’t offer enough support for my midsection. I lie back. “I didn’t have a choice. You took that from me.”
Gabe’s jaw tenses. He remains quiet.
“So she’s his mom.” I can barely form the sentence. That’s why she was watching us, why she had our furniture, my earring. It wasn’t because she was obsessed with me, the wife of her lover. It was because she was obsessed with my son. Her son.
“You grew him, so biologically speaking, he’s yours. Genetically, on a DNA test, he’d show Regina’s—”
“So she’s his mom,” I interrupt, not letting him make this a semantic argument.
“She was never his mom.” His eyes are insistent. And he’s right. She was never Jasper’s mother, not in the ways we think of a mother. Genetically, phenotypically, though, he’s hers. Hers and Gabe’s. Because of course this isn’t about him, the father.
“You let her have a relationship with him?”