7. Allison
ALLISON
The baby has a nose.
I don’t know why that surprises me. Noses are standard equipment. Still, I lie on the paper sheet and stare at the screen like mine’s the first baby in history to pull one off.
“There,” the technician says, and traces a bright curve with her finger. “That’s the profile.”
I nod, even though I can’t read any of it. Mostly it looks like weather over a very small moon. Then the gray shape moves, and a hand comes up and opens and closes, tiny fingers spreading and folding, and all the air goes out of me at once.
“Did you see that?” I ask. “Mom, did you see it wave?”
“I saw.” My mother’s grip on my hand gets tight enough to hurt.
Janet Barrett doesn’t cry in public if she can help it. She cried at my wedding and blamed pollen, and we were indoors in June. Today she lasts about as long as it takes the technician to find the heartbeat, and then she’s wiping her face with the back of her free hand.
“It’s very dry in here,” she says.
“Terrible climate control,” I agree.
“Thank you.”
I’m twelve weeks today. It’s written on every form on the clipboard in my lap, along with my due date and my husband’s name on the line that says Spouse. Under Emergency contact I wrote my mother. The receptionist didn’t even blink. I guess she’s seen sadder forms than mine.
My mother has known since the morning after I lied to Gavin.
I called her before the sun was up, and she came upstairs in her gardening clothes, read both tests at my kitchen table, poured my coffee down the sink, and had this doctor’s office on the phone the minute it opened.
She didn’t say I told you so. That’s how I knew she was really worried.
The technician presses a button, and the room fills with the heartbeat. It isn’t a delicate sound at all. It’s fast and loud and galloping, like a tiny horse running through the wall, and my mother makes a noise next to me that I’ve never heard come out of her.
“Can I record it?” I ask.
“A few seconds. Then I have to finish up.”
I hold my phone next to the machine and don’t breathe the whole time. When the sound stops, I want it back so badly my chest aches.
There’s an empty chair on the other side of the table.
I’ve been not looking at it since we came in, and now I look.
Gavin should be in it. He’d ask a hundred questions and want to know if the machine had been calibrated that morning.
He’d act calm while holding my ankle hard enough to leave marks.
He’d have seen the hand. The happiness is so big it’s almost painful, and the grief comes right in behind it.
My mother sees my face. She always does.
The pictures come out of the printer in a little strip, and the doctor comes in and says everything is measuring right on my dates. In one picture the baby has an arm thrown up over its head like this whole appointment has been exhausting. I relate.
In the parking lot, my mother waits until I’ve got my seat belt on.
“Tell him.”
She doesn’t warm up to it or wait until lunch. That’s Janet.
I put the envelope in my bag. “I tried.”
“You tried once.”
“Rebecca answered his private phone and lied to him while he was in the same room.”
“I know she did.” She turns in her seat to look at me. “And one blocked phone call doesn’t explain every day since.”
I look out the windshield. The medical building faces a strip mall with a dry cleaner, a bank, and a store that sells nothing but strollers so expensive they probably come with a loan officer.
“He called me back,” I say.
“And he asked you straight out.”
“Yes.”
“And you lied.”
“Yes.” It’s an ugly word to say out loud about myself, and my face burns while I make myself say it.
“I’m not saying Gavin was right to leave,” she says.
“He wasn’t. I’m not saying you have to forgive him, or move to London, or wear something nice for him ever again.
But this baby isn’t just part of your marriage.
You can’t keep deciding whether this baby’s father gets to know based on whether he’s earned his way back to you. ”
“If I tell him, he’ll come home.”
“Maybe.”
“He will, Mom. That’s the problem. He’ll come home for the baby, and his mother and his phone and his whole company will come with him, and I still won’t be the reason.”
“Then you deal with all that after he knows.”
“You don’t understand his family.”
“Honey, I understand rich people. They have nicer stationery when they behave badly.”
I laugh, and then I put my face in my hands. She waits and doesn’t touch me until I reach for her.
“What if he comes for the baby and still doesn’t choose me?”
“Then it hurts,” she says. “And you get through it. You’re very good at getting through things you shouldn’t have had to.”
“That’s not very comforting.”
“I’m your mother. Not a greeting card.” She holds out her hand for my keys. “I’m driving. You’re pale.”
“I’m always pale.”
“Today you’re expensive-stroller pale.”
I give her the keys. Before she starts the car she takes one of the pictures out of the envelope and holds it up. “Can I keep this one?”
“You’re the grandmother.”
“I’m aware. I’ve already started a list of things you’re going to tell me the baby doesn’t need.
” She tucks the picture into her wallet, right behind her driver’s license, and that’s what makes me cry again.
My kid’s already in somebody’s wallet. My kid already has a family, and one person in it doesn’t know.
Back at Barrett, a supplier has shipped the wrong wall frames for the museum job. We ordered black steel sections with irrigation built in, and what came off the truck is mostly silver, plus a few pieces that look like they belong to a restaurant trellis somewhere in Connecticut.
“Creative,” Luis says.
“The museum asked for a wall of native ferns, Luis, not a place to grow tomatoes.”
“Tomatoes are educational.” He looks at me a beat too long. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
I’m pregnant and married and separated and carrying pictures of a person with a brand-new nose, and I’m queasy enough to lie down on the gravel. Fine is doing a lot of work. Luis pulls a ginger candy out of his shirt pocket and hands it to me without a word, and I take it.
Then I work. I find our real frames in a warehouse in New Jersey and get them on a truck, and I call the museum before they can call me. In the middle of it I throw up in the office sink, eat a sleeve of crackers at my desk, and keep going.
I don’t need a baby to keep Gavin, and I don’t need Gavin’s money to keep a baby. I feel strong thinking it, right up until I look at the envelope on my desk.
After everyone’s gone, my phone lights up with a voicemail. I sit in the glass office and play it.
“The client dinner let out early,” Gavin says.
He sounds rough and tired. Hearing him in the dark office makes my eyes sting, and my hand goes to my stomach.
“I saw the museum approved the revised wall. Congratulations. You were right about the ferns.” He stops for a moment.
“I don’t know why I needed to tell you that tonight. Call me whenever you want. I miss you.”
I open our texts and attach the heartbeat. It sits there under his voicemail, the baby he doesn’t know he’s missing, and all I’d have to do is touch the little blue arrow. Nobody’s in the way this time, not Rebecca or a client dinner or an ocean. There’s only my thumb, and it won’t stop shaking.
I tell myself I’ll send it when the screening results come back, when I have good news and a clean start instead of a scared one. I know exactly how that sounds.
I save it to my drafts and name it For Gavin.