Rose - 2012 #2
My hand goes to my stomach because of stupid maternal instinct or whatever. I don’t even notice I’ve done it until they do. Then I drop my arms to my sides.
“I've been able to hide the weight under bigger clothes so far, and Michael bought the thyroid story.
I told him I've got surgery coming up to have it removed, which covers the hospital stay, recovery, everything.
I can have the adoption paperwork drawn up.
I've already spoken to two attorneys and my doctors, quietly, and I know what needs to happen.”
The words come faster now that I'm back in territory I understand.
“I deliver at the hospital. You come and pick him up when he's cleared for discharge. You tell Michael you've adopted a baby. And I...” I clear my throat and swallow once. “I go on with my life.”
Samson watches me for a moment before asking, “James?”
I look at him.
“After your father?”
I nod.
His heavy eyebrows scrunch together as he nods slowly, understanding settling over him.
"If there's anything I can give him in this world," I say, "it's a chance.
A chance to be a good person and nothing — nothing — like the man he came from.
And I think the way you do that is you put a little of my father in him.
A little of you." My voice threatens to go, and I hold it.
"Because next to my dad, Samson, you've been everything to us.
Everything. So I'd like him to have that name, and I'd like him raised by you. Please."
He and Lauren exchange a look — one of those we're married and we can hold an entire conversation without saying a word looks — and it makes me love them more and want to gag in exactly equal measure.
"You'll want to tell him one day," Lauren begins.
"No. I won't." I cut her off before she can finish. "I promise you I won't. I'll walk away, clean, and I'll stay away."
"Let me finish, Rosie." She lifts a hand, gentle but firm, and waits until I've gone quiet.
"You'll want to tell him one day. I can promise you that much — that the wanting will come, whether you act on it or not.
But that's not what we're saying." She glances over at Samson, then back to me.
"What we're saying is that it's okay. It will always be okay.
You'll have as much access to him, or as little, as you choose — for the rest of his life.
We will never once keep him from you. We'll give him a good home, a big family, our name, all of it.
But make no mistake, Rosalie. He will always be yours. "
My throat closes and I have to fight the sob rising up behind it with everything I've got left, which isn't much tonight.
"Thank you," is all I can get out.
***
The hospital room is sterile, too bright, and finally quiet.
My own screaming has died down with everything else.
Once they induced me, labor came quickly, but quick and painless are two entirely different things, and nobody warned me how loud a body can get when it's doing something it very clearly does not want to do.
James Samson Monroe came into the world with a roar at 7:21 p.m., six pounds fourteen ounces, and nineteen inches long.
I never planned to hold him. That wasn't part of the deal.
The plan had been simple because I needed it to be simple: deliver him, recover, sign whatever needed signing, and let Samson and Lauren take their son home when the hospital cleared him.
The nurses didn't know any of that, though, so they laid him on my chest wrapped tightly in a hospital blanket, and just like that the neat little plan I'd spent months constructing had a warm, breathing weight on it I hadn't accounted for.
This is probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do, and naturally I'm doing it alone. Lauren offered to be here, more than once, and I told her no every time. I'm used to alone; this was no different.
“Do you want a few minutes with him before we take him?”
I nod because I can't seem to get a word out, and I can't take my eyes off him.
I genuinely didn't expect to feel anything when I looked at him.
I'd spent months preparing myself for indifference if I was lucky and hatred if I wasn't, especially if they put him in my arms and something of his father's face stared back at me from inside that blanket.
That possibility had lived in the back of my mind through every doctor's appointment, every legal conversation, every night I lay awake feeling him move inside me and tried not to imagine what he'd look like when he finally came out.
Instead, there's just a baby.
A tiny, slightly furious-looking baby with a wrinkled forehead and round cheeks who seems deeply offended by his recent eviction.
I stare at him and wait for something terrible to happen inside me, and I can’t name what I feel instead, but the lack of terrible doesn’t change the decision.
Samson and Lauren will give him the life I want him to have, a loud house.
Eventually, they will give him siblings and he’ll be surrounded by people who will love him without having to fight their way through everything attached to how he got here.
I'll slide this day into the never happened file with everything else and keep moving. I'll even see him when they bring him around, and I'll be able to watch from a safe distance while he grows up loved and cared for and given every possible chance to become something good.
Something pale catches my eye near his forehead.
“Look at that.”
I trace my finger over the streak hidden among the darker hair at his hairline.
Just like mine.
I have poliosis, though I've dyed the white streak for most of my life.
There was always a fifty-percent chance I could pass it on, and of all the things this child could have inherited from me, the first one he decided to announce is the thing I've spent my entire life covering up.
Somehow, ridiculously, that makes this a fraction easier.
“Hey, kid.”
I press my lips to the little streak of white hair and then to his tiny nose. He turns toward me immediately, rooting against my cheek, blind and searching and brand new, and I have to close my eyes for a second because I wasn’t prepared for so many goddamn emotions.
“I took a big fat chance putting my dad's name on you, so you'd better do him proud, you hear me? That's a very expensive name emotionally. There are expectations.”
His face remains spectacularly unimpressed by the burden I've just placed on him.
I graze one impossibly chubby cheek with the back of my finger.
“I guess you're kind of cute.”
A wet laugh slips out of me because kind of is complete bullshit. The little bastard is beautiful.
His hand moves beneath the blanket until a tiny fist works its way free, and I put my finger against his palm without thinking. His fingers close around it immediately.
Stupid cute baby and his stupid fat fingers.
“I hope, when the day comes that I need it, and I probably will, you'll find some way to forgive me.
You should've been born out of love, James.
You deserved that much before you ever got here, and instead you were born out of the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
None of that is your fault. I need you to know that, even if I'm the only one who ever hears me say it.”
His fingers stay curled around mine while I stare at the little face I've spent months refusing to imagine.
“I will never regret you.”
That part comes easily.
It's the first thing about any of this that does.
“Not for one second. You're the one good thing that came out of the worst night of my life, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that yet, so I'm going to let Samson and Lauren do what I know they can do better than I can right now. They're going to love the absolute shit out of you.”
Another tear slides down my face and lands on the blanket.
“You'll always be my one good thing.”
I don't know how much time passes before the nurse returns. Long enough that my arm has started to ache beneath his weight, long enough that I've memorized the little noises he makes in his sleep and the way his mouth moves when he roots against me, but nowhere near long enough for what comes next.
I know what time it is anyway.
So I gather whatever is left of myself together and carefully loosen his tiny fingers from mine before handing him over as gently as I can.
“Don't bring him back,” I tell her. My voice is steadier than I feel. “His parents will pick him up when he's ready to be discharged.”
She pauses, clearly confused, but whatever she sees on my face keeps her from asking the question.
Thank God for small mercies.
I watch her wheel my son toward the door and make myself memorize him while I still can: the round cheeks, the tiny nose, the dark hair and that streak of white that belongs to me whether either of us ever says so out loud.
The door starts to swing shut behind them, and for one terrifying second every part of me wants to call her back.
I keep my mouth closed and watch until the last edge of the bassinet disappears from view.
Then the door closes.
And I understand, finally, what Lauren meant when she said the wanting would come.