My breath quickened as he slid a steady hand up the skirt of my nightgown.
“You think it’s okay?” I gasped as Aaron withdrew my underpants and set them aside, though there was nothing more that I wanted in that moment than a fresh start for Aaron and me and our baby, to be able to erase all the animosity in a single moment, with a single deed.
“You think it’s safe?” I begged, and Aaron assured me that everything was okay, and, as we moved together there on the bed, I believed him. For the first time in a long time, I believed him.
July 14, 1997
Egg Harbor
An ultrasound with Dr. Landry confirmed the pregnancy, though there was no need for Dr. Landry’s attestation because I, for one, already knew that it was true, that the manifold of pregnancy tests didn’t lie. The battle with morning sickness had begun already, a misnomer if I’d ever heard one for it was morning, noon and night sickness. Not once did I complain, but rather welcomed the nausea and the fatigue as a gift.
Dr. Landry told Aaron and me that our tiny embryo is currently measuring one-half of a centimeter from crown to rump. As I lay on the examination table, feet in stirrups, for once not put off by the wand inside me, the complete invasion of privacy that I’ve come to accept as par for the course, Dr. Landry pointed out the gestational sac and the yolk sac, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that pint-size nub that would one day be a baby.
Aaron held my hand the entire time. He stroked my hair. He kissed my lips when the image appeared, dark and grainy and impossible to see were it not for Dr. Landry’s informative voice and thin finger telling us what was the gestational sac and what was the yolk sac, and where our baby was growing, and then, once I found it, the embryo—a half centimeter long with paddle-like arms and legs and webbing between its toes and fingers, none of which I could see for myself though Dr. Landry told us were there—the one thing in the world I loved more than anything else, I couldn’t divert my eyes.
There was a heartbeat. We couldn’t hear it yet, but we couldseeit. It was there, the movements of it on the ultrasound screen. Our baby had a heart and a heartbeat, and blood that coursed through his or her tiny body. Its heart had chambers—four of them Dr. Landry said!—and beat like a racehorse, a heartbeat that easily trumped mine, though it too was going at a steady gallop.
I’m six weeks along. And we have a due date now.
By May, Aaron and I will finally have a baby. We’ll be parents!
How will I possibly be able to wait that long to hold my baby in my arms?
July 16, 1997
Egg Harbor
I told my stepmother about the baby today. I didn’t mean to; it just happened. We were on the phone when she asked—as she had so many times in the past—“How much longer are we going to have to wait for you and Aaron to have a baby?”and it wasn’t so much that I told her, because I didn’t, but it was the lack of a response that gave it away, the silence, because I was too busy beaming behind the handset, trying to no avail to manufacture a lie.
If Nora could have seen me, she would have noticed the way my skin turned pink; she, like Aaron, would have seen the way I glowed. She would have seen me run a delicate hand across the cotton of my blouse—a link to the life inside—and triumphantly smile.
She said nothing at first, nothing in response to my nothing.
“When were you thinking you’d tell us?” she asked then with the slightest hint of malice—Nora, of course, needs to be the first to know everything—followed immediately by “Does Aaron’s mother already know?” and there was jealousy and skepticism in her voice long before she offered her congratulations and said how happy she is for Aaron and me.
I called Aaron’s mother next before Nora had a chance to call for herself, boasting that she knew a whole thirty seconds before Aaron’s mother did.
It was like a wildfire then, that instant burst of pregnancy news that caught quickly, spreading through the family from phone call to phone call like a raging inferno. By the end of the day, nearly everyone would know our news.
Miranda arrived as Aaron’s mother and I were saying goodbye, and catching a glimpse of my hand still situated on the cotton of my blouse, she said to me, “It’s about goddamn time, Eden.”
And then she hugged me, a quick, careless hug, sending her boys into the backyard to play alone so she could lie on my sofa and rest. Little Carter didn’t want to go; he, himself, was still a baby, and so she picked him up and plopped him in Jack’s arms and said again togoand we stood there, watching them walk away, listening as Carter cried.She was massive again, still months away from giving birth to baby number four, and the evidence of it was everywhere: in her tired eyes, her unwashed hair, her inflated legs.
Pregnancy did not suit Miranda well.
Her maternity shirts no longer fit correctly, leaving a fraction of her stomach exposed, ashy skin drawn tightly around her baby, a black, vertical line etched on her body from belly button down. Miranda herself didn’t have a pregnancy glow, but rather was covered in blotchy brown spots all over her skin; the hormones were not working in her favor.
“Just wait until you’re as fat as me,” she said, seeing the way I watched her drop onto the sofa, a giraffe making an ungainly attempt to sit.
“Well I have news too,” she said then, as if she couldn’t stand me being happy, as if she couldn’t take a back seat to my glad tidings for once. “We’re going to have a girl!” she screeched, clapping her own hands, going on to say how—though Joe didn’t know it yet—she’d had a peek at her medical file when the obstetrician was out of the room during her last appointment, and there, in the margins of the paperwork, saw the Venus symbol written with black ink.
“Finally,” she said, frowning out the window at her three boys, fifty-pound Jack lugging twenty-pound Carter around, Carter who still cried. “After everything I’ve been through,” she said, and I wanted to be happy for her, I really did.
But I couldn’t bring myself to be.
She didn’t deserve another baby any more than a murderer deserves clemency.
I was grateful when, an hour later, Paul wet himself and they had to leave.
