The place was crowded, but it always was, because theapartment was so small. There were no other children, except Lucinda, who had learned to stand, was even taking tentative steps, hanging onto the edges of furniture. Clara didn’t have mom friends, not the way most women did, not the way Jess had. She might have acquired some, but she’d been put off by the mothers she met who heard her story and said things like, “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.” And then everything started going wrong, and her pregnancy became so complicated and all-consuming that there wasn’t a chance for diversions like music class, indoor play-spaces, and the library storytimes that had helped save Jess’s life when she’d been home with her own kids.
So it was a different crowd, a strange vibe for a child’s party, but Nick had the hospitality right—it was his profession. He put a drink in Jess’s hand, Pimm’s with berries and mint. He’d even remembered juice for the kids, and there were bowls of chips on all the tables, so Bella and Miles were happy enough, wholly absorbed by the tablets they’d brought. Jess went outside, greeting Clara’s sisters briefly on her way to Clara, who was sitting in the corner under the apple tree. Not the guest of honour exactly, but she might have been, looking queenly, in the Victorian sense, laid out on her chaise in a blue caftan over yoga pants. She was the centre of a small group wrapped up in conversation, but when Jess caught her attention, Clara’s eyes lit up. “You!” she exclaimed.
“Don’t get up,” said Jess.
“Don’t worry, I can’t,” said Clara, shifting to sit up higher, her physical discomfort evident in her movements and the expression on her face. She held her arms out for a hug. “My best friend,” she told the others—Pam, who lived upstairs, and Emily, one of Nick’s co-workers.
“Happy birth-day to you,” said Jess. “To both of us, really.”
And Clara explained how Jess had been there a year earlier when Lucinda came into the world. “She cleaned out the pool,” she said. “It was disgusting, apparently. The nicest thing that anybody’s ever done for me.” She smiled. It had been so important for her to have Jess there when Lucinda was born, but this time everything was different. If Clara had a birth vision, she wasn’t sharing it, and her health had been so unstable. Jess had offered to be there again, or else to take Lucinda when the time came, but Clara was being vague about her plans, refusing to commit to anything.
The others got up and gave Jess space. “Adam and the kids are inside,” said Jess, finding room to perch on the end of the chaise beside Clara’s swollen ankles. “How are you?” She could infer by how pale and tired Clara looked, but she wanted to hear what her answer would be.
Clara shrugged. “We’re hanging in there.” For so long, she’d felt excellent, then one day her iron levels plummeted and she fainted at the bus stop. Her breast milk dried up and she was devastated, even though Jess tried to convince her that weaning wasn’t really a big deal. Lucinda was growing well and had already started eating solids, but Clara would not be reassured.
Clara never worried about the things that really mattered. She felt terrible, she’d confess on her worst days, and she looked awful too. Her body was swollen, the circles under her eyes heavy and dark, and her hair was falling out. She ached when she moved and she ached when she lay still, her body spread all around her, but on her face Jess could still, unmistakably, read contentment.
“I was feeling strange last night,” Clara was saying. “Istarted worrying today would be the day and that this party might not even happen. After Nick had done all that planning!” She gestured all around, at Jess’s drink. “It’s going to be such a relief when the babies come, so nice to no longer be living on hold like this.”
Clara didn’t know, Jess thought. Lucinda wasn’t even a toddler yet—she had no inkling of the chaos down the line. The way Jess understood it, Clara’s life was going to be on hold indefinitely, way off into the horizon.
“But the feeling turned out to be nothing,” Clara continued. “Truthfully, I feel strange all the time. Maybe it was wishful thinking to suppose the babies might come today. It’s still too soon, but I just want everybody to be here.” She meant her little family, finally complete.
“But you need to take care of yourself in the meantime,” Jess reminded her, knowing how futile her advice was. Clara was unmovable, in every sense of the word.
She wasn’t even listening, sunk back in her chair, smiling dimly. She raised her glass and took a sip of her drink, which was pink with berries floating in it. She said, “Good, good. I’m feeling good.” The most annoying kind of delirium. As though Jess has asked her the question. As though the answer might even be true.
“And your blood pressure? It’s okay?” The midwives had been monitoring it, Jess knew.
Clara shook her head, “Stop fussing. Last time I checked, you weren’t my nurse.” She put her hand on her belly but looked Jess right in the eye. “And I really want to know: how areyou?” Sometimes she’d do this, briefly surfacing from the spell, as though she and Jess actually still inhabited the same universe. As though she had the bandwidth to follow herline of inquiry beyond a superficial response. But right now she seemed to be waiting for Jess to answer. Maybe she wasn’t so far gone yet.
So Jess told her, “Things are fine. Busy, but fine.” Should she leave it at that? She waited to see if Clara’s attention had already drifted elsewhere. But then everyone was busy. Busy was boring. “Work has its…challenges,” she continued. She was up for her promotion, she reminded Clara, but the politics were getting complicated, plus the day-to-day workplace matters that were now her jurisdiction. It wasn’t all bad: she was putting together an exhibition on the role of luminescence in stories, how images of light, sparkle, and shine—ordinary flax spun into gold, golden plates at Sleeping Beauty’s christening—informed a tale.
Clara said, “What the frog foretold came true.”
Jess was surprised. “You remembered!” Sometimes she wondered if she occupied any part of her friend’s crowded consciousness.
“How could I forget?” asked Clara. “I mean, just look at me.”
Jess said, “I don’t know that any frog foretold that.” Fairy tales were full of stories of barrenness, but rarely of fecundity. Maybe twelve brothers or twelve princesses lined up in a row, but you never heard how it was for their mother, all that laundry.Once upon a time there was a couple who longed for a baby, and then they got what they wanted, and then some.
“The old woman who lived in a shoe,” said Clara.
“But that’s a nursery rhyme,” Jess said. There was a distinction. “I always had sympathy for that poor woman, her children shamelessly multiplying, ducking in and out of eyeholes.”
“I’ve been reading it,” said Clara. “It’s good to be prepared.” She smiled. “And how’s Miles?” This question was ahook on which a lot of freight hung. Jess knew she should be glad that Clara was thoughtful enough to ask at all, that the inquiry did not come with the pointed insensitivity she’d come to expect from the people who relished vicarious misfortune. Or the pitiers—Jess hated the pity, although the people who couldn’t even muster pity were worse. The smug people, who figured she and Adam were making a big deal out of nothing, indulging their son. People who thought the problem was “too much time on the tablet,” which was a sensitive point because it was true, there really was too much time on the tablet.
“He’s doing okay,” said Jess. Most people wouldn’t even notice, not at first. Miles had friends at school, got along with them at recess. He played hockey, rode his bike, and in the Instagram photos she posted, he looked like any other kid. He had the same wide smile as his sister, but he didn’t have Bella’s words. Bella, who talked all the time—she always had, so most people never realized what her brother was lacking. Bella covered for him the way they all did. Miles was smart, but he struggled with the connections between thinking words and actually saying them. Childhood apraxia of speech was the official diagnosis, and Jess tried to be grateful they’d received it early, even though at the time it felt like an infinite corridor of doors had slammed shut. It was a valuable lesson too, with both of her children, to observe that something that came so easily to one person could prove incredibly difficult for another.
“He’s doing well,” she told Clara. “There’s been progress. Little steps.” Most people wanted a narrative with forward motion, instead of stasis and disappointment. Most people eventually stopped asking altogether. “Speaking of little steps, I saw Lucinda standing,” she said. “Nearly walking.” Mundane milestones never ceased to be remarkable, and Jess knew this now better than she ever had.
Clara said, “We’re in for it now.”
“But this is where it gets good,” said Jess. “Once the kids are big enough to be actual people, it gets harder, but it gets better.” She said this forgetting that Clara and Nick were still in the eye of the storm. “I mean, it’s going to be good,” she corrected herself.
“I know,” said Clara with a smile. Sometimes it was as though her brain had gone as loose as her skin. Where were her edges? Jess could have sworn she used to have them. “I feel like the luckiest mama in the world,” she went on, completely sincere, even though she couldn’t move, was swollen to the size of a mountain, and Jess wondered if her friend had really lost her mind.
Adam came outside and greeted Clara with a hug, Nick behind him with the baby in his arms. When he put Lucinda down, she pounced on her mother, who strained to pull her up, to make a space beside her body. But her body itself was what Lucinda wanted, palpable pleasure on her face as she breathed Clara in, her features transformed, her ringlets bouncing. Lucinda looked like a child one might order from a catalogue.
