No poetry, no metaphor, no elaborately constructed declaration. Just a man lying in the dark telling a woman he’s happy, and meaning it so completely that the simplicity is what makes it land.
And I love every word.
“Me too,” I tell him.
And I am. Not the manufactured happiness of a perfect evening or the manic happiness of something new or the anxious happiness of someone waiting for the other shoe to drop. Just happy. The way a house is warm. The way fabric falls when you stop fighting it. The way a woman feels when she discovers, at thirty-eight, that she was never past anything at all.
She was just getting started.
chapter 18
Celeste
Saylor holds the door for me at the clinic, and for a moment I just stand there on the sidewalk, looking up at the building like I’m about to walk into a cathedral. It’s not a cathedral. It’s a four-story medical building in Midtown East with a Starbucks on the ground floor and a parking garage that smells like exhaust and orange peels for some reason. But what’s inside, on the third floor, behind a reception desk and an ultrasound machine, is the closest thing to sacred that I’ve encountered since Whitney’s funeral.
Today we see the baby.
Not in the abstract. Not in legal documents or custody filings or the imagined version I’ve been sketching in my head for weeks, the girl with Whit’s red curls reaching for books on Montessori shelves. Today we see the actual baby. On a screen. In real time.Moving.
My hand finds Saylor’s as we walk through the lobby. Not for appearances. Only because we’re that nauseating couple that likes to hold hands now. He threads his fingers through mineand squeezes once, and the squeeze says everything his mouth doesn’t:I’m here. This is real. We’re doing this together.
In the elevator, he’s quiet. Unusually quiet for a man who once fabricated a bathroom emergency at a funeral. He’s wearing a navy button-down that I bought him last week because his flannel and henley collection, while charming in a lumberjack-chic sort of way, is falling apart. He needed new clothes. I snuck in a few upgrades.Sue me.He’s still rolled the sleeves to the elbow because Saylor Evans cannot exist in a long-sleeved, collared shirt without modifying it to look casual. I’ve accepted this about him the way you accept weather.
“Thank you,” he says, as the elevator passes the second floor.
“For what?”
“For letting me be here. For this. You didn’t have to include me.”
“Saylor, you painted the nursery. You wrote ‘you are so loved’ on the wall. You built the new crib and installed a baby monitor. You even bought Dreft.”
“It’s safer detergent for the baby’s skin.”
“On what planet do you think I would not include you?”
He looks at the floor. The humble version of him, the one that still can’t quite believe he’s allowed to want things. “I just know this is your thing. Yours and Whit’s. I don’t want to overstep.”
“You’re not overstepping. You’re standing exactly where I want you to stand.” I squeeze his hand. “Besides, someone has to drive me home afterward because I’ll probably be crying too hard to see the road. I could accidentally drive off a bridge.”
“Yeah…you’re only a terrible driver when you’re crying.Sure.”
“Hush, you.”
The third floor is a women’s health practice with soft lighting and abstract art on the walls that’s meant to be calming but does not succeed. It’s all abstract flowers that are shaped suspiciouslylike vaginas. Other than the female anatomy art, the waiting room is all muted tones and cushioned chairs and a water dispenser with cucumber slices floating in it, which I find both soothing and pretentious. There’s a woman across the room who is approximately eleven months pregnant and reading a magazine with the detached serenity of someone who has moved past anxiety and into acceptance. She knows it. We know it. She will be pregnant forever. That baby will grow a beard in her belly.
“Celeste! Saylor!”
Raven is already here.
She’s sitting in the corner chair, the one closest to the outlet because she’s charging her phone. Even from her chair, the full scope of her belly can’t be hidden. She is magnificently, undeniably, spectacularly pregnant. Twenty-five weeks. Her belly is a small planet. It has its own gravitational field. She’s wearing a floral wrap dress that I sent her from the office two weeks ago along with a care package of maternity clothes. Raven’s pre-pregnancy wardrobe consisted primarily of crop tops and low-rise jeans, and while I respect her commitment to early-aughts fashion, there are limits to what denim can accommodate.
“You guuuuys.” She stands, which is now a multi-phase operation involving a forward lean, a hand on the armrest, and a small grunt of exertion that she tries to disguise as enthusiasm. I meet her halfway and hug her carefully, my arms finding the space above and around the belly, which is warm and firm and startlingly alive. I feel something shift beneath the fabric. A knee, maybe. An elbow. Some small part of Whitney’s child rearranging herself inside a body that isn’t mine, and the intimacy of that, the proximity to a miracle I have no biological claim to, makes my throat constrict.
I rotate my neck to see Saylor right behind me. “The baby kicked. I felt it.”
“More of a roll,” Raven says. “This is not a baby, it’s an alligator. All day, all night, it rolls. I don’t know what it’s trying to drown, but it’s not working.”
Saylor laughs. “May I?” he asks Raven. She nods like it’s an obvious question and Saylor replaces my hands on Raven’s belly. “Oi, that’s good yeah? Active little thing.”
