The Hopefuls(50)

“I told them we’d come see the baby tomorrow,” I said. “You should text Jimmy.”

“I did.”

I tried to think of something else to say, some question to ask him so he’d have to keep talking to me. This version of my husband was hard to handle—usually he was the upbeat one, and I was already exhausted by the level of pep I was trying to maintain. I sat there for a few minutes, but when I couldn’t think of anything else to talk about, I got up and left him alone. He didn’t really seem to notice.

—

The next night, Matt got home as I was in the middle of tying a bow onto a bag of little gifts for Ash. “Hey,” I said. “Do you think you’ll be ready to leave in like twenty minutes?”

He stared at me with a blank look for a second, and so I said, “For the hospital?”

“Oh right,” he said. “I forgot. Do I really need to go?”

My hands were still holding the ribbon, and I stopped tying and stared at him. “Are you kidding?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“We already told them we were coming,” I said.

“I’m sure they’ll live,” he said. “I really don’t feel like it. Just tell them I’m busy.”

“Matt, they’re going to know that’s not true. Come on, it will just take an hour.”

He sighed like he was being unfairly treated. “Fine,” he said. “If it’s that big of a deal, I’ll go.”

We drove the five minutes to GW in silence and I almost regretted insisting that he come. I didn’t want Matt to be sulking in the corner and I really didn’t want him to announce the reason for his bad mood either—Ash had gone into labor before Matt could tell Jimmy about Dan Cullen’s decision, so they didn’t know that anything had changed.

“I know you don’t feel like doing much,” I said as we parked the car. “But I think this will mean a lot to them.”

Matt turned off the ignition and said, “Whatever. Let’s just get this over with.”

But when we arrived at their room, Matt put on a smile. Jimmy was holding the baby in a light pink blanket, and Ash was sitting up in bed, eating chocolate pudding. Her face was a little puffy and her eyes looked tired, but she had makeup on and her hair was curled. “My mom did my hair,” she said, when I told her she looked great.

Jimmy put the baby right in my arms, and she was so light it made me nervous. I slowly lowered myself into a chair, and then pulled the blanket back to get a better look at Viv. Her hands were clasped together, like a little worried old lady. Viv had a headband on, with a bow so large it looked like it might harm her. (She was wearing this bow in even her earliest pictures, and I can only imagine that Ash had barely finished pushing her out before leaning over to strap it on her head.)

“We’ve been telling her all day that her godparents were coming to see her,” Ash said.

Jimmy laughed and said, “So that’s our way of asking if you’ll be Vivienne’s godparents.”

“Of course,” Matt said. “We’d be honored.”

Matt and I looked at each other across the room then, and I smiled to thank him for pretending to be in a good mood. Jimmy saw us and said, “Oh, I know what that look means. I bet someone has baby fever.” Matt and I managed to make ourselves laugh, and I hoped we were the only ones who noticed how fake it sounded.

—

Colleen had her baby just a few days after Ash, a little girl they finally named Bea after a great deal of discussion. “Bruce wants to call her Theresa,” Colleen told me when I visited her in the hospital. “Theresa Murphy. It makes her sound like a nun.”

I didn’t ask Matt to come with when I went to visit Colleen. It didn’t seem worth an argument, so I went back to GW myself, right back to the maternity floor where we’d just been. And when I told her that Matt was busy at work, she just said, “Oh, that’s fine,” as if it hadn’t even occurred to her that he would be there.

But it bothered me. I knew Matt was upset, but he’d always been the kind of person to brush off disappointment, knowing somehow that something better would come along. The way he was acting now was different from anything I’d ever seen before and it unsettled me. I didn’t say any of this to Colleen, of course. Instead I just cooed over the baby, smiled, and said, “He so wishes he could be here.”

—

Later that week, Matt and I brought dinner to the Dillons. Matt wasn’t in a good mood, exactly, but for the most part he’d stopped pouting. He was quiet, but when I told him we were taking dinner over there, he just nodded in agreement. He did say, “That’s so midwestern of you,” but it didn’t sound particularly mean, so I just said, “I know.”

I was expecting the Dillons’ place to look like a disaster area—bottles and diapers everywhere, but when we arrived it was neat and tidy and Viv was sleeping. They even had a fire going. “Everything looks amazing,” I said as I hugged Ash. “You two are superheroes.”

“Oh, Celeste came today,” Ash said. “She’s going to come a few times a week until we get a hold on things.”

Celeste was the cleaning lady we both used. We shared so many things with them—vacations, secrets, dinners—that it only seemed right that we shared her too. It was the Dillons who’d found her first and raved about how great she was.