Confidential(20)

I started to counter-steer, offering extravagant praise about what an amazing worker she’d always been, and how much we all missed her, and how we can’t wait until she’s back, at which point she began to look worried again, and I had to reassure her that of course we were going to wait until she was back. She finally relaxed. Then Byron let out the fart of a truck driver, and we all laughed, including him. The kid had timing.

“What’s it like, really?” I asked her, since it felt like closeness was baked in after smelling the offspring’s byproducts.

Alexis, who had just taken a seat across from me on the couch, froze. Then she burst into tears.

Emotions were information, all right. She’d just told me all I needed to know. Let go of this ridiculous fantasy, Greer. Look around you. Look at the state of this house and of this woman in front of you, and look at the tiny being who created it. The power imbalance relative to stature was absurd and terrifying. He was cute, but he wasn’t all that. Let it go.

I thought I’d be able to, as Alexis talked about how sometimes it was boring and sometimes it was overwhelming, like when he cried and cried and she couldn’t figure out what was wrong. “Loving him so much makes me feel a little bit out of control all the time,” she said.

I nodded, thinking I didn’t ever want to know. I was dodging this bullet, no question. Therapy schmerapy.

“But you hold him and you can’t imagine anything better. Like here”—and before I could protest, she was across the room and scooping her son out of his opium chair—“try it.”

There was no graceful way to refuse an actual person. There could be no bigger rejection than saying, “No, I’d prefer not to touch the fruit of your loins.” That was why I found myself with Byron on my lap, more than a bit awkwardly, and as Alexis laughed through her fast-drying tears, she advised me to lift him to my shoulder. When I did, I just hated what happened.

Which was that I loved it. I loved his smell—which was not farty at all but sweet, and not just like baby powder but like Byron—and I loved his heft. He was the perfect size. Really, he fit me like a glove. I was flooded with something that felt chemical. Oxytocin, wasn’t that what made nursing mothers’ breasts leak when they heard their babies cry?

I didn’t think I could be having oxytocin for another woman’s baby, but I swear, it was like something was overtaking my body. It was a calm—all ocean breezes and waves and pi?a coladas—only natural, created from within rather than without. After all, there was nothing more natural than the drive to be a mother. So soporific, like I could have fallen asleep right there and slept for a hundred years and it would have been the best hundred years of my whole life.

Oh God. Oh shit. I wanted this feeling, but then I thought of Alexis’s tears. I certainly didn’t want that feeling. It was unlikely that you could have one without the other. If you loved a helpless creature so much, you inevitably had . . . not the opposite, not hate, but out of control, which was a form of pain that I had never tolerated well. It was what I’d always feared, on some level: that love made you painfully beholden.

Fear of intimacy, just like Dr. Michael said.

But did I need love, like I’d blurted out, badly enough to risk the pain?

I gently returned Byron to his mother, feeling equal parts relief and regret, and told her how happy I was that I got to see her in her element (she clearly liked that). Then I beat it the hell out of there.

On the street, I was shaking. I still felt it, the weight of him. That little baby who wasn’t mine but could be. Well, not him, but something similar. Maybe even one a little cuter, if I got lucky. If I picked the right sperm donor.

Jesus.

I was walking down the street, faster and faster, like I could just leave it all behind, like I could pretend that the experiment hadn’t led me to an inevitable, terrible conclusion. I wanted more love in my life, possibly in the form of a ten-pound soul-sucking monster. I turned my phone back on, hoping for some work-related emergency that would require my full attention, but instead, the only message I had was from Dr. Michael. An eye for an eye. A voice mail for a voice mail.

“Hi, it’s Michael,” he said. Not Dr. Michael, just Michael. “I got your message, and I owe you an apology. When I meet with someone as compelling as you, sometimes I get overexcited. I get ahead of myself, and I make presumptions. Sometimes I push too hard. I think that happened in this case, and I appreciate your feedback.” Feedback. That’s a creative euphemism for quitting. “I’d like to ask you to give me another chance. I do think you need to be pushed, at least a little. Don’t go finding yourself one of those ‘How does that make you feel? Umm-hmm’ therapists. You’re too good for that. And even if I’m not right for you, let’s talk about that in person, okay? Because if you leave like this, it could just be another sign of—don’t shoot me—that fear of intimacy we talked about. That you’re afraid to let someone care about you, which I do. Let’s meet on our usual day and time, okay, Greer? I promise you I can do better.”

He was practically begging for a second chance.

I couldn’t say why, but I was smiling.





CHAPTER 15





FLORA


“I’m really glad to have her here,” I tell Michael. We’re in the kitchen, and Kate is sitting at the dining room table. I dump another container of Burmese takeout onto a serving platter while Michael smiles at me affectionately.