The Club(61)
And then late one afternoon as she left the office – it was just her, Adam and Ned in that first-floor walk-up – for the apartment Ned had rented for her, Ned had called her over, glanced again at her midriff and asked: ‘So, Nikki, are you planning to keep this baby?’
And in that moment, as if someone had flicked a switch, she realized both the full horror of her situation and the futility of her coping strategy. No, this was not just all going to miraculously go away and, yes, at some point this baby was actually going to come out. And be a person. With a mother. A person who would eventually want to know who its father was.
No, she was not planning to keep this baby. She. Just. Could. Not.
Ned had arranged everything.
Renting a little house for her upstate when she was a few weeks away from her due date, booking the car that took her to the hospital. Sending those flowers, those enormous looming white lilies, for when she was discharged. He’d tried to sit down with her and go through all the paperwork. The agency was a private one, that was how it worked in America; he’d shown her the brochures – they promised to place the child with a loving family who could provide a safe, comfortable home, a loving and nurturing environment. There were pages he’d flicked through about their vetting procedures, their criteria. Pictures of beautiful homes, happy babies, on every glossy page. Her throat ached, turning the pages. Her heart ached, every time she thought about it. Inside her the baby kicked, and hiccupped, and wriggled.
A closed adoption, that was what she’d asked for, when the options were explained to her. Was that because Ned had made it sound like the most sensible thing for both of them, Nikki and her unborn baby? Afterwards, although she’d been sore for a week or so, cried and slept at weird times of the day and night, it all started to feel fuzzy, as if it had all happened to someone else. She asked Ned if she could come back to work, and was comforted by the fact she had something to return to, something she seemed to be good at.
None of them mentioned it again.
She did think about Ron – once or twice she had even seen him, across a crowded room in one of the clubs, at a launch party, on TV at some premiere, or stumbled upon one of his movies on TV, and felt a curious mixture of emotions.
She thought about the child too, her boy, out there somewhere, wondered which of the two of them he might look like. And then she told herself he was better off not knowing any of it. But sometimes, just sometimes, she saw someone out of the corner of her eye, a boy, a teenager, a young man and it struck her that it could be him, that the chance was slim but it was not impossible that it actually was her son. And that even if that boy, teenager, young man was not her son, he was out there somewhere. Someone with his life and his hopes and his dreams and perhaps even his own family now. Someone she would almost certainly never meet and who would almost certainly never meet her. And that was a strange feeling.
It was even stranger to think that she had no photograph, had never had a photograph of him, had never named him, could barely even remember him – a weight in her arms at the hospital, a howling red thing, born with a great thick head of dark hair slicked down against his scalp, chubby little legs. She could remember the nurse telling her not to worry about that little red mark on his eyelid, and those patches – the two dark patches, one on his calf and one on his shoulder – that they’d probably all fade with time. And she remembered wondering why the nurse would think that mattered to her, and then realizing that she did care, it did matter, and then wondering what that meant. And she remembered being exhausted, and sleeping. And she remembered waking, and the baby being gone.
There had never been a choice, for her. How could she have raised that child? What possible stories could she have told him about who he was, how he had come about? It was a gift, not knowing now stupid his mother was or how his father should have known better. A chance to invent himself, write his own story. Have a good life with people who loved him.
That was the best she had felt she was able to give him.
Adam
Ever since breakfast, Adam had been looking for somewhere to be alone.
At points today he had felt as though he was genuinely on the cusp of a panic attack. That pressure behind the eyes. That weird horrible fizzing in your veins. That awful sensation as if all of a sudden you could no longer remember how to breathe. All day, his phone buzzed and twitched incessantly in his pocket and he had been constantly trailed by one anxious Home employee or another seeking sign-off on the final details for tonight’s party, all sent in his direction by Nikki. His mood had not been improved by the fact that no fewer than three people had mistaken him for Ned – from a distance, from behind, but still, it was not exactly flattering, given the age difference and how much stockier than Adam his elder brother had always been. By mid-afternoon, on about the fifteenth occasion someone had queried whether Adam was allowed to approve something or other (the colour of the sun-lounger coverings for the roof of Manhattan Home, to be precise – and you could see quite how paralysing it was for everyone, for the company, Ned’s insistence on always having the final say on everything), Adam had quite spectacularly lost his temper, asked them whether they knew how long he had been with this company, screamed that no, he did not need to check with his brother before signing off on five thousand dollars’ worth of calico, who did they actually think they were speaking to? An hour later he had called back to apologize and to suggest that, having looked at the two options, maybe they should hold off on a decision just for a bit.