The Almost Sisters(3)

But even as I thought it, he began to quiet. He must be in his mother’s arms, being bobbled and soothed, already forgetting. A real, live human baby. I put one hand on my belly. It felt soft, a little rounder than I would have liked, no different from usual. Yet inside, secretly, it was not the same. In the mortifying shock of being pregnant, I hadn’t thought about getting a baby. But that was pregnancy’s endgame, after all.

“It’s going to be okay, you know,” Margot promised. She sat down beside me and put her arm over my shoulders.

“It’s so weird to think that sex actually works,” I said.

“Reproduction” was a high-school-textbook word. It was like photosynthesis or oxidation, just another process that I’d had to memorize to pass biology. Now here was biology, being true and relevant, working as intended in the darkness at the center of my body. If all went well, a whole and separate person would enter the world. A tiny person, made inside myself. My person. My son or daughter.

“You want to talk about your options?” Margot asked, but I was already shaking my head back and forth.

“I’m thirty-eight years old, Margot,” I answered, slow and serious. “Aren’t I running out of options?”

Margot was my friend. I could see her wanting to tell me that it wasn’t true. But she was also a doctor, and I was dead single and a year and change away from forty. I’d walked away from every man I might have married. No, I’d run. The playground song in my head went, First comes love, then comes hideous betrayal, then comes endless regret requiring expensive therapy. It was a terrible song. It didn’t even rhyme. But it was mine, and I hadn’t made a family, even though I’d wanted one.

I still did. I wanted to fall in love, marry a dork like me, make more dorks. I wanted game nights, summer nerdcations to Ren fairs and Orlando, a better reason than my own sweet tooth for baking Yoda cupcakes. I had imagined what it would be like to leap in and make a life with someone. Make babies that were a blend of us. It must be a kind of magic, to create a kid with my husband’s nose and my own deep-set eyes.

This kid, though? He might be born with Batman’s nose, but how would I know? I couldn’t remember Batman’s nose. This kid would be biracial; he could get my deep-set eyes, but we still wouldn’t look like family to my racist neighbor. Or to anybody’s racist neighbor, actually, and the world was full of them. I’d be raising him all alone, too. I wasn’t exactly living the dream here.

It didn’t matter. No matter how embarrassing the origin story, no matter the potential hazards, a tiny piece of family had crash-landed in my uterus.

“I’m making a baby,” I told Margot, and I sounded terrified.

Even so, underneath the shake in my voice, I heard joy. Margot must have heard it, too, because she grinned and hugged me tighter.

“Yeah, you are, Mama,” she said, and wrote me a prescription for prenatals.

For the first few months, I kept it a secret between me and Margot and my ob-gyn. I bought a book called Late Bloomers: The Pregnancy Handback for Women Over 35, and it advised me not to tell, at least until I’d gotten through the first trimester. That made sense to me, and not only because telling everyone would be uncomfortable and I actively dreaded telling Rachel. I had another, deeper reason. At my age pregnancy was classified as high-risk. I had extra doctor appointments and tests, and in my heart I didn’t trust that it would stick. This didn’t feel like something I would get to have.

So I worked, I hung out with my friends, I put out cat food for the wary stray who lived in my backyard. I went to church and hosted Tuesday game nights. I took out the recycling. It all felt exactly the same as the thousands of times I’d done this stuff unpregnant. I missed having a glass of wine with dinner, but Night of the Bat aside, I wasn’t a big drinker. I wasn’t nauseous or any moodier than usual. I didn’t find myself salting my ice cream or eating sidewalk chalk. Another few weeks and I had to move into my fat jeans, but that was no big deal—it happened every Christmas.

At my fourth appointment, my ob-gyn took some of my blood, and the fetal platelets told us my baby was genetically sound and definitely a boy. I was officially in my second trimester.

Now, Late Bloomers said, shit got real. Maybe not in those exact words, but the book and common sense agreed that it was time to make the guest room over into a nursery, buy some onesies and a Diaper Genie, and hey, maybe mention I was pregnant to my family and friends. I didn’t. I was carrying a viable, whole, human boy, but he still seemed so intangible. He was like a drawing after I had the idea but before my pencil moved along the paper.

I didn’t even tell my grandmother, my only living relative on my father’s side. She was seven hundred miles away, down in Birchville, Alabama, busy making sure her pansy bed was immaculate and disapproving of young people and her own racist neighbor. She would have been the perfect test case, both because she’d never rat me out to Mom and Keith and Rachel and because she loved me so damn much.

I reminded her of my dad, who had been short and dark-haired and built on the thick side, just like me. And just like me he had been a haunter of used-book stores, an eater of Easy Cheese, a roller of many-sided dice. In my favorite picture, the one I kept in my purse, he was wearing Spock ears. The dork was strong in him. He had picked baby names when I was just a bump inside my mother, but he never got to see if I was a Leia or a Solo. He was killed by a drunk driver three weeks before I was born, Birchie’s crowning sorrow in a hard life full of lesser ones.