Reputation(41)
“Ollie and I are really excited,” I said. Because I had to. I needed to draw lines around this baby. Ascribe whom it belonged to.
“I’m sure you are,” Greg said. And just like that, his eyes crinkled mirthfully. He opened his arms. I walked into a strange, tentative hug. A happy ending, then.
Until it wasn’t.
By the time I went into labor, I barely remembered my worries about Greg. But when Freddie was born and the nurses placed him on my belly, his little eyes screwed tight, his big mouth stretched wide, I took one look at him and knew. Thank God Ollie’s back was turned—he was washing his hands at the sink—there was no way I could hide my dismay. I’d heard that babies look like their fathers when they’re born for biologically imperative reasons: It’s so dads will see themselves in those new, tiny faces and feel compelled to protect them. The only face I saw in Freddie’s squished little features was the face of the doctor I worked alongside in the operating room, not the husband who slept next to me every night. Not the man who yearned for this child as deeply as I did.
When Ollie turned and saw me crying, he assumed it was out of joy—our baby was finally here, healthy and strong. I did feel that. But I was also bitterly angry—and afraid of what Ollie might suspect. But Ollie held Freddie outstretched, marveling at his existence. When his mother arrived and declared that the baby was the spitting image of Ollie’s deceased father, Joe, I began to breathe easier.
Still. I knew. I kept Greg from seeing Freddie for as long as I could. But just a few weeks ago, on one of my days off, I needed to pick up my paycheck, so I popped into the hospital with Freddie. Greg wouldn’t be there—I was so paranoid about running into him that I knew his schedule better than my own. The nurses flocked around us, commenting on the baby’s chubby cheeks, his bright blue eyes, his sweet disposition, the milestones he’d already achieved.
And then I sensed a presence in the doorway. My blood ran cold. When Greg clapped eyes on Freddie, it was as though he was hit with an electric current. “So,” he said, “I finally get to meet the big man.”
I tried to act like things were normal. But I felt a horrible twist in my gut at how recognizable my son’s features were. Freddie had the same little bump on his nose that Greg did. The same long eyelashes. That same cleft in his chin. Greg could see himself in Freddie, and it was like a switch had flipped inside him. A rope had snapped.
I got out of the hospital quickly, unable to stand Greg’s charged stare. But during my next shift, I found a folded piece of paper in my locker. It was a printout reminding new mothers to give their baby vitamin D drops. I stared at it for a few long beats, confused. Maybe Tina had slipped it in there? She was crazy about vitamins. But when I asked her, she looked at me like I was crazy. “I’m not going to tell you how to raise your kid.”
Later that same day, I found another printout: studies on circumcision. I’d already circumcised Freddie, and how was it anyone’s business? Two days later came a list of appropriate Montessori schools in the greater Pittsburgh area. A day after that, a sheaf of horror stories about SIDS cases at day care facilities.
A crack formed in my brain. During one of our nights out, Greg had talked about how he’d had a Montessori education. And last year, when a local day care had an infant suspiciously stop breathing while napping, he’d muttered to me, “Personally, I think day cares are evil.”
The messages kept coming, sometimes two or three stuffed into my locker over the course of a single shift. They were about the Ferber method, how long a mother should breastfeed, the benefits of organic food. Each unwelcome piece of paper I unfolded felt like a ransom note, a letter of execution. Greg Strasser was not a man to reject. I learned the hard way.
“My poor, poor baby,” Ollie says, dragging me back to the present. I look around. Dust sparkles through our living room. Our baby turns on the monitor screen, suspended in dreams. “But you don’t have to be scared. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
I frown into my lap, momentarily confused. This is why Ollie thinks I’m upset? But then, of course he does. He thinks I’m in a state because someone murdered my boss in cold blood. But it’s not the murderer I’m afraid of. It’s how relieved I am that Greg is gone.
And that I hold myself a little bit responsible.
16
RAINA
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 2017
Thanks to the free cocktails at Greg Strasser’s post-funeral reception, I’m still buzzed when I show up to Alexis’s party. This makes me chatty with my Uber driver. I babble about movies I’ve just seen, my favorite neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, and wanting to be a writer when I grow up.
“What do you think about that crazy murder that happened near Aldrich?” the driver asks me as we turn onto a Lawrenceville side street. “Pretty scary the killer still hasn’t been found.”
“I knew that guy,” I say, almost proudly. The driver looks at me like I’m a celebrity. Asks who I think did it. But that’s a question I don’t want to answer.
When I get out of the car, I realize I’m a hot mess. I need to sober up. I need to be on tonight for Alexis so I can see what she’s all about.
I stare at my outfit. I’ve got on my highest heels. I’m still wearing my sexiest, shortest black dress—which, okay, probably wasn’t funeral appropriate, but I thought Greg, wherever he is now, might appreciate it. Tonight bears so much promise. Every text I’ve received from Alexis in the past twenty-four hours has been increasingly suggestive and flirty. She’s one of those girls who punctuates her texts with hearts and gives people flirty nicknames—hottie, sexy girl, gorgeous. I knew a few high school girls who did that, always screaming out, “I love you!” to their friends and creating over-the-top tributes in one another’s yearbooks, but with Alexis, the nicknames take on a new charge. I feel she’s calling me sexy because she wants to have sex with me.