Having Nathan's Baby (9 page)

Hilary nodded. “The opportunities will still be here when you do,” she said.
“This is a smart decision.”

As smart decisions went,
I had to agree it was on the list. I went back to my office feeling twenty pounds lighter. The nausea has passed. I attacked my lingering case files with gusto, tearing through the work with relish until, around nine pm I felt an angry welt of hunger slash across my insides. It was followed by a rash of butterflies low in my stomach; like popcorn popping. My hand instinctively fled to cover my womb. I stilled, unsure of the sensation, testing it. After a few silent seconds I realized I was holding my breath. I exhaled slowly, my gaze turned inward. That feeling ... it had been unmistakably new. It was like butterflies, but it had definitely come from below my stomach. It couldn’t be...?

When
I felt it again, an unambiguous outbreak of restlessness low in my body, I almost jumped out of my seat. Good God, it was the baby! Both hands clasped my stomach and I looked down at it, half in terror and half in wonder. A childish laugh gurgled in my throat. I paused again, testing it more closely. Was it hungry, like me? Of course it must be. Gravity weighed down my expression. I had to start taking better care of myself. Working all day and eating only sporadically, it wasn’t good for me, so it wasn’t good for the baby. I’d have to start attending yoga again regularly to get my feel good hormone levels up, not to mention my strength. Why hadn’t I been researching my diet? I should be eating for the baby now, not just for myself!

It was really in
there, this little person, relying on me to keep it safe.

I
breathed out through pursed lips as I tried to assimilate this obvious fact. A real, live human being. One day this person would have a name, and a social security number, and a job of its own. Even a family.  A name ... I felt a different sensation this time as the butterflies rose in my stomach. What were we going to call the baby? Who knew how many other little details like this we still had to work through. I cast an eye at my laptop, wondering if I should start a list. It made sense; if I dealt with this like a lawyer, as though I were mediating someone else’s issues, I would probably have most of the details under control within a few weeks.

These practical matters had to be taken in hand. Nathan wouldn’t think, or probably even care, about most of them until it was a pressing, urgent decision
we had to make. I was sure he would want the baby to have his name: Nathan Black, just like his father and grandfather before him. Why wouldn’t he? I paused. What did I want? Since we weren’t married, it had occurred to me that we could add my surname in there somewhere. Did I care one way or the other? Was this one of the points I could compromise on?

I
reached for the phone instinctively. Despite the gravity of my thoughts, I was still experiencing a rush of endorphins from the movements in my womb. I had to share it with somebody. I imagined Lauren’s reaction to the news, but it wasn’t entirely satisfying. I imagined Nathan’s reaction and my heartbeat sped up so dramatically that I laughed aloud in the quiet office. He would be so excited, just like I was. Our child, our baby, was hungry! It was hungry and kicking and making noise, demanding attention! I realized I didn’t know Nathan’s number and so I foraged about for my cell phone. He was still in the city, thank God. Hopefully I could catch him tonight before he went out for dinner. He’d been right; the hormones had been partly at play, but I’d also taken my fears out on him, and that wasn’t fair. He deserved an apology.

The phone rang out.
I checked the number and tried again, some of my excitement dimming. Frustration kicked in and I stared across at the menus, wondering if I should just order something and pick it up on the way home. Then I felt the restlessness low in my stomach I was galvanized anew to get in touch with him.  I called Rosalind in the end, in desperation, to find out what hotel he was staying in.

“He’s gone upstate,
Chloe,” Rosalind told me, her voice edged with concern. “To Vermont. Are you okay? Do you need me to come over?”

“No, sweetie, it’s fine.”
I felt warmed by my new friend’s concern. “Honestly I just felt the baby ... moving around, I guess. I just wanted to let him know-”

“Oh Lord, that’s so exciting!”
she said.

Rosalind’s screeched response was almost enough to assuage
my need to share in my happiness, but not quite. Armed with the contact information I needed, I finished up the brief, happy call and then picked up my desk phone to call the house at Vermont.

He’d gone upstate?
I supposed that was better than sticking around in a hotel all weekend. He was close enough to take care of his business concerns in the city the following week. It also meant that he wasn’t going to be overseeing the brownstone directly, I realized. I pictured some unimaginative, paid-by-the-hour decorator going in and ordering the best of everything. The place would be perfect in two weeks. Perfect, and soulless. I sighed to myself; our child would spend time growing up there. I suppose it would become a home eventually. My hand sat warmly against my stomach as I punched in the numbers, a pained, nervous smile on my face.

When the ringing stopped, a brief pause sounded.
My stomach cramped with anxiety.

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice sounded down the line. I hung up.

Chapter Seven

The doctor’s office was busy when I arrived. Nathan wasn’t there yet. I felt a stinging relief. The anticipation on seeing him never failed to increase my heartbeat, for good or for bad.  I took a seat by the window and set about composing myself. I’d been eleven weeks along the last time I’d seen him, and now I was eighteen weeks. That was a long time in a baby’s forming life. It felt like a long time in a pregnant woman’s life, too. I frowned out at the bleak winter view over the park and my hand instinctively rested against my slightly rounded stomach. Though I was showing, it was still perfectly coverable behind loose clothes. Today I wore an empire waist dress in deep red, my hair pulled up into a messy bun. I stared at the obviously pregnant women around me, wondering how I’d look in a few months’ time when there was no hiding the bump.

I
was tired. The last few weeks had worn on my energy levels. My appetite had waned and then re-emerged with a vengeance. I couldn’t eat enough and yet I was still losing weight; the baby seemed voraciously hungry all the time. I’d been keeping up with my workload, dealing with my regular responsibilities at work and otherwise, but the days had started to feel longer. This tiredness was different from the initial pregnancy exhaustion; it was psychological. My focus was changing, and it was exhausting trying to fight it.  I would find myself drifting off in meetings, planning the baby’s room in my apartment, wondering what Nathan was doing, or making a growing list of questions for my gynecologist. It was getting harder and harder to focus on the here and now. I was done with my old life and not yet ready to face the new one. And now here I was, in the middle of a workday, at the clinic for my mid-pregnancy scan, going through lists in my head for work, for the apartment, for the baby... I breathed out, hoping Nathan’s assistant had gotten my message. He’d be annoyed to miss this, even if he hadn’t been in touch with me in any real sense since our argument at his brownstone.

I
picked up a magazine and flicked through it. That wasn’t exactly true; he’d been in touch, but our communications had been brief, business-like and quite frosty, and all about the baby. He’d been supporting the band on tour in Europe, I’d heard. Rosalind had spent a few days with them in London; she had come back tight-lipped and uncomfortable. I had never mentioned it in detail, but her demeanor belied her knowledge that Nathan and I had had a pretty serious disagreement.

I
shifted in my seat, and my mind jumped around like a flea on a mattress. I still couldn’t believe he’d left me that Friday and literally within two days had found another woman to shack up with in Vermont. Apart from anything else, I loved that house – it was where the first tentative imaginings of a family had formed in my mind – and it was a stinging reminder of the status quo that Nathan would take another woman so easily, so thoughtlessly. I still felt a cold rage descend over me whenever I imagined him there with another woman. While to me the idea of being with another man at this stage in my life was repugnant, he saw nothing in sharing all of this with another woman. I tried to imagine what kind of thought process justified his behavior, but I just couldn’t reach it. If the incident had served any positive purpose, it had reminded me that I had no hold of my erstwhile lover. He did what he pleased, and always had done.

I
could barely recall our last argument without a feeling of humiliation. It was laughable, that he’d broken my one and only ground rule within forty-eight hours of it having been set. Clearly this woman had been on the scene already. Was that why he’d come back to New York that weekend? So much for Lauren’s advice about coming clean and being honest about what I wanted. Lauren hadn’t counted on Nathan’s utter obliviousness when she’d started lecturing me about being responsible. Well, at least it was all out in the open now. There was something almost comforting about one’s worst fear having been realized; it was done, past, and I could move on. I didn’t have to worry anymore, uselessly and desperately, about what this pregnancy would mean for my relationship with Nathan. The old relationship was dead; I wasn’t sure it had ever really existed except in my own mind. At least now I knew I could move on, and, when the time came, find someone new.

I
stared out at the bleak view. It seemed like it had been a long winter already. I longed to see buds on the trees, the return of the birds and the color in the park. I lowered my eyes. The doctor had predicted we would find out the baby’s sex today. Though I wasn’t very large, I was still within a normal weight category and the nurse measuring me the week before had predicted a good chance of seeing the fully developed fetus. Although I knew they were here to check a number of important things pertaining to the baby’s health, and mine, I was emotionally distracted by the realization that by the time I left I’d know if it was a boy or a girl. I felt a frisson of excitement every time I considered this; Lauren had crinkled her nose at the notion that I would want to know, but I couldn’t help but consider the fact that it would help with deciding on how to decorate the room, and which color clothes to buy, and toys…

I felt tears well behind my eyes and I blinked them back. It would help with a lot of things … including this sense of loneliness. It would introduce a real, living human being into my life who was as equally invested in this pregnancy as I was.

I wondered if I should tell everyone. Things could still go wrong. It was unthinkable, but at the same time, I wondered how difficult it would be dealing with the loss of real little boy or girl, instead of an undefined baby, in the face of all of that sympathy. Taking a deep breath, I cast the magazine down.

These dark thoughts
... Nathan had always been my light. Since forever he’d been the white to my black. I needed that old Nathan back, the one who only really existed in my mind. I missed my friend. As for this new Nathan … our relationship seemed beyond repair, and the future bleak. How were we going to manage after the baby was born if we couldn’t even have a civilized discussion? Was he going to make a habit of storming off for weeks on end when he didn’t get his own way? Christ – more to the point, how was I ever going to bear being in the same room with a man who couldn’t even deal with his responsibilities like a decent human being during the pregnancy? I could have convinced myself at one point that he was merely giving me breathing space, time to think, but now … if he cared for me at all he would have at least tried to call a truce, explain himself.

I
rocked back and forth mentally as though there were two warring personas in my brain. Why did I want that old Nathan back, exactly, anyway? What I needed in my life right now was stability, predictability. Reliability. Nathan turned me into a box of emotional fireworks; I just never knew what was going to go off, when! Every time I thought about our last discussion … where did he get off calling me unreasonable when he didn’t have the maturity to deal with a simple argument? It took a special kind of selfish to turn straight to another woman in the wake of my perceived rejection. I needed him back in my life the same way I needed a smack to the head.

“You’ve got that look on your face again.”

I glanced up. My chest contracted painfully. Nathan was standing by my chair. My eyes combed his features, from the shadow on his jaw to the slight flush across his high cheekbones. He’d been rushing to get here, I decided, meeting his gaze reluctantly. My stomach lurched and I realized I was hungry again. Nausea kicked in.

I
chose not to take the branch his familiar comment had offered.

It took him a few seconds to work that out. His tone stiffened. “How’re you feeling?”

“Okay.” I placed my bag to one side to let him sit. “Hungry. I don’t suppose you have anything to eat on you?”

A glimmer of a smile shone in the depths of his eyes. “I saw a vending machine out in the hall. What do you want?”

“Chips.”

He came back within two minutes, brandishing three different varieties of potato chips.
I took the largest packet, opening it and beginning to eat wordlessly.  It was like feeding a machine.

“How long you been waiting?”
he asked.

I
shrugged. “Not long. It’s pretty busy, though.”

“You look well.” His eyes zeroed in on
my stomach. “A little on the skinny side, but I can see a bump.”

“He, or
she, is hungry all the time.” I said. I sighed, still eating. “I guess we’ll find out about the he or she thing today.”

“Are you working too much?”

“Of course I am.” I smiled, feeling some satisfaction when the tiny dagger hit its mark; his expression hardened. Wasn’t he at all curious about the baby’s sex? “What about you?”

“So, so.”

“How was Europe?” I asked.

“Australia,” he corrected. “
Europe was weeks ago, and to answer your question, it was a blur.” His gaze narrowed on me. “It’s bloody freezing here. I can’t believe I was on the beach yesterday in Malibu. The sea was warmer than this room.”

“Lucky you.”
I picked up the magazine I’d discarded earlier and placed the chips aside. Slight warmth circulating on my cheeks betrayed a silent admission to making such a childish and petty comment, but I squashed it mentally. I’d been bustling around in the stinging cold feeling awful for the last few weeks; why shouldn’t I resent his perfect life?

I inhaled in an effort to calm my now erratic heartbeat. Damn him, but he also smelled annoyingly good. I could almost taste that familiar woody, masculine flavor, so different from my own. Out of the corner of my eye, his leg, clad in black jeans, vibrated to the same, overactive tune he always heard in his head. A heavy watch – new – glinted against the firm, hair-spattered skin on his wrist while his fingers tapped out a silent beat.

I
forced my eyes back to the page, the text merging together in a nonsense script. Outside my medical visits I hadn’t been touched in months. It was impossible to stop myself from imagining those determined, confident hands stroking across my skin, as they had so many times before. To think I’d lain in that bed with him, the first night in Vermont, with his solid wall of heat behind me, holding me, and I’d wasted the opportunity. Wasted the chance to explore that hard, vital body with mine ... why hadn’t I taken advantage while I could have, before everything had become so ... complicated, and final?

I
gave myself a mental shake. What the hell was I thinking? It was stunning how just mere proximity to him could scramble my brain. He seemed to ooze sex chemicals. Over the top of the page I became aware of inactivity in the room. When I glanced up I realized that at least half of the women in the room were staring at him, including the staff. That old feeling of possessiveness reared up in me.

I
reined it in. They were welcome to him.

“Ms Stewart?”

I only heard my name after Nathan touched my arm. Rebounding from the sensation snaking its way across my skin, I blinked at the nurse. The woman had obviously said my name more than once, if her amused expression was any indication.

“Yes.”
I stood up. “Yes, that’s me.”

“Is your husband coming with you?”

I turned and stared at Nathan. There was a muted question in his dark expression, and some amusement.

I
turned back to the nurse. “We’re not married.”

The
nurse shrugged, as well she might. I wondered why I’d felt the need to clarify that when she said, “You can have whoever you want in the room with you. Whatever makes you comfortable…”

I
inhaled involuntarily and turned to him. “Do you want to come?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “
That’s what I’m here for.”

Of course he was.
I felt the heat in my cheeks expand. Why else would he be here? He was here to see the baby, not to support me, I reminded myself. I nodded and followed the nurse, inwardly berating myself for the slip. Things had changed. I had to stop falling back on the notion that he was still my best friend.

“Well,
there’s no need to look so distraught,” Doctor Goldberg told me as we entered the examination room. “It’s only an ultrasound.” She patted my arm comfortingly and shook Nathan’s hand. “You’ll have enough baby blues to deal with after the birth. You should be enjoying this!”

Plastering a smile on
my face, I allowed the nurse to lead me out of the room to get changed.

“A boy.” Nathan sat across from me in the park some forty-five minutes later, his breath coming out in bulbous clouds of freezing cold air. His expression was dazed.

Despite his obliviousness, I still felt pressure in my chest; some repressed angry emotion that refused to be quashed. There were so many things still to decide that I had to repress it further, reason beyond it.

I took a deep breath. “Are we going to tell people?” I asked him.

He turned to me. “Tell them what?”

“That it’s a boy. That we’re expecting a boy.”

“Why wouldn’t we?” he asked, his tone surprised.

I swallowed back the fluttering in my throat. “Because … You know, Nathan, things can still go wrong. I’m only half way through the second trimester. Dealing with…” I looked away from him, taking a deep breath of the frigid air. “If anything happened, it might be harder to deal with if everyone knows-”