I take the bottle to the couch and look at the others, noticing something. “Wait,” I say. “Where are your babies?”
Francie is silent, but then something changes in her expression. She seems to compose herself. “It’s girls’ day,” she says, sitting down beside me, her eyes on Joshua. “Remember? We said no babies. Right, Nell?”
“Girls’ day?” I tug down the fabric of the baby carrier and prod the nipple into Joshua’s mouth. “Sounds fun. I must have missed that e-mail. I just hope you’re not hungry. This meeting is unexpected.”
Colette moans from the kitchen floor, and I see that Nell is pressing one of my good hand towels into the wound at her side. “Did you bring your muffins?” I ask Colette.
Nell’s face is chalky. “Her muffins?”
“Isn’t that her thing? She brings the muffins, the rest of us bring the ennui.” Joshua squirms at my chest, and I pull the bottle from his mouth. He lets out a burp. Barely a burp, but it will do. I stand to make a note of it in my notebook but then decide to sit back down. I’ll do it later, after they leave.
“Well, how about some coffee?” Francie asks.
“Coffee? What about the clogged duct? I told you caffeine just makes it worse.”
“I know. I gave up. Formula feeding now.”
“Formula? Really? That’s too bad.” Joshua is watching me, and I know there’s no use in continuing to avoid his eyes. Right away I see the scolding look, the anger. He so resembles his father right now. Asking me how I let this happen, why I haven’t done a better job of avoiding this, like I promised I would. I look away. “Coffee? Let’s see.”
I walk back into the narrow kitchen and open the cupboards. “Nope. I’ve already packed the coffeepot. Lactation tea will have to do. Now where are the mugs?”
I start the water and rifle through a box in front of the door, spotting the tacky Cape Cod Is for Lovers cup Dr. H bought me as a joke at a rest stop during our first weekend away together two years ago. The first time we had sex somewhere other than the floor of his office, the white noise machine turned as high as possible, in case his next patient arrived early. The weekend he first said he was in love with me, and long before I discovered what a monster he could be.
I unearth a jar of unopened pickles and a can of black beans in the back of the cupboard. I pop open the pickles, pour the beans into a clean bowl, and when the water is ready, I carry them to the coffee table with the tea.
“Looks great,” Francie says, but her face doesn’t register appreciation for my efforts. Knowing her, she’s judging me for not having baked something. She takes her tea. “Now, as you know, we have a certain way of starting these meetings,” she says.
“You mean my birth story?” I laugh. “That was my idea, wasn’t it?”
Francie nods. “And since you’re hosting, you should go.”
I urge Joshua to accept the pacifier clipped to his shirt. “Well, I delivered on Mother’s Day. I lay down for a nap—”
“No,” Francie interrupts. “Before that. Start with the pregnancy.”
“Oh, okay. Let’s see. So, Dr. H didn’t want any more kids. He claims I tricked him, but I was on the pill. I’m the one percent.” I laugh. “Not that one percent. The other one. The one the birth control package warns you about.”
“Dr. H?”
“My psychiatrist. Joshua’s dad. I called him my boyfriend once.” I cringe, remembering that moment at the bar in Queens, next to the hotel where we’d sometimes meet. “My boyfriend will have another whiskey sour,” I told the bartender, a woman in her seventies, plastic earrings dangling from her stretched lobes, a Styrofoam cup swimming with cigarette butts between the dusty bottles of flavored vodka behind her.
She turned to make the drink, and he seethed beside me. “Don’t ever call me that again,” he whispered in my ear, his hand gripping my thigh, leaving five purple dots I discovered later that night as I undressed for him. “We’re not a pair of fucking teenagers.”
“He’s married,” I tell Francie. “But we were together for two years.” I roll my eyes. “You know, on and off.”
Francie nods. “Is he the one parking the car right now? Your husband?”
“Hmmmm?” Oh right. I’d said that earlier. “No. I don’t have a husband.”
“So Dr. H—”
“We haven’t spoken in months, since I told him I was going to keep Joshua. He’s kind of nuts. Narcissistic personality disorder, if you ask me. It makes it hard for people to love others. I learned about it from him, in fact. The only person your father was capable of loving was himself. That’s what Dr. H always said, but swear to god, he could have been talking about himself.” I’m surprised to feel a lump growing in my throat. This isn’t easy to talk about.
“Anyway, my parents weren’t the best role models, and I wasn’t planning on kids. But then Joshua came along, and I never wanted anything more. From the minute he showed up as a pink plus sign between two thin sheets of plastic, I knew him.”
I rub Joshua’s back, thinking about those days, how joyful they were, feeling him growing inside me. Reading him books in the bathtub. Taking him for walks in the morning to the new playground, promising to bring him back one day. I’d walk barefoot through the sand pit, envisioning him collecting rocks, learning to climb trees. All the things kids are supposed to do. “He was such an active little guy. Such a kicker. Always telling me what he wanted.” I laugh as I tip another stream of sugar into my tea. “Remember how they talked to us from inside?”
I can see by the empty expression on Francie’s face that I’ve veered off topic. “Sorry. Dr. H always said I talk too much and risk boring people to death.” I press my fingers to my temples, trying to huddle my thoughts into order, to concentrate on what I’m saying, and not on the way Joshua is looking at me.
“Stay focused, Scarlett,” I say. I smile at Francie. “I had a very specific birth plan. You know, no epidural, skin-to-skin contact, sprinkle him with organic fairy dust but don’t clean him off before giving him to me. The thing is, nobody seemed to care about my plan. Before I could even hold him, they’d taken him away to that little table thing, with all the lights and wires.
“I can’t remember the doctor’s name, but I can hear her yelling something—barking orders at people. Then she was attaching wires, wheeling him out of the room, not even letting me see his face—to see if he looked the way I’d been imagining he would.” The other doctor was there then, telling me I needed to be stitched up where I’d torn. You need to lie down, Mom. We need to take care of you first.
“Would you like a pickle?” I extend the jar to Francie. “No? Nell?” Nell’s eyes are swollen. She shakes her head. “Anyway, hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy. That’s what a doctor told me. In other words, he suffocated during the delivery. Or, in even other words, fetal demise. Fetal demise. Doesn’t that sound like it should be the name of a female punk band?” I begin to laugh and find that I have a hard time stopping. “Sorry,” I eventually say. “I don’t think this is funny at all. To be honest, I’m so racked with guilt. I was so careful during my pregnancy. I did everything I could to keep him safe. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t mean to hurt him—”
Francie touches my leg. “Scarlett. It wasn’t anything you—”
“Anyway,” I say, standing up and walking away from the pity in her face. “Another woman came in to ask me if I wanted to hold my son before they took him away. I didn’t know if I wanted to hold him. ‘Is that what people do?’ I asked her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Closure.’ That’s the word she used. Someone had thought to put a hat on him, before they brought him to me. As if we still had the luxury of worrying that he might be cold.”