“You can do that?” I ask, incredulous. The purpose of security devices is to protect the baby. Handing them out willy-nilly to everyone defeats their purpose, but then I remember she thinks I’m Laurel’s mother. A woman as kindhearted and helpful as Lois Belcher must do this for every grandmother she meets.
We stop at a computer at the nurse’s station. Lois Belcher asks for my personal information—legal name, address, birth date, social security number. She swipes my driver’s license into a yellow digital scanner the size of a baseball and then directs my attention to a computer monitor, where all this information appears. I press “Enter,” verifying the accuracy of everything. She pulls out a KISS bracelet from the pocket of her hospital smock, scans it into the machine. A minute later, Lois Belcher wraps the bracelet around my wrist.
“To activate it, press it against Anne Elise’s bracelet within the next sixty minutes,” Lois Belcher says.
“How will I know if I do it right?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll know!” Lois Belcher says and then excuses herself so she can go on her rounds and help the ward’s other new moms cope with the demands of breastfeeding.
Peering into Laurel’s room, I spy Anne Elise nestled on Laurel’s lap atop the bed. Out of all the babies in this ward, she alone remains quiet, calm. Unaware she’s being watched, Laurel coos to Anne Elise, her high-pitched squeals cute and goofy, and I’m filled with the desire to do the same: rush in and snatch Anne Elise from Laurel so that I too could bring delight to Anne Elise. A coo, a funny face, kind words, and maybe a kiss. I could do it, too: I could be Anne Elise’s mother.
Laurel’s hair is undone and unwashed. I doubt she’s showered since stepping foot in the hospital. Without makeup, her face is the plain-Jane visage of the gal-pal character in a television sitcom, someone integral enough to the show’s plot to be granted a few compassionate lines of dialogue in each episode but anonymous enough that the show’s producers would never think of building romantic scenes around her. Her eyes, though large, are set slightly too wide apart, her flat nose a tad broad. Not for the first time do I wonder what James thought when they first met. Had he been drinking? Did he look across a smoky bar with beer-goggle eyes?
Laurel’s focus is totally on Anne Elise. She doesn’t notice me until I’m standing next to her bed, my shadow looming over her. She shields Anne Elise from me with her arm, her hand covering the baby’s eyes as if I’m something she never wants Anne Elise to see, and the IV tubing connected to her arm pulls tight, causing the stainless steel IV stand that holds her IV bag to roll a few inches on its caster wheels.
“What are you doing here?” Laurel asks, instinctually distrusting me. She pulls Anne Elise closer, sits up a few inches higher on the bed. “Who let you in here? Did Jimmy send you?”
“Your baby’s so adorable,” I say, unable to take my eyes off Anne Elise. Like a magnet, I feel instinctively drawn to her. “Can I hold her?”
“No. Of course not.”
“I’ll be gentle. I’ll hold her tight and secure.”
“He sent you, didn’t he? Why did he send you?”
James, I surmise, hasn’t called Laurel since walking out of this room yesterday, and for a moment, I sympathize with her. She isn’t the beatific young mother of a Renaissance painting but a confused young woman with bloodshot eyes wrapped up in the most emotionally charged situation of her life. In her own way, she’s like me: trapped in a predicament not entirely within her command to change. James, her lover, the man who only yesterday asked to divorce me so he could devote his life to her and the baby, hasn’t so much as called her. She’s probably only now realizing what a cad he is and what a mess she’s in.
“He was with me last night,” I say, settling into the recliner beside her bed that is neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. Technically, what I say is true: soon after I led him upstairs, James flung off his clothes and passed out on our bed beside me. Laurel’s expression deflates from defiant combativeness into outrage. “He was with me last night, enjoying my comforts. You may think, Laurel, that I’m nothing but—what? A dried-up bitch?—but I can assure you there’s nothing dried up about me. Ask James, if you like.”
Laurel’s mouth opens a notch. She gulps.
“So how’s your episiotomy healing?”
Laurel looks up at me with horror and embarrassment. I can only imagine how painful the wound, the incisions, must be and how discomforting it must be for her to talk to a near stranger about something so intimate and private. “You know about my episiotomy? How’d you know about my episiotomy?”
“Laurel. Laurel. Laurel.” Clearly, I’ve struck a nerve with her; right now, I’m so thankful Lois Belcher gave me the ammunition to get under her skin. “There’s one thing you should know about me: nothing gets past me.”
Laurel removes her protective hand from Anne Elise and wipes the tears forming in her eyes. Anne Elise, flashing a dimpled smile, must think it’s a game of peek-a-boo, her mother’s hand blinding her eyes one moment, and then, when the hand lifts, she sees the brightness of the room—and me. Her eyes so radiantly blue, her abundantly blonde hair softer than corn silk, she bedazzles.
“Your daughter. Anne Elise. She’s smiling at me.”
“Newborns don’t smile. If she looks like she’s smiling, it’s because she’s passing gas. That’s what doctors told me. So how does that feel? Knowing the merest glimpse of you makes an innocent baby fart? I pity you.”
I laugh. “You? You pity me?”
Laurel wraps her free hand around the railing of her hospital bed. She’s bigger than I am, a woman who probably had her share of girl fights over the years. Color rises in her pale face, an unsightly vein throbbing at her temples, but she’s a cooler cucumber than I thought, for she doesn’t launch into the kind of visceral verbal attack I expect. She pulls Anne Elise to her chest, turns her around so she no longer faces me. “I pity you because you wanted a baby but can have none. I pity you because you wanted a husband and are realizing you can’t have the husband you wanted. I pity you because, very soon, you’re only going to have your money to keep you company at night. And money, let me tell you, is no substitute for a loving man. Or a baby.”
I sink into the recliner. It’s the same recliner James was supposed to sleep in last night. The room becomes silent, leaving me to contemplate Laurel’s icy assessment. She has identified my weakness: my futile desire to be like she is—a mother. She looks toward the window and the snowy grounds outside the hospital and then undoes the sash to her robe. As if she were a magnet drawn to metal, Anne Elise attaches herself to Laurel’s breast, and the sound Anne Elise makes, a gentle slup slup slup as she’s gulping down the milk, is both just about the cutest sound I’ve ever heard and the most painful.
“I’m going to be the world’s greatest mother,” Laurel says, and then I see the glow on her cheeks and the caring way she glances down at her daughter. She’s a woman like I would have been if I, too, had a baby at my breast. Every woman must go into motherhood with the same intention: to nurture her child with love and adoration. That’s what I wanted to do. I, too, wanted to feel what it was like to be generous.
“I’m going to be a way better mother than my mother was to me.”
Birds chirp outside the suite’s window, a rare sound during the winter months.
“Were your parents pretty bad?” I ask, amazed that she’s revealed this much to me.
Laurel glances toward the window, where a red-breasted robin perches on the brick windowsill just outside her window, and in the way she purses her lips, I sense regret. “You have no idea how bad they were.”