“God bless you,” Dr. Magee says. Her hands smell like hand lotion and latex from the powder-free exam gloves she wore while examining me. Some people, like her, naturally ooze sympathy. She takes my rough hands into hers.
“How bad is it?” I ask, gritting my teeth, knowing she must’ve found something really bad down there. Although I’m better than yesterday, antibiotic-resistant infections are a leading cause of death in hospitals. Everyone knows this. People walk into emergency rooms all the time with minor mishaps—sprained ankles or a bad cold—and hobble out with untreatable staph infections or communicable hepatitis. “I must be in pretty bad shape if you’re already invoking God to protect me.”
“You’re going to be fine. We’ll still need to keep you here a few more days, but you’re healing, and the infection shows signs of improvement.”
I should be elated, but Dr. Magee glances to my parents, a glance only I can see, and frowns. She pities me, and it’s humiliating, once again being an object of pity. It was the same when I was a kid—everyone in Oyster’s Edge, our small town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, would look at me with pity when they saw me with my parents. Ever since meeting Jimmy, I’ve felt special, like a someone. It’s impossible not to be messed up big time after being locked up in juvenile detention, but Jimmy helped me push aside my hopelessness. Meeting him, I made the decision to be normal again. To be trusting. To be pure. People would see me with him, and I’d watch their esteem for me rise. I wasn’t just another young twentysomething wallowing in downward expectations and a going-nowhere waitressing gig but an intelligent young woman worthy of a middle-class life. Slowly, I became someone I wanted to be. Someone capable of applying to grad programs—psychology or social work—that would lead to a career of helping girls like me.
“It’s . . . how to say this?” Dr. Magee says. She’s maybe a decade older than me, but as she strokes her chin Einstein-like, it’s like she’s the personification of Wisdom. “We have counselors on staff, people who can connect you with social services and WIC benefits. Do you understand?”
My cheeks burn with shame. I’m not in anywhere near as bad a predicament as Dr. Magee assumes, and it feels unfair—no, horrible—to be characterized like this. I’m no charity basket case aspiring for food stamps or a sometimes placement in a homeless shelter. I have a college degree. I have hope for a decent future. I have a man who loves me. But it stings, being mistaken for someone too stupid and irresponsible to take care of herself.
My father glares at me after the doctors and nurses vamoose. He taps his fingers against the veneer table on the opposite side of my bed, a rat-a-tat-tat rendition of “Taps” to ratchet up my indignation. “You heard that: you’re in a tough position. Let’s be smart about this. You aren’t in any shape to raise a kid by yourself. You know that. Adoption or orphanages aren’t bad things. Plenty of kids go that route, and some of them end up okay.”
“Dad. Shut up, will you?” I say, shocked. All my life, my father’s always assumed the worst things possible about me. We haven’t seen each other in years; he doesn’t know anything about me. “I’m not giving up Zerena. I love her more than anyone I’ve loved in my life.”
Tully slaps his forehead, shakes his head as if I’m either too flighty or just plain stupid. “Honey, don’t you know love’s expensive? How are you going to afford a rug rat?”
My mother weeps in the recliner. Her sandal in her hand, she fingers the remaining petals on the pink plastic flower. My parents don’t know about Jimmy and the happiness he brings to my life. They don’t know about this incredible bond I feel with Zerena. They don’t know about the riverside apartment Jimmy bought for me or the nursery in that apartment Jimmy hand painted and furnished with a crib, stuffed animals aplenty, a changing table, and an old-fashioned cane rocking chair on which I’ll spend warm, harmonious hours rocking Zerena to sleep each night.
“I hear you, Laurel,” my mother says in a voice so quiet my slightly deaf father cannot possibly hear. She tears off a plastic flower petal from her sandal and pinches it between her fingers. Sometime in the past, perhaps with me or perhaps at the announcement of an unwanted pregnancy she never told me about, my mother might have heard the same lecture from my father. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. We’ll think of something to do with your baby. Don’t worry.”
Jimmy knocks on the door, catching my eye, a generous smile on his face. He’s a tall, cheerful, broad-shouldered man, a proud new father eager to see his family, a prosperous man in a magnificent blue pinstripe suit and polished black wingtips. Though glitches remain in our relationship, he’ll love me, cherish me, be an awesome father to Zerena. He strides past my father, kisses me on the lips, and sweeps Zerena up into his arms, hugging her. The excitement is too much for Zerena. There’s a smile on her lips, zazz in her cobalt-blue eyes. Hard as it is to believe, I sense Jimmy loves Zerena even more than I do. I can’t imagine my father ever whirling me about with the same glee when I was a baby. And yet, watching Jimmy, I’m reminded about Tricia’s warning—that Jimmy’s not the responsible person I think he is. Can that be true? Will he one day punch a hole in the wall of some trailer if he ever finds out Zerena spilled a glass of milk? Can any man be as good as you think he is?
But one thing’s for sure: we’re not going to give Zerena up. We’re not going to put her up for adoption or abandon her in a wicker basket on the steps of an orphanage. She’s ours.
Jimmy sways around the room with her, kissing her again and again, and my parents are flabbergasted. In Jimmy’s hands, Zerena looks as if she is the craziest, coolest toy ever to come into his possession. She giggles. Delight in a baby is an amazing thing to behold. But then Zerena wet burps on him, a dollop of regurgitated mother’s milk spitting from her lips onto the lapel of Jimmy’s gorgeous blue suit. Jimmy’s eyes widen. He sniffs the dollop. His nostrils flare at its scent, and I can’t help but think he’s going to show me an angry side of him I’ve never seen before, but then he shrugs and looks at me with no hint of reproach. He doesn’t let little things derail his emotions. Fingering the white goo, he laughs. “Isn’t this the damnedest thing?”
“Believe it or not, the lactation consultant told me that’s perfectly normal,” I say. “It’s called ‘reflux.’ As long as it doesn’t happen all the time and as long as she’s not burping up, like, gallons of it, we shouldn’t be concerned.”
My parents, speechless, stare at Jimmy. He’s suspicious too, wondering who they might be, but gentleman that he is, he broadens his smile. With each sweep around the room, he glances at them as if trying to place them, but finally, handing Zerena back to me, he bends down and whispers, “Hey, who are these people? They give me the creeps.”
I’ve not mentioned my parents to Jimmy. Ever. Partly because I wanted to forget them but also because I feared they’d be a deal breaker in our relationship, a pair of baggage-laden straws objectionable enough to break any camel’s back. Jimmy is all about class, and though they might be clean and sober now, there’s nothing classy about my parents. Taking a deep breath, I cringe. “Jimmy. That’s my father, Tully. And my mother. Her name’s Belinda. They came down to see Zerena.”
Jimmy scrunches his brows. “Zerena?”
“Anne Elise,” I say, correcting myself, for this is still another conversation we need to have, for she’s way more Zerena-ish than Anne Elise-ish. Zerena’s the name of an adventurer, a superhero, a warrior princess—not an old-fashioned stay-at-home do-nothing name like Anne Elise.
“Your parents, you say? These are your parents?”