July 16, 1997 Egg Harbor
I told my stepmother about the baby today. I didn’t mean to; it just happened. We were on the phone when she asked—as she had so many times in the past—“How much longer are we going to have to wait for you and Aaron to have a baby?” and it wasn’t so much that I told her, because I didn’t, but it was the lack of a response that gave it away, the silence, because I was too busy beaming behind the handset, trying to no avail to manufacture a lie.
If Nora could have seen me, she would have noticed the way my skin turned pink; she, like Aaron, would have seen the way I glowed. She would have seen me run a delicate hand across the cotton of my blouse—a link to the life inside—and triumphantly smile.
She said nothing at first, nothing in response to my nothing.
“When were you thinking you’d tell us?” she asked then with the slightest hint of malice—Nora, of course, needs to be the first to know everything—followed immediately by “Does Aaron’s mother already know?” and there was jealousy and skepticism in her voice long before she offered her congratulations and said how happy she is for Aaron and me.
I called Aaron’s mother next before Nora had a chance to call for herself, boasting that she knew a whole thirty seconds before Aaron’s mother did.
It was like a wildfire then, that instant burst of pregnancy news that caught quickly, spreading through the family from phone call to phone call like a raging inferno. By the end of the day, nearly everyone would know our news.
Miranda arrived as Aaron’s mother and I were saying goodbye, and catching a glimpse of my hand still situated on the cotton of my blouse, she said to me, “It’s about goddamn time, Eden.”
And then she hugged me, a quick, careless hug, sending her boys into the backyard to play alone so she could lie on my sofa and rest. Little Carter didn’t want to go; he, himself, was still a baby, and so she picked him up and plopped him in Jack’s arms and said again to go and we stood there, watching them walk away, listening as Carter cried. She was massive again, still months away from giving birth to baby number four, and the evidence of it was everywhere: in her tired eyes, her unwashed hair, her inflated legs.
Pregnancy did not suit Miranda well.
Her maternity shirts no longer fit correctly, leaving a fraction of her stomach exposed, ashy skin drawn tightly around her baby, a black, vertical line etched on her body from belly button down. Miranda herself didn’t have a pregnancy glow, but rather was covered in blotchy brown spots all over her skin; the hormones were not working in her favor.
“Just wait until you’re as fat as me,” she said, seeing the way I watched her drop onto the sofa, a giraffe making an ungainly attempt to sit.
“Well I have news too,” she said then, as if she couldn’t stand me being happy, as if she couldn’t take a back seat to my glad tidings for once. “We’re going to have a girl!” she screeched, clapping her own hands, going on to say how—though Joe didn’t know it yet—she’d had a peek at her medical file when the obstetrician was out of the room during her last appointment, and there, in the margins of the paperwork, saw the Venus symbol written with black ink.
“Finally,” she said, frowning out the window at her three boys, fifty-pound Jack lugging twenty-pound Carter around, Carter who still cried. “After everything I’ve been through,” she said, and I wanted to be happy for her, I really did.
But I couldn’t bring myself to be.
She didn’t deserve another baby any more than a murderer deserves clemency.
I was grateful when, an hour later, Paul wet himself and they had to leave.
Aaron had wanted to keep the news of our pregnancy a secret for a while longer, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops, to let everyone in the whole entire universe know that I was going to be a mother. “Why wait?” I asked later that afternoon as he prepared for work. I frowned at him, feeling punctured that he would want to keep our baby a secret. We’d spent a year trying to achieve this, watched our lives and our marriage flounder to make a baby, drained our savings and accrued mass amounts of debt on our credit cards.
And yet I couldn’t be happier. I couldn’t be more thrilled.
This was the one thing that I wanted more than anything. More than anything.
I wanted everyone to know about it.
“Just in case,” Aaron replied when I asked why we should keep our baby a secret, why we should wait to share the news.
“In case what?” I asked, provoking him, but he wouldn’t say the words out loud. He was being cautiously optimistic, I knew, but what I wanted was for him to be jubilant like me. He stood before me in the kitchen, slipping his feet into a pair of new shoes, waterproof, slip-proof black loafers that cost us an arm and a leg. But none of that mattered now, not trivial things like the cost of groceries, the cost of shoes.
We were going to have a baby.
He stood and came to me, wrapping his arms around the small of my back, and I breathed him in, the scent of his aftershave and soap because Aaron, of course, didn’t wear cologne. His hands were rough from years of hard work, the scrubbing of dishes, the scalding sauces that bubbled over onto his hands, burning them. The many near misses with a utility knife. The gashes and lacerations, healed now but always there. Aaron’s hands were rough and worn, but also the softest things in the world to me as they slipped under the hemline of my blouse and stroked my bare skin.
He wouldn’t say the words out loud, but he didn’t have to.
I knew exactly what he was thinking.
“We saw our baby,” I told him, whispering the words into his ear. “We saw the heartbeat. Everything is fine.”
jessie
I’m out the door early, hurrying to the side of the carriage home to collect my bike, but when I arrive, I see that she’s gone. That she’s not there. That the spot where I left her last night is completely empty.
There’s a moment of panic.
Someone has stolen Old Faithful from me.
My heart picks up speed, my face warming with frustration and anger and fear. I look up and down the alleyway as my heart sinks. For a minute, tears well in my eyes. I could cry.
But then I remember leaving Old Faithful tethered to the bike rack outside the Art Institute. No one has taken her from me. I left her there.
I take the Brown Line out to Albany Park, getting off at Kimball. From there it’s a walk to Mom’s and my old home, a classic Chicago-style bungalow that’s boxy and brick with a low-pitched roof on a street where every single home is a replica of the next. The desperation has gotten under my skin now, a do-or-die need to find my birth certificate, to find my social security card, to figure out who the hell I am. I need to make a final sweep of the home to see if there’s anything there, anything I may have missed. Because the estate sale will kick off soon, and then it will be too late. Everything that was once mine will be gone.