The waitress appears with our salads. Mine is seaweed and shavings of cucumber, which looks like a pile of green spaghetti. John’s salad is red somehow. I find myself ordering both steak and lobster and wondering if the waitress will faint if I ask for a doggy bag at the end of the meal. Before she leaves, she asks John if he would like another martini. He hesitates and says no but to ask again after the entrées have arrived.
After she leaves, we look at each other. Our conversation was interrupted at a point where it does not need to be continued. We both know how he abandoned Finny again. We both know he didn’t attend graduation or reach out all summer. We both know how the story ends.
“I don’t want to feel like I’m selling my child to you,” I finally say.
He closes his blue eyes and nods. “The more I think about it, the more I see how it was a desperate and manipulative move, Autumn. To dangle money that by rights should belong to your child anyway. That’s why I brought the papers today. The money is yours and the baby’s, even if you choose to never see me after this.” He takes a briefcase from under the table and pulls out a manila envelope and sets it on the corner of the table.
“Thank you,” I say. I’m still unsure whether I can trust him. Perhaps this is still a manipulation.
“Whatever you can give me,” he says, “I’ll take it. And if you never want me to know your child, I’ll accept that. All I ask is that today, you stay for this lunch and tell me about my son.”
“Tell you about Finny?”
He swallows, and his eyes are beginning to look wet.
“I’ve been meeting with different people who knew him. I’ve been taking notes and even recording some of the conversations. I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with his soccer coach and a couple of his teammates.” He reaches back into the briefcase and pulls out a much larger file that he opens and flips through. “I’ve met with teachers, some from all the way back to elementary school, who’ve given me insights into his character. There’ve even been classmates and parents who’ve started reaching out to me with stories, and then Sylvia Whitehouse and I—” He glances up at me.
“How is she?” I ask.
“Healing,” he says. “I hope you know she hopes the same for you.”
“I’m honestly surprised that she doesn’t hate me,” I say. “It seems like she should.”
“She is incredibly mature beyond her years,” John says. “She told me that she understood what I meant about looking back and knowing I was lying to myself about Phineas, because when she looked back, she always knew she was standing in the way of you two.”
“If you see her again, tell her that we were standing in our own way. And I’m glad to know that she’s healing.”
He nods, and I can see that he’s wondering whether he’ll ever see me again.
“I’m going to need those stories that you’re collecting,” I tell him. “And Jack’s been working to get all sorts of pictures from people. Maybe we could put them together as a book for the baby.”
“Phineas always said that you were an amazing writer.”
“Well, for authenticity, we should try to keep the original voices as much as possible, but I can edit for clarity, maybe help with the timelines,” I say. “I think your insight into how the mythology of a good father can help shape a child will be very helpful to this project.”
When the waitress comes with our entrées, John doesn’t order another martini. There isn’t space at the table anyway with all the documents spread out. Together we build another inheritance for Phineas’s child.
fourteen
“Autumn, your lips are blue,” Mom says to me. “You’re going to alarm the technician when they arrive.”
We’re waiting for the ultrasound to begin. Mom has already grabbed a white towel and is running water on it.
“Claire, that’s to wipe the gel off her afterward,” Aunt Angelina says.
“You need to let me finish this first.” I hold up the precious candy packet that Finny bought me those few long months ago.
At first, I had planned on hoarding them forever, running my hands through them like a miser with gold coins. But one day, the craving hit me. My body was demanding the colored sugar powder. My body needed it for the baby; that’s what it was telling me. Perhaps it was the baby telling me it needed it. And even though I knew what Finny, the almost premed student, would have said (“The flaw in that theory is the lack of nutritional value, Autumn.”), I also knew that if he were alive, he would have been reading up on the topic, and he would have learned that what the mother eats can influence the flavor of the amniotic fluid in the womb. He would have to concede that maybe, on some level, my body was telling me to give the baby a treat.
Imagining that conversation made me cry, and as I wept and ate the candy powder, I went through and counted the rest of the packets. To affect the fluid, I’d probably need to eat a whole strip of the packets at a time, and I had enough to do that once a week.
That’s why it’s important that I finish this last blue packet before the technician comes; it’s my way of sharing Finny’s gift with our baby.
Mom advances with the wet cloth, and I flinch away from her.
“Mom—”
“Hello! Hello!” A woman in scrubs bustles into the room.
“She doesn’t have heart failure. She was eating candy,” Mom says.
Angelina sighs and rubs her forehead.
“I’m done now!” I say, because I am and because I realize how childlike I look in this situation. I grab the cloth from Mom’s hand and wipe my mouth.
“We’ll need to get another towel for you later,” the technician says as she sits down with a grunt.
“Sorry,” I say. “I have these cravings.”
“It’s fine. There are more towels in the cupboard. My name is Jackie, and I’ll be the technician doing the main scan, and then your doctor will come and meet with you, go over any images if need be. Is this your first time?”
“Oh, I mean, of course?” I say, blushing.
“Oh honey. I’ve seen a few your age with their third on the way. Why don’t you go ahead and lie back—there you go. And pull your shirt up—perfect.” She turns to look at the screen in front of her and presses keys on the machine. “The way I see it, it doesn’t matter how old you are when you have your kids or how many you have, just as long as you can take care of them. Okay, to confirm a few things, you are Davis, Autumn R., born on nine-two-eight…”
After a few more questions and the cold spurt of bluish clear gel on my ever-expanding belly, Jackie looks at me and gives me a smile that is genuinely excited for me.
“Are you ready to see your baby?” she asks.
Mom and Aunt Angelina squeal harmoniously in the corner as I whisper, “I’m ready.”
The wand presses firmly into my bump. There’s a swirl of black and white on the screen, and then—
“There it is,” Jackie says. “Posing for the camera already. I should get this shot before they move. That’s the keepsake right there.” She mumbles to herself, and I hear the clack of the keyboard. I even hear The Mothers crying over my shoulder, but in another way, it’s all very distant.
Finny, I tell him. That’s our baby. I swallow the lump in my throat as if I were actually saying the words to him. We really did make a baby.
The leg—their leg, our baby’s leg—kicks, and I feel the flutter, the one I’ve been so unsure about all these weeks.
I’ve been feeling our baby move, Finny.
“I’ve saved that one to print. It’s time for me to start doing my job. I’m going to move over here and start taking some measurements of the head and brain…”
She alternates between ignoring me as she works and explaining what she’s doing. A few times, she points out the clearer images for me to see, like the gentle curve of the spine and the feet tucked together with all ten toes.
The Mothers are still crying a bit, but it’s mostly happy whispering now. I told them that I both wanted and didn’t want them here, because it’s always a moment you think you’re going to share with the father of your baby, but I also didn’t want to face it alone.
This situation is working. They’re here, and I feel supported, but I’m free to let myself feel how much I wish Finny was the one supporting me today.
“So did you tell me whether you wanted to know the sex and I forgot?” Jackie asks. “Or did I forget to ask you?”