“What are you thinking for a name?” Sarah asks.
“We’re torn,” Fiona says. “Sam is keeping a list, but I keep vetoing everything on it. Declan? Theo? Quinn? None of those seems exactly right to me.”
“I like Declan,” Sarah says.
“It’s a big responsibility, a name,” Fiona says. “The first act of parenting, and your first chance to fuck up.”
Henry’s name was a foregone conclusion, once they discovered he was a boy. She’s not sure why her parents hadn’t named her brother after their dad but is glad they didn’t—naming the baby for his dead uncle would have been too fraught. Henry should be nothing but cause for joy. Sarah wonders, though, if there isn’t, in Lulu and Huck, some muscle memory associated with cradling a brand-new little boy. She’s always known it intellectually, but now she’s a parent and knows it in a different way: There can’t be a worse horror than losing a child. The baby has given her a new view into Lulu, a new empathy for her. A new bride in a foreign land when she wasn’t much more than a girl; a mother at an age when she still could have used some mothering herself. And then: for him to die? It seems impossible. It’s no wonder they’ve never discussed it.
Sarah feeds the baby, draping one of the big muslin blankets over his head because she doesn’t feel like sharing her chapped and swollen nipple with Fiona and Lauren. Fiona fills a napkin with carrots, then when she’s eaten them all, she leaves. Lauren finishes tidying, brings Sarah a glass of iced water, and stays. The baby goes down, snoring steadily. She transfers him to the bedroom, switches on the monitor, leaves him there, and she and Lauren are alone.
“So how is it?” Lauren is on the floor, her back against the sofa, looking up at her. She’s cradling a cup of coffee. “You’re a mother.”
“I know,” she says. “It’s . . . I don’t know yet, is that a weird answer?”
“Not especially,” Lauren says.
“One day I was myself, then one day I had a baby, and now I’m still myself, but I’m also not. It’s not like something magical happened. I mean, sure it was magical and chemical and blah blah, but mostly, I still feel like the same person with a whole new set of things I have to think about during the day. Every day. For the rest of my life.”
“That seems like a pretty succinct description of parenthood,” Lauren says. “Of course, it’s all another country to me, so to speak.”
“Maybe not forever,” Sarah says.
“Maybe forever,” Lauren says. “What do I know?”
“What do you know? Tell me about Rob.”
“Nothing to tell,” she says.
“Nothing at all?”
“He’s good, I don’t know. Would you like his number?”
“Don’t be an asshole.” Sarah sighs. “We’re making conversation.”
“I’m not being an asshole, I’m just saying. Rob’s Rob. It’s good, it’s fine, it’s the same, it’s not important. We’re here together for the first time since you had a baby, I don’t want to talk about some guy.”
Some guy—this is a telling turn of phrase. Sarah sees it immediately, that Rob will not last the year. Something has changed, Lauren’s mind has changed. Sarah’s disappointed, maybe not as disappointed as she’d have been a few months ago, before a baby monopolized her every emotion. She likes Lauren and Rob together but is somehow not surprised. “What should we discuss? South Sudan? The election? I can conference in Papa if you’d like.”
“I don’t know, your baby?”
“Yes, he’s very important,” Sarah says. “But he’s very boring. He sleeps, he nurses, the doctor says he’s healthy. You’re not going to turn me into one of those women who only talks about the consistency of their baby’s poop.”
Lauren frowns. “The dignity of motherhood.”
“Do you ever think about it, having a baby?”
“The last time I thought about it was because I was going to and had to take care of it.”
Sarah remembers Lauren’s abortion, of course—the year after college, for all those years of expensive education, it was the first year they actually learned anything. Lauren didn’t have a doctor, as she’d been seeing student health clinicians the previous four years, so Sarah had found the place, out in a part of Queens that was otherwise all tile distributors and malls that catered to Chinese people. They took a car service there, Sarah sat in the waiting room, which was trying so hard to be tasteful, with its plants, its upholstered seats, unobtrusive classical music, its general, genial air. Before, and after, despite not wanting to interfere, despite wanting to simply let Lauren heal, she’d urged her to discuss the thing with Gabe. He had a right to know, didn’t he?
“Shit.” Sarah thinks for a minute. “This isn’t hard for you, now, is it, this baby stuff, because of that?”
Lauren shakes her head. “Ancient history.”