‘I’m not coming home,’ he said, without identifying himself. The hurt that rose within me was almost overwhelming. I wanted to lash out at him but I knew that I couldn’t afford to do so. I still wanted to fix things with Leo – and if I was going to do that, I had to keep calm.
‘Leo, please don’t do this. Please come home.’
‘Look, we agreed we needed some space anyway,’ Leo said, and he seemed uncharacteristically awkward. ‘I’m having trouble getting some resources for the next project, so I’m going to Istanbul instead to try to figure that out.’
‘We’ve had some space,’ I said. ‘Now we need to talk.’
‘Molly, I need to find a translator or the whole project stops, and we’ve put months of work into this. Brad is out for six weeks after his baby comes anyway. I’ll try to get back during that time. That’s the best that I can offer you.’
When I hung up that night, I felt a completely new emotion enter the equation of our marriage. All the lows and all the fear and all the longing had been bad enough but for the first time when I thought about Leo now, all I felt was panic.
That night on the phone, I realised that he was not just pulling away now – he was disentangling the last parts of himself that had been joined to me. I really was losing him.
Well, if he thought I was going to give up on our marriage without a fight, he was wrong. I walked to the computer and started looking for a flight.
38
Leo – September 2015
Molly’s belly becomes quite obvious over the weeks that follow. Soon it’s a small but perfect curve that I can’t seem to keep my eyes or my hands off, and I love even the idea that people can tell she’s pregnant now just by looking at her.
I join her at the obstetricians one Friday morning for a check-up, and we get another brief glimpse of the baby on an ultrasound. This time, it waves its tiny hand towards us, and Molly’s eyes get misty. ‘You’re not crying in public, are you?’ I tease her, and she slaps my arm and tells me to shut up. The doctor and I laugh, and she rolls her eyes at us.
‘You should be able to find out the gender at the next scan,’ the doctor tells us, and Molly looks to me in surprise.
‘We haven’t talked about that. Do we want to know?’ she asks.
‘I kind of do,’ I admit, and she grins.
‘Okay, we’ll find out.’
In the car on the way back to our apartment, I rest my hand on her bump and think about the movements of the baby beneath it. I can’t wait for a few more weeks to pass so I can feel it kicking against me.
‘Do you have a preference?’ Molly asks me quietly.
‘Nope.’
‘What about names?’
‘I like Henry for a boy,’ I say, then suggest. ‘Henry Andrew?’
‘Oh yes,’ she gives me a surprised smile. ‘I really like that. And for a girl?’
‘Maybe you should pick that name.’
‘I’ve always liked the name Juliette – Juliette Stephens. It has such a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?’
‘I like that too.’
‘Wow, that was easy!’ she laughs.
‘I have a feeling this kid was meant to be, don’t you?’
Molly is clearly delighted to hear me say that. She gives this adorable shrug of her shoulders as she giggles, and says, ‘I feel like that too.’
‘I mean it’s been such an easy pregnancy so far. You’ve hardly had any morning sickness and you look fantastic!’ Her smile becomes a grin and I look down at my hand against her belly. ‘And we just agreed on names like it was nothing. Plus of course… well, the fact that it was conceived at all is pretty much a miracle, right? Weren’t you on the pill?’
There’s a brief pause, but it’s long enough that I look from her belly to her face. She nods quickly, but avoids my gaze. I frown. ‘Molly?’
‘I was,’ she says, but she says it too quickly, and then she looks out the window.
‘We haven’t actually talked about that… About how the baby came to be,’ I realise aloud, and I can’t help but frown.
‘I got lazy with my pill,’ she admits. Her voice is very small.
‘Like, you got busy and you got lazy?’ I say, and then a memory rises – of Molly all but begging me for a baby, and then once the subject rose, it rose again and again and again.
Some of those arguments flood back at me now, and once I know it, I can’t unknow it.
I remember picking up the phone to call her more than once and putting it right back down again so we didn’t have to discuss this very topic. And in the beginning, I’d actually been quite open to the idea – so open that I’d spent a lot of time wondering about it myself while I was in the field. But any enthusiasm I had for a baby quickly faded when Molly’s calm request turned into an endless nagging that I just didn’t know how to counter. She found a way to work the topic into any discussion and the more she pressured me, the less appealing the idea had seemed.