Santa, Baby

by Blair Babylon

  “Sorry.”

  The choir sang a lovely, wordless song, a happy harmony of voices.

  Another contraction ripped through Raji, and she clutched Peyton’s hands, grunting and trying not to cry in front of the several dozen people in her delivery room.

  When it ended, Peyton said to her, “All right, my delicate flower. We’re going to have you hold onto my forearms here,” he moved her hands up, “instead of my fingers. Musicians are funny about their hands. Now, you just squeeze there as hard as you want to.”

  Reverend Yaa started preaching again and was just saying that she would ask the bride and groom to recite their vows, when another woman wearing blue scrubs bustled into the room.

  “Hello, Dr. Kannan,” Dr. Tashi Nyima, whom Raji knew from seminars and such, sat at the foot of the exam table and took a quick glance at the circus surrounding Raji. “Let’s see where you are. Up in the stirrups, please.”

  Reverend Yaa asked, “Do you want us to leave?”

  “Just hurry up!” Raji told her. “Ask us the vows!”

  Reverend Yaa asked Raji, “Do you, Raji Kannan, take this person, Peyton Cabot, as your lawfully wedded spouse—”

  Dr. Nyima told Raji, “You’re at ten centimeters, full dilation. You can push any time you want to. Do you feel the need to push?”

  “—to have and hold, to love and cherish, in sickness and in health, as long as you both reside on this Earthly plane of existance?”

  Raji nodded. Another contraction swept over her, and she gripped Peyton’s forearm as her muscles spasmed.

  Reverend Yaa asked, “Raji, do you take Peyton as your spouse?”

  “Yes!” Raji screamed.

  Darkness took over her.

  The contraction receded, and Raji panted.

  The minister asked, “—as long as you both reside on the this Earthly plane of existance?”

  Peyton said, “I do. Raji, could you pry your fingernails out of my arm, please? Yes, Reverend. I do.”

  Reverend Yaa said, “By the power vested in me by the Unitarian-Universalist Greater Los Angeles Rainbow Congregation and Reformed Coven and the State of California—”

  The choir’s voices swelled in song, reaching a crescendo for the wedding ceremony.

  Dr. Nyima said, “Okay, Raji. Push with this one. Here it comes!”

  The choir behind Raji sang a full-throated Hallelujah! refrain.

  “—I now pronounce you married as husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

  “Push! You can do it!” Dr. Nyima called.

  “Hallelujah!”

  Peyton’s lips touched Raji’s forehead. “I love you, my wife.” He gripped her hands while the pain swept over her, drowning her. He fiddled with her left hand and slipped her wedding ring down next to the ornate engagement ring. “I love you.”

  A tiny, soprano cry joined the Hallelujah chorus.

  Dr. Nyima said, “It’s a girl!”

  Beth and Mom

  PEYTON leaned over the pillow, trying to curl around Raji, his wife—his love and his life—and his child.

  When he had seen that terrible article in the magazine, every cell in his body had been desperate to get to Raji, to protect her from the reporters and Xan’s counter-spin, even if she might reject him again.

  Seeing Raji and their child had multiplied his protective instinct a thousandfold. A simmering rage waited just outside his soul, ready to unleash on anyone who threatened them. The energy vibrated within him.

  Reverend Yaa and the chorus filed out of the delivery room, everyone wiping their eyes and congratulating them.

  Peyton nodded and smiled as they left, but he couldn’t look away from his wife and their child.

  Mine.

  Some fracas was happening in the hallway, chattering and shoving.

  Peyton shifted, ready to leap up and defend his wife and their child—he couldn’t get enough of saying that in his head—but he didn’t want to leave them.

  Raji felt so right in his arms. The baby looked so perfect in hers.

  He was the mountain that lifted them up and protected them from everything below.

  “Ra-ji!” a woman’s voice said, and then there was a torrent of words in a language he didn’t know.

  He glanced over.

  Oh, Raji’s mother had arrived. Her cape fluttered behind her as she stalked into the room.

  A slim, tall, blond woman followed, wearing a white doctor’s coat over her navy blue suit. Everything about her signaled that she was a professional, upper-class woman, from the expensive, shiny high heels she wore with her tailored designer suit to her carefully bleached hair.

  Peyton remembered her from the hospital’s masquerade. She had been wearing a designer dress there, too.

  This was Beth Dansk of the New Jersey Dansks, the traitor who had sold Raji’s secrets to Fame This Week.

  He could spot the signs of a bottle blonde—the darker roots, the shredded ends, the strategically placed highlights and lowlights. Killer Valentine’s stylist, Boris, had rotated Xan through dozens of shades of blond over the years, not to mention that many other members of the band did their hair in some way, from Tryp’s ice-blue tips to Cadell’s subtle chocolate streaks. Georgie had so many processes and extensions that Peyton never knew what she was going to look like from one concert to the next. Boris had finally gotten a girl-child to work with and was still having far too much fun.

  Raji’s mother unleashed a torrent of some other language at Raji.

  From the bed, Raji replied to her mother and then said, “Hello, Beth.”

  Peyton stood up.

  Beth straightened, staring him right in the eyes. “Hello, Peyton.”

  Raji’s mother strode over to the bed, her hands flailing and haranguing Raji about something.

  Peyton’s shoulders raised like he was swelling with righteous anger and ready to do battle.

  Raji, even as tired as she was, waved him off and talked to her mother, but she switched to English. “I texted you as soon as I could. Evidently, Beth brought you here as quickly as possible. I’m sorry you were cheated out of the birth of your first grandchild, but seriously.”

  Raji’s pleading glance up at him sealed the deal.

  Peyton guided Raji’s astonished mother backward and stepped between them. “Thank you for coming. Raji needs to rest now. Please wait in the seating area outside for a few more minutes.”

  Beth stepped up and tried to get in Peyton’s face. Even though she was tall for a woman and wearing heels, she was still half a foot shorter than he was. She said, “Hey, Raji didn’t say that. You don’t speak for her. Her mother has a right to see her and the baby.”

  Peyton crowded Beth backward, looming over her and blocking her with his broad shoulders and chest. “Raji needs rest and quiet, and we both need to become acquainted with our child.”

  Beth said, “I’m a doctor in this hospital!”

  He reached out his hand, herding Raji’s mother toward the door, too. “Raji needs some time to rest before receiving visitors. Please wait in the seating area until we call you.”

  “What you are doing!” Raji’s mother demanded.

  Beth said, “You can’t treat us like this! What would people say?”

  He straightened until he towered over Beth once more and glared down at her. “People had better not say a damned word about us, ever again. We know that you sold us out to the magazine. We know that you betrayed Raji’s trust. You hurt my band, me, and Raji. Personally, I don’t ever want to see you again. Raji can make her own decisions, but I swear to God, I will not let you hurt my wife ever again.”

  “Your wife?” Beth exclaimed.

  “I’m here for her, and I will protect her from you and people like you for the rest of our lives. You need to leave this hospital room right now. Raji will call you if she wants to see you.”

  Beth swelled up in a huff. “Asshole.” She stalked off.

  Raji’s mother looked between Peyton and Raji. She
asked Peyton, “You will be there for her?”

  “Always,” he said.

  “You not leave her?”

  “Never,” Peyton growled.

  “You protect her, right?”

  “I will.”

  “Good.” Raji’s mom leaned around Peyton. “Raji, you don’t have any food in your refrigerator. I will go to the Indian store on the way back and pick up onions and pickle, and I will have lots of food ready for you when you come home. I will make pakoras and samosas and bhel puri chaat to help you recover your strength. I make some masala dosai for Peyton-Cabot, too. Boys love dosai.”

  She stalked off down the hall.

  Raji was smiling tiredly when Peyton came back and wrapped his arms around her and the baby again. “She likes you.”

  “How do you know?” he asked, settling his arms and staring at their little girl. Her tiny mouth worked, and her chin bobbled.

  “She’s cooking for you,” Raji said. “It’s an Indian mother thing. When Indian mothers are mad at you, they withhold their cooking. When they like you, they cook special things for you.”

  “And that works?” he asked.

  “Oh, you haven’t tasted my mother’s cooking yet. Once you taste her masala dosa, you’ll be wrapped around her little finger. Her masala dosa should be a Schedule One Controlled Substance. It’s as addictive as heroin. The next exposé article will have pics of you lying in a corner, bloated, with coconut chutney running down your chin.”

  Xan Hits Back

  RAJI lay in the hospital bed, recovering.

  Dr. Nyima had winked when she had injected something into Raji’s I.V. that ran into the back of her hand, whispering, “This is the good stuff we don’t let the civilians have.”

  Within minutes, the pain receded.

  A pleasant narcotic glow had risen up around her.

  Peyton and the baby and the nurses were all so pretty.

  Raji held their baby girl in her arms while the baby slept. Their baby girl was beautiful, with her pale caramel skin and light brown eyes. Black hair topped her head, and she had the most lush eyelashes that Raji had ever seen on a baby.

  The baby didn’t have a name yet. Raji hadn’t thought about names at all.

  Raji also had no crib, no car seat, no diapers, no baby clothes, and no bottles or whatever, but the very nice stuff that Tashi Nyima had injected into her I.V. kept Raji from panicking or worrying or even thinking about it too much.

  It would all work out.

  Everything would be fine.

  The nurse who checked on Raji and cooed over the sleeping baby for a minute was pretty, too.

  Even Peyton was pretty, there with his thick, blond hair bound back in a bun and his neat beard trimmed and handsome, but he was behaving like a daddy Viking. He snarled at the nurses and doctors until Raji told him to let them do their jobs. He hovered over Raji, pacing around her bed, until she finally suggested they turn on the television for a few minutes.

  Peyton shook his head. “Screen time is bad for children.”

  Raji laughed. “They aren’t talking about watching a TV around an infant who is just a few hours old, Peys. They’re talking about plunking toddlers in front of the computer to play first-person-shooter games for hours at a time. It’s fine.”

  “No good can come of it.”

  “The lactation consultant said that I need to relax and take my mind off the birth and the breastfeeding thing. Let’s turn on the news or something.”

  “Not the news,” Peyton said. “The news is the worst.”

  Raji narrowed her eyes at him as much as she was able. “Why?”

  “Let’s just not watch the news for a day or two.”

  “Why?”

  Peyton sat on the side of her bed and leaned over to peek at their baby again. “At least not the entertainment news.”

  Light dawned through the narcotic haze. Something else was published? “I will kill Beth.”

  “She didn’t do anything. Xan Valentine gave an interview. He’s obsessive about publicity. He had to control the narrative. It’s why Killer Valentine has done so well. Xan has micro-managed every drip to the media for years.”

  “So they’re concentrating on him now? That’s good, right? They’ll leave us alone.”

  Peyton shook his head. “He said some things. I’m surprised Georgie didn’t talk him out of doing it, but she’s his wife, not a miracle worker. When Xan gets locked onto something, it’s hard to pry him loose.”

  Raji tightened her arms around the baby. She lied, “I knew I never liked that guy.”

  Peyton shook his head. “A lot of it was directed at me, thankfully. We have a few options.”

  The baby in Raji’s arms wiggled a little in her swaddle but went back to sleep. “Like what?”

  “It depends on what I will do next,” Peyton said, “since I quit Killer Valentine.”

  Tears rose in Raji’s eyes. She wiped them on her shoulders. Dammit. Pregnancy hormones are supposed to go the hell away after the pregnancy is over with, right? “You shouldn’t have quit.”

  “It was time. It was past time. If I had been thinking long-term about my career, I should have quit after a year or two with them.”

  “You didn’t want to quit being a rock star,” Raji said.

  “For years, I didn’t quit because you liked that I was a rock star. We had hammered out an odd lifestyle of me touring and us meeting each other. The busyness was so crazy that I didn’t stop and analyze what I should have been doing. I’ve been ready to go my own way for a long time.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have met up so much.”

  “You were on track. You were thinking strategically. I should have followed your example.”

  “But you quit the band.”

  Peyton said, “When the article came out, Xan was blustering. He sees things as threats. If you consider his childhood, it makes sense. The problem is that most of the time, he’s right. If he were wrong even a quarter of the time, it would be a lot easier to talk sense into him. He saw the Fame This Week article as a broadside shot. Not even a shot across our bow, but a direct hit.”

  “It sounded like a pretty horrible piece,” Raji said. “I haven’t actually read it.”

  Peyton grimaced. “It was brutal. The main problem is that Killer Valentine has been on top for so long, so the reporters wanted to tear KV apart. With celebrities, there is a narrative that news outlets and gossip sites perpetuate. A band rises and is the new, golden thing. Then stories come out. Then they fall from grace. Then they climb back up. Just being a working band isn’t interesting to the gossip sites. They have to make it more dramatic.”

  “Ugh. I’m glad I’m just a surgeon. Surgery’s easier.”

  “The dramatic narrative of the rise and fall doesn’t even correlate with sales. Killer Valentine’s sales have steadily risen, plateaued, and are climbing again.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “This article and the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching around this one have gotten particularly vicious.”

  Raji held the baby more closely to her chest. “Oh, no.”

  Peyton said, “Here’s my problem: if I want to have a performing career, I need to get out there and hit back. If I just want to teach at Colburn or Juilliard or something, it doesn’t matter and I should let Xan have his story. But if I want to get back out on stage in whatever capacity, as a classical musician or contemporary, I have to manage the publicity for this one.”

  She swallowed hard. Even the nifty stuff that Tashi had loaded into her I.V. couldn’t blunt her worry about Peyton. “What are you going to do?”

  He sighed. “I’m going to need to call a press conference or do an interview. I’ve had two and a half years to learn from the master. I have to control my own narrative now.”

  Phone Call to Mother

  PEYTON picked up his cell phone and punched a contact. “Hello, Mother?”

  A woman answered the phone with a low, cultured tone. “So have
you made me the laughingstock of all my friends by turning me into a grandmother yet?”

  “I’m sorry to report, yes. You’ll have to lament to your friends how inconsiderate I am. Raji and the baby are doing beautifully, but we do seem to have a problem.”

  “Oh?” As usual, his mother sounded distant, somewhat disinterested.

  “Raji plans to return to her residency—”

  “Yes, have we mentioned how much we appreciate that she is a career girl and not a flighty socialite?”

  Yes, they had mentioned it. Often. “—in three weeks.”

  “So soon?”

  “That’s what I thought, too. Though I have quit Killer Valentine—”

  “You have? Your father will be so pleased.” That was code for how pleased she was, that a decade and a half of shuttling Peyton to classical piano classes and workshops and competitions, not to mention standing over him during practice, had not been wasted on a career in (shudder) rock and roll.

  He said, “So though I have some extra time on my hands, we are going to need help with the infant.”

  “Oh?” Her voice was faint. The insinuation was obvious: what to do you expect me to do about it?

  “So I was wondering if you could send Lupe to help us set up our staff and get settled in a house for a few months?”

  “Oh! Yes! Of course. I’ll have her on a plane this afternoon. So pleased that we could help you.”

  “Thank you, Mother. I expected nothing less.”

  Interview

  PEYTON adjusted the lavaliere microphone clipped to his black tee shirt.

  Raji had insisted that he wear this particular shirt even though he thought was too tight. It rode up his biceps and showed off the Nordic armband tattoos that she had convinced him to get, practically marking him as hers.

  He liked that thought.

  The interviewer smiled at him as she adjusted her mic and read from the teleprompter just over his shoulder. Extra flood lights were stationed around her to illuminate her ebony skin for the cameras. Her dark plum lips curved in a smile as she read Peyton’s weird bio, from classical piano at Juilliard to Killer Valentine rock star.