The Nest

by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

  “Want one?” she’d ask. She always brought an extra for herself, hoping to be invited to join them. But Jack always grabbed whatever she had and shooed her away.

  “I remember very well,” Jack said to Melody. “The good old days under the pine trees. When life was so much simpler and merry and gay.”

  “They were gay, right.”

  “Not all of them. Some of them. Enough.”

  “Why didn’t they like me?”

  “What?”

  “They never liked me, those gay boys.” Melody was trying to keep her voice light, casual. “I was always trying to hang around and you all were always trying to get me to go away.”

  “You were a little girl.”

  “So? I brought you guys stuff. I brought you drinks and ice cream and all I wanted was to maybe play cards or listen to you talk or anything. But you and your friends never liked me. So I was wondering why. If it was something specific.”

  Jack sat back and crossed his arms, grinning at Melody like she was telling a particularly excellent joke. He started to laugh, but her expression became so raw, so Melody-walking-wounded that he stopped. “Mel,” he said, putting a hand over hers. “They didn’t hate you. You were adorable, stumbling over the grass in your saggy two-piece bathing suit, carrying a pitcher of warm lemonade or melting Popsicles that tasted like freezer burn. You were adorable.”

  Melody stared down at her half-eaten sandwich. She couldn’t look at Jack. She was mortified now that she’d brought the whole thing up and mortified to hear his take on her pilgrimages across the grass and particularly mortified that hearing him say “you were adorable” made her so happy.

  He continued and his voice lost its usual sardonic edge. “Whatever happened—under the pines—it wasn’t about you or liking you or not liking you. That’s just crazy. I was seventeen. I didn’t want to have you around because I had a twenty-four-hour erection. I didn’t want my little sister there.”

  “Gross.”

  “Exactly. Think of it as a different form of brotherly love. Is that what you’ve been obsessing about because of Nora? Whether you have some kind of built-in gay repellent?”

  “No. I’m just thinking. I want to do the right thing. I want to understand and be supportive, but I’m scared. I don’t know what she needs anymore, how she feels.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I don’t, Jack, I don’t. I never wanted a girl—”

  “You do know,” he insisted. He stood and gathered the garbage from lunch and shoved it into an empty grocery bag. “You wish she weren’t gay,” he said, calmly.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I’m not saying that to be hurtful. I don’t want her life to be any harder than life already is. I don’t know how to smooth the way for this, make it easier. I don’t know what to say or what to think or how to behave and I don’t know who to talk to. Except you.”

  Jack was staring out the window of the shop, tapping his fingers impatiently against a display case. “Walker wanted children,” he finally said.

  “Really?”

  “I was nervous about the whole thing. You know me. He wanted to adopt and all I could think about was how do we know what we’re getting? It seems like such a crapshoot. How does the kid know? Nobody signs up for two gay fathers. It seemed like such an easy thing to fuck up. Walker would always say I was overthinking. He would always say, ‘There’s a reason they call it giving custody. Parents are temporary custodians, keeping watch and offering love and trying to leave the child better than they found him. Do no harm.’ That’s what Walker would say anyway. I don’t know if it helps.”

  “It helps a little,” she said.

  “Just another example of my selfishness, according to Walker as he walked out the door.”

  “Not wanting to adopt?”

  “Yes.”

  Melody thought for a minute. Why was it so easy to wound the people you loved the most? She pointed to an art deco bar cart a few feet away with crystal bottles filled with a dark liquid. “Is that real alcohol?” she said.

  “It most certainly is,” Jack said. “Are you suggesting a drink? Because if you are, you are my favorite person in New York right now.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Jack filled half their plastic cups with scotch and they sat and sipped in a companionable silence for a few minutes.

  “I don’t think you were being selfish,” Melody said.

  “About adopting?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think you were being thoughtful and cautious and honestly airing your concerns. Having kids isn’t easy.”

  “I know!”

  “Don’t get me wrong; it’s great and I think you and Walker would have been great parents—if you both wanted it. But it’s not for everyone.” She finished her scotch and poured a little more. She was building some alcohol-fueled momentum. “Do no harm.” She laughed. “It sounds so, so easy, but do you know what else is easy? Doing harm! Accidentally doing harm is distressingly easy. I don’t think you were being selfish. I think you were being realistic.”

  Jack watched Melody, amused. He wasn’t surprised she was a cheap date in the booze department, but what she said also resonated with him—and made him feel better. “Tell that to Walker,” Jack said, joking.

  “I’ll tell him.” Melody straightened. “Where is he? He thinks being a parent is so easy, such a cakewalk? Get him on the phone. I’ll tell Mr. Attorney just how easy it is. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, let’s see.” Jack took out his phone and she was abashed to see him open the Stalkerville app, the one she’d talked him into using. “Let’s take a peek,” he said, waiting for it to load. “Here we go. He’s at work and, look!” He pressed the “call” button on his phone and held it up for Melody to see as the screen said “Walker” and the phone rang and rang. He banged the phone onto the counter. Melody picked it up. “What are you doing?” Jack said.

  “I’m deleting this. If you want to tell Walker something, you should go find him. This thing?” She raised the phone and shook it a little. “It’s not telling you what you need to know. It’s one tiny part of the story; it’s bullshit.” She typed in a few commands, and the app was gone. Jack was looking past her lowered head and out the window, watching the pedestrians walking down the street on a heart-wrenchingly perfect spring day. He’d never felt so alone in his entire life. Handing him back his phone, Melody realized that Jack’s scattered, slightly unfocused gaze, his too-long hair, and his wrinkled shirt—it all added up to heartbreak. He wasn’t mad or blithe; he was empty. She sat with him for a while, wishing she could erase the look on his face, a world of comeuppance and regret.

  “Mel?” he finally said. “Nora just needs to know you love her as much and exactly as you did before. She needs to know she’s not alone.”

  “I know,” Melody said.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  It was the day before Mother’s Day and Stephanie was still wearing her down vest. May in New York City was fickle. On Friday she hadn’t needed any kind of overcoat, but Saturday dawned cloudy and cold, more autumnal than springlike. Still, there were bunches of pink and purple and blue sweet peas at the farmers’ market and she splurged and bought four bouquets for herself. She’d scatter them around the house and their heady scent would permeate every room.

  Vinnie and Matilda were coming over to her house for lunch. The day when she’d answered Leo’s phone, she’d quickly ended the call with Matilda, saying Leo was out. She didn’t forget about the call—or the poor girl who’d been in the car with Leo—but there was so much else for her to contend with; weeks later, she’d called back, out of duty more than anything else.

  Stephanie knew she wasn’t responsible for Leo’s mess, but as Matilda nervously and somewhat disjointedly explained why she was calling, Stephanie realized she might be able to help. One of her favorite clients, Olivia Russell, was a hugely successful journalist who had written extensively about artificial limbs, especially the challenges facing Gulf
War veterans. Olivia had lost a leg herself when she was young. She knew everyone and how to work every program and now ran a nonprofit that helped amputees navigate the expensive and complicated world of artificial limbs. Stephanie offered to broker an introduction. Matilda asked if she could bring her friend Vinnie. So they were all coming for lunch: Vinnie, Matilda, and Olivia, who’d already agreed to help Matilda as a favor to Stephanie. Then Stephanie’s job would be done.

  “Happy Mother’s Day,” the farmer who took her money said. She assumed he was a farmer anyway; he was scruffy and already sun weathered. His fingers were thick and blunt and dirt stained, and he was wearing a bright blue baseball cap that said SHEPHERD FARMS ORGANIC in orange script on the front. It took Stephanie a minute to realize he was addressing her.

  “Oh, thanks,” she said. With her height, she was carrying the pregnancy well but at six months her bulge was prominent, unmistakable.

  “You have other kids at home?”

  “Nope. First and last,” she said, employing the emotionally neutered tone that she’d learned usually shut down baby conversation, shifting her bags of spring potatoes and asparagus and strawberries into the crook of one elbow so she could carry the vibrant flowers in one hand, like a spring bride.

  “Yeah, that’s what they all say,” the farmer said, grinning. “Then the kid starts walking and talking. Soon he won’t sit in your lap anymore and before you know it”—he gestured toward her middle—“you’re cooking number two.”

  “Hmmmm,” she said noncommittally, holding a palm out for her change.

  She’d listened to her pregnant friends complain for years about the invasiveness a protruding belly engendered, how even in New York where you could stand inches away from someone’s face on the subway secure in the tacit but universal agreement that nobody (sane) would engage with you, ever, all bets were off when you were pregnant.

  Boy or girl? First one? When are you due? (Stephanie always heard When are you due? as What do you do? Always.) So she had been prepared for the annoying questions, but the thing she found most infuriating was how everyone needed to talk not only about the baby she was gestating, but also about her unplanned, unwanted future children. It was so odd. As if only wanting one child was already undercutting the motherhood that hadn’t even officially begun. As if these strangers had something at stake in the process. As if having one baby, alone, was some kind of half-hearted gesture, a part-time commitment. (Oh, they’re just jealous, Pilar, mother of one astonishingly charming and erudite nine-year-old son, told her. They want to make sure you’re going to be knocked back on your ass as soon as you’re sleeping all night. Misery loves company, my friend.)

  “So do you know what it is?” the farmer said, counting out her ones.

  “It’s a girl.”

  “Got your name.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling thinly. “But that’s my secret.” She’d learned to keep her counsel on baby names the hard way. When she started mentioning names she was considering, before the obvious one occurred to her, everyone had an opinion based on logic so subjective and personal that it was utterly bizarre: “My first wife was named Hannah and she was a cold bitch.” “My daughter has four Charlottes in her class.” “Natasha is kind of Cold War, no?”

  It also seemed to Stephanie that like so much else surrounding parenting, naming had become a competitive sport. Some dude in her childbirth class couldn’t stop talking about his Lotus spreadsheet for baby names. “We have three priorities,” he explained to a bored Stephanie and a bemused childbirth instructor (she’d seen it all). “The name needs to be unique, it needs to reflect the ethnic background of both my wife and me—a little bit Brit, a little bit Jew—and”—he paused for effect—“it needs to be mellifluous. Pleasing to the ear.”

  “I know what mellifluous means,” Stephanie said.

  “Sophia is the type of name we’re going for,” his wife added in her clipped BBC accent, “but it’s much too popular these days.”

  “It’s popular because it’s pretty,” Stephanie said. “A classic old-fashioned name.”

  “Too popular, I’m afraid, and the classic tips to trendy,” the wife said, putting a sympathetic palm on Stephanie’s arm, who she clearly thought was hapless and uninformed.

  “In addition to the top three priorities,” the husband continued, “we have subset qualifications.” He ticked off the items on his fingers. “What happens when you Google the name? How many syllables? Is it easy to understand over the phone? Is it easy to type on a keyboard?”

  The last one was too much; Stephanie burst out laughing. The couple hadn’t really spoken with her again.

  “Good luck,” the farmer said, waving his hand as she walked away. “This will be the only quiet Mother’s Day you have for a long time. You let your husband pamper you.”

  This was another thing that surprised Stephanie, although she supposed it shouldn’t. How everyone assumed because she was pregnant that she was also married. She lived in New York City, for Pete’s sake. Not just New York, Brooklyn! She wasn’t the first fortysomething woman to have a baby alone, but even if she was having the baby with someone, who said she was married? Who said her someone wasn’t another woman? She wasn’t only offended by the near unanimous conventionality of everyone’s automatic assumptions, she was unsettled because she knew her daughter would eventually face the same kind of cavalier reasoning about a father who—well, who knew what the story with her father was, what it might be when the baby was old enough to ask.

  Stephanie redistributed the shopping bags so her shoulders and arms were evenly weighted and started to walk home. It was downhill from the park to her house, thank goodness. Her legs felt strong, but her center of gravity was shifting and her back hurt if she walked too far while carrying packages. She should get one of those shopping carts on wheels, but she’d be pushing a stroller soon enough.

  Stephanie was still annoyed about the farmer’s husband comment. There wasn’t much about having a baby alone that stymied her except what to tell people about Leo—whether to tell them about Leo. Her closest friends and coworkers knew the story, sort of. They all knew about Leo and their past, how he had briefly resurfaced and that she’d been surprised but happy to find herself pregnant and now he was no longer in the picture.

  It was harder with the casual acquaintance or the out-and-out bold and nosy stranger. Many people were stopped with a curt, “I’m a single mom.” But many weren’t. She was going to have to come up with something specific enough to shut everyone up but not intriguing enough to encourage questions.

  She also hated the looks of pity and concern that accompanied her deliberately upbeat clarification that she was having the baby alone. Pity was such an absurd sentiment to be on the receiving end of because all she felt was lucky. Lucky to be having a baby, lucky to be forming slow but encouraging bonds with Leo’s siblings and their families, which she was doing specifically for her daughter so that she would have a sense of her extended family.

  Stephanie was the only child of a widowed mother who had died years ago. She’d loved her childhood and her doting, accessible, smart, and funny mom. The only regret she had about not having a baby sooner was that her mother was gone and her mother would have been an amazing grandmother. But Stephanie had been lonely sometimes as a girl, too, so she hoped the Plumbs would embrace her and Leo’s baby and so far, they had.

  If Stephanie was perfectly honest with herself, she knew that the particular family configuration hers was about to take was her preferred configuration because it was what she knew. If she was being scrupulously honest, one of the reasons she’d never had a kid was because having a father in the picture was something she didn’t know what to do with. It wasn’t really something she’d missed. Her mother and her cousins and summers in Vermont with her beloved uncle satisfied her craving for family. In the middle of the night, in the dark, where nobody could see the satisfied smile on her face, her hand on her rising belly, she recognized that
although this baby hadn’t been premeditated (it hadn’t, Leo had shown up at her door), the night of the snowstorm she didn’t insist on a condom, something she had, quite literally, never done before—not during the most inebriated hookup, not during the most spontaneous erotic moment.

  She hadn’t planned the pregnancy (hadn’t), but she hadn’t prevented it and if she was being brutally honest, deep in the night in the privacy of her room, her room, hand on her belly gently rising and falling with the undulating motion of her rolling, kicking, hiccuping baby, listening to the quiet of her creaky house under the duvet arranged exactly as she liked, she could admit the truth about the night of the snowstorm: that she’d let a tiny aperture of possibility open to something that was of Leo but wasn’t Leo. And that she liked it that way.

  “You’re more like a guy than a girl,” Will Peck had said to her once when they were together and she suggested he might want to sleep at his place a little more often. He didn’t appreciate her love of solitude. She supposed that was true in a way. Although she didn’t buy the stereotype of women being the needy ones. It seemed wrong. Sure there were women hell-bent on getting married, but men were just as bad once they decided they were ready to pair off. Wasn’t it the divorced or widowed men who always remarried right away, who had to be taken care of? Wasn’t it the elderly women who reinvented their lives alone? Of all her friends whose marriages had split up—and by now there were quite a few—it was usually the woman who had the courage to step away from something broken. The men held on for dear life.

  You’ll be beating the divorced Brooklyn dads off with a stick, Pilar warned her. That was the last thing she needed! A guy with his own kids. She’d dated and dismissed a number of divorced men she suspected were mainly on the prowl to have someone around every other weekend to help with their kids. They didn’t particularly charm her, the men she thought of, collectively, as “the dads.” She had to admit, though, that there was something captivating and even a little sexy about a man fumbling to pin back his daughter’s curls with a barrette or braid a ponytail.