Expecting: A Novel

by Ann Lewis Hamilton

  “This isn’t like that,” Alan told her.

  “The Apartment, that’s the name of the movie.”

  “I’ve never heard about anybody using it for affairs,” Alan said. Not true. Grayson, a VP in Specialty Materials, used it to meet his secretary here for years.

  “I guess they don’t have a problem with theft because everything is so ugly. And brown,” Laurie said as she examined the brown carpet, brown cabinets, and brown plates. “And—gross, the people who’ve used the glasses and the silverware, do they really clean them?”

  “That’s part of the agreement, you have to.” Alan pointed out a small dishwasher. When Laurie opened it, the door creaked and something black and oily dripped on the floor. “Lovely,” she said. “It’s haunted.”

  Laurie insisted they put the comforter cover on the other side of the room—“They never clean comforter covers. In hotels or in places like this.” And when Alan tried to pull up the blanket, Laurie shook her head. “Just imagine Indians. And smallpox.”

  ***

  Alan is thinking of Laurie and the smallpox blanket and the haunted dishwasher. He wishes Laurie was here with him. They could laugh about the brown plates and the microwave that looks as if it’s one of the first ever invented. Laurie appreciates things like that; it’s one of the reasons he loves her. One of the many reasons. Her wicked sense of humor. Her crooked smile. Her legs, her breasts, her body. He realizes he is writing out a list in his head. He closes his eyes, and Laurie is in the apartment making haunted whoo whoo dishwasher sounds. Who knows how Nancy Futterman would react to a room like this? She probably wouldn’t make a joke. She would never make whoo whoo sounds. “Alan, why aren’t we staying at the Four Seasons?” Nancy would say. “I need room service.”

  It’s much better that things didn’t progress with Nancy. For a million reasons. Although poor Bob was probably thrilled at the thought of Nancy running off to L.A. with another man. And now Bob’s looking at Nancy, her face splotchy and red from crying—she’s hunched over her computer and typing frantically, “Why won’t Alan answer me?” And Bob will tell her encouragingly, “Keep trying, Nancy. He’ll write back.”

  Alan will email her soon. Apologize. Tell her he and Laurie have worked out their issues. And by the way, Laurie’s pregnant. Thanks, Nancy, for your support. Can’t wait until your next Christmas letter.

  ***

  Laurie doesn’t call in the morning. Alan thinks about trying her before he goes to work, decides texting might be better. “Miss U.” But the minute he sends the message he regrets it. It sounds too casual; he should have spelled out you. He could send her another message, but he has to get to the office to work on Choc-O.

  Maybe Laurie’s called him at Palmer-Boone. When he gets in, he asks Wendy, his secretary, but she says no. “I’ll track her down,” Alan says with a smile he hopes comes off as casual. And then he begins to worry. Laurie is eight months pregnant. Of course he should track her down. Suppose something’s happened, a medical emergency and she can’t get to a phone? He calls again. When she doesn’t pick up, he leaves a message. “Just want to make sure you’re okay. Let me know.”

  He’ll drive by the house at lunch.

  Only Charlie, his fellow Choc-O VP, wants to work through lunch so Alan doesn’t get a chance. Laurie hasn’t emailed or phoned or sent a text; he thinks about calling one of the neighbors and having them check on her. Except then he’ll have to explain the fight and why he’s staying at the Oakwood Apartments—too complicated.

  Will Laurie go to Lamaze without him? He could show up and surprise her. With flowers. Unless she decides to skip class. And that nosy woman who always wants to sit beside them at Lamaze, Victoria Martinez, she’ll ask him why he has flowers and by the way, where is Laurie?

  At lunch in the conference room Charlie asks how Laurie’s pregnancy is going. Pretty typical, Alan says. The first one’s the hardest, Charlie says. Because you don’t know. You don’t know anything.

  Charlie has three kids. My life was incomplete without them, he tells Alan. Although sometimes…how many are you and Laurie going to have? That’s a trick question, Alan wants to say. Because even though it seems like we’re having one, we’re not really. We’re sort of having half of one. Or one and a half if you count Jack. Impossible to explain. “We’ll have as many as we can,” that’s what Alan says.

  ***

  After lunch, Wendy tells him Laurie called. “She said everything’s fine.”

  What does that mean? How can everything be fine when Alan isn’t living at home?

  He works until eight since there’s no reason to hurry home. On the way back to the apartment, he goes to the drive-through at In-N-Out. It was a Friday night ritual when Alan and Laurie were dating. Stop by In-N-Out, eat french fries on the way home. Alan likes extra salt, hates ketchup; Laurie likes ketchup, hates salt. So Laurie had the responsibility of seasoning the fries in the takeout box. Half with salt and no ketchup for Alan, half with no salt and ketchup for Laurie. And as Alan would drive, Laurie would put fries in his mouth. “Perfect,” he’d say when she’d hand him fries, sharp and salty. Occasionally she’d touch one of her ketchup-y fries by mistake—“Ah,” Alan would yell. “I’m tasting ketchup.” By the time they’d get home, there were never any fries left.

  Tonight it’s just Alan and it’s hard to salt the fries while he’s driving, and he decides to eat them anyway, but they don’t taste the same. He might as well be eating the box.

  He walks through the parking lot to his apartment, past a group of kids playing touch football. One of the disadvantages to this complex is because it’s so close to movie and TV studios, it’s crowded with parents who’ve brought their children here to audition for TV pilots and movies and commercials. Once when Alan was staying at the apartment to work on a project, he was sitting by the pool and a five-year-old girl mistook him for a producer and handed him her headshot.

  “I’m not—” Alan started to say, but the child gave him a rehearsed grin and pointed to her résumé.

  “I take horseback riding lessons. And gymnastics and I can do a full split,” which she demonstrated on the pool deck.

  ***

  Back in his apartment, he sits on the brown sofa eating his cold burger and fries and watches a documentary about Hitler’s Other Family Members on the History Channel. He checks his phone for messages—nothing from Laurie. No emails either, but his mother has sent a link to her Ancestry.com account. “You’ll find this interesting!” she’s typed.

  She’s already come up with a huge list of potential baby names, all based on past family members she’s tracked down through the web. “Lawrence is nice, it’s an old Gaines family name, I’ve traced it back to Cornwall in 1618!!” She emailed him a few weeks ago to explain how she’d found a family connection to William Henry Harrison—their family is related to a U.S. president! Days later, another email with more exclamation points—this connection linked up to the Churchill family, yes, that Churchill family. And if they were linked to Winston Churchill, that meant they were also linked to Princess Diana and her family. Princess Diana! A U.S. president and royalty.

  Several days later, another email. She’d made a mistake. No connection to Churchills or Spencers or William Henry Harrison. But a hint that might link to Abraham Lincoln. Which would be a thousand times better, since William Henry Harrison only served thirty-two days in office.

  He hasn’t told his mother about Jack. Genealogy means so much to her—if she finds out that the baby isn’t Alan’s, will she see it as the end of Alan’s line?

  Where is Laurie? Shouldn’t she be calling so he knows how she’s doing? Unless she’s at Lamaze. He checks his watch. No, she should be home from Lamaze by now. He could call her. But she’ll think he’s being a pest. A little room, that’s what they both need.

  ***

  He knows it’s a bad idea to drive by the
house, but he wants to reassure himself that Laurie is okay. Suppose he sees her through the window and she’s crying? That would be an excuse to go inside. “I’m sorry, honey. Let me stay here with you,” that’s what he’ll tell her. And she’ll forgive him and say she knows the only way they can get through this is if they have each other.

  The lights are on in the house, that’s a good sign. Laurie didn’t come home from Lamaze tired and depressed and crawl into bed. He’s guessing she’s curled up on the sofa in the den watching TV. He parks in front and wonders if he should go inside. Or drive around the block again.

  Is this a terrible idea? He thinks about heading back to his apartment—no, he’s come all this way. He gets out of his car and starts up the walk, notices a car in the driveway behind Laurie’s. An old Honda Civic. It looks familiar, but he can’t put his finger on it—remembers it belongs to Jack.

  Oh. Jack is at his house. Why? Alan looks in Jack’s car—it’s packed with boxes and suitcases. T-shirts and tennis shoes on the floor. Jack’s living out of his car? Great, that bodes well for baby Buddy. Homeless dad. Super.

  Alan walks up to the front door. He has his key and he doubts Laurie has changed the locks. He hopes she hasn’t changed the locks. Should he ring the bell? But if Laurie and Jack are in the middle of something, he shouldn’t disturb them.

  In the middle of what? He peeks in the living room window—the curtains are drawn, but they’re sheer enough so you can see people if they’re in the room. There’s no one there.

  He’ll just look in the kitchen window. They could be at the kitchen table drinking hot chocolate. As he makes his way to the side of the house, he stumbles against the recycling bin. Damn, is it garbage day tomorrow? That must be why Jack is here. Laurie called him to help take out the trash. He has to stand on his tiptoes to look in the kitchen window.

  The lights are on, no sign of anybody. He sees a saucepan on the stove and a bottle of Hershey’s syrup on the counter. He was right about the hot chocolate. They could be in the den—but to check he’d have to go in the backyard and the gate is hard to open and probably locked.

  On the other side of the house, he has to move past bushes that slap at his face and he wishes he’d gotten the gardeners to trim them back the last time they were here. He’ll make a note. Assuming he sees the gardeners again. The front bedroom light is off, but the lights in the middle bedroom, the baby’s room, are on.

  He pushes his way through more bushes—when did his yard turn into a fucking forest? He hopes the next-door neighbors don’t see him and think he’s someone trying to break into the house. A dog begins barking and Alan really hopes the next-door neighbors don’t have a gun and a shoot-first mentality. He crouches below the window and raises his head slowly to look in the baby’s room.

  Laurie and Jack are sitting on the floor, the pieces of the crib around them. Most of the frame has been assembled. Laurie holds up two long screws and makes a face like, “Uh-oh, did we forget these?” Jack takes them and shakes his head. Points to another spot on the crib where they should go.

  Laurie picks up a baby mobile. Alan hasn’t seen it before. Where did it come from? Marine animals dangle from a blue plastic circle. Whales and jellyfish and sea horses. Jack nods at Laurie; he seems to approve.

  Alan notices two mugs on the floor beside Laurie and Jack. And a plate of cookies. Did Laurie make Jack cookies?

  He could still go inside. Ring the bell, not use his key. Laurie would make him a mug of hot chocolate, offer him a cookie.

  Unless she’s happier putting the crib together with Jack. He watches her as she takes a sip of her hot chocolate. Jack holds the mobile in his hand and pushes a button. It begins to spin slowly and Alan can hear the faint sound of music.

  Jack

  Jack wonders if his life would have turned out differently if he’d had a mother like Laurie. Not that he’s exactly sure what kind of mother she’ll be since the baby isn’t born yet, but he can already tell she won’t be a “my child must be a genius or else” mother. “I want the baby to be happy,” Laurie says when they’re putting the crib together. “Maybe that sounds shallow, Jack, but after going through all this—not the you part of this, the miscarriages part—it makes you realize happiness is severely underrated.”

  He doesn’t disagree with her. He thinks about the times he’s been happy lately—when he listens to Megan recite lines from her play, for example. He is so proud of Megan—it’s like a kind of wonder that somebody could be so good. And that somebody like Megan could like him.

  Happiness is feeling baby Buddy kicking away in Laurie’s belly. “He really wants out, doesn’t he?”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Laurie says.

  And being the father of a baby…he can’t even explain how that makes him feel. Although once the baby is born, everything could change. But now it seems right, being with Laurie, feeling Buddy wiggling around. Even if Jack ends up living on the street in a cardboard box and begging for change at freeway exits, he has still managed to do one amazing thing.

  “Would you like me to get you more hot chocolate?” he asks Laurie.

  “Maybe later.” She frowns. “I wish I could remember where I put the crib linens. It’s funny—you spend so much time picking out a crib and linens, and when you bring the baby home, he’ll sleep in a bassinet.”

  “You don’t put him in the crib? Isn’t that what it’s for?”

  “You want him close. In some cultures, babies share a family bed for weeks, for months. Or years. One of the reasons is because of breast-feeding—babies eat a lot more frequently in the beginning.”

  Jack hadn’t thought about breast-feeding. “You’re sure you’re going to do that?” he asks Laurie, trying not to look at her breasts.

  “Yeah, it’ll be nice. All this hormonal stuff happens when you’re pregnant—not just your body changing, emotional things too. In a good way. You’re suddenly anxious to do it all. Be a mother, a mama bear.” She growls. “See?” She growls again.

  “I’d be clueless,” Jack says. “I didn’t know about the bassinet. Or how breast-feeding works. What happens if you’re not around? How does he eat?”

  “You rent a breast pump and express the extra milk and save it. In the fridge. A lot of people think breast milk is better for a baby. Did your mother breast-feed you?”

  Jack has no idea. He can’t imagine his mother taking time off from her busy schedule to breast-feed him. Of course, he can’t imagine his mother taking time to get pregnant. “I don’t know,” he says.

  “You still haven’t told them?”

  Jack shakes his head. “Too scary.”

  “They might surprise you. Be excited. They’re going to be grandparents.”

  Jack tries to picture the look on his mother’s face when he tells her she’s going to be a grandparent. You’re too young, you’re not married, she’s married to another man, you donated your sperm?

  “I think it’s better they don’t know. It’s enough for them to realize I’m finally going to graduate. Graduate and be a father? Their heads might explode. What about you? Did you tell people?”

  “I told my mother and she’s okay with it. She’s somebody who likes things a little off-center. My dad was the same way; they were perfect for each other. He died when I was a little younger than you.”

  “Sorry,” Jack says.

  “He was a cool guy. He taught high school English. He always said he felt his goal was to teach kids to like reading. Hemingway or Jane Austen or MAD magazine—it didn’t matter. Liking it, that was the important part. You two would’ve gotten along. The sperm switch, he would think that was crazy, in a good way. Alan’s family, they’re more—conventional. He hasn’t told them yet, but he will eventually.”

  “Maybe when the baby’s born and looks like me—unless you could tell them you had an affair.” Jack’s trying to make a joke, but when Laur
ie doesn’t smile he remembers Laurie talking to Alan about old girlfriends on Facebook. “Oops,” he says.

  “That’s okay.”

  Jack isn’t sure how to ask about Alan. Laurie told him Alan was going to live somewhere else for a couple of days.

  “Alan isn’t mad at you,” Laurie says, as if she knows what he’s thinking. “He’s not mad at me either. He’s sort of mad at everything else. He’s somebody who likes his life to go a certain way. He’s very orderly. He doesn’t like surprises.”

  “But he wants to have a baby, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes. But not exactly this particular baby.” Laurie gives Jack a sad smile.

  “He should be here though. With you.”

  “Don’t worry about Alan and me. It’ll work out. You’ll see.”

  Jack nods. He hopes she’s right.

  Laurie tries to get to her feet—it’s not a pretty sight. “Come help,” she says to Jack, “and if you laugh at a pregnant woman trying to stand up, I will kick you in the shin. And a mad pregnant woman kicking you is not something you’ll forget.”

  ***

  They have more hot chocolate in the kitchen and she asks him if he’s excited about graduation. He says he is, but he’ll mostly be glad when it’s over. He only has one final that worries him. “The professor hates me,” he tells Laurie.

  “I’ve heard that excuse before,” she says. “What’s the class?”

  “Medieval Literature of Devotion and Dissent.”

  Laurie makes a face. “An elective?”

  “For my religious studies minor. I thought it sounded fun.”

  “Nothing about that sounds fun. What’s the final?”

  “Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Heresy.”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t be drinking hot chocolate. I’d be drinking gin from a bottle.”

  “The final’s fifty percent of my grade and Mr. Bryant told me unless I make an A, he’s not passing me.”

  “So you’re studying hard.”