The Baby Plan

by Kate Rorick

  Finally—finally—the timer dinged on the turkey.

  “Don’t worry, Kathy, I got it!” Nathalie said automatically, knowing that the clip of kitten heels was headed toward the kitchen. “Time to get around the table everyone!”

  She heaved the turkey out of the oven, and inserted the thermometer.

  The dial did not rise nearly as high as it should.

  “That’s not how it’s supposed to be,” she muttered to herself. She’d done everything right—she thought. She checked and double-checked the timing, and was sure she’d calculated correctly to allow for the potatoes, and . . .

  “Hold on . . . who turned down the oven?”

  “I did, sweetie,” Kathy said, all shock and innocence. “You can’t cook a bird that high, it’ll dry out!”

  Nathalie closed her eyes. “I know that, Kathy,” she ground out, “it wasn’t that high the whole time, I had to take the turkey out for an hour. I looked it up—it would have been fine.”

  “Well, I didn’t know that,” Kathy huffed.

  “Now it has to go in for another . . . I don’t know how long!”

  And that meant that the potatoes, the beans, the stuffing, everything else was going to go cold.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Kathy tried. “We’ll cut around any pink parts.”

  “I’m not serving undercooked poultry for Thanksgiving!” Nathalie nearly screeched.

  “I’m just trying to help!”

  “Hey, Mom,” came Lyndi’s weak voice from the kitchen doorway. “Did you know Marcus is from near Branson?”

  Kathy turned to her daughter with a watery smile. “Is he? Oh, Marcus, I must know everything. Who’s your favorite artist? I just love the greats—Hank, and Cash, and Dolly.”

  “ . . . Yeah, Dolly’s the best,” Marcus said agreeably.

  Nathalie caught her sister’s eyes, giving a silent thank-you.

  “I’m getting pretty hungry, kiddo,” her dad then said. “Maybe we start in on the sides while the bird finishes.”

  “But . . .”

  “Yeah,” came David’s voice. “There’s only so many chips and guac a guy can eat. Let’s sit down.”

  Nathalie looked from the underdone turkey to the ready-to-go everything else. She shoved the turkey back in, upped the heat, and set the timer. Maybe it wouldn’t take too long.

  Besides, she had a toast to give.

  Her heart started fluttering as they all gathered around the table. As they put the potatoes, stuffing, beans, and cranberries on their turkey- and pumpkin-shaped trivets, she looked to David. He gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. They all took their seats, and Nathalie realized the empty space at the center where the turkey should go didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except that everyone was here, and she got to tell them her wonderful—

  CRASH!

  “Oh my God!” Lyndi cried. “Marcus, are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Marcus replied from the floor. “My chair just . . . I think I broke it.”

  The NORRNÄS chair had come apart beneath him, its Allen bolts unscrewed, its legs lying in broken bits.

  “I’m so sorry,” the skinniest person there said. “It’s my fault.”

  “I think that one’s my fault,” David said, pulling Marcus to his feet. “Interpreting IKEA instructions is not my strongest suit.”

  Suddenly everyone was looking at their chairs with apprehension.

  “Let’s just . . . stand, for the toast,” David said, giving his wife a look. “And then we’ll . . . break out the folding chairs from the garage. Honey . . . ?”

  “Yes. Yes,” she said, forcing a smile. Then, she launched into her speech. “I’m so glad that everyone could come to this family occasion . . . And you, too, Marcus. Friends are wonderful and welcome. But, like I was saying, Thanksgiving is all about family. And my family is so important to me. Especially now as . . .”

  “I’m sorry!” Lyndi’s voice broke through the toast, thin and reedy. She was no longer gray, she was pea-green. And she wasn’t looking at Nathalie. She was looking at the big casserole dish of holiday mashed potatoes, which was sitting directly in front of her. “Nat, I’m so sorry . . .”

  She pivoted as quickly as a ballerina, grabbing the first container she saw: the brass cornucopia, which had been placed haphazardly on the buffet table behind them.

  The sound of her hurling up bile and ginger ale echoed metallically through the room.

  “Oh my God!” Kathy cried, once the retching was through. “Sweetie—”

  “Are you okay, squirt?”

  “I’m fine! I’m fine,” Lyndi said, as Marcus placed a soothing hand on her back. “I’m just . . .”

  The timer dinged. The turkey was ready.

  Lyndi wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and gave a sheepish smile. “I suppose now is as good a time as any to tell everyone I’m pregnant.”

  Chapter 2

  “SEVENTEEN HOURS OF COOKING, AND NO one said thank you,” Nathalie grumbled as she spooned the last of the gluten-free (basically mush) stuffing into the trash. “And if it was so important for Marcus to have gluten-free stuffing, the least he could have done was EATEN the gluten-free stuffing!”

  David, from the couch, grunted in agreement, which only managed to make Nathalie’s rage burn brighter. After days of decoration and preparation, after running out to the Whole Foods all the way in Glendale to find gluten-free bread crumbs, and after being the most agreeable, accommodating host on the planet, Marcus didn’t even touch the goddamned stuffing.

  Okay sure, after Lyndi destroyed Nathalie’s brass cornucopia with her own announcement, the afternoon had gone slightly awry, so maybe he wasn’t hungry . . . but surely, he could have taken the stuffing home.

  There was at least two-thirds of the turkey left over too, not to mention all the holiday mashed potatoes. Luckily, Dad had taken the triple berry pie back to Santa Barbara with them, lest they would have had to find space for that in the fridge, too.

  It turned out, after Lyndi’s surprise, everyone pretty much forgot about the food. Instead, they had just stood stock-still in shock, until Kathy burst out with a screech that sounded like a Muppet being slaughtered.

  “Oh, my baby is giving me a grandbaby!” she’d said as she grabbed Lyndi into a big hug, and then, Marcus with them. Lyndi, through being mobbed, barely kept a handle on that now-filled brass cornucopia. Nathalie had stepped forward to take it from her just in time.

  As her father loosened Kathy’s grip on Lyndi, and placed a kiss on his little girl’s cheek, Nathalie moved off to the kitchen, to drain the cornucopia. Once she deposited it in the sink, she came back into the dining room.

  “Um, I am, too,” she’d said, barely loud enough to be heard over Kathy’s mews of joy and their dad manfully trying to find something to say to Marcus—but mostly just making a lot of “Well!” and “That’s . . . well!” noises.

  “Pregnant, that is,” she’d finished lamely. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. Before.”

  Again the room stilled in shock. Until David—unfrozen for the first time in minutes—had stepped forward and thrown his arm around Nathalie’s shoulders. “That’s right!” he’d said. “We are having a baby. We’re twelve weeks—”

  “Thirteen,” she’d mumbled.

  “Thirteen weeks along, and are due in . . . May? May.”

  No one moved. Nathalie waited for the strangled-Muppet sound from Kathy, but . . . nothing. Just leftover sniffles from her Lyndi-based joy.

  “We are . . . really excited,” she’d said, forcing a smile up at David.

  “Of course you are!” her dad had finally replied, coming over to kiss her on the temple and slap David on the back. “So are we, kiddo. So are we!”

  And that was it. That was her big announcement. Um, I am, too.

  Something that she’d been wanting, and preparing for, for years, reduced to an “I am, too.”

  And an entire massive family dinner that should have been a celebration, redu
ced to no one eating, the wine being gulped by the people that could, Kathy sniffling over her cranberries, and awkward glances shared between sisters at the table.

  “Hon, you don’t have to clean everything up now,” David said from the living room.

  “Yes, I do, because if I don’t it will just sit out on the counter overnight and the food will go bad. And attract bugs. And then we will have to have the house fumigated and we’ll have to stay at a hotel and you know I can’t sleep at hotels!”

  A pause before an answer of “Okay then” drifted in from the other room.

  “How can you be so calm about this?” she yelled over the water filling the turkey pan. “Admit it—that was a disaster!”

  “It wasn’t a disaster, hon,” David replied. Somewhat unconvincingly. “Your dad was super happy for you.”

  That was the one solace. When her dad’s lips had hit her temple, he’d whispered, “You’re gonna be a great mom, kiddo,” in her ear. And she’d felt the warm rush of emotion across her cheeks, and tears beginning to sting her nose.

  Then, he moved over to Lyndi, and placed a kiss on her temple . . . and no doubt whispered the exact same thing to her.

  “You don’t think Lyndi puking in the cornucopia was a disaster?” She shut off the water just in time to hear David’s whispered and obviously not-meant-to-be-heard reply.

  “And there it is.”

  She stepped into the living room. “And there what is?”

  “Nothing,” David replied immediately. But instead of letting him off the hook, she watched him, her hands dripping. Eventually, he said, “I’m sure Lyndi didn’t mean to ruin dinner, Nat.”

  “She didn’t ruin it,” Nathalie replied immediately. “I can’t blame her for morning sickness. I mean, that’s just another thing we have in common.”

  “But . . .”

  “But . . . what is she doing?” Nathalie said finally. “She’s twenty-four and can’t decide on a career but she’s gonna have a baby? She can’t even remember to walk her dog!”

  David’s brow came down. “When did Lyndi get a dog?”

  “It’s a metaphorical dog, David!”

  “Okay, okay!” David held up his hands in surrender. “I’m just saying, she didn’t do this on purpose. Step on your moment.”

  “Our moment.” Nathalie huffed. “And I know she didn’t do it on purpose. That’s the problem! Obviously this entire thing was an accident for her, but she’s just going to trip into it and go ‘oh well, guess I’ll have a baby now!’ Because that’s how she is!”

  She wiped the wet from her hands on the dish towel tucked into her back pocket. Lyndi, no doubt, would just have wiped her hands on her pants leg, if she even bothered to do the dishes at all.

  “‘I didn’t like accounting, so I guess I’ll take an extra year and be an art major now!’” Nathalie mimicked in a high, little-girl voice. “‘I graduated so I guess I’ll be a graphic designer now!’ ‘Didn’t really dig that, so I guess I’ll be a barista!’ ‘No, now I’ll be a florist!’”

  “Honey, she’s twenty-four. Not everyone is like you and knows exactly what their life is going to be,” David said calmly.

  It was true. Nathalie had known since she was six she wanted to be a teacher. She had known since she was ten she wanted to teach literature. And she had known since she was nineteen that she was going to marry David Chen, who she met half-drunk at a college party, and they argued all night and into a 3 AM Del Taco run about the merits of Dickens’s early work.

  Later, he’d confessed he hadn’t ever read any of The Pickwick Papers. He just wanted to keep Nathalie talking to him, so he took the opposite opinion of whatever she said.

  No wonder he was a lawyer.

  “Screwing up and figuring it out,” David continued, “that’s what someone’s twenties are for.”

  “Yeah, but . . . she had only just begun screwing up. Now she won’t get to anymore!” Nathalie said. “This is her big screwup! And once she has the baby, she can’t just decide to drop it and do something else.”

  “You think she’s making a mistake,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes. No.” She sighed deep, suddenly tired. “But you and I . . . we know what it’s going to take. We’ve planned for this. We’ve been trying forever!”

  His brow knit. “We tried for two months before we got pregnant.”

  She stared at him, her eyebrows disappearing beneath her bangs. Her nose began to sting. “We’ve been trying for three years, David.”

  “I meant . . . this time,” David said eventually.

  But it was too late. Nathalie just held up one hand, shook her head, and headed for the bedroom before she could break down in tears in front of him.

  Stupid hormones.

  She’d been on the knife’s edge of crying all day. All the stress of cooking, all the emotions of the announcement—then the fumble of said announcement. Add that to the funhouse ride of hormones her body was putting her through to grow a human . . . well, there was a reason she had avoided watching TV. One sappy refrigerator commercial and she would be lost.

  But through it all, she thought she could count on David to be her support! To be outraged and pissed off with her. To be aghast at Lyndi’s lack of pie making and Kathy’s messing with the oven temp, and Marcus’s . . . sperm’s ability to bypass what she hoped was decent birth control. But instead, David sat there, his eyes forward on the TV, playing devil’s advocate.

  Which, considering his lawyerly ways, wasn’t new for him.

  But if his plan was to talk her around to a more open mind, he failed utterly.

  I meant . . . this time.

  As if the last three years had been a fluke, easily forgotten.

  Nathalie remembered precisely when they began trying. It was on her thirtieth birthday. She had just made tenure at her school the year before, David was on track to be named a junior partner at Stanis and Lowe, his old law firm. And he was only months away from paying off his student loans. So, on her thirtieth birthday, after she and David and her friends had stumbled out of the bar after last call, Nathalie went straight to her bathroom, where she flushed her birth control pills down the toilet.

  She was ready.

  They were ready.

  All they had to do was make a baby.

  Which turned out to be harder than anticipated.

  After five months of trying—of tracking her periods by plugging them into an app on her phone, which dinged whenever their algorithm said she was having a fertile day—Nathalie called her doctor for an appointment. Just to “check,” she’d said.

  Dr. Duque—a woman a few years older than her with a mop top of wavy brown hair and an authoritative motherly vibe—gave her a cursory exam, looked at her tracking app, and said, “Hmm.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Listen—you’re very likely fine,” Dr. Duque said kindly. “You’re young, you’re healthy. Most people conceive within the first six months of trying.”

  “It’s been five,” Nathalie replied.

  “Your cycle is short,” Dr. Duque said. “The average menstrual cycle is twenty-one to thirty-five days. Yours are ranging from eighteen to twenty-three.” The doctor took out a pen and a little slip of paper that said “Menstrual Record Chart” and copied out the info from the app. “Your app is pretty low-tech, it’s predicting your fertility based on the average cycle, not on yours. So, instead of having sex when it tells you to, I want you to have sex every other day, between days five and fifteen of your cycle.”

  Nathalie took the card, finding a sense of security in this scrap of paper that she hadn’t in all the technology the modern world could offer. Of course the app failed her—it wasn’t for her, it was for everyone! Now . . . now she had more than a ding on the phone telling her when to have sex.

  Now she had a plan.

  “If you haven’t conceived after eight months of trying, you should come back in and we’ll do some tests,” Dr. Duque said. “But seriously, don’t
worry. Enjoy this time.”

  Nathalie hugged Dr. Duque—yes, hugged. She wasn’t a super huggy person, but the relief she felt warranted it.

  However, the relief was short-lived.

  Nathalie and David had always enjoyed a healthy sex life, and at first David had found the novelty of having sex at the ding of a phone app kind of funny. But five months of that had taken its toll. So to be told he had to perform his husbandly duties on a more aggressive schedule was . . . not romantic, to say the least. Although, Nathalie tried! When the circled dates came up, she dolled herself up, cooked his favorite food, cued up certain scenes in Blue is the Warmest Color . . . but doing this every other day, on command, was a bit more challenging.

  David, to his credit, was game. He just said, “We’re going to do what we have to do.” And so they did. For the next three months.

  And then Nathalie made another doctor’s appointment. This time for both of them.

  “It’s been eight months,” she told Dr. Duque, gripping David’s hand, “and still nothing’s happening, I just want to know . . .”

  “Okay,” Dr. Duque said, nodding. “Let’s do some tests.”

  The tests came back.

  She was fertile.

  David was fertile.

  But for some reason his sperm kept missing her egg.

  This only frustrated Nathalie more. Because there was no solution. If either she or David had fertility issues, modern medicine would be able to help. But as it was, she couldn’t hand David’s sperm a map of her uterus and a GPS. Instead, they just had to—

  “Be patient,” Dr. Duque said, soothingly. “Again, you’re healthy, you’re young. If we reach a year without conception, then we’ll talk about more aggressive measures. But for now, keep trying. And don’t forget to—”

  “To enjoy this time,” Nathalie repeated dully. “We know. And thank you.”