Then Came You

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “This was all a bit of a shock, but I’ve got plenty of resources. I’ve hired a doula, and India left all kinds of things for the baby.”

  This, at least, was true. Even I had to admit that the nursery was exquisite, with a crib and an antique rocker and a rug with a pattern of flowers around its border. The dresser and the closet were both loaded with everything a very fashionable baby could possibly need. There were clothes in sizes newborn, zero to three months, and three to six months. India had arranged for a diaper service and had bought about a thousand scented aloe vera baby wipes and a wipe warmer. The white wicker toy chest was filled with stuffed animals, lambs and bears and kittens, and the bookcase was filled with fairy tales, books by Maurice Sendak, Sandra Boynton, and Dr. Seuss. There were two business cards stuck to the refrigerator, one from a pediatrician and one from a doula, both of whom, it turned out, were on standby, just waiting to be notified about the baby’s arrival. The doula turned out to be a kind of hippie-fied, glorified baby nurse, a woman from Park Slope with a wild tangle of curls and a calm, earth-mother presence who’d been hired to be on duty for the first twelve weeks of the baby’s life. The pediatrician was the woman three blocks away who’d taken care of me and my brothers when we were little.

  Standing in front of the refrigerator, looking at the shopping list written out in India’s neat hand: greens and lean meats, ground turkey and fish and fresh fruit — I thought about how I’d told India I would ruin her. I didn’t know what she’d done versus what she’d paid other people to do to get ready for Rory’s arrival, but she’d done a lot, and, certainly, her preparations didn’t hint that she’d planned on bolting, or that she was using the baby as a prop, or a means to an end. But she’d left. . and no matter how pretty the nursery’s flowered curtains, how cunning the crib bumpers and the embroidered pillow reading dream time that hung from a pink-and-green ribbon on the door, no matter that she’d arranged for a doctor and a doula, the fact was, she was gone, and I was stuck.

  There were a million things for me to do and read and buy and figure out. I’d need more formula. . and baby food. . and a high chair, and one of those crazy little vibrating bouncy seats that had always made Violet look like she was being electrocuted. I’d also have to find other babies for Rory to be friends with. There was, I knew, at least one woman in my dad’s building with a smallish-looking baby. We’d exchanged hellos in the elevator a few times, and while it was true that I hadn’t noticed whether her baby was a boy or a girl, I would make a point of asking the next time I saw them.

  Annie wiped her eyes while I signed the papers. “You know how to work the car seat?” she asked. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?” I told her I’d be fine with the car seat and that I was positive I’d be fine. I was almost out the door with the baby in my arms when she said, “Oh! My milk!”

  “Pardon?”

  She pointed to a scary-looking machine next to her bed. Clear tubes ran into funnel-shaped suction cups that were screwed into bottles with ounce markings on their sides. “I was going to overnight India my breast milk for the first month. Should I still do that?”

  “That would be very nice.” The baby was getting heavy. I shifted her from my left arm to my right. Her head flopped back alarmingly, and I adjusted it fast, hoping Annie hadn’t seen. “Do I pay you by the bottle, or how does it work?”

  She shook her head. “You don’t have to pay me anything. India set it all up. I’ve got a FedEx account. They’ll stop by in the morning with the dry-ice packs and the boxes, and you should have it every day by noon.” She reached onto the bedside table, where she had two of the little bottles, each one full and labeled with a strip of tape indicating, I supposed, the time she’d pumped it. “Here. This will get you started.”

  What do you say to a woman who’s just handed you four ounces of her breast milk? One of the bottles was still warm. I shifted the baby again, trying not to cringe as I put the milk into the diaper bag. “Thank you. We’ll be in touch.”

  “Send pictures,” she said. I could tell that she was getting ready to cry again, so I quickly set the baby into the car seat, fumbled the buckles shut, and hurried to the exit, where Manuel was waiting.

  That had been seven days ago, and the baby seemed to be doing well, so far. If she sensed that she was at the center of a storm, being cared for by people who were not her biological parents, she gave no indication. “She’s good-natured,” Tia the doula told me, pointing out that Rory cried only when she was hungry or wanted to be held or rocked. That might have been true. . but if it was, she was hungry or lonely for most of the time she was awake. Worse, she wasn’t cute. To my eyes, not only did she not resemble anyone in my family, but she didn’t look like she was completely through being formed. Her eyebrows were so faint they were almost invisible. She had stubby lashes, mottled pink skin, and an unfortunate case of acne. . but she was filling out a bit, losing some of her scrawniness and starting to look a little more like the plump pink babies I’d grown familiar with from diaper commercials.

  I gave her car seat another gentle push with my toe, then glared across the conference table. “Why didn’t they tell me I’d be the baby’s guardian? When did they decide?” Leslie pulled a fresh tissue from the box and pressed it underneath her right eye.

  “They made their decision months ago. I don’t know why they didn’t tell you. We certainly urge our clients to be as forthcoming as possible about the arrangements they’ve put in place.”

  “Our guess,” said her lawyer, stepping in smoothly, “is that they would have let you know after the baby was born. Maybe they would have made you its godmother, and at that point they would have initiated a discussion about the responsibilities involved if something were to happen to them.”

  “It would have been nice,” I said, “if someone had, you know, talked to me.” I sounded bratty, exactly the way Leslie and her lawyer were probably expecting I would: a poor little rich girl who’d had everything she’d ever needed, a petulant princess who didn’t want to be bothered with the lab-engineered competition.

  “I should let you know that you won’t have any concerns financially,” said Jeff, flipping through a sheaf of documents he’d pulled from his briefcase. “Your father had a very generous life insurance policy, with specific bequests set aside for you, your brothers, your niece, and this, um, new addition.” He went through the specifics of what the baby would be entitled to once the will was probated, which I wrote down without really hearing. I was still stunned, sitting there in a skirt and heels and the green sweater I’d worn because it had been the first thing I’d grabbed, and bare legs, only one of which it appeared I’d remembered to shave.

  From underneath the table, the baby gave a little squeak. I rocked her again, bending down to brush the top of her head with my fingertips. “Who was the egg donor?”

  Leslie and her lawyer exchanged a glance “That’s confidential,” said the lawyer.

  “I’m the guardian,” I shot back. “Don’t I have a right to know what I’m dealing with? Genetically speaking?”

  Another glance. I exhaled loudly, letting Leslie and her lawyer know that I was getting sick of their making eyes at each other. Finally Leslie said, “India and your father chose our anonymous donation option. They never met their donor. All they had was her profile.”

  “Well, I’d like to meet her.” I wasn’t sure that this was true. What I did know was that I wanted everything I could get out of the clinic, every apology, every bit of discomfort and hard work. God knew they’d made my life hard enough.

  “I suppose. .” Leslie began, “we could contact the donor, maybe give her some sense of the, um, change in arrangements. She could agree to let us give you her contact information, but it would be entirely up to her.”

  “Why don’t you do that.” I paused for a moment, gathering myself. “There’s no chance. .” I said, and snuck a guilty look down into the car seat, worried, irrationally, that the baby would
overhear me and take offense. “There’s no chance that this custody arrangement was a mistake? They wanted me, not my brother?”

  Without any hesitation both lawyers, plus Leslie, shook their heads. “We’re here for you,” said Leslie, managing to sound sincere. “Whatever support we can provide, in any capacity. We can be a resource, if you need a nanny, or any other kind of help. .”

  I shook my head and got to my feet, lifting the handle of the car seat and struggling to get my purse over my shoulder. “We’ll be fine,” I said, and then, with the car seat banging against my leg and the cup of coffee I’d poured myself in my free hand, I walked out the door and into my father’s office, and set the baby’s seat down on the floor. Someone had been cleaning. There were cardboard boxes on the mostly empty shelves, filled with photographs, the tin cup with the picture of the Eiffel Tower that I’d bought him from my junior-year trip to Paris, the finger paintings that Violet had done. I sat on top of the empty desk. His chair was gone, and I’m sure the place had been vacuumed and dusted since his death, but I imagined, sitting at his desk with my coffee beside me, looking out over the city, that I could still smell him, could feel his presence, here in the place where he’d spent so many intensely focused hours. “Now what?” I asked. No answer came. I missed my father terribly, felt his absence like a stitch in my side, a pain that never left me. In the car seat, Rory was sleeping, her chin slumped on her chest, a ribbon of drool securing her Petit Bateau sweater to her cheek, the slightly scaly surface of the bald spot on the back of her head exposed. A wave of pity rose inside me. Poor thing, I thought. Poor little thing with no parents to love her, and she’s not even pretty.

  “It’s you and me, kid,” I said. Rory, of course, didn’t answer.

  I took the elevator down to the ground floor. Manuel was waiting at the curb. I hefted the car seat inside, sighing with relief when I set it down. The baby barely weighed ten pounds, and the seat couldn’t weigh much more, but carrying it felt like having a lead bowling ball shackled to my wrist. It took me a minute to loop the seat belt through the back of the car seat and click it shut. As soon as we started moving, Rory’s eyes opened and she smacked her lips together, a move that I’d already figured out was a prelude to crying. I found the bottle of breast milk, shook it, uncapped it, and plugged it into her mouth. My phone rang, and I pulled it out of my purse, still hoping that maybe it was my mother, who’d come to her senses and was calling to say she’d come home.

  It wasn’t my mother. It was Annie.

  “Sorry to bother you,” she said as Rory batted the bottle out of her mouth. “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “We’re fine,” I said. As if to disprove me, Rory started to wail. I popped the bottle between her lips again, but Rory turned her head. The nipple stabbed her in the cheek. Milk leaked out, pooling in the crease of her neck. I tried to wipe it away with my sleeve as the bottle fell out of the car seat and onto the floor, just out of my reach.

  “Did the milk come this morning?”

  “I’m not sure. We had an appointment. I got a box yesterday…”

  Rory was turning an alarming shade of purple. Her mouth was open, but no sound was coming out, even though she was shaking with what I guessed was indignation. Was this normal? As soon as I got off the phone I could go online to the websites I’d bookmarked, look up crying and shaking and purple and see what the experts had to say. “Can you hold on for just a moment?”

  I put the phone down on top of the baby, bent, grabbed the bottle, and popped it back in her mouth. This time, she started sucking. I exhaled, realizing that I was sweating. I wiped my forehead against my shoulder and used one hand to keep the bottle in the baby’s mouth and the other to bring the phone back to my ear. “Okay. I’m back. Sorry about that.”

  Annie sounded faintly amused. “Listen. I know you’ve got a baby nurse, but I’d be happy to come up and help out for a few days. It would save a lot on the cost of shipping my milk.”

  Honestly, I did not care about how much the milk-shipping was costing. God knows I’d never see the bill. But the idea of another set of hands, hands belonging to the woman who’d carried Rory for nine months and might, theoretically, have some idea of what she wanted when she started shaking and turning purple, sounded wonderful. “How soon can you be here?” I asked.

  “Tonight?” she asked.

  “Perfect,” I said, and hung up before she could change her mind.

  Tia met me in the lobby, where she wrinkled her nose and diagnosed the problem. “I think she pooped.”

  “Ah.” Upstairs, the mess was startling, both in color and in quantity. I stood by the nursery door, trying not to cringe, as Tia wiped off Rory’s legs and bottom, applied diaper cream, fastened a fresh diaper in place, and put the baby into a fresh outfit. Her formerly peony-pink pants were a yellow-brown ruin; even the car seat had gotten splattered. Tia whisked everything away and, somehow, I ended up in the rocking chair, with the baby in my arms. When she fell asleep I sat there, too terrified to move, until Tia came back and eased the baby into the wicker bassinet.

  Five hours later, Annie arrived. For someone who’d just given birth, she looked remarkably normal, in khaki cargo pants and a T-shirt and sneakers, with a wheeled suitcase in one hand, a cooler balanced on top of it, and her breast pump packed in a carrying case and slung over her shoulder. By then I was feeling foolish. Annie had caught me at a bad moment, but I was managing just fine. Now I knew that silent scream and turning purple and not hungry meant pooping, and I was sorry to have wasted her time. But as soon as Annie took Rory out of my arms and cradled the baby against her, I changed my mind. Everything she did, the way she held the baby, jiggling her gently up and down, the way she patted her bottom in a way that even I found soothing; the way she knew, instinctively, to support Rory’s neck, made her look like an expert, and made me feel like the rankest of amateurs.

  She gave me a sympathetic smile. “Why don’t you take a break?” I looked down at myself. I was still in the same green top and blue skirt I’d worn to the meeting on Wall Street that morning, and I hadn’t showered before I’d put them on. I went to my bedroom and shucked off my clothing. I’ll take a shower, I told myself. I’ll call Darren, see if he’s tracked India down. I’ll call Tommy, ask if he wants to come visit, and Trey. . and then, before I knew it, I was facedown on my bed. When I opened my eyes again it was ten o’clock at night.

  I scrambled into the shower, then into a pair of sweatpants one of my brothers had left behind and an old T-shirt of my father’s. Annie was on the living-room couch, the baby asleep in her arms, the television tuned to an episode of Real Housewives. She turned around, looking guilty, and turned the TV off when she saw me.

  “Tia’s having her dinner. I nursed her,” she said.

  “Rory, not Tia, right?”

  Annie looked too worried to smile at my attempt at a joke. “I hope that’s okay. I probably should have asked you first…”

  “No, no, it’s fine.”

  “… but you were sleeping, and it just seemed silly to pump it and then feed it to her, so I just…”

  “Really, it’s okay.”

  “She’s an angel,” said Annie, gazing fondly at the baby. I looked to see if Rory had undergone some sort of transformation during my nap, but she was the same, wrinkly and red and bald and disagreeable-looking, even in a very sweet white-and-pink one-piece outfit with a matching hat. “Here.” Annie lifted the baby, holding her out to me. Before I could think about it, I shook my head. I braced myself for rolled eyes or laughter, or, worse, disgust, but Annie just said, “I remember when I had Frank Junior. I felt like I was babysitting. I think I spent the entire first year of his life waiting for his real parents to come get him.”

  At her mention of her son, I realized I had no idea what she’d done with her children. “They’re staying with my parents,” she told me. “My folks know what’s going on, and I’m fine to stay for a few days.”

  I took a s
eat on the couch beside her. “Did you always know you wanted kids?”

  Annie looked thoughtful. “I guess I always knew I’d have them. But that’s not exactly the same thing, is it?” I shook my head as she continued. “That was just what everyone I knew did. My mother, my aunts, my cousins. . everyone had babies, and most of them ended up raising a baby or two that wasn’t even their own.” She looked at me. “Did you always know you wanted to go to college?”

  I considered before answering. “I guess it’s the same thing. It’s what everyone I knew did.”

  She nodded. “It’s not so bad, though, is it? I mean, you had fun in college, right?”

  Because it was late, because I was still foggy from my nap, because, in the past weeks, my life had changed so radically that I barely recognized it anymore, I told her the truth. “Not so much. Not really. I’m not even sure I know how to have fun.”

  Annie looked at me, startled. “Really? Huh. I always thought. . I mean, if you had money. .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Money can’t buy you social skills. Or friends.”

  “True.” She sat quietly, maybe thinking that, in some respects, she was richer than I’d ever be. Rory started to stir, stretching and waving her fists in the air. “Want to hold her?” Annie asked. She handed over the baby, and this time, I took her. Rory opened her tiny, toothless mouth and yawned before settling herself against me. “Cute,” I said, and meant it. It wasn’t great, but maybe it was a start.

  JULES

  Once you’re done with school, summer doesn’t mean what it used to. Every day was a workday, and the only way the seasons mattered was whether it was light when I left for the office and when I came home, and what I’d wear from Kimmie’s apartment to the subway. Once I was at work, time and weather disappeared. The office seemed to generate its own climate, hot and humid, the air thick with stress and gray with unhappiness. In an effort to recognize summer as summer, Kimmie and I would try to eat outdoors once every week. We’d take turns picking the spot: bistros with sidewalk seating, pocket parks, museum courtyards, restaurants with backyard gardens where we could sit and imagine we were someplace other than New York.