How to Make a Baby: a novel

by Sadie Sumner

  Arun was so different from her father; it had taken a long time to understand him. Where her father had searched for the clear pathway between the deities and their daily existence, Arun was cavalier. His respect for the past lessened with each year of their marriage. She wondered now if she could have stopped him. If she had interjected at the dinner table when he railed against injustice, perhaps she could have led him on a more moderate path. Why, she wondered, had she let go of her friends? Why had she curled herself around Arun’s life so that it was just the two of them? And Ria, with her eyes wide, as she drank in every word her father said.

  When she thought of Ria, Kavitha wanted to cry. Arun had paid her university fees in advance, and she was not due to come home for a few months. But after the summer break, there would be nothing left for next term. And she was still unaware her father was missing.

  Seven

  Monica was avoiding the office. She sat in traffic and inched over Burrard Bridge to Kitsilano beach. The Summer Shakespeare had folded their tents, leaving behind an imprint in the faded, soft ground. She swapped her heels for sneakers and walked the sweep of the sandy beach. She felt Dotty beside her, all tangled hair and crazy laugh as she kept pace with her daughter. Monica wrapped her scarf tight and walked fast. With Dotty’s death and the funeral, her patience had disappeared, replaced by a gnawing anxiety to leap at something. She craved solidity and yet everything around her was fluid, the air suctioned from her lungs, the ground unstable. As she took the path towards the coffee cart and the local playground, Dotty disappeared, buoyed away by a cold current.

  The children were oblivious to the chill wind that skimmed across the slate sea to sneak beneath their coats and jumpers. At one end of the playground, hemmed in by yellow slides and a climbing frame, a small boy stood alone, his arms so drooped they appeared to pull his whole body forward as he howled. Monica ordered a coffee, and even from that distance, she could see his bright red nose. She should do something. Look for his mother, go and comfort him. She thought of the possibility of rejection, and the mess his damp, grubby body would make if she tried to lift him. And she was already late, her first day back at work. She took out her phone and held it, unsure whom to call until a woman strode towards the boy, threw her cigarette away and pulled on his arm as she swung him onto her hip.

  The child clung to the woman’s neck and tried to hug her as she peeled off his skinny arms and turned her face away from the snot of his distress. They left the playground, and the phantom baby trotted behind, its hands waving in the air. Monica looked down at her fingers laced over her stomach and felt a stirring, a twist of discomfort. Somehow the mirage baby was connected to her. When she looked up, it had disappeared along with the crying child and his mother.

  Monica’s Bridal was on the ground floor of a small concrete building on an arterial route, sandwiched between a pizza joint and a balloon shop with a workroom and office behind. When she signed the lease, Monica’s heart sank. Cars and trucks ground past, and men in work boots and too-short shorts from the building site behind stopped to gaze and laugh at her bridal window, empty cans of coke, crushed in stained over-sized hands.

  “It’s a good start,” Rufus the optimist said at the time. “The brides will think they’ve discovered a hidden gem, a wedding insider’s secret emporium.”

  With paint and lighting, the store now appeared polished; every surface gleamed like pewter. The floors were glossy white against the sandblasted brick walls. Thick glass replaced tin that once lined the roof. In homage to the building’s history, Rufus had sculptured three ceramic pigeons that tremored on invisible threads.

  Monica stood beneath them and considered Rufus, stranded in bridal spreadsheets, his face buried in the satin of women’s dreams. He had joined her when the business was still new, just her and an elderly Portuguese seamstress who spoke almost no English. The brides were a fascination, as though they were a whole new species. By the end of her first year, she knew she needed someone who could calm and soothe them and manage the books.

  Rufus answered the advertisement. “What you need is a fluffer,” he said when they met in a bar. “But a fluffer who can run the books and the staff while you concentrate on designing.”

  Charmed by his humor, she bought him a drink and laid out her grand plan to be the best wedding dress designer in the city. By the third drink, she confessed she could not afford to pay him. He’d smiled and suggested a 50/50 split, and they’d shaken hands as his best friend showed up, hair over his eyes, his t-shirt as white as his teeth. Monica had looked away, determined not to show any interest. But by the next morning, she had a business partner and Gil.

  From the workroom, she heard Chloe’s sewing machine and felt a pang of guilt. The business had started so well ten years ago, when brides wanted masses of lace and satin. But now it was all sleek, fitted silhouettes and off the shelf ironic takes on the traditional wedding dress. Without a big sale, she would have to pay Chloe from savings again. The thought made her shiver. Monica flicked through her design pad and went through to her seamstress. Tailor dummies and rolls of material overflowed into every corner and space. Chloe jumped up and hugged her. “I’m so sorry for your loss. Are you okay?”

  Monica nodded and turned away, surprised by a sudden welling of emotion. She flicked through a rack of brown paper patterns that hung from rails, affixed to the back wall.

  The curdled and throaty cry of a baby caught Monica off guard and she swung around, afraid the phantom had followed her here. Chloe shrugged with an embarrassed smile and lifted a baby capsule from beneath the cutting table. Her child was dark haired with red cheeks that protruded from his round face, and she rocked him in the capsule for a moment then lifted him out. Chloe was blonde and aquiline, and the baby looked like he belonged to someone else. “This is my son.” She held him up.

  Monica had only seen photographs before. The way Chloe said ‘my son’ touched her, and she gulped. The baby’s dark eyelashes glistened in the light.

  “He’s beautiful,” she said, and the simple truth surprised her.

  Chloe cradled him. “Teething. I thought he was sick, but he just needs comforting. I had to bring him in.” She drooped with tiredness. In her late 30’s, married to a squirrel of a man, Monica remembered him from the wedding, shocked by Chloe’s choice. They had started the baby right away, and Monica remembered thinking it was desperation, a baited trap into domestic hell. She sucked back her frustration. For weeks after Chloe returned to work, there were days off and last minute phone calls for high temperatures or tardy babysitters. Throughout the pregnancy, baby talk filled each day. Rufus came in and gave the baby his little finger to squeeze, and Monica was aware how excluded she felt from their club. The atmosphere in the workroom congealed. They were waiting for her to say something.

  “We should get you a comfy chair, for breastfeeding,” Monica said in her brightest, most egalitarian tone, the one she reserved for shop assistants and tradesmen. The temperature lifted, and she pulled a bolt of fabric from the shelf. “Could you use this for backup options for that large woman? No doubt she’ll change her mind at the last minute. And we’re behind in everything with all the disruption.” She stroked the fuzzy head like she touched babies every day, unafraid and confident. A shiver, like a tiny seizure, ran through her body.

  In the office, Monica had replaced her desk with a treadmill with a flat surface for her laptop and phone. The slow walk calmed her, like meditation, as she cleared her emails. The face of the child from the park disturbed her, his utter desperation and the mother’s nonchalance and lack of concern for his distress. I will be the kind of parent who kneels in front of my child and explains the intricacies of the world in a reasonable voice, she thought and took out the card the doctor had given her. Planete Bebe, Antoinette Matthews, Surrogate Matchmaker. She tapped in the URL from the card.

  A page of perfect newborns smiled at her. ‘Create your family right here,’ it said as baby bottles flashed pink or
blue. The gossamer feel of Chloe’s baby stayed with her, and she clicked on the blue one. A cascade of newborn boys popped up, serene and chubby-cheeked.

  Rufus dropped a sheaf of papers on his desk and glanced at her screen. “Oh look, Puffy.” He pulled back the fabric of the sling. “Such cutie pies. Have you ever smelled the top of a baby’s head? Just the top, someone should bottle that as perfume.”

  Monica pointedly shut her laptop. “They are not cute. It’s research. I’m thinking of starting a line of baby clothes.”

  “Are you all right? It’s been a tough week. And now a baby at work… and you’re not exactly a baby person,” he said lightly.

  “You’re wrong,” Monica said. “Both you and Gil are wrong. I do like babies.” The tight feeling in her stomach returned.

  Rufus indicated the treadmill. “Is that still working for you?”

  “15,000 steps a day, you should try it. And before you echo Gil, it is not an excuse to stay at my desk for longer and avoid nature.”

  “He misses you.”

  Monica adjusted her eye patch. “Did Gil really say he misses me?”

  “Well not exactly. It’s probably just me editorializing your life.” Puffy wriggled and peddled his little back feet.

  “Dotty came to the beach today,” Monica said. “She tried to walk faster than me.”

  Rufus raised his one expressive eyebrow. “That’s so sweet. She’s keeping an eye on you.”

  Monica looked out to the strip of grass verge that ran along the edge of their car park at the back of the building. The phantom baby stood very still, its face tilted to the thin winter light. Monica ducked down.

  “What is it? Who’s there?” Rufus went to the window.

  “No one,” Monica raised her head, and the phantom baby waved both arms. “Okay, look.” She pointed, “What do you see?”

  “Nothing. I mean, just the back street, our car parks, the grass where you insisted we take our mid-summer picnic.”

  “Okay, maybe the picnic so close to the office was a mistake, but seriously? You don’t see anything else?”

  “Like what?” Rufus scratched at the rabbit’s ears.

  “Just a trick of the light,” Monica said as the baby disappeared.

  When Rufus left, she opened her computer and paused the cursor over a pale boy with dark eyebrows. ‘It should be a swipe app,’ she thought and clicked on the pink bottle. Every baby girl was beautiful. “Okay, I’m shopping,” she said out loud and wondered if there was another word for it, for something this important. She turned up the treadmill and walked absently, as she looked at each baby.

  “You can’t outrun your clock,” Dotty had said not long before she died, like her daughter was in constant flight from her biology. When Monica explained they were childfree by choice, that motherhood was over-rated, Dotty had declared parenting the best thing she’d ever done. It made Monica want to shout, to parade her mother’s life of careless abandon, her disdain for motherhood, and the smear of the lost baby. But Dotty seemed to have forgotten every uncomfortable thing, till all that was left was the memory of a happy life. Monica stepped the treadmill and sat in her old office chair. The last time she’d seen Dotty she had smoothed the blanket to cover her nakedness. “See you tomorrow, Mom.” She’d kissed the tissue cheek and placed the buzzer within reach.

  From the corridor she watched as Dotty tried to push the blanket away, frail as a newborn, so unsubstantial she seemed to have jettisoned even the weight of her daughter. As she left, Monica placed her hand on the cold glass of the window and gazed at the courtyard of gray stones and peeling picnic tables. A moth lay on the sill, and she touched its powdered wing and carried it outside, cradled in her palm. The trees were almost bare, the last of their leaves turned to sludge in the gutters. Damp seeped beneath her jacket, and even a clear blue sky could not dispel the creep of early winter. Beside an old maple, she squatted down and settled the moth and covered it with leaf mold and wondered if the phantom baby was an apparition, a mirage, or worse, something incarnate called into being by her longing.

  She held her stomach as if it ached and felt herself drawn back to the computer and the website of babies. The cursor seemed to move of its own volition until a drop-down menu appeared to select traits: hair color, eye color and height. I’m just looking, Monica told herself. It’s free to look. But she stared at the list and imagined the child she and Gil would make. It would be mousey and bad at sport, uptight and hopeless at math. She selected blonde hair, green eyes, technical whiz and sports lover. A bubble slid onto her screen, ‘Click here to become a mother’. Monica felt a strange detachment, like she’d stepped outside the randomness that made the universe whole. She let her cursor hover over a radiant baby girl, added her contact details and clicked send.

  The dark winter sky parted, and for a moment the workroom flooded with light. Monica turned her face toward the momentary warmth and the pigeons twisted, their ephemeral clay feathers reflected in the glass.

  Her phone pinged with a blocked number. “Hi, this is Antoinette.” A woman said in a tone that assumed Monica knew her. “From the clinic.”

  “Which clinic?”

  “Planete Bebe.” The woman’s voice was childlike.

  “That was quick,” Monica said.

  “We understand how important these decisions are, not to mention time-consuming. It’s always good to start right away. And here at Planete Bebe, we trust in the universe. No doubt you were led to us for a good reason.”

  Monica held her phone away from her ear. The constant whir of the sewing machine calmed her, and she made an appointment and hung up.

  In the empty shop, she switched on a hidden fan and pressed herself back against a deep-buttoned velvet chair and watched the long white gauze curtains ripple like shallow water over sand. She was on the bed in her mother’s room as Dotty lit an array of candles, draped silk scarves around a mirror and twisted the ends of her long blonde hair into a knot. “Your trust in the universe is very weak,” Dotty had said as she smiled into the mirror, her eyes just out of focus. And in that moment Monica thought her mother looked right at her.

  Eight

  The rain had stopped, and the lights from the ski lift on Mt Seymour glowed in the distance as Monica drove home through the endless road works and traffic. She remembered snowshoeing with Mitchell along the trails behind the mountain, where she pretended they had landed on another planet, exhausted but exhilarated as she tried to keep up. Dotty would have been away in India, she thought, escaping the cold and everything else. Monica knew she would be a better parent. Her appointment with Antoinette at the clinic was tomorrow and she’d still not told Gil about the ache that had grown day by day, or her plan and his part in it.

  When she arrived home, she put together the juicer and made wheatgrass shots. Gil arrived, carrying a large phototube and she held out a tiny glass brimming with the foul green liquid.

  He downed the shot and grimaced. “Does it have to taste so bad?”

  “I think we need to change our lives,” she said and drank her own in one gulp.

  From the freezer, Gil took out the vodka and watched as Monica collected the spiral of wheatgrass pulp from the machine and patted it onto her face. “That seems to be working.” He smiled, and Dog turned circles beside his bowl.

  “Will you still love me when I’m wrinkly?”

  “How wrinkly?” He handed her a paper towel.

  “A baby would keep us young.” Monica wiped at the green that dribbled down her chin and sat at her desk built into the corner of the kitchen. She drew a series of long wavering lines, an abstract of a body on her sketchpad, and wondered if this was the moment their age difference hit home.

  “You are the most adamant childfree person I know. Where has this baby stuff come from? I don’t get it. What about a holiday? We could do with one of those.”

  Monica bristled. “With what? Magic beans? You don’t have any money. Or not enough for a holiday.” It suddenly o
ccurred to her she had no idea what it would cost to make a baby with Planete Bebe. She’d been using her savings to prop up the business without telling Gil or Rufus. That left the house. She’d paid the deposit, and the mortgage was in her name, but despite the fact Gil rarely had enough for his share, legally the house would probably be half his.

  Gil shrugged. “I just thought, you know, it costs over a million dollars to raise a child. I read that somewhere.”

  “You might need to earn a little more.” Monica watched as he cleaned the wheatgrass machine with small, fast movements and tried to remember when they had last made love.

  “If we had a child. But we don’t.” He drained his glass of vodka. “Actually, I have something I need to tell you.”

  She heard the tremor in his voice and wondered if he’d been eating burgers again, sneaking meat when he thought she wouldn’t notice.

  She looked up from her sketch pad as Rufus skipped in without knocking. He carried paper sacks of food, and the aroma filled the kitchen. “You really should lock your front door,” he said. “I know you trust in the universe and all, but hello, it’s not the 90s.”

  Monica smiled. “Smells almost like real cooking,” she said.

  “Vegetarian lasagna with extra mash, just how the boys like it.” Rufus hugged Gil and air kissed Monica. “And a little brown rice sushi for mademoiselle.”

  Monica worked to conceal her irritation. In her perfect life, they hosted dinner parties all the time. She saw Gil as the charismatic chef in the kitchen, funny and entertaining as he whipped up Instagram-worthy food. The reality was takeout tipped into bowls: hors d'oeuvres trays from a local organic store and her fussing over the flowers.