Flora laughs again. “Dork.”
After one more act, they head home, swinging their hands between them on the way to the parking garage. The night is cool, the trees along the sidewalk are budding with new leaves: the hope and promise of spring. Downtown is buzzing with energy and neon lights and music. Nashville isn’t New York or L.A., or even Vegas, but it has a vibrancy and character all its own.
“I thought I was a rebound,” Gwen confesses, walking at the flash of the crosswalk. Red lights spill onto the street where they hurry across. “That you’d go back to Imani, and I’d never see you again.”
Flora stops them under the pink and green dotted awning of a children’s boutique that’s closed for the night. “Let me tell you about Imani,” Flora says, winding Gwen close. “She was stunningly gorgeous and brilliant and well-read and—”
“Is this supposed to be making me feel better?”
“I was getting there, hush. And I saw absolutely no future with her. She was right on paper, but nothing else. You were nothing that I expected and everything I needed. And when I looked at you, when I was with you…” Flora runs one hand up the back of Gwen’s head. “I saw forever. And not just that, I was excited about our forever.”
Gwen brings her hand around, kisses the center of her palm and lets her lips linger there to say against her skin, “No wonder we work so well; I’m a huge dork and you’re a giant sap.”
Flora smacks at her hip, and they continue on. “You know, Imani is still single,” Flora teases when they get in the car.
Gwen backs out of the space and onto the street. “Maybe we could hook her up with Clementine.” She’s joking, but that’s actually not a half-bad idea.
Back at home they make out on the couch the way they did the first time Gwen brought her home, only the place is much nicer and the furniture isn’t a bare mattress she found on a corner, and Gwen isn’t quite as shocked to be kissing Flora. She’s straddling Flora’s lap, one hand down Flora’s shirt and the other up her skirt, creeping past the waistband of her panties, when her phone rings.
It’s probably Nico, with either a fashion crisis or a “Grady and I will never agree on a house and we’re going to live in the bed of his truck at this rate” crisis. She lets it go to voicemail and continues on her mission.
Gwen pushes the sleeve off Flora’s shoulder, wiggles her fingers deeper—
Flora’s phone rings. She cranes from under Gwen to check it. “Hello?” Gwen drags her tongue along the slope of her shoulder, dots kisses along the curve of her clavicle, and nips at her mouth. “Thi—mmm. This is she, yes.”
Gwen moves her lips down Flora’s neck, sucking and kissing, to the hinge of her jaw, her earlobe. She doesn’t need Flora’s full attention to have fun. Then Flora stands, upending Gwen right onto the floor.
“Ow.” Gwen pouts.
“What? Yes, of course. Okay. Okay. Thank you.” Flora hangs up the phone, turns to Gwen with eyes widened and the phone clutched to her chest. “A baby,” is all she can say.
They don’t know much about him. He’s eleven weeks old and was born nearly three months premature. Birth mom had no prenatal care; he has “probable” continuing medical and developmental complications. His first placement fell through at the last minute. He has a shock of thick black hair, light brown eyes, and soft skin a few shades darker than Flora’s. And in less than twelve hours after the phone call, he is home.
His name is Cayo.
33
Parenting, Gwen quickly learns, is the opposite of beige drudgery. It’s not for the faint of spirit, or weak of stomach, and there’s no sense of stability or normalcy at all for those first few topsy-turvy days. Flora’s parents and sister and nieces come to visit, cuddle and spoil Cayo, give Flora and Gwen so many baby care tips they could fill an encyclopedia, take a million pictures, and leave them with more food than they could ever eat and a mountain of tiny clothes.
Clementine sends them a gift basket of luxe baby items from a boutique in France. Nico and Grady come by with a slick, black, Armani leather diaper bag stocked with supplies and a wicked space-age stroller.
“Top of the line,” Nico says in his “I’m extraordinarily pleased with myself” voice, “all-terrain wheels with a reversible seat and twelve-inch wheels with settings for sand or snow. One-handed operation and folding, five-point harness for safety, and we even threw in a parasol, snack tray and cupholder, and a cozy wool seat liner.”
“You can take this baby off-roading,” Grady adds, his arm settled proudly around Nico’s waist. “Oh! Dibs on taking him for his first four-wheeler ride!”
They babble at the baby sleeping in Flora’s arms, and then Grady holds him and sings to him and Nico keeps a pleasant and polite distance.
Gwen’s parents send a gift card.
“Okay, I’m just gonna be up-front with you: I have no idea what I’m doing.” Flora is at work, finishing the last few weeks of the school year, as it was easier for Gwen to get time off at a moment’s notice. Flora’s family is gone, all the visitors are back to their daily lives, and now it’s just Cayo and Gwen. It’s as if she’s standing on the roof of the Stratosphere again, taking a breath and jumping with blind stupid courage all she has to cling to.
Easing him carefully onto the changing table, she struggles with the little snaps on his onesie and tries to remember all the advice swimming around in her brain: Get everything ready before starting; keep one hand on his belly to keep him from squirming off the table and cracking his head on the floor; put a washcloth over his little baby firehose penis or she will get sprayed. Don’t use diaper cream every time. Or was it do use diaper cream every time? Or never use diaper cream? Or was it baby powder? Which one causes cancer? She can’t remember...
Cayo kicks his feet, dislodges the washcloth, and starts to fuss. “Okay. All right, I—” Gwen blows out a frustrated breath. “Everyone seems to have faith in my ability to do this, but I think they may be wrong. Lucky for you, I’m all about the doing and not so much with the thinking.” She opens a clean diaper and starts to slide it under him. “Or maybe unlucky for you, depending. At any rate, we’re gonna do this, and if I screw up then we can both be thankful that your long-term memory has yet to develop.”
Cayo scrunches up his whole face, kicks his feet, and squawks.
“Exactly,” Gwen tells him.
It takes a few tries, some mismatched buttons, and a little frustrated crying on both their parts, but they manage. Then she has to figure out how to dose him with his reflux medicine and warm a bottle while he ramps up the crying with his little fists balled and his legs kicking furiously.
By the time they make it to the couch and he’s pulling on the bottle with greedy little grunts, one hand gripping the front of her shirt, Gwen is exhausted. And it’s only midmorning. She hasn’t had a shower yet, hasn’t eaten. The cats ate, at least; they made sure of that.
“Right, where were we?” she says as he sucks with his eyes half closed in the cradle of her arms. “I think we left off at the Industrial Revolution at around three in the morning, right? So, with the advent of factory technology, interest in fashion took off in the middle class and even working classes. Style was no longer a luxury for the wealthy, Cayo. This is where fashion design and innovation gets really inter—”
A text from Flora interrupts the lesson.
Flora: How is he? How are you? Is he still sniffly he seemed sniffly this morning.
Gwen sends a picture of him eating and reassures Flora that he’s fine and doesn’t seem sniffly.
She puffs out a breath so hard it makes the stringy hair fly up from her face. Great, now she’s worried about him being sick. She drops her head back against the couch and watches him eat. At twelve weeks old he is still roughly the size of a newborn, still mostly acts like a newborn. The doctor they’ve seen a few times already assures them that this is normal, and it tak
es time but most preemies catch up eventually, more or less.
The hospital released his medical records to them, and they learned a little more: He’d been on oxygen for months and had some hemorrhaging in his brain that caused some vision loss, though to what extent they won’t know for some time. His digestive system is still immature, so he has to eat special formula very frequently, day and night.
Gwen has never been so tired and less sure of her abilities. And when she looks at him—eyes only open to drowsy slivers, his eyelashes like butterfly wings, tiny feet and chubby cheeks, and his little hand holding on to Gwen as if she’s his safe harbor in this crazy world—she has never been more in love.
She had no idea she could love someone this much.
So she is completely out of her depth and still convinced she’s going to screw this up one way or another. She still sees Flora and the way she held Cayo for the first time: it was as if the mothering switch flicked on. Gwen is still waiting for that to happen, if it ever will. But she would stand in front of a speeding train for this boy without needing to give it a second thought, and that has to count for something. She loves him right now, exactly as he is, and she wants only his happiness. It seems so simple and so tremendously impossible.
After his bottle, Cayo slips off to sleep, milk-drunk and messy. Gwen carefully wipes his chin and mouth, eases him to her shoulder to burp him, and has just decided to try him in his little bedside bassinet and go back to sleep herself when her phone rings. Cayo startles, and she settles him back to sleep by bouncing and pacing as she answers the phone.
“Mom?”
“Gwen. Hello. Your father and I were discussing coming there to meet the baby at some point in the future.”
Gwen fumbles with the phone, almost dropping it when Cayo shifts in her arms. “Let me put him down, hold on.” She drops the phone on the couch next to his empty bottle and the soiled burp cloth, swaddles Cayo and puts him in his crib, and then has to find and sanitize a pacifier for when he wakes. She gets him settled again and does not expect her mother to be waiting when she remembers where she left her phone.
“You still there?” Her mother gives a noise of affirmation. “Sorry. I’m completely frazzled right now. What were you calling about?”
“I remember those days,” her mother says. “You were a very difficult baby.”
Gwen is raw from lack of sleep and an overwhelming roller coaster of emotions, so she snaps, “I’m sorry I’ve been such a disappointment and source of misery for you since birth.”
Her mother says nothing. Gwen leans against a wall and presses her thumb and index finger against her glassy, bloodshot eyes. She starts to apologize.
“Gwen,” her mother interrupts. “I’ve been thinking a lot. And I, I’d like to start fresh, if we can. I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye—”
Gwen snorts; delirious exhaustion has reduced her very thin layer of self-preservation to nothing at all. “Sorry.”
“However,” her mother goes on, ignoring Gwen’s outburst, “you are an adult now, and your father and I are both very proud of the life you’ve built for yourself. Even if it isn’t the one we would have chosen for you. I guess you know now how your children are never quite what you’d expect.”
Gwen smiles at the surprising journey that led them to Cayo. “Yeah. ‘Expect the unexpected’ is the key to parenting successfully, I think.”
Her mother hmphs disdainfully over the phone. “A couple weeks in and you’re a parenting expert? You still have plenty to learn, Gwen.”
Gwen lifts her eyes to the ceiling, but manages to contain her heavy sigh. Baby steps, she thinks. They can exchange vague pleasantries and surface-level affection, and she can start fresh, let things roll off her back like water off a duck’s oily feathers. Speaking of oily—she touches her hair and curls her lip in disgust. She really should take a shower while she can.
“You guys are welcome here whenever. I’d like to start fresh, too, Mom.” She covers a yawn with her elbow. Nap first, then a shower.
“In that case perhaps we’ll go ahead and book a flight.”
Gwen blinks. “Wait, for real?”
Her mother has switched to no-nonsense mode, the one Gwen is most familiar with. “Yes, I’d like to meet my grandson.”
Gwen hadn’t been sure they would accept Cayo at all, if they would ever truly consider him family. “Really?”
“Of course. Now we should discuss getting him on a schedule. He’s not too young to learn discipline, Gwen—”
Cayo starts to cry, and Gwen still has to shower and eat and nap, and as she heads up the stairs the cats hop in front of her, begging for food. Perfect timing, really.
“Baby is crying; gotta go.” Gwen hangs up before her mom can continue the lecture. She can laugh about it, though. She picks Cayo up and rubs his back soothingly. Her mother may be trying, but some things never change.
They spend most of the summer in Los Angeles, subletting a little condo near the beach while one of Flora’s teacher friends house-and-cat-sits for them. It gives Cayo a chance to get to know his West Coast family and roots. Gwen picks up clients with no problem, and she and Flora take Cayo to all their old spots: the cafés serving fresh California produce; the hiking trails and gardens; Flora’s old school and favorite library; Disneyland; and downtown, where Gwen spent much of her time, patronizing and then working with clients who were appearing at the clubs there.
Cayo won’t remember any of it, but L.A. will be woven into the story of his life.
The last day there, they sit on the beach and stick his little feet in the Pacific Ocean. After a visit to Ocean City, Maryland with Flora’s sister and her family, Cayo has now been to both coasts.
“I don’t miss it the way I thought I would,” Gwen says, as a wave slides up around them. “Like finally coming home again, but it doesn’t feel that way.”
“No?”
Cayo is curled up on Flora’s lap, his skin is sand- and sun-kissed, and he’s fast asleep. The low tide glides in as far as Flora’s crossed legs, but doesn’t reach the baby safe in the cradle of Flora’s arms.
Gwen smiles at them, the dual tugs on her heartstrings. “I guess home really is just a state of mind.” Cayo’s little bare, wet-sandy feet stretch out and push against Gwen’s knee, and his hand rests high on Flora’s chest. Wherever she wanders, Gwen knows where her home is.
34
Three months ago…
Flora’s ideas about destiny weren’t quite the same as Gwen’s; Flora believed in choice, like Gwen, and that choices rippled out like falling dominoes or waves of energy or, sometimes, an avalanche. Unlike Gwen, she did believe in a higher power, a guiding force, the whisper in her gut that said, “This way.”
That was what had brought her to California on a scholarship, and to Gwen—to staying with Gwen even through the bleakest moments. That was what had told her it was time to move on from L.A. and that Tennessee was right—what made her sure that Gwen would never betray her trust, despite what those terrible magazines had to say about it.
She believed that fate was what had brought her to Cayo; and fate was choices guided by destiny. How else to explain that the moment she laid eyes on him, she knew without a doubt that he was her son, and that they had been waiting for each other?
But losing the baby... No. That wasn’t predestined. That wasn’t meant to be. It was terrible and heartbreaking, because life is sometimes terrible and heartbreaking. The courage to try again, to take Gwen’s hand and trust in Gwen’s bravery and her own faith, to take the jump together—that was meant to be. They had found a new path, together.
Though destiny, of course, was not quite as simple as arriving at the proper place and time and then all was as it should be.
For all of Gwen’s worry about being a terrible mother, she certainly dove right in anyway. Flora knew she would, but still, the a
bsolute chaos of those first several days; it was as if the settled quiet of their life as a couple was suddenly shot from a cannon, landing them in this exhausting new reality of a baby who was learning to eat, learning to settle and sleep, learning everything. The diaper changes and baths, the late nights and early mornings, deciphering what his cries meant and how to soothe him, family in and family out and friends in and friends out…
Gwen thrived in the insanity, while Flora was overwhelmed.
Then finally, they found a routine; a settling into their new normal. Flora was relieved. And Gwen was restless, which brought them to their compromise: a cozy apartment in Marina Del Rey for the summer. It wasn’t much bigger than Gwen’s first place near the university, but considerably nicer, with nautical decorations of ship’s wheels and seashells, blue and white stripes and anchors and old-timey maps. It was crisp and bright, with the taste of salt in the air. She and Cayo spent most of their time in a rocking chair by the big sliding glass door. Cayo ate and slept and blinked wide-eyed at the world around them; Flora fed and soothed and watched. Watched him, watched the boats in the marina drift in and out. Watched the waves bump against the docks. Watched the seagulls spiral and screech and heard the palm trees rustle in the brined ocean breeze. She’d always loved the ocean; she found its power and mystery soothing.
Gwen worked, taking on jobs that required the hustle and vehemence and kick-in-the-teeth that Nashville just didn’t. They’d found their stride, for now.
“He’s getting so chunky! I love it. The girls can’t wait to get their grubby hands on him again.”
Flora tucked the phone between her right ear and shoulder and spoke softly. Cayo was heavy with sleep and limp in her left arm with his bowed little mouth slack, eyes darting behind his eyelids. She marveled at how much he’d changed already: His skin had darkened in the California sun, his cheeks were now round and fat, and his thighs were adorably squishy. His hair remained thick and black with a mind of its own; there was just more of it now.
Burning Tracks (Book Two: Spotlight Series) Page 19