by Ann Hood
“Who’s going to handle the official business?” Emily managed. She gulped air as if she were drowning.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you even looked at anything they’ve sent us?” she cried.
“You’re having so much fun doing it all, I just let you handle it.”
“This is our baby. And you are going to be on that plane with me next week. Do you hear me?” Of course he did; she was screaming now. But she didn’t care.
“Do you?” she shouted.
She didn’t wait for him to answer. Instead, she walked out of the room and closed the door good and hard behind her.
“WHO WILL BE your significant other?” Emily asked Maya that night over the phone. “Who will handle the official business?”
“I know our guide,” Maya said. “She’ll help out.”
Emily sighed. “What am I going to do if he doesn’t come?”
“He’s going to come,” Maya said.
SOMEHOW, EMILY FELL ASLEEP. She felt the bed dip as Michael sat beside her.
“I’ve been on the phone with Chloe and Rachel,” he said.
Emily tried to make out his features. She tried to remind herself that she loved him. That Beatrice was theirs.
“I talked to them and I sat there and I thought about everything. About her, and about us. What you’ve been through with the miscarriages. How happy you’ve been these past few weeks.” He touched her hair. “Your little lists. And the way you tell everybody you see that you’re getting your baby.”
Emily squeezed her eyes shut, but it didn’t stop the tears.
“How could you have for one minute considered not going to China?” Emily said.
“What?” Michael said. “I never said that. How could I not go and get our baby? I just want to figure out how to make this work better.”
“What an idiot I am,” Emily said
Michael was covering her with kisses and she was laughing and crying at the same time and he was undressing her.
NELL
“I can’t believe we are the only ones who upgraded,” Nell whispered to Benjamin.
He grunted an answer and kept his face buried in the Wall Street Journal.
“I mean, it’s something like an eighteen-hour flight,” Nell said. “In coach?”
She glanced around the gate area. Odd that everyone was here, but no one sat together except Maya and Emily. It was as if they hadn’t had all those brunches and potlucks together, as if they hadn’t shared all those nervous emails during these long months of waiting. As if, Nell decided, they were strangers.
There was Theo and Sophie. The sight of the two of them—his hand on her arm, her pregnant belly—made her feel slightly queasy. What in the world had she been thinking? When Theo’s hand rested ever so lightly on Sophie’s stomach, Nell looked away, a surprising sting of tears in her eyes. Foolishly, she reached for Benjamin’s hand and grabbed onto it, too tight.
“What?” he asked her.
Nell tried to think of something to say.
“Hey,” Benjamin said, “you’re crying.” He wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb.
What an idiot I am, Nell thought. She made herself look over at them again. Sophie had a magazine open, practically resting on her belly, and they were both reading something in it with great interest.
“Is it even safe for her to fly?” Nell said.
Ben followed her gaze. “Don’t be jealous,” he said, patting her leg. “We are on our way to get our baby.”
“I’m not jealous,” Nell said.
She almost asked him why some people got two or three children and they had to work so hard for just one? But he had gone back to his newspaper and the gate agent, in her military navy blue uniform, was at the Jetway door, ready to call them on board.
SOMEWHERE OVER THE Pacific Ocean, Nell woke gripped with panic. She looked around the dim cabin. Ben was asleep beside her, stretched out in the first-class seat, the red blanket tucked around him. Someone’s computer glowed eerily in the dark. Nell was not afraid to fly. For work, she had logged thousands of miles on this same route to Asia. She had spent hours hunched over her own MacBook, working numbers and spreadsheets, preparing PowerPoint presentations. But tonight, she could not focus on anything as simple as the magazines she had brought to read. Now this. A gripping in her gut, her heart pounding.
Nell nudged Ben, but he didn’t wake up. Maybe he had taken an Ambien. Maybe she should take one. She’d read about people doing crazy things, asleep on Ambien. Driving cars and eating raw meat. Nell did not want to do anything she would regret. She realized her foot was tapping like crazy. Was it anticipation? Or terror? In three days, she would be holding a baby. Her baby. Finally.
The flight attendant appeared at her side.
“Would you like anything?” she asked. She was so old and overweight that Nell thought she should be sitting down herself. Flight attendants used to be so beautiful, so lovely in their crisp uniforms and perfectly made-up faces. This woman was so rumpled and tired-looking that Nell almost felt sorry for her.
“Maybe some scotch?” Nell said. “Neat?”
The flight attendant smiled wearily and shuffled off in her scuffed loafers. Shouldn’t they wear high heels? Nell sighed.
The scotch did calm her a bit. She took out her iPhone and made notes: Pack diaper bag. Iron red blouse. Get baby.
She added the items she would put in the diaper bag. Two diapers. The travel case of wipes. A change of clothes. A burp cloth. A sweater. Two empty bottles. A board book. A plush toy.
The red blouse was silk. Red to stimulate the baby. Silk to soothe her.
Nell looked at the third thing. Get baby.
Her heart started to race again. Wasn’t this what she had wanted for years now? She thought of all the tests, the dye shot into her fallopian tubes, the D&C’s, the vaginal sonograms. She thought of the hope that each tablet of Clomid held, how she had gritted her teeth and bent over the bed while Benjamin gave her shots in the ass because those shots, that sting of the needle, held the promise of a baby. She’d had her eggs counted and her ovaries overstimulated and her moods swinging. All of it somehow wrapped up in this moment, this journey toward a baby. And now she couldn’t remember why she’d even begun it.
Nell made lists. She made lists and she carefully checked off each accomplishment. Even in grade school she had goals that she carefully wrote in her lined notebook. Win the spelling bee. Read every book for the Read-a-thon. Become champion in jacks, in T-ball, in jump rope. With each item checked off, Nell’s accomplishments grew.
Years later, she wrote: Have a baby. Months passed, then years. In three days, Nell would be handed a baby girl, and that night, in her bed in a hotel in Changsha, China, she would finally check off that item.
“Benjamin?” Nell said, shaking her husband hard enough to wake him.
He looked at her through half-open eyes, his cowlick poking upward, his breath sour with sleep.
“What happened?” he mumbled.
“Benjamin,” she said again.
Nell did not let go of his arm. “What the hell are we doing?”
THEO
Theo stood on top of the Great Wall and stared out. The group had come here by bus—they went everywhere by bus, together. Their guide had pointed in one direction and said that was the easier climb. Then he pointed in this direction and told them it was more difficult. Of course, Nell had babbled to him in Mandarin, made some joke that sent him into a fit of laughter, then she headed off this way without waiting for anyone else.
“Either way,” the guide said, “be back at bus at one o’clock. Then we’ll all go for lunch.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t climb it,” Theo had told Sophie. Even the easier way had crumbling steps and steep inclines.
“I’m in China,” Sophie said. “I’m climbing the Great Wall. You go and do the hard route. I’ll take the easy one.”
“Okay,” he said reluctantly. From where they stoo
d, he could see young children and a couple of women in high heels scampering up the easier path. “But be careful.” He’d kissed her and held her close so that he could feel her hard, round belly against him.
Standing here at this high point, the Wall snaking endlessly before him, Theo actually, ridiculously, missed his wife. He would have liked her standing beside him, taking in the view. Sophie had done her research. He knew that. If she was standing next to him, she would be able to tell him how long it took to build it, how many people were buried inside it.
Ever since they got off the shuttle at Logan Airport and she’d slipped her hand into his and said: “Let’s go,” Theo had believed he was almost forgiven. She’d smiled up at him when she’d said that, and it was the first time her smile looked like Sophie’s own instead of some strained, tight version of it. Theo’s heart had soared in that moment. He’d walked side by side with his pregnant wife toward the plane that would take them to their daughter. He felt huge and abundant and grateful. He still did.
When Heather was pregnant, her swelling breasts and the small bump of her stomach had repulsed him. For the first time since they’d met, he did not want to touch her. He moved from their bed to the sofa, and then he moved out. But Sophie became beautiful to him. The larger she grew, the more he wanted her.
“You are glorious,” he told her last night in the hotel.
The group had eaten at a restaurant famous for its Peking duck, and later, in their room, Sophie had stood before him, lifted her shirt to reveal that beautiful belly, and groaned.
“I am not glorious,” she’d said. “I am full of duck.” She smiled at him as he kissed that belly. “I am gluttonous,” she added.
“Glowing,” he’d murmured, inching her black maternity pants off her hips.
Sophie let him lead her awkward naked body to the bed. Afterward, she whispered, “Glad.”
“Me too,” Theo said, though glad did not say enough.
“Am I really glorious?” Sophie said. “So fat and getting fatter every minute?”
“You are,” he said. “Glorious.”
That was how they decided to name the baby she was carrying Gloria. Someday he would tell his daughter how she got her name, how her mother was so beautiful when she was carrying her that she looked glorious.
Abundant, Theo thought again as he looked at that narrow Wall. He was a goddamn cornucopia.
“A bhat for your thoughts,” Sophie said.
There she was in her black maternity pants and her beautiful stomach, her face flushed and damp, standing on the difficult climb of the Great Wall of China.
“I am thinking about cornucopias,” he said.
Sophie narrowed her eyes. “Like at Thanksgiving?”
“Yes,” Theo laughed.
Sophie took in the view. She had her back to him when she said, “You slept with Nell Walker-Adams.”
Theo’s breath caught. He could lie to her so easily. He could change facts and deny everything.
“I can’t even describe how I knew,” Sophie said. “Just a hunch. The way you avoided looking at her. How late you came home from those classes she took with you. Then that day you told me you were at Tazza doing lesson plans. See, I was at Tazza that day.”
If he thought hard, he could make up an explanation even for that. “I’m sorry,” he said instead.
“She’s not even very pretty,” Sophie said, her back still to him.
“I can’t explain it,” Theo said. Then he tried to explain, how it had only been once, stammering about his fear of children and his nervousness about the adoption and a sense of drowning.
Sophie said nothing. It was as if she wasn’t listening at all, but rather that she was deciding something.
When she finally turned around to face him, she said softly, “Someday we’ll come back here with Ella and Gloria, and maybe even Rose. We’ll come back with our family.”
Theo wanted to say thank you. He wanted to drop to his knees with relief and love. But Sophie did not give him a chance. Instead, she began the arduous climb along the difficult path, taking small, careful steps.
SUSANNAH
“Tomorrow at eleven a.m., you will get your babies,” the guide said.
They had landed at the airport in Changsha and were headed by bus to their hotel. The guide had the improbable name Elvis, and to live up to it, he wore his hair slicked back into a pompadour.
“We will meet in the hotel lobby at ten-thirty sharp and we will board the bus and we will drive to city hall and get your babies.” He grinned at them. “I’m all shook up. How about you?”
Carter laughed beside her. He was such a good sport, the guy who helped the guides count everyone to make sure they were all there. The guy who figured out the checks in restaurants and collected the money. At dinner in Beijing the first night, Carter had stood and made a toast to Maya, thanking her for their babies. The toast was heartwarming and funny and poignant. Perfect. So why had Susannah hated that he’d done it?
She stared out the window, trying to see something of the anonymous city they drove through. It was almost midnight, and she was jet-lagged and irritable. Maya had insisted that they all spend three days in Beijing before flying on to Hunan. It was important, she said, that they see some of China and learn about its history and culture. Bleary-eyed, Susannah had listened to tour guides talk about dynasties and emperors. She’d waited too long in line to catch a glimpse of Mao’s body, wandered for hours through the Forbidden City, visited silk factories and porcelain factories and jade factories. Carter had bought souvenirs everywhere. T-shirts and a Mao watch and a jade bracelet and a porcelain dragon for her astrological sign, all for Clara. He’d bought silk comforters, garish things with Chinese designs in jewel tones. “What are we going to do with all of this?” Susannah muttered as he bartered and bantered and shopped.
“Hunan girls are called Spicy Girls,” the guide was saying. “Hunan food is very famous for its spiciness, so the girls are Spicy Girls.”
Susannah pressed her face against the cool window. She imagined Carter would buy chili peppers and cookbooks here. The bus slowed, and the bright lights of a hotel broke the darkness.
Everyone stood and filed out. Every time the group got on the bus, they took the same seats, as if they’d been assigned to them. When they got off the bus, they were always in the same order, Susannah squeezed between Carter behind her and the ever-glowing pregnant Sophie ahead of her.
When Susannah passed Elvis he touched her shoulder lightly.
“Tomorrow morning at eleven a.m., you will get your baby,” he said. “No problem.”
Susannah jerked her head around to look at him. Why had he said this to her and not Sophie?
Carter was grinning at the guy. “See you in the lobby,” Carter said brightly.
Emily walked past Elvis, and he said nothing.
Susannah stood at the door of the bus watching the rest of the group get off. Elvis smiled and said, “See you in the morning!” and “Get a good night’s rest!” But only to her had he made that pointed remark. No problem? Susannah thought. Why would he say that to her?
THE HOTEL ROOM had a crib set up in it. In the bathroom, there was a small plastic baby bathtub. Propped in one corner was a lime green portable stroller. Everything waiting for the baby whom Susannah would get at eleven o’clock the next morning.
Carter whistled in the shower, and Susannah willed him to stop. But he didn’t. He kept whistling until he appeared, a towel wrapped around his waist.
“One in the afternoon at home,” he said. “Let’s call Clara and tell her she’ll have her sister in under twelve hours.”
Susannah watched him as he sat on the bed and dialed the United States. He had mastered everything here so easily. Long-distance calls and the currency conversion. The lights in the hotel worked on some system involving the room key, and he had that figured out too. Annoyingly, he could even say simple phrases in Mandarin.
“It’s Mommy and Daddy!”
he was saying into the telephone. “I did buy you more presents,” he said. “Oh, I can’t tell you. They’re surprises. Mommy has something to tell you.” He motioned for Susannah to come and take the phone. “Of course you want to talk to Mommy,” he said.
“She doesn’t,” Susannah said flatly. “That’s fine.”
Still he coaxed and pleaded. “Mommy has such good news for you, honey.”
“For Christ’s sake, just tell her so we can get to bed,” Susannah snapped.
She climbed under the covers and rolled away from where he sat, still talking in that tone of voice that drove Susannah crazy. The crib stood there, empty and forlorn. No problem, Elvis had said. So of course there must be a problem, something he knew that he was trying to prepare her for. When Clara was born, Susannah noticed the nurse frown slightly when she examined her. “Is everything all right?” she’d asked, panicked. The nurse, a doughy-faced woman in pea green scrubs, had smiled at her. “No problem,” she’d said.
Finally Carter hung up, and slid naked beside her.
“Clara’s excited,” he said.
“Mmmm.”
“You excited?”
The crib took on an ominous shape in the dark room. Susannah thought: I am terrified.
“Of course,” she said.
Just like that, her husband was asleep, breathing the tiniest snores. Susannah told herself everything was all right, or Maya would have come to their room. She would have told them the truth. No problem, Susannah thought. Then she waited out the long night.
18
MAYA
Maya awoke from a dream in which she was falling off the highest part of the Great Wall into an abyss below to the sound of pounding on her door. For a moment, even as she lay in bed struggling to get up and answer it, she felt that stomach-dropping feeling of falling from great heights. When she finally stood, she had to hold the edge of the bed for balance. The banging did not let up, even as she paused to wrap the hotel robe around herself and glance at the clock. 5:40.