Shopping for a Billionaire’s Baby

by Julia Kent

  We didn’t have to work hard to make this baby. One month of disappointment is a drop in the bucket compared to so many other couples.

  Tears bloom along the lower edges of my eyes. Declan sees it as the ultrasound tech closes the door, facing me. “What’s wrong?”

  “I feel like someone is twanging my bladder with a sledgehammer.”

  “You haven’t felt him kick yet,” Dec says.

  “No. But my bladder’s about to kick her if we don’t get this over with.”

  “Shannon, I’m Terri,” the tech says, smiling at me, then at Declan. She gets me up on the exam table, sheet draped in all the right places, goo all over my belly in a couple of minutes. It’s cold in the room, and while Declan’s holding my hand and there’s no speculum or anything else invasive, this feels monumental.

  An alien appears in black and white on the screen, lines distorted, my eyes trying to adjust and pattern match to find a baby in there.

  “Is that an arm?” Declan asks. “Or a hip, with the thigh and knee over to the lower right?”

  “That’s actually a torso,” she says, poking deep into my belly. My bladder screams back.

  A dot grows big then small, big then small, and then a sound like horses galloping fills the room.

  “There’s your baby’s heartbeat,” she says confidently.

  Dec threads his fingers through mine and squeezes hard as he leans forward, completely captivated.

  “That’s his heartbeat we hear? And that’s his actual heart on the screen?” he asks, mesmerized.

  “Yes.” The room is dark and tiny, the glow of the screen all anyone is focused on. Magic warms the air, as if someone is rubbing two wands together to create heat. In a way, while what’s happening to my body is obviously deeply rooted in science, it’s a variant of magic. No one knows what triggers labor. No one knows why some babies come early and some late.

  When it’s a medical problem, sure, but in the tides of “normal” pregnancy and birth, the variations are so enormous as to have a mystical quality. Are babies drawn by the lunar cycle? Held back by mercury in retrograde? Do eclipses make a difference? Sun spots? Beltane? Declan would laugh if I voiced my questions, but they are ancient, timeless musings that aren’t easily solved by a Friedman chart and oxygen monitors.

  “That’s our son,” Dec says, voice thick with emotion. He’s close to crying.

  “Or daughter.” I can’t help myself.

  “Do you want to know the sex? As soon as I’m done taking some measurements, we can zero in and see if we can tell,” Terri says, professional but friendly.

  “Yes,” we both say simultaneously.

  A few minutes later, she’s digging the wand in, trying to find the answer.

  “Here. I have to tell you that ultrasound is never one hundred percent sure.”

  “How close is it?” Declan asks.

  “Ninety percent or so.”

  “Good enough.”

  “Well, then... here’s your son.”

  I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until it comes out in one long, slow, emotional gasp, the tears filling my head crowding out all thought, my ears burning and bladder an afterthought.

  “Son?” Dec chokes out. “We’re having a boy?”

  “Yes,” she says. “It appears to be a boy. Here’s the umbilical cord, and...” She continues speaking, but I don’t hear her, caught in the steady drum sound of my own recognition that a little boy is growing inside me.

  “It’s a boy,” I say, laughing as fat tears run down my cheeks.

  “Are you okay? I know you wanted a girl,” Dec says.

  “I don’t care! I want a baby! I just thought it was a girl. I’m happy either way. A little boy. We’re having a little boy.” My hand goes to my mouth, as if I have to hold in all the love to keep it from bursting out of my body. Declan’s hugging me, and I need to pee so bad, but we’re laughing and he’s so warm and good. We made a little boy.

  A boy.

  “I guess it’s time to look at trucks and dinosaurs,” I say. “Carol will be sad. She wanted a niece so she could finally buy pink clothes.”

  I expect Dec to join in, but he cocks his head and says, “He can wear whatever he wants. Pink, purple, a tutu, a batcape–I don’t care. As long as he is who he is.”

  “But everyone will buy blue.”

  “That’s fine.” Our eyes meet, even in the dark. His glitter with happiness. “You’re growing a little boy inside you. For me.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “A boy.”

  “Yes, a boy.”

  “Wow.”

  The moment really is magic, but reality kicks in, and when in conflict, reality always wins. “I need to pee,” I tell him. “I want to celebrate and be with you but right now, Dec, you’re an obstacle to my getting out that door and racing to the bathroom.”

  Terri wipes the goop off my stomach like the pro that she is. “Go!”

  As I leave the room, every clerk or midwife in the hallway parts, my trajectory obvious. I get to the bathroom, sit on the toilet, and two things happen:

  1. I don’t pee. My muscles can’t relax.

  2. I start to cry.

  The crying makes me tense up, which only makes my bladder hurt more, and then I’m crying harder because I can’t even get my body to do the most basic of functions. I am failing at peeing.

  How can I succeed at mothering?

  Dangerously close to sobbing in the loud and gut-wrenching ways that bring concerned crowds, I think about the hypnosis app I’ve started listening to, remembering the soothing waves, and just like that, I relax.

  I flow.

  I overflow.

  The agony of an overstretched bladder is no match for the ecstasy of the moment you can relieve it. Within seconds, my mood shifts to elation, my crying a happy, joyful feeling as I process it all.

  On the toilet.

  Why do so many important parts of my life take place in bathrooms?

  Tap tap tap.

  “Shannon? Honey?”

  “I’m fine,” I call back. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Okay,” Declan says, his voice receding. I imagine him out there in the hall, hands in his pants pockets, a silly grin on his face, emotions like balloons on the wind. Someone walking past him would think he was a concerned husband waiting for a pregnant wife, and they’d be right.

  But they’d miss his inner elation.

  I’m missing his elation.

  I finish, wash up, and come out to find him, arms wide, my entrance into his space unspoken, like gravity. Dec becomes a force in and of himself, and soon he’s mumbling happy words into my neck, followed by a long, sweet hug.

  “A boy,” he says, pulling back and staring at me.

  “Time to start picking names,” I note.

  “Anything but Declan, Jr.” He bristles as he says it. “Or James.”

  “Not Jason,” I add.

  “I want him to have his own identity.”

  “Agreed.” I sigh. “Now we need to do the rest of the appointment with Paula.”

  He looks around. “Oh. Right. While you were in the bathroom, she got called to a birth. The receptionist said we can go home and you can just come for your next appointment. The scans looked fine.”

  “They did?”

  He reaches into his breast coat pocket. “Here.”

  “We made an alien baby,” I say, looking at the printout.

  As we walk to the main doors, he hugs me. “We made an entire human being out of nothing but love.”

  “And semen. And an egg. And a lot of orange food.”

  “I’m so glad you’re over that orange food phase.”

  “I’m so glad I can drink coffee again!”

  “Let’s go get some, and call everyone while we’re there.”

  “I really just want to go home, Dec.”

  “Are you okay? Tired?”

  “I just want to be with you.”

  “Be w
ith me, or... be with me?”

  “How about both?”

  “I like both.”

  * * *

  Declan

  * * *

  “That’s it?” After we got home from the ultrasound where I learned I was going to have a son, we walked through the front door, Shannon stripped my lower half to nothing, removed her underwear, climbed on top of me in her dress and rode me until she orgasmed two minutes later.

  Now she’s putting her panties back on and smoothing her hair like she winded herself catching a stray piece of paper on a busy road.

  “What’s it?” she asks, genuinely confused.

  “No... cuddling?”

  “Why would I want to cuddle?”

  “Shannon. Every time we have sex, you’re the one who turns into an octopus and wraps herself around me. You once told me that it was a rule: for every ten minutes of sex, thirty minutes of cuddling. Something about the same one-to-three ratio college professors require for class time versus homework.”

  “Oh, that? No. Rule dismissed.”

  “Dismissed?”

  She kisses me on the cheek and says, “Thanks! That was exactly what I needed.”

  I’m staring at the light fixture, slightly catatonic, the thick leather of the couch cold and unfeeling against my bare ass.

  Did my wife just use me for sex?

  A door closes, clicking with clarity. Water starts to run as she takes a shower.

  Yeah. She did. Huh.

  I thread my fingers together, hands clasped behind my head, pants brushing against my foot as I take a few breaths and intently study the ceiling patterns. My phone buzzes in my pile of pants, but I ignore it.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  Chuckles walks in from the kitchen, sniffing the air with disapproval at such primal carnality. How dare we do that in his home?

  My lower extremities are practically vibrating, like my phone, as my heart rate finds normal again. That was super-quick sex. Less than a quickie. I think we need to just call that a Qui. So fast, it doesn’t even get the last few letters.

  She just pulled my pants down and went at it with me. Used me like a piece of meat to get off.

  I grin.

  I love the second trimester.

  I figured we’d have sex after the emotionality of the ultrasound. What I didn’t expect was how unemotional sex has become. For a woman who is usually all about the love via touch, she’s become exceptionally transactional about sex lately.

  It’s not bad. Not at all. Just different.

  I like different. Don’t get me wrong. We’re having sex up to five times a day, all of them fast and furious like a car chase, only instead of four tons of steel, Shannon’s chasing her orgasms. They come swiftly: a thunderstorm, a fireball of need turning into a hurricane, a water bomb, a flash of power that builds and fades with a whiplash change that leaves me breathless.

  And naked.

  Plenty of sex has been like this for the last month, but I guess I expected more this time. Coming home from the ultrasound appointment feels fragile. Unreal.

  Come to think of it, so does our sex life.

  “Shannon?” I can hear the shower running. I walk into the bedroom and follow the steam. She’s in there, eyes closed, head tipped up to the shower head, water running down her forehead and hair. One knee is bent, her swollen belly on display, her profile the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.

  I stop dead in my tracks and just watch.

  The shower spray makes the light come through the glass door in broken fragments, crooked and gleaming, her body a series of angles that turn soft curves into an abstract work of art. Steam billows up, touching me, letting me breathe it in as if the invitation isn’t enough. It has to offer itself to me as a ritual, my lungs inhaling water that just kissed my wife’s skin. We’re connected by air, by water, by elements that we combine in our own right to share in our own, rich world.

  Ours.

  And only ours.

  She’s relaxed and soapy, her head a white cloud of shampoo and focus, arms up as she washes her hair. In the daylight, I catch covert–and sometimes overt–glimpses of Shannon, marveling at how the soul inside is wrapped up in a full, complete package of gorgeous flesh. We’re given the same organs, the same bones, all the sinew and tendons and hair the same, same, same.

  And yet she is so unique.

  Infinite combinations of finite elements make her. Make me. Make the baby that she nurtures inside that lush belly.

  I can’t help myself.

  Watching her isn’t enough.

  I need to touch her.

  Heat radiates off her wet skin as I step in with her, the wide-open shower with a four-jet spray that the designer insisted I needed when I bought this place now a sanctuary of skin. Keeping her eyes closed, Shannon grins as I slide my open palms against the sides of her belly, her slick ass a hot ride against my quads, the stinging water making me close my eyes, too.

  “Mmmm,” she says, the purr low and pleasure-filled. I rest my chin in the crook of her shoulder and breathe, letting the water soak my hair, brushing onto my forehead, the drip drip drip a methodical mantra that takes me into my body and damn near into her. Not in a sexual way.

  Sensual.

  I don’t want to be in her right now. I want to be with her, holding our baby so close with hands that can’t quite believe my life is this full. When I met Shannon four years ago in that damn store bathroom, I knew. I didn’t know I knew, but I knew.

  She leans back against me, shoulders relaxing, skin on skin lighting my soul. We’re two, about to become three, and as my throat tightens with emotion, she lets out a long sigh, a letting go that signals my work is done.

  If the atom is the building block of matter, then trust is the building block of love.

  She trusts me.

  I trust her.

  And as we breathe together, her belly rising and falling under my hands that press into her skin with a gentle respect for the divine, the water washing away our doubts, I find even more.

  I trust myself.

  Chapter 12

  Shannon

  * * *

  We made a decision not to tell anyone the sex of the baby until we go to Mom and Dad’s house for Sunday dinner again, and today’s the day. It’s a simple gesture, one we don’t have to make, but revealing our special news in person feels more powerful. More connected.

  Mom invited Andrew and Amanda over. Pam couldn’t make it, and I know James was invited.

  “How did you get that fat tree into the house?” Declan marvels as we work on decorating it. Dad got a spruce from Nova Scotia from the same Christmas tree stand where we’ve been buying our trees forever. This one is particularly bottom heavy, wide as can be, but tall.

  That sounds like a description of me these days.

  “Took some man power. Jeffrey helped.” Dad’s proud of that. You can tell. He’s the closest person Jeffrey and Tyler have to a father. Raising them isn’t Mom and Dad’s job – that’s Carol’s – but they take their role seriously as helpers.

  All of the plastic storage containers with Mom’s extensive holiday decoration system litter the living room as we take our stations and coordinate our attack on the house. A detailed schematic is taped to the underside of each lid. Declan insisted on being late on purpose, knowing how elaborate Mom’s Christmas decorating tradition can be.

  “Oh, honey?” Mom calls out to me. “Don’t forget to take the bag marked ‘Chuckles costumes.’ You know how cute he looks when we dress him up like a candy cane. Just think – next year we can get candy cane costumes for Chuffy, Chuckles and all the grandkids and make the most adorable pictures!”

  “I am not dressing up like a candy cane,” Jeffrey announces, emphatic. “Men don’t do that.”

  “Men don’t do dat,” Tyler says, darting out of the room as if Chuffy were —

  Oh. Here’s the dog. Mom scoops him up, then turns to Jeffrey.

  “You’
re still a little boy,” Mom says to him, trying to kiss his cheek. “Stop trying to grow up so fast.”

  Twisting away, he gives her a stare that Carol passed down through her DNA. “I am not a little boy, and even if I were, you can’t just make people and animals wear stupid costumes. Animals have rights, too!”

  “Chuckles loves being a reindeer. Or a candy cane. Or a -- ”

  “Grandma, did you get their consent?”

  “Their what?”

  “Their consent! We’re learning about the importance of consent at school. You can’t just make someone do something they don’t want to do.”

  “Good to know you’re being taught about consent while forced to attend compulsory education classes,” Declan says.

  I elbow him. “Whose side are you on?”

  “Mine.”

  Dinner’s over, ice cream bowls are being scraped, and Declan skipped dessert and went straight for a third beer. Jeffrey gives up and finds a plate of cookies to devour, Tyler on his heels. We’re getting ready to tell everyone when Mom looks around the room and pounces.

  Scheming looks abound in my mother’s eyes, but this one takes the cake as she asks us, “You’re coming to my first Unicoga class, right?”

  Declan frowns and looks to Amy for confirmation. “Uni-co-what?” Andrew starts shaking his head behind Amanda. Is he mouthing the f word?

  “Unicoga,” Mom says slowly. “Unicorn yoga.”

  Amy points at Mom. “Yeah. That.”

  “How do unicorns do yoga?” I ask as Declan takes one careful step back, trying to escape the conversation. I grab his elbow and squeeze hard.

  That squeeze says: If I’m stuck hearing this, so are you, buddy. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, in Unicoga and hoo-haw cams.

  His nostrils flare, mouth tightening, but he doesn’t pull away.

  Yet.

  “How does a unicorn do yoga?” I ask again, then give Mom the palm of my hand to talk to. “And don’t you dare say ‘very carefully.’”