“Hey, Rodger,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you, after yesterday.”
She paused.
“I’m a little nervous,” she confessed.
“I’m nervous, too,” she heard. She smiled. She thought that she'd heard a little bit of a boyish squeak in his voice. She waited while he cleared his throat and began again. She spoke before he could say something else strange.
“I think we should meet in person to discuss... everything,” she said, her own voice wavering. She didn’t have to force herself to smile anymore. “I think—I think—I think I’d like to be a parent, and I’d like to talk to you about what we need to do to make that happen.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. She wondered if he'd dropped his phone.
“Rodger?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she heard him say, and his voice was cracking again. “Melissa—this is going to be very good.”
“I think so too,” she said. “But we’ve got a lot to discuss—”
“And quite a bit to do, if you know—”
“Shut up,” she said, laughing. “We’ll get it all taken care of, we’ll figure out what we need to decide and such—”
“Let me take you out to dinner,” Rodger said. His voice was stronger and fuller now.
Melissa covered her mouth with her hand and then ran her hand through her hair. She smiled, and then laughed.
“Yeah, I guess another date would be good,” she said, smiling. “Another date—to talk about having a kid—”
“This is surreal, isn’t it,” said Rodger.
“Yeah, very,” said Melissa, glad that she wasn't alone in that thought.
“Let’s make it feel realer,” said Rodger. “I’ll pick you up in an hour. Pizza sound good?”
“And wine, lots of wine,” said Melissa.
“Sounds good,” said Rodger. “Fifty-nine minutes.”
“Right,” said Melissa. “Um. Bye.”
The fifty eight minutes before Melissa decided it was time to walk down to her front stoop went by interminably quickly. She wasn’t regretting her decision. She was just pretty sure that she really didn’t have any idea just how much she and Rodger were about to change their lives.
He was already pulled up in front of her home when she walked downstairs. He smiled at her, tentatively.
Here were the nerves she'd expected on her first date! Here was the squeamishness, the tenuousness, the goosebumps!
But this was their first meeting as potential parents.
“How are you,” he said, dryly.
“I’ve been better,” she said. And then she re-thought that. “Actually, I’m not sure. I’ve been less weird,” she clarified.
“Yeah, this is an interesting feeling.”
“I wonder if anyone’s felt it before,” Melissa said, half smiling.
“You sound like a teenager who’s pretty sure that she’s just written the world’s first love poem.”
“Perhaps I was,” said Melissa. “I did tell you that I was a writer.”
“But are you a poet?”
“Not remotely.”
“Any plans to become one?”
“Not a chance,” said Melissa, laughing as Rodger handed her into the car.
“That’s good,” said Rodger, as he walked to the other side of the car and started up the engine. “I’d find it hard to co-parent with a perpetual rhymer.”
“Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme,” said Melissa defensively, and then wondered what she was doing. She didn’t care at all about poetry. But then a thought occurred to her. She turned to Rodger. “Is that all we’re going to be to each other? Co-parents?”
“I think that’s on the table of what we’re going to be talking about tonight,” said Rodger. “But I think the general gist is that we’re going to figure that out as we go. Not every aspect of our relationship has to be crazy accelerated,” he said, giving her the side-eye.
“Just the one,” Melissa said, quietly. “So—we’ll—see how things go? I guess?”
“Yeah,” said Rodger. “That’s what I think. And, I think that’s how tonight should go, too. We’ll get a bottle of wine…”
“And see where things go,” said Melissa quietly. She smiled up at Rodger, and he reached over and put one hand on her knee as he drove off into the night.
***
“This is an incredibly nice place that you’ve got, here,” said Melissa.
She clutched a wine glass to her chest and looked out through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the expansive pool just outside the kitchen. Inside everything was gleaming stainless steel and marble. Smooth music was playing, crystal clear, from a hidden but clearly very good speaker system.
“Thanks,” said Rodger, calling from around the corner. Melissa was in the kitchen snooping through his cupboards. Everything in this kitchen was as high-end as they came. Everything was polished to a degree which Melissa had only before ever seen in catalogues.
“It’s all mine, but I rarely use it,” Rodger said, walking into view and frowning. “I just asked the realtor to hook me up with someone who could stage my home.”
“You used a stager for this?”
“Or a decorator, or whatever,” said Rodger.
“So you live in a place that someone else outfitted,” said Melissa. “Does it feel like yours? Do you feel at home, here?”
Rodger shrugged. “You know,” he said, a wicked spark flicking into one of his eyes, “There is something which I think would make this feel a little bit more homelike.” He took Melissa’s hand, the one that wasn’t carrying a full glass of wine, for which she was thankful, and walked around the place. “Here we could put a bassinet.”
“In the corner of the living room? Next to the fireplace?” Melissa walked forward and felt the large flat stones which made up the fireplace, the chimney of which went up to the very top of the cathedral ceiling.
“As brilliant as that sounds...” she said, laughing
“No, I know,” said Rodger. “We don’t put the children in the great room; they need their own room.”
“They? We’re having multiples all of a sudden?”
“I think multiples refers to, like, twins or triplets. Which, those are really rare, aren’t they?”
“Most of the time,” Melissa said. She paused. “What else would make this place feel like home?”
She took a swig from her wineglass and beamed up at him. Rodger looked down at her, his eyes soft, the skin around the edges of them crinkling a bit. Melissa wanted to touch his face but she decided that that would be improper at what was only their third date, and their first parent meeting.
“We could get a train set to go around the corners of the room, I’ve always loved those,” Rodger said fondly.
“Go on.”
“And socks! Those tiny little baby socks!”
“What, just to throw around the room?”
“I think it’s a good idea,” Rodger said defensively. “Babies are always losing their socks. If they were everywhere in the living room, you know, just scattered about, we’d be able to just pick up another one, all the time—it would take a lot of stress out of our every day.”
“That’s thinking ahead for you,” Melissa said wisely. She had another sip of wine, and clinked her glass against his.
“You’ll find that I'm just a treasure trove of stress-relieving tips,” Rodger said, winking.
“Oh, shut up,” said Melissa. “Assuming we don’t go for the corner of the living room right next to the fireplace, where would the baby sleep?”
“Well, there is a really great room that could be the nursery,” said Rodger.
“I want to see it,” said Melissa. Rodger took her hand again and led her down a hallway. He pushed open a door and Melissa instantly cooed with delight.
She'd just walked into a space which seemed like the most ridiculously promising and cozy corner for a cute childhood she'd ever seen. There was a crib which was already outfitted with
green sheets which had four leaf clovers dotted all up and down them. Immediately next to it was a gigantic cushioned rocking chair, and next to that was a shelf of books. Melissa found herself drawn to them as if to a magnet, were she something magnetic. She knelt on the ground and scanned the titles.
“Wow,” she said. “Some of these are some of my very favorites! Look at these! Alice in Wonderland and Doctor Seuss—the Harry Potter books—the Lemony Snicket books—”
“I thought you’d like it,” said Rodger, from just behind her. Melissa swiveled round and threw her arms briefly around his neck, laid her cheek briefly on his chest. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured, and then drew back.
“When on earth did you have time to do this? I called you an hour ago.”
“But we talked about it last night,” Rodger reminded her. “And, well, I went a little crazy. I’m so excited, Melissa. Scared, yes. But so excited.”
He put his hand behind his neck and surveyed the room with her, looking a little bemused.
“Of course,” he said a moment later, “Everything in here can be changed. Should be changed! I know that you probably want to have at least some say in the decor—obviously. I just wanted to feel like I was doing something while I was waiting for your decision, you know?”
Melissa put her hand over her mouth again and walked slowly to a small dresser on the other side of the room. She opened it up and took from inside it a white puffy sweater which was not much bigger than her own hand. Her heart melted a little bit, and then she turned to look at Rodger again.
His eyes were huge and earnest. “I didn’t overstep, did I? This isn’t too weird, is it? I know it’s a little weird. And I promise, if you’d decided that you didn’t want to have a baby with me, which would have been totally understandable, I would have donated all of this to a family in need. Or something. It would have been used. But—I’m so glad—I’m so very glad—that you like it. And our child will be using this room! Isn’t that crazy?”
Melissa took his hand and kissed him and led him from the room.
Chapter 7
Two months later, Melissa was staring at a pregnancy test.
She’d never before had to take one. She’d never before had a reason to. Her cycle had always come faithfully like clockwork, and she’d always been very careful that whenever the occasion warranted it all protection necessary was used; no, she’d always been very sure, up until now, that there was no way that she could be pregnant. None at all.
Walking into the grocery store and purchasing the small box, then, had felt very significant. She’d stood in the health and beauty aisle for several minutes, looking at the other women buying vitamins and shampoo and other pedestrian things, not wanting there to be any audience when she reached up and picked up the thing from the shelf. Not that she was embarrassed. It just felt like a very, very private thing; and if someone had squawked from behind her as to the nature of her purchase, she simply didn't know how she would have handled that. Not well, Melissa assumed. Accordingly she bought several things that she didn’t necessarily need—shampoo, vitamins (unnecessary; she and Rodger had already gone online and bought almost every varietal of prenatal vitamin that the internet had to boast), even a strange and lumpy pair of grocery store socks, in which she planned to hide the pregnancy test until she brought it up to the cash register. She half-smiled at the memory, the time when she’d shaken the pregnancy test box out of the pair of socks before an unbelieving male cashier’s gaze. She’d also spent some twenty minutes waffling in front of the cashier’s line, hoping that a woman would be there to check out her purchases, before throwing her hands metaphorically in the air and deciding that on the whole she was being ridiculous, and it wasn’t as if anyone else in the store cared what it was that she was buying.
The purchase done, time had seemed to stand still. She drove home, very carefully, thinking all the way very true and very unhelpful thoughts.
This could be the last time (for example, she thought) that she drove home as not a mother.
This could be the last time that she unloaded the car … without another life growing inside of her. Melissa shivered. As wanted and tried for and wholly expected this baby was going to be, when—if—he or she came, it was hard, on this side of things, not to think of the inbound fetus as a strange, alien sort of being.
She’d stayed up late the other night watching pregnancy vlogs. She couldn’t tell whether that had been a good idea or a mistake. Watching women’s stomachs move around like that, when in later months the baby was big enough to punch the woman from the inside or cause her skin to move about as if an elephant were under a rug…Melissa shivered.
And then she reminded herself that once again she was getting ahead of herself. They’d clear those bridges as they came to them. She was now sitting on the leather couch in Rodger’s home — sort of her home, now that she thought of it. When they’d decided to become co-parents they’d begun to buy things together and spend more time together; first, in kind of a project mindset (obviously they’d have to spend time together; they were going to be parents); but as they grew to get used to each other and appreciate each other, their relationship slowly and carefully but perhaps inevitably grew beyond that. Melissa was beginning to forget how her life could have possibly been, or at least been good, before she met Rodger.
Everything was easy now. Rodger’s money opened doors which Melissa could never have dreamed of accessing. She now had a very thick, very heavy credit card in her wallet which had connected to it more money than she could have even fathomed. She had resisted, but Rodger had insisted. She was the mother of his child—his as of yet hypothetical child, she’d remind him, his child which they had not yet successfully conceived, she’d remind him. Her prenatal health was very important to the ongoing health and happiness of their child and their future family, he’d argue, and then he’d shower her with gifts. This had made her extremely uncomfortable. He’d kept bringing her useless things she didn't need—beautiful, yes, but things which she would not use—and she begged him to stop, both for economy and propriety and to reduce her guilt at being the relatively penniless consort of a billionaire. He'd smiled (she later suspected that this had been his plan all along) and handed her a small envelope, telling her that the only way he’d stop was if she accepted and used what was in the envelope.
And so the credit card, which had her name on it and everything, went into her wallet and she had used it. She was starting to get used to it, too—approximately one hundred cashiers had pretended to weigh the metallic rectangle in their hands before swiping away the very large numbers on the small screens they protected.
And all of that had led to this moment. She'd moved to the floor of the bathroom. It seemed like a poetic, romantic sort of place to look at one’s first pregnancy test.
Had it been two minutes? It felt like it had been much longer.
The timer on her phone beeped.
Melissa froze. Somehow, now, she didn’t feel like she could stand. But she had to, because the pregnancy test was on the counter, about four or five feet away from her. It was really a very large bathroom. It was probably about as big as her entire bedroom in her old apartment, the one which was still being rented, somewhat uselessly. Melissa would have to make a mental note to get out of that rental contract. For economy reasons, she thought.
She tried and failed several times to get up off the floor, but at this crucial juncture of her life, her legs weren’t really working, that much. She couldn’t seem to make it happen.
Her phone was on the floor next to her. She could reach that. It seemed like a healthy compromise. She could reach the phone and call for help. She picked up her phone and called the number which was, by now, first on her speed dial.
“Hey, um. Rodger,” she said. She tried to keep the strangled feeling out of her throat. She had to sound normal. She cleared her throat. “Hey,” she tried. So, normal wasn’t really happening.
“Are you okay?”
/>
She could hear him going into alert. She could tell that he was sitting on the edge of his seat. The adrenaline. She had to smile. Was this going to be the rest of her life? Knowing exactly what he was doing? Because she knew him well, or something?
She swallowed and focused her eyes on the pregnancy test which was teetering on the edge of the sink an impossible distance away. “Um, Rodger, I need you to come home,” she said. She closed her eyes. He was a billionaire. She wasn’t even precisely sure what he did, but he could afford to come home, right?
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said.
He could, apparently.
“Are you okay?”
“Um,” she said, and she swallowed twice very quickly. This did not do wonders for her voice. “Yes, I’m very okay.”
“That’s not something that a normal person says. Hold tight. Nine minutes.”
Some eight minutes later, Rodger was sitting on the floor next to her.
He looked at the pregnancy test.
“Have you looked at it yet?”
She teared up at that. “No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think I can move.”
Rodger looked at her, really looked at her, and his face softened. She was terrified.
“I’m terrified,” Melissa clarified.
She was a little bit excited that she'd made a rhyme. But she was aware that no one would know that except for her.
Rodger looked at her again. He bit his lip, and then he smiled. “Would you like for me to look at it?”
“Yeah, I think that’s the only way it’s getting looked at,” Melissa admitted.
Rodger rocked forward and half-crawled to the sink, then came back to sit on the floor next to Melissa.
“Okay,” he said. He held up the test. Melissa squeezed her eyes shut. Really, this was embarrassing, she was really, usually, far more courageous than this. She was a librarian. She read scary books, because she had to, for her job.
“Melissa,” he said, his voice shaking.
Be My Bride and Have My Baby Page 7