Melissa opened her eyes. That was odd. Not that she opened her eyes, she thought to herself, impatiently, but that he'd actually said her name. He usually didn’t say her name. She half-smiled. She liked that.
Melissa focused. This was not the time to lose her concentration. This was a time to be very dialed in to precisely what was happening in front of her—which was very possibly why things which shouldn’t have been fascinating, like the impossibly clean grout—Did Rodger clean this bathroom? Or did he have a service? She mulled it over; he definitely had a service) or the way that the dust sparkled in the air—
“Melissa, focus,” Rodger said. He waved something white, something white and pink, something white with two pink stripes on it in front of her face.
“Melissa, we’re going to be parents,” he said. She could hear the smile in his voice before she looked at him. “Melissa—we’re going to have a little boy—or a little girl—Melissa, we did it—”
And that was the last Melissa knew before she woke up in a hospital room. As she looked at the ceiling, her first thought was that she was back in the same hospital room she'd been in when she'd hurt her leg after the skydiving incident. She was instantly terrified. Had nothing that happened between then and now happened? Had it all been a dream?
She turned to the side to look for her glasses and there Rodger was, beaming at her.
“You know, on the whole, we should really work on how fragile your constitution is,” he said thoughtfully. “But, glass half full, we were able to get the doctor to run a blood pregnancy test.”
Melissa shot forward. Her heart began to race again. “What, am I not really pregnant?”
She couldn’t tell how she felt about this. But there was something dismal, something suddenly empty within her, something sad about the prospect of loosing the fullness and light which had previously—
“No, no, of course you’re pregnant, we just wanted to know for sure,” said Rodger. “Congratulations, honey.”
Melissa smiled.
They were going to be a family.
***
The storm hit them so quickly. For all of the years that Melissa had on the down-low dreamed of being a mother, she'd given very little thought to the legions of people who would be keen on giving them advice which they didn't want; of people who wanted to judge them for decisions which they hadn't yet made; of people who wanted to give them things which they didn't need. Melissa felt extremely tacky telling people that her partner was a billionaire. Also, people were now asking them all sorts of questions.
It started on her way home from the hospital—it happened that fast. Rodger was wheeling her out to the carpark in the mandatory hospital wheelchair when a wonderful, kindly old lady stopped them both.
“Oh, goodness, are you pregnant?”
Melissa unintentionally sucked in her gut. There was no way that she was showing, not yet.
“That’s wonderful,” said the old lady, obviously mistaking their silence for acquiescence. “Congratulations, congratul—oh! I notice that you’re not wearing your wedding rings, dear. Have your fingers begun to swell already? Smart, quite smart, like sausages, mine got…”
And the lady had walked away and Rodger and Melissa had stared blankly into the middle-distance for thirty full seconds before quickly walking and rolling away from the spot, tacitly agreeing to pretend that that, whatever that had been, had not remotely happened.
Until Rodger had been driving along for a few moments, that is, and decided to mention it.
“It starts,” he said, dryly.
“Do I look like I’m pregnant?” demanded Melissa.
“You sort of had a dazed expression on your face,” said Rodger. “But no, of course not,” he added hastily.
“These are just our lives now, I suppose,” Melissa said.
“Yep,” said Rodger. “That they are. I could hire someone to walk in front of you and forestall all awkward pregnancy conversations.”
“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.”
“I could just take time off work and do it for you.”
“Oh, would you? Thanks, that’s the sweetest.”
“Aren’t I the sweetest, though?”
He let this hang in the air for a moment before pulling to the side of the road and looking at Melissa steadily.
“I could do it. I could take time off work. It’s not like I have to work, anyway.”
“I mean, you’re right,” said Melissa. She studied his face. He had the wide-eyed, crazy look about him that generally preceded either an awful or a brilliant idea. With Rodger, there was no in-between.
But he was right. With Rodger’s fortune, he didn’t have to work on a day-to-day basis. He had a whole committee of people who reported to him; he could conceivably leave for weeks, for months even, without doing more than providing yeses or nos via email.
Months.
“You aren’t thinking,” breathed Melissa. Her hands went to her stomach.
“Nine months? I could be out of work for nine months. For a year. And you could take a sabbatical from the library.”
“I could quit my job at the library,” shrugged Melissa.
Rodger had made it very clear that Melissa—especially now that she was the mother of his child, he said often and uncomfortably enough—that she wouldn’t want for anything again for the rest of her life.
“Nonsense, you’re family now,” he said brusquely, every time she brought it up.
“But what if—”
“No what if’s. I know you love to stress about things,” he said, as delicately as he could while giving her a significant, ominous glance. “But! Even if we split up—assuming we’re together now—even if I die or something, even if … whatever; with my finances, I’d be paying a nanny full-time anyway. So, if you’re looking for a strictly pragmatic view, taking care of you financially for the rest of your life is actually saving me money.”
“For the rest of—”
“Come on, let’s discuss that later,” said Rodger. “You can work! You can not work! You can do whatever you like! We can hire a nanny to make sure that you have time off, and another nanny to make sure that she isn’t overtired all the time! Don’t you see? We can do precisely whatever we want; and we have some nine months to do it in before we have the great joy of becoming a family of three. Which means that we should do something crazy! And big! And wonderful! Before we can’t anymore. You know?”
“Depends,” she said. “We’ll have to make sure that the doctor okays whatever we do. I mean, now that I’m carrying a kid in me, there are a million things I can’t do. You know? Like, we can’t go to Italy and drink our way through the Roman vineyards, I can’t...I don’t know...eat soft cheeses, if I wanted to train for a marathon I’d probably have to get some kind of physical and a doctor’s note—”
“Okay, okay,” said Rodger. “Calm down. We’ll think of something, we’ll brainstorm something.”
They arrived back at home. Somehow the rooms which they'd stared at so many times now seemed different. Each surface seemed as if it popped with a million to do’s and safety hazards.
“Baby proofing,” Melissa said, and then she slumped down on the couch closest to the TV. There were three couches and six televisions in the room; it was the media living room, which Rodger had decorated to look like a sports bar.
“Well, yep, we’re going to have to do that,” said Rodger. “Unless, you know, I think there’s a whole school of thought—I think it’s from the French, they know what’s up—that says that you shouldn’t baby proof, that babies should learn from experience that knives are sharp and ovens are hot and things like that, so that they won’t do it again.”
Melissa paused. “Well, that sounds like a great idea, in every way except for in practice,” she said. “I mean, whether or not we’re following the french method of baby proofing won’t matter too much when we’re in the emergency room because our one year old has sliced his fingers off—”
“I mean, you’
ve got to be smart about it,” said Rodger, a bit stung.
“Okay, okay, it’s way too early for us to be fighting about parent-y sorts of things. We just found out this morning.”
The drama of that statement washed over them. Melissa looked up. “Is there anyone we need to call?”
“What? We just saw a doctor. She told us that we should call your OBGYN in about a month to set up prenatal appointments.”
“No, I mean, like, our parents.”
Melissa had been thinking about this for a while. She wasn't close with her parents, and she hadn’t really told them that she was moving in with a man who was emphatically not her husband—a fact which she could reconcile with, but her very traditional mother would be less thrilled about, she knew—and, moreover, she was targeting parenthood with the precision with which she would have tried to shoot a basketball in the past.
“My parents are dead,” Rodger said crisply. “Do you want to tell your parents?”
“Not particularly,” said Melissa.
“Hm,” said Rodger. “Seems to me that we could just put a pin in the whole ‘awkward discussions about the kid’, thing, then. Especially—”
“Especially what,” said Melissa. She was suspicious of silences like the one he was currently languishing within.
“Well,” said Rodger. “We shouldn’t force that conversation before its time, you know? Like—miscarriages happen,” he said, a bit tentatively.
“Oh,” said Melissa. “Yeah.” Of course she'd thought of this, of course that had been a footnote in the back of her head, but she hadn’t really been actively thinking about it….
“We just want to be careful,” Rodger said quietly. “I don’t want to be the harbinger of anything.”
“A harbinger doesn’t sound like a fun thing to be, anyway,” quipped Melissa.
“Doesn’t look good on a resume, either,” said Rodger.
“Where were we,” said Melissa.
“Deciding what we’re going to do with the nine months that we have,” said Rodger.
“Well,” said Melissa. “If I wanted to be pedantic about it, I’d say that we don’t actually have nine months. We have more like eight. And a bit.”
“Okay, fine,” said Rodger. He leaned back onto the couch and stared up at the ceiling. Melissa watched as he closed his eyes and smiled. “Is there something you’ve always wanted to do with your life, Melissa?”
Melissa thought about this for a moment, and then lowered herself back to sit next to Rodger. She did so very carefully, almost holding herself in a way that she'd seen pregnant women move on sitcoms.
Rodger snorted.
Melissa blushed. She hadn’t realized he was watching.
“Feeling it already, are you?”
“No,” said Melissa defensively. “That would be insane.” But as she settled among the pillows, she thought that she might feel a tiny twinge of something small, something different, very deep within her. She knew that there was no rational reason for this—what was it; her baby was now the size of a poppy seed or something equally tiny—but she couldn't help but feel like she knew that she would never again be alone, and that something very big was happening which only seemed small in one respect.
“What do I want to do with my life,” said Melissa. “Well, I’ve always wanted to be a parent, I suppose. Even if I wasn’t always super honest with myself about it…the want was always there…”
“Okay,” said Rodger. “Check. Anything else?”
Melissa closed her eyes and thought about the dreams she'd had as a teenager, the ones—the one in particular—which had stayed with her and helped her choose what she did on a day-to-day basis.
“I want to write a book,” she said.
“Okay,” said Rodger. “Write one.”
Chapter 8
Two Months Later
Coughing all the time, she wrote. Sore. Everywhere. Feet are beginning to swell—thought was too early for that?
Melissa was onto her fourth notebook of pregnancy notes. When Rodger had asked her what it was that she wanted to do with these last precious months before parenthood took over their lives, she’d at first had no idea. But she knew that she didn’t want to let pregnancy flit by. She knew that she wanted to steep herself in these months and remember them, not just be hyper-focused on the end goal.
It was a sweet time. She and Rodger were bonding—they did everything together, now; Melissa’s apartment stood dusty and unused. The two prospective parents spent most nights looking over shared Pinterest boards of nurseries decked out in pastel. Rodger had said that of course the nursery he'd put together was already done but if Melissa wanted to put any personal touches on it she should feel more than welcome. And Melissa wanted to make it personal.
It was one of the most personal rooms she’d ever set foot in, after all. The room which she was only just beginning to feel belonged to her—the one in which she and Rodger slept—still felt sort of like a room into which she was moving, rather than a room which she could make to be hers; which, to be fair, was very close to being true. She and Rodger had still not yet decided what they were to each other, and it seemed like daily they were putting off the discussion, forgoing that bit of sure awkwardness to instead coo over the idea of what their little babe would look like.
They were both raging with curiosity about what he or she would grow up to be, what she would like, and even what she or he would look like. As Melissa was black and had very dark skin and Rodger was extremely fair, they knew that their son or daughter would have skin which was of any shade along the whole spectrum of beautiful skin colors.
Melissa couldn't wait to meet her child.
But in a way, she was beginning to feel like—on some level—she already had. Or was in the process of doing so. While she wasn’t explicitly showing yet, she was beginning to experience interesting bodily phenomena which she wouldn't have expected. Bits of her were sore which she didn’t even remember ever feeling before. She was hungry, often for what felt like days at a time. But then she was often unable to eat when food was placed in front of her. She was having the weirdest food cravings. Only the other night, she'd woken up in the middle of the night with an insatiable urge for peanut butter and saltines with lemon juice. She'd never liked any of those things before. Particularly not together. But that morning, just when everything in the world was closed and there was no way she could get any of those things, she’d already raided Rodger’s kitchen cupboards and come up dry, they were the three things in the world about which she couldn't stop thinking.
Rodger had left after listening to her caterwaul about these three ingredients and come back a half hour later with a lemon and peanuts and sourdough bread. He’d then taken his food processor out of the cupboard and whizzed up fresh peanut butter, toasted bread, and squeezed fresh lemon juice on top. Melissa had thanked him for it, thought that the first two bites were the most heavenly things which she'd ever tasted, and then threw up all over the floor.
Rodger was being tested in several ways. He never failed to be the model procurer of food, however, which Melissa most wanted him to be.
All of this was going in her notes.
Melissa was still going to work, but she'd put in her three weeks’ notice. She and Rodger were still trying to think of something amazing to do in the six months or so before they were able to meet their child.
Rodger had wanted to go on a tour of theme parks in the United States, but Melissa had shot this down. It was a good idea, she told him, nodding emphatically, smiling like a maniac—she was having a hard time being super in touch with her emotions after pregnancy; she often felt sad when she should have felt happy, or confused when she should have known exactly what she was doing; or, really, just confused all of the time— except that she wouldn’t be able to go on any of the theme park rides, as she was pregnant.
She found herself telling Rodger this a lot of the time even though (obviously) he was very aware of her condition.
One day, she found the courage to tell Rodger this. Admittedly, this normally wouldn't have taken much courage, as it was certainly not much of a risk; however, her pregnancy hormones had convinced her that this was an extremely scary undertaking which was only to be completed with a whole pile of vast moral strength.
Rodger looked at her, bemused.
“Okay, great,” he said. “So, where would you like to go?”
Melissa looked at the ceiling.
“Well, I want to write my book,” she said, slowly. “So, ideally—a place where I can just write, undisturbed, for a bit?”
“You want to take a baby-moon, but also a writing retreat,” Rodger said.
“Sure.”
Rodger mulled this over. He paced around the room. Then he clapped his hands and looked up. “Your last day at the library—it’s in two weeks, right?”
“Three,” Melissa said.
“Right,” said Rodger. “Well—I have an idea.”
He paused significantly after this. Melissa looked up at him. “Were you planning on saying anything else?”
“Nope,” said Rodger. He grinned brilliantly.
Melissa paused. “Okay,” she said. “So you have an idea.”
“That I do. And it’s a good one.”
“So. When do I get clued into your idea?”
“At the very last possible moment.”
“So you’re putting a pregnant woman in indefinite suspense.”
“Yeah, I thought it was a good idea.”
“Well, I hope your track of ideas gets better very quickly.”
“Oh, it will.”
Melissa stared at him in exasperation.
“Well then, I’ll just wait to find out, I suppose,” she said.
And so she went to work for the next three weeks, all the while wondering what it was that Rodger was cooking up. He had a wicked expression on his face, and he kept his eyebrows waggling each time he passed Melissa in the hall. He did a lot of research on his laptop and would close it whenever she walked into the room, chortling at her unnecessarily.
Be My Bride and Have My Baby Page 8