Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  “What’s the matter?” she tries now, touching Emily’s arms as if looking for something broken. “Are you in pain?”

  “Ha,” Emily says, her lips tight. “Why yes, I am.”

  Gretchen squirms, unnerved. “Do you want me to get a nurse?” She adds, “Or Nick,” if somewhat reluctantly.

  Emily looks confused. There’s a blood pressure monitor attached to her, a giant white clip on her finger, and an IV in her arm. Her heartbeat ticks away noisily on the machines. “Nick . . . no. Wait, did you talk to Nick?”

  “Me?” Gretchen doesn’t know how to explain the utter improbability of that—the way Nick walked right by her in the hall, as though they had never met. I’m invisible. Men like your husband look right through me. You see, she might say to blond, innocently pretty Emily with her milk-ripe boobs and glowing skin, It served Troy’s purposes that I didn’t feel desirable, because it would never confuse me when, as soon as the ink was dry on our marriage certificate, he didn’t desire me. That would just confirm my worldview and keep him safely milking my money . . .

  Gretchen tried—in her outrage, her shame and humiliation—to mess up Troy’s plan. But no, he is getting everything he planned on anyway, except the one thing he never wanted: her.

  “I waited too long,” Emily says, her head lolling a little to one side in a way Gretchen wants to correct. “I was going to call it weeks ago, but I just . . . didn’t.”

  It takes Gretchen a moment to catch up, to cleave from her own anxiety and bile . . . to realize she has no idea what Emily means.

  “I changed my mind,” Emily tells her. “I kept changing my mind. Then this happened, and I thought, great, it’ll just kill me and then I can rest. Everyone will be better off.” Jarringly, Emily cackles. “But look! Not so much! So much for best-laid plans.”

  Gretchen doesn’t know how to process what she’s seeing, this cracked-mask version of the self-possessed earth mother she has previously known. What is Emily even referring to, in her confused state? Should Gretchen give her some lecture about postpartum depression, like an infomercial? Some people experience radical fissures from their normal personalities, Gretchen imagines herself reciting. Talk to your doctor if you’re experiencing . . . But she chews her chapped lower lip, mumbles only, “Is there anything you want me to get for you, to make you more comfortable?”

  “Your brother doesn’t deserve this baby,” Emily says coldly.

  “What?” Gretchen’s body pricks upright, shocked.

  “He’s a phony. Don’t pretend you don’t know. He tosses around every excess and charm, and then takes it all back. He’s glib—he’s a careless person. You know it’s true, he does it to you, too.”

  Gretchen’s mouth fills with saliva. “Okay,” she says quietly, then feels instantly guilty for having given even that much. Is Emily planning to sue for custody of this child, too? Somewhere in that crappy west-side house of hers, are legal papers already drawn up, just like Gretchen has? Nick is listed on the birth certificate as the father—Emily almost died giving birth: Would they have a claim? But no . . . of course Nick isn’t the father, and Emily has no blood shared with the baby, and they have no money and no chance. Gretchen’s spiked heart rate leaves her dizzy in her chair, but she tries to breathe slow and long, calming herself. Only she, the biological mother, has a legitimate claim on Imogen, no matter what any papers she signed through the attorneys or the fertility clinic may say. Biological mothers have fierce precedent in the law. Still, poor Emily must have fallen in love with the baby inside her and wanted it for herself, and for a moment, Gretchen wants to be the kind of woman she has never been: the kind with scads of girlfriends she easily hugs and reassures. She wants to put her arms around sick, weeping Emily, who seems to have grown in energy through her agitation—it can’t be good for her blood pressure—and assure Emily that once these hormones die down, she will probably go back to her own monkey-sphere, her own family and career, and forget about the whole lot of them—that it will all probably pass.

  Except of course maybe it won’t. Just like for Gretchen, maybe it won’t.

  And she is a bitter woman, apparently. So instead of going to Emily and holding her, she says, “You were supposed to be the hero in this story.” As soon as the words are out she thinks, Don’t you mean heroine—but no, heroines are always given the shaft; they never save anybody. “You came out of nowhere and offered my brother and his husband your womb. They trusted you, against all my better judgment. They said you weren’t like the rest of us—that you were idealistic and selfless and didn’t care about money. But I knew it was bullshit. Nobody’s like that.”

  Now Emily is the one to look confused. “But . . . you’re like that. You’re the one who offered your egg. It’s your baby.”

  Gretchen’s hands grip the arms of her chair, as if the rollercoaster she has been poised precariously atop for nearly a year is finally going down. Her baby. Not Saint Emily but Saint Gretchen. Nobody has ever suggested that possibility aloud except perhaps her clueless parents, who were communally understood to be offensive and homophobic for doing so—lauding Gretchen an affront to Chad and Miguel. Nobody has ever—not once, especially not Chad—spoken aloud that this was . . . an extraordinary thing to do . . . perhaps even a crazy one, in its kindness. Nobody has ever suggested to Gretchen that her generosity, her genuine love for Chad or maybe even her own careless nature, similar to that of which Emily has accused her brother, would come at such a cost.

  She lets herself look, hard, searching, into Emily’s slitty blue eyes. But what she sees isn’t what she carries in her mind when she thinks about Emily—Emily as a concept. This woman in the hospital bed, who gave an emergency, medically induced birth last night to a potentially unviable infant in order to save her own life, doesn’t glow like usual. If anything, her skin has the consistency of a sauce that’s cooled and hardened unappetizingly on a plate. Emily: the sort of woman who attracts charismatic assholes like Nick and keeps them; Emily, the usurper of an egg that was supposed to be Gretchen’s, and with her swollen stomach began to steal not just the baby but Chad, even their parents. But that Imaginary Emily is gone. There is only this sick, depleted person in the bed—middle-aged, body swollen and slack. Only another mother of a special-needs child, who may have longed for a do-over, just like Gretchen did, and did something heroic, not for the right reasons but rather to avoid the life she had. What Gretchen would give to get back the life she had, once—how inconsequential Imogen feels, truly, compared to what Gretchen is facing with Gray. What she would do—God, what she would only do, to go back . . .

  But if that’s true, what are these papers in her handbag? If that’s true, why is she prepared to put Chad, Miguel, and Imogen through what Troy has been putting her through? If she isn’t doing it out of blind love, as a mother lion claiming the cub she would die for, then why is she doing it?

  Imogen as payback. Imogen as consolation prize. Gretchen was the heroine of their story, even if nobody recognized it, but she has ruined all that. She has become the Wolf. She brings her hands to her face, begins to cry quietly alongside Emily, who actually sighs impatiently and says, “Oh, calm down. I didn’t mean it about Chad. I like Chad. I like him better than just about anyone else I know, that’s the problem.”

  “I do, too!” Gretchen sniffs, muffled, into her hands.

  And she thinks of Chad, then, at last, though she has been trying vigilantly for the past twenty-four hours—maybe for the past few months—not to linger on him, not to remember the brother-ness of him, not to recognize his humanity at all. All at once she sees him, behind her determinedly shut eyes. Not her brother now, the adult Chad with waterlogged blue eyes as he traverses the halls from the NICU to waiting rooms to fill everyone in on Imogen . . . no, if anything, she has barely looked at that man, has not imprinted him on her brain, too preoccupied has she been with trying to find the courage to pull off her own mask. Instead she sees Chad as he was at four or five, when Gretchen painte
d his fingernails sea-foam green, and dressed him in the fairy costume she’d worn to her dance recital, and Chad—more euphoric than Gretchen ever saw him again until he began his obsession with historic-building preservation—begged their parents to let him go to school that way. Maybe it was even class picture day, Gretchen thinks, though she may be embellishing that part, and Chad, more delicate and fine-boned and ethereal than Gretchen would ever achieve, flitted around in the fairy costume yipping, Please please please, like an annoying little dog, until finally their mother shouted “Charles, make him stop, make him act normal!” and Charles Merry strode across the room on his impossibly adult legs and picked Chad up by one arm, yanking the fairy leotard with its attached skirt off his skinny body with one rough tug, and left Chad standing there, naked, in their kitchen. Although Gretchen saw Chad naked all the time—sometimes they even took baths together still, she abruptly recalls; they were practically babies, for God’s sake—the shame of Chad, stripped of his fairy costume, rang through the cavernous kitchen like thunder, so Gretchen felt too afraid to cry. How long had Chad stood there before—what?—had he run weeping from the room like a shorn animal? What had Gretchen and her parents said to one another in his absence? She would like to believe she stood up to Charles and Elaine Merry, but get real—what would she have said? She was six years old at most. She didn’t know anything about gender roles or sexual identity. She only knew she had witnessed something not meant for her eyes and had failed to come to her brother’s defense the way big sisters were supposed to.

  “I’m the one who could sue for the baby,” she says preemptively, looking up from her hands and putting on the steely face her father gets sometimes. “If you make a move, even if your husband really were the father, even if my brother and Miguel were no match for you because they’re gay and you were willing to put all your so-called liberal idealism aside to snatch their baby right out from under them, all I would need to do is walk into that courtroom as the biological mother, with my parents standing behind me, and we would have any judge in this country signing Imogen over to us by the end of the day. And then all I would have to do is give her right back.”

  Emily’s eyes have grown wider. “What are you talking about? You’d do that to your own brother, just to prove you can? What kind of monstrous family are you?”

  And most of the time, in life, things just happen to you, Gretchen knows. They happen and you react. You do the things you do and suddenly that’s the kind of person you are, even if you never planned it that way. So, Emily is not the Wolf. Whatever she has been talking about is outside Gretchen’s range of vision, is not a mirror held up to Gretchen’s own plans. Gretchen says to Emily, “I didn’t mean that—I don’t know why I said it—I was just afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?” Emily asks. “Of . . . me?”

  But where can Gretchen even begin in chronicling her fears? Of the loss of her son, of the loss of her daughter who is not hers to grieve, of the loss of some fragile identity she took for granted her entire life that can be so easily stripped by someone who hates her on his own endless steam. Of forty-three years of invisibility and the uncertainty she can ever manifest herself properly—that she can ever be seen. Of how alone she is in the world outside of a family she often doesn’t entirely like, who don’t seem to have her back. She has, if she is honest with herself, no idea if she is even the kind of mother Gray, in his luminous specialness, needs, but she knows she is a better choice than Troy so she will fight him tooth and nail—still, she could end up losing.

  “I could end up with nothing,” she says to Emily, and though she explains the context of none of this, surprisingly Emily nods.

  “Why did you do it then? Why would someone give away her own baby?”

  There isn’t any one answer, though. “I love my brother,” Gretchen tries. “It’s not fair that he can’t have what other people get to have without having to justify it in any way. He and Miguel have been together for over a decade—they’re making a better go of it than I did, in my marriage. Why shouldn’t they be able to have a baby, if they want one? They’ll be good parents.”

  “They could have adopted,” Emily insists. “The baby is yours.”

  “Stop,” Gretchen begs, and the plaintiveness of her own voice both surprises and shames her. “Please. You have to stop saying that. She’s not mine. She really isn’t.”

  It isn’t often that you have a moment when you get to choose, once and for all, how far you will go, how much you will let reacting determine who you’re going to be. “You did a good thing,” she says to Emily, who shrugs wearily and looks done with Gretchen, turns her face toward the door. Gretchen knows she is being signaled to leave, but instead she grasps Emily’s hand for real, the way a friend would. Emily twitches with shock, but then seems to tune this out, too, falling silent, relaxing into Gretchen’s touch though with her face still toward the door, eyelids shutting. Gretchen’s skin is dry and cool, Emily’s alarmingly slick and hot. The light outside the hospital window glows a gray-yellow amber of waning day. Now that Gretchen knows with bone-thudding clarity, a clarity that hurts, that she is not serving legal papers, she wants to jump up and bolt—not to the NICU where Imogen hangs in the balance, but all the way back to Winnetka, to gather Gray up in her arms and promise him, There is no replacing you. Not with Carrot. Not with Imogen. You are my baby. You are the ship I will go down with if I have to.

  Instead, for the moment, she clutches on to the mass of secrets and desires that is Emily—who knows if she will ever even see her again? Soon she will have to go to the NICU and face whatever hell or beauty is about to transpire there, that belongs to her brother and Miguel, not to her. There are only so many moments of truth a person is offered in a lifetime, and it is a fleeting miracle to recognize one for what it is—a miracle so slippery and tenuous that Gretchen supposes it must be false: surely poor little Imogen will die, and all this drama and epiphany will have been for naught, and they will each be left alone with the lives they tried to change or flee by conjuring her into the world. They wanted—six adults—for this three-pound infant to save their lives, and in return they can do nothing for Imogen except to wait it out and try to do no harm.

  “Do no harm,” Gretchen whispers under her breath like a prayer. Emily is breathing sleep-breath, and Gretchen releases her hand onto the bed to reach into her own handbag, taking out the neatly clipped legal documents and ripping them harshly down the middle, then again. Some stray scraps glide down to the floor, and Gretchen awkwardly bends to pick them up, gathering them in her fist and placing them, neatly, under some discarded plastic and cups in Emily’s trash, where no one will ever notice. Emily still doesn’t look so good, and Gretchen wonders if she should ring for a nurse—get up and disappear, ending their temporary Venn diagram of overlap—but instead she merely sits there in the weak amber wash of light, keeping vigil until Emily’s people return, counting the seconds until she can go back to her son.

  EMILY

  This time, the house is clean. Although they seemed to spend every waking moment at the hospital, except Jay, who has been with neighbors, Nick and Miles have inexplicably pulled off a spotlessness in their home that Emily has never previously beheld. They help her not to her bed, where she will fester in exile like before, but to the sectional sofa, handing her the remote control for her own discretion, rushing to make her a cup of the Ginger Peach tea she loves, that they both ordinarily claim smells like wet dog. Flowers are everywhere around the house—it resembles a funeral parlor, really. Most are from Emily’s colleagues, but some are from families at Jay’s school, one is from Emily’s best friend from college who now lives in Baltimore, and a few are from couples she and Nick used to socialize with regularly, before Jay was born—people Emily would have figured had long forgotten about them. Emily doesn’t like the overwhelming smell of the collective bouquets, but she is stunned—moved, but mainly shocked—that so many people . . . give a shit that she was in the hospital, that sh
e had a “close call.” She is perplexed, honestly, how so many people even knew.

  Miles is snapping photos of her with his iPhone, no makeup, her hair in some three-days-in-the-hospital nest, and suddenly Emily realizes: social media. She is not on Facebook—not as a vice principal, wherein nothing she could possibly post would seem professional enough unless she were updating her “status” with cutting-edge curriculum and lectures about upstanding behavior. But everyone else in the world seems to have joined the craze—certainly her son, and even Nick, who claims he uses it to “network” professionally, though Emily suspects he uses it to keep tabs on old girlfriends.

  He also, perhaps . . . she is not sure what to feel about this (flattered? violated?) . . . uses it to tell the world that his wife has had a medical crisis. Did he mention on Facebook that she “had a baby” that isn’t theirs, Emily wonders—though of course all her colleagues already know this, seeing her as they do every day. Miles, who is normally so secretive about his phone that if Emily so much as lifts it up to dust a table, he accuses her of leading a spy ring against his top-secret teenage life, sits next to her on the couch, scrolling down the sixty or seventy people who have wished her well on Miles’s profile page, offering “prayers” and “white light” and “love” and heart emojis.

  Who are all these people? Some she knows—without knowing they were “friends” with her son. Friends of the family who must mean something to Miles, if he has let them into his online domain. Others, Emily has never heard of, but Miles seems not to mind her reading their messages, too. She must be a great lady if she has a son like you! someone named Caitlin writes. Hoping your kick-ass mom makes a full recovery, brother, writes a long-haired kid named Tomer. Tomer is her son’s “brother”? Where has Emily been?

  Jay sits so close to her it hurts her tender body, and she cringes. He keeps putting his head on her overripe breasts, which are bound so they will dry up more quickly, from the child she is not going to nurse. From the child who is probably not going to be . . . Imogen in the NICU, not breathing normally, no corners turned beyond the point when they should have been. Miguel and Chad are still there with her round the clock, Gretchen still wandering the corridors, too, the Guerra-Merry clan an ensemble group of Penelopes, waiting attentively for a boat, a love, a hope that will probably never arrive. They are all there, even Miguel’s mother, so much older than in Emily’s memory that it makes her feel ancient—she is roughly the age, now, that Miguel’s mother was when they knew one another in 1985, 1986. There they all are, standing vigil, Imogen’s extended clan, but Emily . . . Emily was pronounced “out of the woods” and sent home.