First Comes Baby

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Laurel had a melting sensation that made her want to turn and lean against him, burrow her head beneath his chin. Feel his arms around her, strong and encompassing.

  They’d made this baby together. That gave them a bond even more lasting than friendship, didn’t it? He wouldn’t give up on her now.

  Even if he was as disappointed in her as she was in herself.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LAUREL’S DAD INSISTED on taking her grocery shopping regularly. He wanted to help her financially and, once she’d started working, she had refused his support. But if they shopped together, she couldn’t very well make a scene at the checkout stand when he said, “Let me get it today.” Which is what he always said, right after she finished unloading the cart and reached for her wallet.

  Pride was all very well, she figured, but he was happier if she’d accept at least this much help.

  Today, as she pushed her cart down the cereal aisle, she told him about going to the UW bookstore and having lunch at Costa’s a couple of weeks ago.

  His eyebrows rose. “Did you.” It was commentary; not question.

  “Ran into a friend of mine from law school. Sela Sweeney. Remember my mentioning her?”

  “I met her at your place a couple of times. It’s too bad you lost touch.”

  He was such a tactful man, his bluntness when she announced her pregnancy atypical. Lost touch implied one of those regrettable facts of modern life, an unintended drifting apart, rather than the deliberate act of slicing someone out of your life.

  “We may have lunch one of these days. Catch up.”

  “Nadia and now Sela. I’m glad, Laurel.”

  His face was so kindly, her eyes prickled with tears. “Aren’t you ever tempted to criticize?”

  They’d never been a touchy-feely family, but he laid a hand on her shoulder. “You’re a lovely young woman, Laurel. I thank God every day that I still have you.”

  She briefly pressed her cheek to his hand, her eyes misty. “I love you, Daddy.”

  “And I love you. Now,” he said, “get more than one box of cereal. You’ll be out in less than a week.”

  Dutifully Laurel added a second box to her cart.

  “The trip to the U District your idea?” he asked casually.

  “No, Caleb’s,” she admitted. “He has a tendency to push.”

  “Pushing usually makes you dig in your heels.”

  In the produce department now, she chose a head of lettuce. “It’s funny, because he never has before. Maybe it’s just because we’re spending more time together these days.”

  Her father put a basket of raspberries in her cart. “More time? Whenever I talk to you, he’s in Bolivia and God knows where else.”

  “I’ve told you he needs to travel now if he’s going to stick around after the baby is born.”

  “He is going to stick around and help?”

  She kissed his cheek. “Yes, Daddy, he is. You know Caleb better than that.”

  If there was one thing Caleb was good at, it was stick-to-itiveness. She hadn’t been able to shake him, no matter how hard she tried.

  He’d actually backed off since the day they went to the University District. Laurel had expected Caleb to figure he’d scored a triumph. So why shouldn’t she drop by the law school for a visit next, or drive through the parking garage just so she could see that it was nothing but concrete and painted lines?

  But he hadn’t. In fact, he had seemed a little…remote. She frowned, thinking about it. He called every couple of days and had gone with her to her doctor appointment Wednesday. Plus, they’d done stuff. Saturday had become “their” day. Last week he’d helped her divide spring blooming perennials, and then after she took a nap they went out to dinner and a movie. This coming Saturday, they were planning to go see Nadia and her baby.

  But they hadn’t talked much, or not as easily.

  Of course, it probably went both ways. She’d felt…constrained. Wondering whether he thought she was a coward, or whether he was plotting some way to get her over all her fears, make her like her old self. The Laurel he’d obviously liked better than he did the new version.

  But she also knew she had let him see an angry side of her she had succeeded in hiding until now. Maybe she’d even sounded irrational. She didn’t care. If she didn’t want to talk about what happened, she didn’t have to. He didn’t know, couldn’t know, what it was like to be degraded and hurt like that. To be battered into submission, to be raped to your own whispered pleas. “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.” To have the breath choked out of you until your vision turned red and then darkened, to be dropped like garbage, your head bouncing off the pavement… No. She had no obligation to spill her guts.

  That evening, after her dad had gone home and she was getting ready for bed, Laurel thought more about the flash of anger she’d seen on Caleb’s face when she refused to tell him what he wanted to hear.

  She had told everything she remembered to the police officers, because she still thought she might die and she wanted them to catch him. But then they didn’t, even though every word had been agony with her face grotesquely swollen, and every sound she formed with her lips painful to make. Even though the police artist had drawn a picture from her description that looked terrifyingly like him. Afterward…afterward, she never wanted to tell anyone ever again.

  Not even the other women in her group. A few of them talked about the rape, over and over. Laurel couldn’t imagine why. It seemed compulsive. Any excuse, and the raw story spilled out again. No one ever interrupted. They all nodded, murmured sympathetically, hugged the storyteller when she was done, her eyes stricken and her face wet.

  Others, like Laurel, had never told more than the bare bones of their story.

  “I was attacked in a parking garage and left for dead.”

  Nods all around, a respectful acceptance for her reserve.

  On most of them, the trauma was invisible. Outside the women’s center, they would be like other women, shopping, picking up kids after school, going to work. Only a few of them, like Laurel, bore scars and had aches that would never go away.

  What she’d come to realize is that the women like her who’d been badly injured weren’t necessarily any more screwed up than the women who described their rapists as apologetic, almost gentle, or the ones raped by a man they knew. If anything, they struggled more with a sense of complicity.

  How many times had she heard “I guess I flirted with him.” Or “I should have fought.” Or screamed. Or been smarter about leaving a porch light on, about leaving a window open on a hot summer night. They all, in greater or lesser degrees, searched for ways they could have prevented what happened. The funny thing was Laurel didn’t know why. None of them could go back, or change the ending. So what was the point?

  But they all did it.

  She picked up her toothbrush, but didn’t immediately turn on the water. Instead, Laurel studied her face in the mirror, turning her head and lifting her hair with one hand so that she could see the thin, pale line that ran from what had been her shattered cheekbone up into her hairline above her temple.

  The plastic surgeon had done an extraordinary job. She didn’t quite look like her old self, but close. Closer than she…no, not deserved. Had expected. Still, the reconstruction made her face asymmetrical and the scar tugged at the left corner of her mouth. Sometimes she was almost glad. Her outer self matched her inner self. Scarred.

  Maybe that was why some of the women felt compelled to retell their stories so often, she thought in surprise. Because their suffering wasn’t written on their faces. It must be odd, for them, to look into the mirror expecting to see a face that reflected who they now were, only to see someone who no longer existed.

  It would make it easier for other people to forget, too. We humans, she thought, judge so much on appearances. If all looks well, it must be, right?

  Perhaps, in this way, she was lucky, she tried to tell herself with dispassion. />
  Laurel stared at herself even as some emotion swelled in her chest, puffing up larger and larger until it filled her and she recognized rage and hurt.

  The toothbrush clattered into the sink and she wrapped her arms around herself. In the mirror she saw her mouth open in a soundless cry.

  Lucky?

  Tears wet her cheeks, and she gagged, bending over as if with labor pains.

  Don’t think about it. Think about the baby. Think about Caleb, and the salty smell of the Sound and the sight of hundreds of rhododendrons in bloom in his yard. You don’t have to remember.

  Not lucky, she thought drearily, after she’d run out of tears and had scrubbed them away with a cold, wet washcloth. Because I can never look in a mirror without remembering.

  CALEB LOVED GOING to her doctor appointments with Laurel. He was sorry every time he had to miss one. It was the only time he got to see her bare belly, for one thing, with mysterious movement beneath the surface, and occasionally a knob would poke up. Once, her entire belly had had this rhythmic jerk, and the doctor had laughed.

  “Hiccups.”

  The doctor, a woman, always let him listen to the heartbeat. She’d move the stethoscope over the swell of Laurel’s stomach, her expression inward, and then she’d stop, murmuring, “Ah. There he is.”

  Then she’d pull the earpieces from her own ears and Caleb would don them.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  “Damn,” he’d whispered in wonder the first time.

  The wonder hadn’t diminished an iota. There was a baby in there.

  Her baby. His baby.

  Maybe some of his surprise was rooted in the unusual way they’d conceived this child, but he suspected most fathers-to-be felt the same awe and even disbelief. Women seemed to take more in stride the whole idea of a real, live kid in there, under their ribs.

  Just this past Wednesday when he went with her, he’d looked up with the stethoscope in his ears and met Laurel’s eyes. They’d just gazed at each other for a moment, emotions naked, and he had felt a profound relief. Lately, he’d begun to feel some real doubt about how this was going to turn out for him. Maybe his parents had been right. Maybe he was just a sperm donor.

  Oh, Laurel saw him as a friend, too, but a hell of a lot more casual one than he’d realized. It was his own fault for not seeing sooner how superficial their relationship was. He hadn’t let her cut him out of her life when she tried, but she had cut him off from her inner life. He was still stunned by her ferocity when she’d told him he wouldn’t understand because he was a man.

  In a flash he’d realized she saw him as a threat. That, deny it how she would, Laurel did hold him responsible on some level for the rape. If he had a penis, he must have brutal impulses.

  He knew he shouldn’t be angry, but he was.

  Hiding it took some effort. She was his best friend, and here he was waking up and realizing that in the past five years she hadn’t told him anything meaningful about what she thought and felt. Mr. Sensitive Guy, he’d gently suggested he was available if she ever wanted to tell him about the rape, but had let it be okay that she didn’t.

  What he hadn’t let himself see was that she didn’t talk to him about anything else really important, either.

  Today, for example.

  He picked her up at ten and they drove onto the ferry for Bainbridge. They went up to the observation deck, Caleb buying a cup of coffee. Then they went outside and leaned against the railing.

  Even at this hour, the day promised to be hot. The water was unusually still and shiny, the surface almost oily looking, the sky a washed-out blue. Laurel gripped the railing with both hands, tilted her head back as if to receive the sunlight and gazed dreamily ahead, toward the distant bulk of Bainbridge Island.

  She wore a thin tank top and a loose jumper over it, flip-flops on her feet. Caleb was ticked to find himself stirred by her body, even as alienated from her as he felt. Her hair, a shining mix of honey and pale brown, was gathered into a ponytail that bared the long, slim line of her neck. Her shoulders and collarbone were as slender as ever. But her breasts, always full and now voluptuous, pressed against the fabric of the jumper. And he kept seeing her belly as she lay on the examining table at the doctor’s office, swollen with the life inside.

  He faced the railing himself, hoping like hell she didn’t glance down and notice his erection. Wouldn’t that be wonderful. She’d recoil from the evidence that he was the brute she had feared he was.

  “You’re quiet,” Laurel said at last.

  “Nothing to say.”

  He felt as much as saw the look she flicked at him before she turned her head again to stare out at the water. Tension gripped his neck and shoulders, braced for…what? Some kind of confrontation?

  He should have known better. A confrontation would have required some honest emotion from her. Nope, she just let it drop, let the silence build. By the time the ferry landing neared and they joined the line of people heading down the steep stairs to the car deck, that silence was as thick as a wall stuffed with insulation.

  As he drove, she commented brightly on houses and gardens they passed, on peekaboo views, on anything and everything to avoid acknowledging the new tension between them. But he knew she wasn’t impervious.

  Nadia and her husband owned a beauty of a house on grassy acreage, sharing a pond with one other home. They’d had it built five years before, she had told them the first time Caleb came with Laurel. Shingled, half craftsman, half chalet, it had lots of windows, flowers in window boxes, a wraparound porch and gleaming wood floors. A surgeon and a marketing executive, they must make a damn good living.

  When Caleb’s car pulled into the circular driveway, Darren waved from his ride-on mower. Much of the grass was left to grow long and go to seed, but perhaps an acre around the house Darren kept as lawn. Caleb parked right in front and they got out to the sound of the mower, seemingly echoed from afar. Sunny Saturday morning, the neighbors were all out mowing, too. With daylight extending well into the evening, Caleb had taken care of his lawn last night.

  Darren headed toward them, and Nadia came out the front door holding the baby. She wore a sacky T-shirt and shorts and was barefoot, her short dark hair tousled. She was patting the baby’s back, and he let out an inelegant burp just as his dad switched off the John Deere.

  “There,” Nadia cooed, “you’ll feel better now. You know you will. Little pig,” she told Laurel and Caleb, “all he wants to do is nurse.”

  Darren and Caleb shook hands.

  “Don’t feel you have to stop mowing because of us,” Caleb said. “You want to finish before it gets too hot.”

  “Getting there already,” Nadia’s husband said. “Won’t take me a half hour. If you’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “I’m the only one who’ll even notice.” Caleb nodded at the women, both cooing at the baby now.

  Darren laughed. “Gotta tell you, I never thought I’d descend to baby talk, but you should hear me when I change his diaper. You’ll do it, too.”

  “Goochy goochy goo?”

  “Something as bad. I kid you not.”

  Darren got back on the mower. Caleb followed the two women into the house.

  Nadia said, “Lemonade? Iced tea?”

  “Iced tea would be great,” Caleb said. Laurel asked for lemonade and offered to go pour the drinks.

  “No, you can play with Alex, since he’s actually awake. Here,” she said, holding him out not to Laurel but to Caleb. “Do you want to hold him?”

  “Sure.” Dealing with as many women’s cooperatives as he did in Latin America, he’d become used to toddlers running underfoot, usually wearing T-shirts but no diapers or pants, and the women often carrying babies slung on their backs. He’d held his share. Caleb accepted the slight weight, automatically placing a hand to support Alex’s head.

  Big dark eyes gazed suspiciously at him, as if unsure whether this face was familiar or not.

  “Hey, little guy,” Cale
b said. “So you’re a big baby, huh?”

  Laurel had come to stand so close to him, he caught the scent of her shampoo, something flowery. Staring in fascination at Alex, she said, “He’s still awfully tiny, isn’t he?”

  “They all come that way.”

  “I hadn’t actually seen that many newborns before.”

  In this country, women didn’t tend to take their babies out much until they were older. Or they were swaddled so you couldn’t glimpse much but a scrunched, sleeping face.

  Over his diaper, Alex wore only a thin blue cotton garment with short sleeves and no legs. His bare thighs were chubby, his knees drawn up against Caleb’s chest.

  A month from now, he’d be holding his own baby.

  “Here,” he said, transferring Alex to Laurel.

  She accepted him with a competence born of her previous visits, and laid her cheek against the baby’s downy head. As if instinctively, she rocked slightly on the balls of her feet and murmured silly things in a singsong voice unfamiliar to Caleb.

  She already knew on the deepest level, it seemed, how to be a mother, how to connect to her child when the time came. Why was it so easy for mother and child and so difficult for man and woman?

  Nadia came back with drinks and they all talked until her husband came in, showered, and said he had the coals hot in his barbecue for hamburgers.

  Alex napping in a bassinet, they sat outside in the shade on the porch and ate potato salad, corn on the cob and hamburgers on ciabatta bread instead of regular buns. The hamburgers were unusually good, chopped up onions in them and maybe some spices.

  “I love staying home,” Nadia was saying. “Big career woman, and I have absolutely no desire to go back right now. I used to talk about waiting until I was in my thirties to start a family. And I was thinking if then.”

  “What changed your mind?” Laurel asked.

  Her husband laughed. “She got pregnant.”

  “It was an accident?”