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by Pamela Redmond

  “I don’t blame you,” I said. I felt so much more envious of this place than I did of Kelsey’s or even Stella’s. As a native New Yorker, it was crazy to be in a city that was filled with charming cottages and light-filled midcentury houses and grand old apartment buildings that looked like palaces. You could live in the heart of Los Angeles and still be surrounded by quiet and green. Though as I now knew, there were snakes in that grass.

  My phone buzzed again. I looked at it. Sure enough, another text from Kelsey.

  “I’m shutting this thing down,” I said, deliberately powering it off and burying it in my bag. “I have an hour.”

  Hugo didn’t respond. Instead, he gathered me into his arms and kissed me, a kiss that was soft and insistent, passionate and eternal. I hadn’t been kissed in two years. I hadn’t been kissed this well in… maybe since Josh and I got back together that last time. Or maybe ever? Right now it felt like ever.

  Had kissing always been this good? Because if so, why didn’t everybody do it all the time?

  We kept kissing. There was the kiss and how amazing that felt, infinitely soft and hard at the same time. And then there was the knowledge that the person on the other end of those lips was Hugo Fielding. That the quite substantial penis that was pressing into my hip was attached to his hips.

  A phone began dinging with an incoming text.

  “I thought I turned that off,” I mumbled.

  We kissed. Ding Ding ding ding!

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “That’s mine.”

  “It’s probably Kelsey.”

  “Sorry.”

  He fished it from his voluminous sweatpants, examined the first one for a moment, then handed it to me.

  The texts were indeed from Kelsey.

  Is Liza with you? Her friend Maggie is trying to reach her, the first one read.

  And then, If you hear from her, her daughter’s in labor.

  I experienced a deep sense of dislocation of the kind you get in a hot place in the middle of winter. Didn’t Caitlin have at least eight more weeks to go? Had I completely—even kind of psychotically—lost track of time?

  I powered my phone back on to see the flood of texts and calls from Maggie. I tried calling first. She didn’t pick up but texted immediately.

  At the hospital, Maggie wrote. C’s water broke. Come asap.

  Omw, I typed.

  I had forgotten Hugo was even standing there.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  “What’s happening?”

  “My daughter’s having her baby.”

  More than eight weeks early. How big would the baby be? Could it even survive? I couldn’t help thinking about that and at the same time tried to shut that possibility out of my mind.

  “I’ll get a plane for you,” he said.

  “I’m already on the first available flight,” I said.

  I was calculating in my head: Half an hour to LAX, then through security, then a five-hour flight, minimum. Another half hour to make my way out of JFK, plus another hour to get to the hospital in Manhattan. In fucking rush hour! So maybe two hours. In all, that was—fuck!—nearly ten hours to get to my daughter’s side.

  “No,” Hugo said. He was already on his phone. “I mean a private plane.”

  Whoa. The airport was right in Santa Monica, Hugo said. It didn’t make sense to get a helicopter. He’d take me on the Ducati.

  Which was apparently a motorcycle.

  I’d never really inhabited the world of people who do whatever they want whenever they wanted, and I wish I’d been able to enjoy it, but speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway, clinging to Hugo’s back, all I could think about was Caitlin. And the baby. My grandchild. But mostly Caitlin, my baby.

  What the fuck was I doing here? Why wasn’t I with her where I belonged? I’d chased a rabbit through the looking glass, but what was I searching for? What was there on earth that was more important than her?

  When we reached the little airport in Santa Monica, Hugo roared through the parking lot and right out onto the tarmac. Everyone seemed to know him there. The plane was waiting. It was dramatic and even romantic, but at the time, it all—I mean the movie star and the motorcycle and the waiting plane—seemed like natural elements to bridging the time and space that separated me from my child.

  He walked me up the stairs onto the plane, which was outfitted with an all-cream leather interior. He gave me a warm, reassuring hug, and in that moment I felt toward him like I might toward an older brother, maybe the person my own brother might have been had he not been killed by that hit-and-run driver.

  I pulled back from Hugo and simultaneously pushed him away.

  “Thank you so much,” I said.

  Meaning: Now please get off the fucking plane and let me go.

  He kissed his fingertips and then touched them to my cheek. And then he was gone, and, ten minutes later, I was miles and miles away, above the earth, speeding through the clouds to New York.

  fifteen

  Less than five hours later, the jet landed at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. The only thing I’d noticed throughout my flight was my phone. There was an empathetic flight attendant named Andy who did his best to tempt me with drinks and food, but all I wanted was water and tea. Finally, he brought me an enormous comforter, a down pillow, and a Xanax and told me to press the button if I needed anything else, but otherwise he’d leave me be.

  Maggie kept sending reassuring texts, saying everything was fine, labor was progressing slowly, I would make it in plenty of time.

  Hugo had arranged a helicopter to meet me at the airport in New Jersey. I had never been in a helicopter before, but I experienced it only as a magical way to transcend the traffic that clogged every artery that crossed the river between New Jersey and New York City. We traveled to the roof of Caitlin’s hospital in less time than it would have taken us to drive across the George Washington Bridge.

  Maggie was waiting on the helipad with a member of the hospital staff, and escorted me downstairs, her arm locked firmly in mine.

  “Is everything still all right?” I asked her breathlessly.

  “Yes, it is,” she said firmly.

  “I can’t believe I made it in time. Where is she?”

  “I’m bringing you to her now,” she said.

  She gripped my bicep and steered me down hallways that felt dark and silent. I expected every door we approached to be Caitlin’s. We passed the nursery, where babies that looked too big to be newborns slept and squalled, before Maggie guided me through a door she opened with a special pass she wore around her neck, like someone who worked here.

  “Is this the way to the labor room?” I asked hopefully, excited to have nearly reached the end of my journey. Any second I’d be holding my daughter’s hand, watching my grandchild take her first breath, resuming my place as a guardian angel making sure everything went all right.

  Maggie didn’t answer. We turned another corner and came to stop in front of a glass wall, behind which there were medical personnel in full protective gear standing around futuristic equipment.

  “What’s this?” I asked, suddenly afraid of new things.

  “This is your granddaughter,” Maggie said. There was a slight smile on her face as she inclined her chin toward one of the pieces of equipment. It was a transparent box, I saw now, elevated on a steel platform with vents and tubes running from it to various other pieces of equipment. And inside the clear box, I could just make out a tiny scrap of a human.

  “You mean…”

  “Three pounds, twelve ounces,” Maggie said. “She’s a fighter.”

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe it happened already.”

  “It happened right after your plane took off. They did an emergency C-section.”

  “You should have told me,” I said to Maggie.

  If there had ever been another time Maggie had withheld information so central from me, I wasn’t aware of it.

  “I knew how terrible you’d feel mi
ssing her birth, and how worried you’d be,” Maggie said, “and there was nothing you could do anyway.”

  I understood why she felt that way, maybe even appreciated that she’d tried to protect me from anxiety and heartache and guilt that I wouldn’t be able to channel into any productive action. But at the same time, deliberate dishonesty from someone I had always relied on to tell me the truth made me deeply uneasy.

  I focused on my tiny granddaughter. All the feelings Maggie had tried to shield me from washed over me. It seemed miraculous that she could survive at all, no matter how many tubes they connected to her. The doctors and nurses all seemed busy and distracted; no one was gazing at her as if they could keep her alive by their attention alone. I wanted to do that. But I wasn’t allowed to get that close, and as hard as I might have wished my presence would make everything all right—wasn’t a mother supposed to have that power?—I knew that in fact I was as helpless as I’d been when I was trapped in the airplane.

  When I’d imagined this moment, I’d seen myself searching the baby’s face and body for evidence of a resemblance to Caitlin, or to me, or to my parents and brother, all now gone so long ago. I’d hoped Caitlin would have red hair like my brother, the red hair I had always envied, and since his death longed to see reborn. But Caitlin was blond like her dad had been when he was younger, and it was too soon to tell with this start of a child. She looked unfinished, not ready for the world.

  Then a tall figure dressed in a hospital gown, a green cotton cap over his hair and a mask over his face, moved over to my granddaughter’s incubator. A nurse helped him slip his hands into the glove-like portals that extended inside the plastic. His hands looked almost as big as the entire baby. I assumed the man was a doctor, until I realized, thanks to his height, that it was Ravi. That was reassuring for two seconds, until I wondered why he was there alone.

  “Where’s Caitlin?” I said.

  “They wanted her to try and sleep,” said Maggie.

  “I want to see her,” I said.

  Maggie hesitated for long enough that I thought she might refuse to take me to my daughter, in which case I would find my way by myself. But instead Maggie nodded and led me back into the maze of corridors, taking me up the stairs when the elevator proved too slow. Finally, we were in the maternity ward. Walking down the hallway past half-open doors, I was able to glimpse new mothers, sometimes with their partners or families, sometimes alone, sometimes with their baby in their arms or asleep in a plastic bassinet beside the bed. I remembered how utterly delicious and fantastic those first hours were, lying in my bed after the storm of labor, staring at this human being I had created. It was the closest, mushroom trip included, that I’d ever come to seeing God.

  And my daughter wasn’t going to have that. Because her daughter was shut away in a special facility on another floor. So Caitlin couldn’t hold her—oh God, I’d completely forgotten to ask the baby’s name!—and the baby could not be held. What a loss for both of them.

  * * *

  We turned a corner and walked through a door and there was my baby, still awake but looking wan and very lonely.

  I burst into tears, Caitlin burst into tears, and all up and down the hospital corridors, babies started crying. Caitlin and I both stopped our wailing, horrified by what we’d set off, then looked at each other and burst out laughing. Which made us hug and both start crying again.

  “I wanted you,” Caitlin said into my ear.

  I couldn’t tell whether Maggie had heard, but I didn’t really care.

  “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here,” I said. “That must have been really frightening.”

  It felt so good to hold my little girl in my arms, though it seemed cruel that I got to do that when Caitlin didn’t.

  “It’s okay. Ravi and I took care of everything,” Maggie said.

  As grateful as I felt toward Maggie, I wanted to slug her. I didn’t need her to tell me it was okay I wasn’t there; it wasn’t okay, and it never would be. She and Ravi may have taken care of a lot of things in my absence, but they couldn’t take care of me being there when my daughter needed me.

  “I’m here now,” I told Caitlin, smoothing her hair.

  “Did you see her?” Caitlin said. And then, sounding more panicky, “Is she okay? I should be with her.”

  “She’s beautiful,” I said.

  “I have to go see her,” Caitlin said, trying to pull away from me and climb off the bed. “I have to make sure she’s still breathing.”

  I held on to Caitlin.

  “Ravi’s with her,” said Maggie.

  “Would you go check on them?” I asked Maggie.

  For a moment, I thought that Maggie was going to refuse—we had just been down there, after all, and there was nothing she could really do or see from the corridor—but then she seemed to understand that Caitlin needed the reassurance, and I needed a little time alone with Caitlin.

  “I’ll let you know how everything is going,” Maggie said, slipping back out of the room.

  Then it was just me and Caitlin.

  “I shouldn’t have been working so much,” Caitlin said. “I was running around, trying to make everything perfect. I’m a terrible mother.…”

  “Shhhhhhhhhh,” I said. “This didn’t happen because of anything you did. You’re going to be a wonderful mother.”

  Caitlin’s eyes grew wide and scared. “What if she dies?” she whispered.

  “She’s not going to die. We will all make sure of that. You need to sleep now. You’ll see her in the morning, and everything will be all right.”

  I cranked down her bed, fluffed her pillows, dimmed the lights, pulled her covers up over her shoulders. Then I took her hand and sat there waiting for her breathing to grow calm and regular, feeling my own eyes become heavy, just like when she was a toddler and I sat with her to help her fall asleep. I could not believe that this morning I’d been in a meeting with Fernando, then in Hugo’s arms, and now here. Today Caitlin became a mother, my granddaughter became a person, and the world became a place brimming with new dangers and new love.

  sixteen

  Three days later, they sent Caitlin home from the hospital without her baby. She’d had a C-section, which is major abdominal surgery, so she was in pain and her hormones were going crazy, but she couldn’t rest because she hated to leave the baby—Eloise, after Caitlin’s favorite childhood heroine—alone.

  Ravi had been able to take emergency medical leave around the baby’s birth, but he got only two weeks of paid parental leave and he wanted to save that for moving, bringing Eloise home from the hospital, and any emergency that might arise in the meantime. Ravi invited me to move into their tiny apartment and sleep on the fold-out love seat, so I could be there with Caitlin when he had to work long shifts. He also wanted me to help Caitlin get back and forth to the hospital and manage the doctors and treatments. Ultimately, of course, he and Caitlin both knew far more about the worlds of hospitals and medicine than I did, and were perfectly capable of handling Eloise’s care by themselves. But it was clear my presence was considered some kind of talisman against the frightening and unexpected. I was supposed to keep away the bogeyman. We all almost believed I could.

  Poor Caitlin was pumping milk when she wasn’t crouched by Eloise’s incubator, stroking her back and telling her how much she loved her. They wouldn’t let me in the NICU yet, so I stood on the other side of the glass, watching in awe. My baby’s baby. The mother’s mother. There’s nothing like having your first grandchild to bring alive the feeling that you’re one link in a chain that stretches back through the ages and will go on, God willing, into the future long after you’re gone. It’s amazing how the same thing can make you feel completely insignificant and cosmically important at the same time.

  The fact that she was a self-aware, educated mother, a member of the health profession who’d been conscientious throughout her pregnancy, seemed to make Eloise’s premature birth and extended hospital stay more rather than less diff
icult for Caitlin. Modern pregnancy and baby guides make parents feel that all they have to do is follow the rules and their children will be healthy, their pregnancies and births will go smoothly, and they’ll never have to deal with the kinds of complications and risks that befall expectant mothers who smoke cigarettes and drink Diet Coke. It’s so hard to accept, as a parent, that some of the biggest, scariest things are outside your control and you can’t always make it all better. Having the baby so early and nearly losing her undercut much of Caitlin’s sense of confidence not only in herself but in the world.

  I could only try to reassure her that she was doing her best and help to make her life easier. When I wasn’t actively taking care of Caitlin or accompanying her to the hospital, I shopped and cooked and cleaned the apartment and took out the laundry. I ordered nursery items with delivery held for some time in the future. There was no room for a crib in Caitlin and Ravi’s one-bedroom apartment unless they removed their bed. They had to move before they brought that baby home. And with Ravi trying to bank time at work, and Caitlin spending every minute she could with the baby, it fell to me to do all the house hunting.

  Ravi taught me how to plot my route on Google Maps when I ventured to neighborhoods with apartments that were big enough for a family and affordable for both them and me. Despite living in or near New York for most of my life, I’d never even heard of, much less been to, these neighborhoods: Kingsbridge and Mott Haven in the Bronx, Auburndale and Glendale in Queens, Gravesend and Dyker Heights in Brooklyn, Huguenot and Great Kills in Staten Island.

  I took public transportation on all these house-hunting trips, partly because it was invariably faster than driving and partly because I wanted to experience for myself how long it took to get there, and how big a pain in the ass it was.

  I was in Great Kills, which I wanted to disqualify along with Gravesend on the basis of the names alone, when Kelsey called. It had taken me nearly two hours to get there from Caitlin and Ravi’s apartment on the Upper West Side, first by subway, then across New York Harbor on the Staten Island Ferry, and then twelve stops on the mostly aboveground Staten Island Railway. It didn’t seem fair to have to travel that far to see a butt-ugly house with aluminum siding and fake wood floors, only to turn around and go all the way back. I couldn’t imagine making that round trip every day, and from what I could see, Great Kills didn’t offer any more in the way of urban sophistication than any closer and more affordable suburb.