“Hey, big guy,” Macy said, her voice a half whisper.
“Cam let me pick the radio station in her truck again.”
“She did?”
Macy smiled at her, and Cam’s heart jumped.
Jeremiah knelt beside his mother. “Are you pregnant yet?”
“I don’t know, sweetie.” She looked at Cam. “You come bearing gifts. I guess Jeremiah ate at Eileen’s?”
“Yeah,” Cam said. “Eileen sent dinner again. She made me a plate, too.” She lifted the foil covered plates for Macy to get a better look.
Macy scooted to one end of the sofa, and Jeremiah quickly jumped up beside her.
“Homework?” she asked him.
“Just to practice my letters.”
“Let’s go ahead and start working on that.” She nodded toward Jeremiah’s backpack, a bumpy lump of canvas by the door.
“I’ll heat this up a little.” Cam walked toward the kitchen.
“Thanks. For everything,” Macy said.
Cam grinned. It was her pleasure to help out. Really.
When she took the warm plate to her, Macy swung her legs around and sat up.
Cam said, “Eileen made me promise to make sure you ate. She said to at least eat the meat, that you need the iron and protein and crap.”
“Crap,” Jeremiah sang out.
Cam twisted her mouth, showing her distaste over slipping with her language in front of Jeremiah.
“Mama can’t eat crap,” he said, giggling.
“That’s enough.” Macy pushed the food around on her plate. “Show me how you write your name.”
He sighed. “My name is so long. My friend Joe finishes his work the fastest.”
“Well, look at all the extra practice you’re getting. Your letters will be fantastic by the end of the school year.” She ruffled his hair.
Cam noted how tired Macy looked. And it was pretty obvious that she’d been crying. She watched Macy push her green beans to the side and fought the urge to feed her herself.
Cam wasn’t going to be shy about her own dinner. She was starving, and Eileen Stokes was a great cook. She stuck a piece of steak in her mouth and chewed.
Jeremiah finished spelling out his name, first and last, and leaned closer to his mother. “Now are you pregnant?”
Macy smiled. “We won’t know for another week or so, baby.”
“When you’re pregnant, then have it, I won’t be the baby. The new one will be. And I’ll always be older. And the boss.”
“Write my name.”
“M-a-m-a,” he said, giggling.
She laughed. “My real name.”
He giggled some more. “I’ll write your name and our address. Then I’m gonna write Cam’s name.” He looked thoughtful. “What’s your last name?”
“Webber.”
“That’s going to be hard to write.”
“You can handle it.” Cam winked at him.
Jeremiah whipped out a new piece of paper and started writing oversized, lopsided names. After doing his mom’s and Cam’s, he wrote “Uncle Kenny” and “Aunt Dori.”
Cam glanced from Jeremiah to Macy and saw that she was putting a piece of steak in her mouth. She relaxed a little.
“More, Mama?”
“Yeah, baby,” Macy answered and ate a forkful of green beans.
Cam figured if she could keep Jeremiah writing, Macy would stay distracted and eat most of her dinner. “What other names?” Cam asked.
“Emma,” Jeremiah said. He slowly wrote the name Cam was unfamiliar with.
“Good,” Macy said. “Who else?”
Jeremiah leaned against her side. “Help me with Sharon’s name.”
She put her fork down and pushed the plate away. “Why don’t you let Cam help you with that one?” She swung her legs around and twisted into a lying position.
Cam watched Jeremiah form the letters and showed him how he’d written the “N” backward. She glanced in Macy’s direction. Macy had buried her face into her pillow and shifted toward the wall.
Jeremiah practiced writing his numbers while Cam cleared the plates. She covered Macy’s leftovers and set them in the fridge, hoping she’d get hungry later. She washed her plate and both forks and knives. As Cam walked back into the living room, she clapped her hands together and said, “Hey, buddy, it’s getting late.”
“I can take a bath all by myself,” Jeremiah said.
Cam looked at Macy, who looked up from the pillow and nodded.
“Okay.” Cam sat down on the chair. “Shout if you need me.” She picked up a book and opened it to the middle. Big, bold letters jumped out at her. STRETCH MARKS. She closed the book and looked at Macy. She was again facing into her pillow. Cam would have done anything to make her feel more like her old self.
She looked into the index of the book. Depression. She flipped to the section on depression during pregnancy. Then she remembered the brochure Macy had brought home from Dr. Benson’s. She snooped around in the kitchen until she found it on the counter by the phone.
Jeremiah came barreling in from the bathroom, hair damp around the edges, toothpaste smeared on his chin.
“Tell Cam thanks for the ride home from your Grandma’s.”
“Thank you. Will you pick me up tomorrow, too?”
She looked at Macy and then said, “Yep.”
Before Cam left, she carefully spread open the brochure and placed it at the end of the coffee table, closest to Macy’s head.
Chapter Twenty
Leveling the Playing Field
The paper under Macy sounded exactly as it had two weeks earlier when she’d had the embryo implanted. It was even tinged with the hiss of the voice, the one obviously trying to drive her crazy. Why are you doing this? it demanded.
“You okay?” Dori asked.
“Yeah. Thanks for coming in with me today.” It was nice to have Dori there while she waited. Macy hoped it would keep her from obsessing over Sharon. And maybe even quiet the accusing voice in the back of her mind.
Macy realized Dori was talking, but the words hadn’t registered. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“Kenny was so hyped up this morning. He’s probably driving everyone at the shop crazy.”
“I’m sure he is. You told him we’d call as soon as we were done, right?”
“Yeah.”
Dr. Benson came into the small room wearing shiny black shoes, brown slacks, and a white lab coat over a gray button-down. Macy hoped his fertilizing abilities were better than his fashion sense. She squelched the negative thoughts. Michael had set them up with Dr. Benson, and she was glad the specialist hadn’t backed out after she and Michael broke up.
They were given the rundown again.
“If the pregnancy test is positive,” Dr. Benson said, “I’ll do an ultrasound in two weeks to confirm and to count heartbeats. If the test is negative, you will have to decide when to start the process again.”
Macy had been watching Dori’s face as the doctor was speaking. She felt Dori’s pain when she winced at the mention of starting over. Macy wanted to assure her it wouldn’t be necessary. J-man had kissed her belly before she left for her appointment, telling her it was for luck. At that moment, Macy knew she couldn’t lose.
“I’ll be back with a nurse, shortly, to examine Macy and draw blood.” When there were no questions or comments, he went out and left them alone.
Dori twisted the ring on her finger. “Macy, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“The other day something popped into my head. Remember at the bookstore when you said you once liked me too much?”
Macy studied the waffled texture of her paper gown.
“I feel stupid for just now catching on to what you meant,” Dori said.
Macy held her breath.
“I need to be sure that you’re clear the comics were just a game for me—practice even,” Dori said.
“I know.”
“It was neve
r real for me.”
“I know,” Macy repeated. She smoothed the gown over her legs. “This is a weird time and place to be having this conversation.”
“Yeah, it is, but I need to understand some things.”
Macy pulled at the bottom of her gown. “Dori, I’m feeling a little vulnerable here.”
“Sorry.” Dori stood and walked toward the door. Staring at a poster of fetal development hanging on the wall, she went on. “I’ve felt vulnerable for years. And now with me needing help with something this natural and basic, well—that’s real vulnerability.”
Dori turned, and Macy saw no malice on her face. “Okay,” Macy said, “maybe the time and place is a karmic leveling of the playing field.” Dori paced the length of the room a few times, and Macy asked, “What do you want to know?”
“Are you a lesbian?”
Macy felt the blush creep from her face to her neck as the memory of Sharon inside her came crashing back over her, as it had so many times the past two weeks. “Yes.” The word came out much weaker than she’d intended.
“Do you still like me that way?”
“No.” This time Macy’s response came out much stronger than she’d wanted. She didn’t want to sound like she was protesting too much, or like she was suggesting that Dori shouldn’t flatter herself.
But to Dori, it was apparently just a word. “Okay.” She walked back to her chair.
Macy thought about how she’d kept the secret of their romantic comics—Love Me, Volumes 1 through 4, and Real Romance, aka Stony-Faced Sea Urchin. She hadn’t told Emma, or Sharon, or anyone else about them. She thought about how she had been denying her feelings for so long and about overcompensating by sleeping with men she didn’t have any feelings for. She’d cheated herself, by not having the courage to be with Emma and by not having what it took for Sharon to want to be with her again. Macy didn’t want to be cheated out of having this baby for Dori, and Kenny also, but she had to know Dori still wanted it, after learning the truth about her.
“Do you want to change your mind?” Macy asked. Anger stabbed at her chest. “Because if you do, two weeks ago would have been the time to say so, not now.”
“Change my mind? About this?” She gestured around the room with her hands.
“Yeah, about me carrying your baby.”
“No.” She sniffled. “No way.”
“What is it, Dori?”
She started crying. “This is the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
Macy cried, too. Had Dori rejected her—on top of Sharon’s declaration that they’d never be intimate again—it would have been too much for her to bear.
Macy had cried a lot right after the implant. Curled into a fetal position, she’d lie around wishing Sharon would call and say she wanted to come over. She had called several times but only to check on how Macy was doing, not to ask to see her.
Cam had been great, coming over to Macy’s house in the evening after work. Since Kenny had helped her find an inexpensive pickup truck, she wasn’t relying on other people for transportation anymore. Macy had become the one relying on her. And of course Jeremiah was quite the man of the house. He brought her drinks and snacks and even read to her from his Spider-Man comics.
While Macy had been camped on the sofa crying, Cam left a brochure on the coffee table. It was opened to the section about it being normal for the patient to be depressed following the implant phase of the cycle. That reminder got Macy’s butt off the sofa and back to being J-man’s mama and Cam’s friend.
When she and Dori both jumped at the knock on the door, Macy guessed Dori had been in her own little world also.
The doctor came in with a nurse. “Are you ready?” he asked Macy. When she nodded, he turned to Dori. “You can wait outside, Mrs. Brewer. The nurse will let you know when we’re finished.”
She glanced at Macy, and Macy nodded. Dori gave her a quick smile and left the room.
Macy knew the routine, so she scooted down when the doctor pulled up his stool.
The voice returned. Selfish, it hissed.
More and more, Macy worried if her motivation to have the baby was as altruistic as she’d made it out to be. Maybe it was an issue of control, like the voice in her head claimed. She shut the voice out. She would not ruin this precious time in all of their lives by questioning herself.
“Slide down a little farther,” Dr. Benson said.
During the exam, Macy mentally left the room to be with her son. J-man had a thing for the sound of the water at the Savannah River rapids. She took him along the path between the canal and river a few times when he was a baby. This was the other end of the path from where they went with Emma. One day, three cyclists rode by, rowdy and loud, and J-man started crying. Macy tried everything to hush him. Nothing helped, not rocking, not even playing his favorite game, kissy-face. Finally she held him with his back against her chest, looking out over the water. He stopped crying and started giggling. Every time she tried to turn away to leave, he’d start crying again. She held him facing the white-laced water until her arms and legs ached and J-man breathed with the rhythm of sleep.
Dr. Benson’s voice ripped her away from the rushing water. “Everything looks good. Now we’ll take some blood. How do you feel?”
“Fine,” she answered.
He motioned for the nurse, who helped Macy sit up. Then the nurse came at her with a needle, and Macy did what she knew would divert her attention. She closed her eyes and relived the moment when J-man gave her belly the good luck kiss. It just had to have worked.
†
“You swore you’d never drive a station wagon, Kenny.” Dori turned away from the computer screen and looked at him.
“Did not.”
“Yes, you did.” She swirled the mouse around on the table. She did that a lot, and Kenny hated it. The arrow moving fast on the screen like that made him seasick.
He looked away from the computer. “What, when I was twelve?”
“Seventeen, actually.”
“That was a long time ago. That was before we had a bun in the oven. Well, a bun in Macy’s oven. Besides, now they ain’t station wagons, they’re sport wagons.”
“Oh, you want a sport wagon. Why didn’t you just say so?”
“You ain’t acting so sick now,” Kenny said.
“I feel better.”
“Better enough to be a smart-ass,” he teased.
“Yeah, but you love me.” She paused. “Now would be a good time to tell me that you do.”
“I do what?”
She punched his arm.
“Okay, okay, I love you.” Kenny was relieved to see she wasn’t as pale as before. “You are feeling better.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “I hated missing Macy’s appointment today, but with the morning sickness, I just wasn’t up to it.”
Kenny had been putting up with that nonsense for four long months. “Dori.”
“Don’t look at me like I’m crazy. If a man can have sympathy symptoms, why can’t I?”
The phone rang. They looked at each other, and Dori picked it up.
“Macy.” She paused and nodded a few times. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m feeling better, how about you? Good.” Dori was quiet for another few moments. “Oh? Wow. Yeah, he’s right here. Macy, thanks.”
When she hung up the phone, she had a dreamy look on her face. It was even spacier than her after-sex look.
“So, what did she say?” Kenny asked.
“Two distinct heartbeats.”
“In English, Dori.”
“Twins.”
Kenny sat down. Actually, more like fell down. “Twins.” The thought flashed through his mind: twice the cost, twice the worries. But all he did was repeat, “Twins.”
“Are you okay?” Dori asked.
“Yeah. Hell, yeah.” He smiled a big, goofy grin.
“I guess that settles it.” She rolled her chair closer to the computer. “We go with the sport wagon.”
S
he clicked the mouse a few times, and the next thing Kenny knew, there was a picture of one on the screen.
“Can we get one with a CD player?” he asked.
“Oh no.” Her eyes got wider.
Hell, it was just a CD player. “What?”
“I’ve read somewhere that twins sometimes means double the morning sickness.”
Here we go again. But then he started to feel a little queasy himself. It was probably just all the excitement. To settle his stomach, he thought about the materials he would need to make the second cradle. Thankfully, the flathead wood screws, cross dowels, and Roto hinges helped him relax some.
†
Kenny and Dori dropped Macy off at her house and were trying to decide where to eat lunch before they both had to get back to work. Dori was driving. She’d been feeling better. In the two weeks since they had learned Macy was carrying twins, Dori’s morning sickness had disappeared right along with Macy’s.
The sun reflected off the slick surface of the sonogram picture. Kenny stared into the black and white murkiness, not seeing what Dr. Benson saw. But it was good enough for him that the doc saw it clearly. One boy, one girl—their babies.
Dori glanced over at him. “Macy’s already four-and-a-half months along. We need to talk about names.”
“It ain’t too soon for that?” He knew it wasn’t. He’d been thinking about names ever since this started. “You know we’re never gonna agree on no names.”
“We can’t even agree on Taco Bell or KFC,” Dori said. She reached over and touched the edge of the picture.
“We could write some ideas on scraps of paper and draw them out of a hat.”
“That’s kind of lame. No offense.” She smiled.
Kenny shrugged. “Then you name one, and I’ll name the other.”
“Really?”
“Why not?” Kenny pivoted in his seat to face her.
“Can I name the girl?”
“If you want.” He gave a silent thanks that he wasn’t gonna have to fight to name the boy. “This could be pretty cool.”
Nesting Page 18
