She's Having Her Baby

by Lauren Sams

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I had been joking about the wallet and we both understood that. I knew that Nina and Matt had invested almost every dollar they had – and a fair chunk they’d borrowed from the bank – in this baby, who’d yet to materialise. Pressure point number 457.

  ‘But the good news is that we can start once the counselling is over, which will be pretty soon. Since we’ve already got the eggs frozen from the last try, we can basically start right away. Just got to wait til your cycle starts.’

  I looked over at Matt, who had kept eating his overcooked bacon throughout this conversation. Lesser men might have gagged on the word ‘cycle’ – not Matt. ‘Great,’ I said.

  Nina barrelled on, talking about embryos and mucous viscosity and rectal temperature checks, and I tried to look as calm as possible while simultaneously forcing myself to swallow the coffee I’d just sipped.

  Act normal. These are perfectly normal things to talk about.

  Suddenly it dawned on me that I would soon be pregnant. With child. Like I had never planned to be.

  Oh baby.

  ‘Guess I should give up the vino, then,’ I said, attempting to inject some light into the situation.

  Nina and Matt exchanged another look.

  ‘You haven’t stopped drinking?’ Matt asked, his voice darkening with a faint shade of irritation.

  ‘Oh, well, I haven’t been drinking much,’ I countered.

  ‘Matt!’ said Nina. ‘George, it’s OK. Just, you know, lay off the booze so your body is ready to have a baby. It’ll be good to be living with two seasoned non-drinkers like us while you do it.’ During their many attempts to conceive, both Nina and Matt had sworn off booze and deli meats and sugar and salt and all sorts of things that supposedly inhibited one’s ability to make a baby (unless you were an American teenager – they could fall pregnant by sneezing in each other’s general direction, it seemed). I guess, on some level, I had known I’d have to give a few things up, but I hadn’t quite realised it would happen so soon. Pressure point number 458.

  ‘No problem. Just don’t tell me I have to give up coffee too.’

  Nina and Matt laughed. ‘Yeah, of course,’ said Nina.

  I raised my eyebrows. Nina went on. ‘And look, while we’re at it, if you could cut down on sugar, that would be ideal. How much exercise are you getting?’

  Did walking to the photocopier count? ‘Um … I do a little exercise when I can.’

  ‘You still go to the gym at work, right? Dr Fisher says yoga is one of the best things you can do if you’re trying to get pregnant, so maybe you could look into it.’

  ‘Alright.’

  I was starting to think Nina didn’t know me at all. No coffee? Yoga? Exercise? Bloody hell. She was going full Paltrow on me.

  Best friends never go full Paltrow.

  ‘But I mean, you don’t have to go crazy with this stuff. Don’t go overboard,’ said Nina.

  ‘Right, right.’

  ‘Some women drive themselves nuts trying to be these perfect breeding grounds, you know?’

  I nodded, thinking of all the things Nina had done to try to be the perfect breeding ground. Matt must have been thinking the same thing because he quickly changed the subject.

  ‘Anyway, we just want you to know how grateful we are and how lucky we feel to have you as a friend. Especially after all the stuff with … you know, with Jase. Don’t feel like you have to look for another place. We’re here for you.’

  I’d said something similar to Dr Hewitt when he’d asked me exactly why I’d wanted to be a surrogate. ‘Because I want to be there for Nina. She’s my best friend. I know that she’d do the same for me.’

  He’d nodded and said nothing. I continued.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s supremely unfair that some people get to have kids, even if they’re not really meant to be parents?’

  Nothing.

  ‘I do. I mean, I’m saying that as someone who would be an incredibly selfish and bad parent. But I know that. So I don’t want kids. But Nina … she would be such a good mum. And Matt – he’s going to be the best dad. And the two of them together –’ I paused, trying to find the right words. ‘They’re just a great team, you know? They know each other so well, they’ve been together for so long. I know they’ll be so, so good at this.’

  A slight nod. I made a mental note to never play poker against this dude.

  ‘And look, this might seem clichéd or corny or whatever, but … Nina deserves this. She deserves her own family, one she’s made by herself, because her other family – her dad and her idiot sister and her stepmum – are not …’ I tried to say it politely, ‘They’re not up to scratch. Nina deserves this. And if I can help, well, why not?

  ‘Honestly, though? The biggest reason for wanting to do this is because I actually have no idea what Nina is going through. I don’t want this for myself. I don’t know what it’s like to want this … I don’t know what it’s like to want it, and want it, and want it, and to keep having it taken away from me. But I can’t think of anything more heartbreaking. And I know that Nina’s heart would be broken if she couldn’t do this, if she couldn’t have this.

  ‘She should get her baby. Simple as that.’

  I thought I saw a tiny smile on Dr Hewitt’s face, but I was probably just imagining it.

  10

  Week 16

  I’d taken more pills in the past month than I had in my entire life, even including that month in Costa Rica when I was nineteen. I had fertile ground already, but doctors didn’t like taking chances with ‘good enough’, so I’d been prescribed a party bag of hormones and drugs to get my bits in pristine working order. Then there were the vats of vitamins Nina had bought for me – pills promising healthy spinal cord function and brain development for your baby and, as an added bonus, excellent hair and nails for you. So win-win.

  ‘I wonder what’s taking so long.’

  I looked over at Nina, who was pacing around the waiting room. ‘Doctors always take forever, don’t you think? They must have secret portals to golf courses in their offices.’

  Nina barely managed a smile. ‘But they said we had to wait. Why would they say that? I thought we were done. They told us we’d be out of here straight after the procedure.’

  I shook my head. ‘No idea. Maybe to tell me what beautiful eggs you have and how well they’re adjusting to their new home?’

  Nina stifled a laugh.

  ‘I thought it would take longer.’

  ‘That what would take longer?’

  ‘The transfer. It seemed quick, yeah?’

  I shrugged. ‘I guess … I don’t know. It’s not like I do this every week.’ I was pretty zoned out – they’d given me a valium to relax my muscles and it was kicking in nicely. ‘Neen, sit down. It’s going to be fine. Whatever the doctor says, we’re going out for ice-cream after, OK?’

  She nodded and continued to pace the room. Inside, I was just as nervous as Nina. If the embryo had implanted properly, I could be pregnant soon. Like, in a few hours. Of course, we wouldn’t know for a few weeks, but the idea that my whole life was about to change – albeit temporarily – loomed large in my mind. I might have a baby growing inside me – a tiny, unrecognisable blob of a baby – while I ate dinner later tonight. A baby that would grow and swell my belly and make me puke and sweat and possibly go a little nuts. God, the predictability of our biology was so depressing sometimes.

  I was surprised to be feeling this way. Up until this morning, I had felt pretty disconnected from the process. If anything, the counselling had only reinforced that. This is Nina and Matt’s baby. I’m just helping them. It’s like a business transaction, except that I love Nina and Matt and I have no intention of screwing them over. I’d had the injections and swallowed the pills. Today I had lain on a cold hospital bed swathed in a green gown while a doctor deposited a tiny little embryo in me. Up until this point, it hadn’t felt real enough for me to feel anything. But now, sitting in the waiting room that
had become so familiar to me over the past weeks, with the same dour old receptionist who should have retired a long time ago and the same reader-beaten magazines she should have taken home with her, I felt a shift. Something had changed. I could feel it.

  I glanced across at Nina, still pacing the floor. I made a motion for her to sit but she shook her head.

  ‘Neen?’ I whispered, even though we were the only people in the room. Thank god, too. I didn’t think I could have handled another room full of drawn, tired faces that had seen too much devastation.

  One day a woman had been bullied out of the waiting room because she’d brought in her three-year-old. Her eyes, shiny with tears, had begged the other waiting women for some understanding.

  ‘It’s called secondary infertility!’ she had pleaded.

  ‘I don’t care! I don’t need to see that here,’ the woman next to her had snapped. ‘That’ was the floppy-haired toddler, innocently sipping on his water bottle and swinging his feet back and forth under the seat he was too small for. He couldn’t have looked more blameless if he tried. ‘Nurse! She’s breaking the rules!’

  Nina and I had exchanged surprised looks, but today I could sort of understand where that woman – who at the time I’d thought was horrible – had been coming from. This was tough. Like, ‘pack up your bag and go home if you aren’t prepared to see your heart torn in two’ tough. Tough.

  Nina hadn’t responded. ‘Nina!’ I stage-whispered. She lifted her head and I noticed that she had to open her eyes. Had she been praying? My atheist friend, who’d been given a fortnight of detention at our Catholic high school for daring to talk about AIDS in debating? Surely not.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She shrugged. ‘I can’t just sit here, reading a magazine. This is it.’

  I stood up and gently guided her back to our seats. She put her head on my shoulder.

  ‘It’s just been so long, you know? If this isn’t it … I think we may have to gi–’ She stopped mid-sentence, her voice cracking with sobs that didn’t quite come. I tried to imagine wanting something as badly as Nina wanted a baby. In a lot of ways, it was just so far beyond my understanding. I suppose that, before Jase, I had wanted a partner with a fairly persistent pang, but that was different, wasn’t it? You had to wait for that, you couldn’t simply make it happen. So you got used to the wait. And it was easy enough to distract yourself – you slept with unsuitable men, ate Nutella out of the jar and called it dinner, and went on expensive holidays by yourself where you ‘forgot’ to see the Tate Modern because you found the hotel bar instead. But all the time, you had confidence – maybe not 100 per cent, but close – that someday, it would happen. And in the meantime, you had Nutella.

  This was different.

  The way Nina had described it to me, it was like being set adrift in an ocean. ‘It’s like, rationally, you know how to get to the shore, but there’s this big part of you – bigger than the rational part – that’s looking for another way home. It’s like your mind is telling you that there’s something else out there, something you’ve got to look for and grab hold of, otherwise you’ll never make it back in one piece.’ In her more sanguine moments, she had told me the saddest part was having to figure out what, exactly, you were going to do with the rest of your life, now that your plans had been indefinitely shelved. ‘After a certain point, people just expect you to get on with it and make do with what you’ve got … but it’s so hard to forget what you haven’t got.’

  I leaned my head against Nina’s and hugged her close.

  ‘It’s OK, Neen. It’s all going to be OK,’ I said, before remembering that that’s one of the things you’re never, ever meant to say to someone trying to conceive. Shit.

  ‘Ms Henderson?’

  The pinched-faced secretary bobbed up from behind her desk.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Dr Fisher will see you now.’

  Nina wiped the wetness from her eyes and made a gargantuan attempt at a genuine smile. We nodded to each other, a silent signal from friend to friend – we were in this together now.

  I held my hand out to Nina – something I’m not sure I’d ever done before – and she took it.

  Dr Fisher stepped out of her office to open the door for us.

  ‘Georgie?’

  I nodded. She motioned for me to come to her office. I glanced at Nina, whose quizzical expression probably matched mine.

  ‘Can I –’ Nina was cut off by Dr Fisher.

  ‘Just Georgie, for now. Thank you, Nina.’

  I looked at Nina and shrugged. Nina furrowed her brow and returned to her seat, burying her face in her palm.

  I walked into Dr Fisher’s office and sat down.

  ‘Let’s start with the good news,’ she said.

  11

  Week 16,

  DAY 4

  From: Georgie Henderson

  To: Jolie Editorial

  Hey guys,

  Can we gather at the lounges ASAP please?

  George x

  As soon as I hit ‘send’, I knew I should have worded the email differently. The team hurriedly scampered to the lounges and sat primly, ready for action, like they would for any other meeting. But I noticed their worried glances and shrugged shoulders.

  They think they’re going to be fired. Bloody hell.

  Pregnancy had apparently rewired my brain. This morning I’d walked out of the house with my dressing gown over my work clothes, thinking it was my blazer. I’d made it to the bus stop before I realised I was wearing a robe I’d once nicked from the Park Hyatt over my silk harem pants. Weirdly, it kind of worked.

  I refused to believe it was the hormones – I was just so bloody overwhelmed at the thought of being pregnant. It was completely surreal to think that inside me, at this very moment, was a little heart just beating away. Inside me. Me.

  I sat in my usual place and, looking around, saw that everyone was sitting in the exact same spots as they always did. Lucy sat next to me and Katie, our creative director, next to her. From there, it basically spiralled out in terms of seniority. The fashion girls sat together, flicking through a recent issue of Phive, a luxury fashion mag the team wanted to rip off every month. Greer, our chief sub, looked mildly impatient that this meeting was taking away precious minutes she could spend correcting somebody’s spelling. Fran, ever the trooper, sat closest to the door, where she could hear the phone ring.

  ‘Guys, I called this meeting because I have a few things to discuss with you.’ A few of the girls gasped audibly. ‘No, no, please don’t worry – it’s not bad news.’

  Shoulders returned to their resting places, breaths were released, eyebrows lowered. I had seen enough redundancies in the last few years to know that I shouldn’t have sent that email. The girls were, quite rightly, terrified. News travelled especially quickly in a building full of writers, and the recent increased frequency of Meg’s closed-door visits definitely hadn’t escaped the team’s attention.

  ‘There are going to be some changes though. Jolie is doing really well – so well, in fact, that we’re going to be expanding the digital side of the business.’ I paused, wondering if anyone could see through my blatant lie. Nobody seemed to notice that I wasn’t making direct eye-contact with anyone – the tell-tale sign of a pork pie if ever there was one – so I carried on. ‘As you know, we have an iPad edition and it’s doing great. But what we want to do is make it even better. I’m sure you’ve all seen Charm’s iPad issue.’

  ‘Yep – I subscribe to it,’ said Katie. ‘Each month they do this thing with the cover where it comes alive and the star does a little intro to the issue. It’s so cool.’

  ‘Right, right – well, that’s the exact kind of thing that we’re going to do.’

  This time the girls were gasping with delight. They were nodding their heads, their eyes alive. Wow. This is going so much better than I’d imagined.

  Everyone except Lucy seemed excited. Sh
e sat, saying nothing, doing her best to look as uninterested as possible.

  ‘The videos with Emily Collins will work so well on the iPad. Right, George? And could we do that thing where readers can shop from the pages? They just click to buy? Advertisers would love that,’ said Dom.

  I nodded, looking at Greer, whose eyes had widened with alarm at the prospect of inserting a gajillion hyperlinks into each issue.

  The fashion girls looked up from their magazine. ‘Our stories work better on paper – that’s the way our photographers shoot them,’ said Jen, our fashion director. Jen had been at Jolie even longer than I had but she could pass for an intern. Thanks in part to her daily yoga and stand-up paddleboarding sessions, and in part to her fantastic Eurasian genes, she was forty-two going on twenty-three. The woman was Benjamin Button-ing before my eyes.

  ‘I know, Jen, but the art team can take care of the differences in quality. We’ll make sure the stories look as good on the screen as they do in the book.’

  Jen nodded, but looked unconvinced. If it had been just the two of us, I would have agreed with her. Fashion shoots did look better on paper – that was how they were meant to be seen. Swiping from one page to the next just wasn’t as tactile and immediate as turning the pages, feeling the clothes right beneath your fingertips, imagining yourself as the models on the page. And I didn’t care what anyone said – nobody really thought those bloggers knew anything about fashion beyond being able to throw on an oversized sweater with a whimsical skirt they’d been gifted by a generous designer.

  ‘Georgie?’ said Fran. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her actually put her hand up, like in school. Which she had only finished last year, to be fair.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What about the website? Are we changing it at all?’

  I nodded. ‘Yep, definitely. We really want to re–’ I searched for the right word, trying to remember what the digital team had told me last week. Renovate? Remaster? Replicate?