... and Baby Makes Two (19 page)

Teresa felt certain that he was not really married, and therefore even more despicable. Karen worried about Jane's karma and ex-
plored the possibility of a relationship between Jane and Peter in some previous lifetime that had echoed in this one.

Karen justified her otherworldly approach. “It's possible. It's the only explanation I can find for Artie, my last boyfriend. He was a relentless, brooding jerk.” But Jane found no tangible help there. She still wanted Peter. She wanted him so badly.

“Push him,” Teresa advised. “He
wants
to leave her and go to you—if she exists, that is. So give him a push. Can't you see it? He's practically begging you to push him. Push him!”

These women were big on advice. Karen advised Jane to give Peter a set of time boundaries. This sounded like a soft way to say “deadline” or “ultimatum,” and Jane shied away from both. And then Arlene spoke, at last. Hers was the advice that got under Jane's skin and stayed there.

“You want him. You can't have him. Walk away”

No one got good Christmas bonuses, and Jane had the privilege of telling everyone precisely how little they were getting. Hers was slashed, beaten, and barely breathing. The London acquisition had strained the firm's resources, and everyone had to share the burden. But Jane got a card from Barbara. It contained an official warning, on behalf of Founding Mothers, stating that this would be the last holiday season where she could tear up the town. Next year, life would be unrecognizable. Next year, she would celebrate Christmas with her baby.

Jane overspent, especially on her dad. No one in the world was going to have a tougher Christmas than Howard. Betty had always loved the holidays and found ways to gild lilies and then add lights to them. Jane tried her best to re-create her mother's heavy touch in decorating.

“Do you want me to put the singing snowman on the porch or next to Rudolph?” This was one of many questions she tried to frame seriously. He kept the cocoa coming, and she kept putting up lights, holly, and crèches. But no amount of staple-gunning could make it look like Betty was still there.

On Christmas Day, Kevin, Neil, and their wives and their kids seriously outnumbered Jane. But she had the Christ Child on her side. The original one, not the one from her neighborhood. They knew they would lose valuable moral high ground if they said anything harsh to Jane today. So they said nothing. This was just like having People around. You didn't talk about things in front of Christmas.

The children were bigger and louder. They were more thoroughly inducted into pop culture than ever before. They quoted prime time and MTV. Jane, aka Margaret Mead, studied their aggressive behavior. She saw Dylan slinking off to call his girlfriend. She saw the little ones topple their parents' ability to say no. Jane promised herself that her child would be more pure of heart, and she was going to disconnect her cable TV immediately.

Kitty and Linda managed to re-create Betty's Christmas dinner perfectly, and anyone with good sense would have to wonder why. Betty openly despised cooking. For years, she had been inventing the fully microwavable Christmas. She invested in an industrial-size microwave oven, for maximum efficiency. It was her moment of triumph when the turkey emerged from his plastic tray, ready to serve.

“No one can tell the difference!” was her battle cry.

Howard always made appropriate
mm-mm-mm
noises, and the family followed suit. Kitty and Linda always had hot dogs or Lunchables for the little ones. The first Christmas without Betty would be no different. Kitty sat in Betty's seat, so as not to draw attention to her absence.

After dinner, the adults exchanged presents while the children fought over which DVD to watch first. Kevin, Neil, Kitty, and Linda had pooled their money to buy Howard a watch. It was a classic gold pocket watch, engraved “from your loving children.”

Jane's blood ran backward. Your loving children? We left out the un-loving children, Jane and Sheila, because, hey, they don't love you. Jane said nothing. You can't say anything in front of Christmas, remember.

Jane's gift was a collection of PBS DVDs on history topics that

Howard loved: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II. Wars in a digital format. It looked stupid and shallow next to the gold watch from the loving children. But Howard was no fool. He crowed with excitement over his gifts from Jane. He put Sheila's gift under the tree for later. Much later.

Jane needed to tell Howard about the baby because, from an adoption point of view, she was beginning to show. She looked for an opportunity to get Howard alone. On Christmas. With the whole family around. It wasn't easy.

Howard, Jane, and the Loving Children all endured a constant stream of visitors. Everyone who was anyone in northern New Jersey wanted to check on newly widowed Howard on his first Christmas without Betty. By midafternoon, Howard had received a year's supply of holiday cookies and a stack of fruitcakes. Some guests talked about Betty, some talked around her. But every guest seemed to study Howard for a sign of sadness that they could heal with their baked goods. Howard twinkled good-naturedly and allayed all fears and worries.

These were truly nice people, weren't they? Jane thought so. That's why she had to stop wishing them all to start sneezing a lot and urgently need to go home so that she could have some time alone with her dad. She didn't have the power to inflict sneezing fits, so she would simply have to wait out all this niceness. She'd have to tell him later.

Night was falling, and the visits stopped. Perhaps she could sit with her father on Christmas night and tell him everything, everything. It sounded like a good plan in Jane's head.

It sounded even better when her brothers gathered the tryptophandrowsy children and departed for home. It was late, and Jane had missed the last bus back to the city. She would have to stay over. Good. She went upstairs, theoretically, to find a toothbrush, but instead she sat in her old room, which had been painted into a taxi-yellow guest room, and tried to rehearse a Dad-I-Made-a-Big-

Decision speech for Howard. She'd be fine, as long as there weren't any more—

“Janie! Come down here! Look who's here!”

Visitors.

Jane walked into the living room, and there he was: Peter. He stood up when Jane entered the room. It was definitely Peter. And that had to be her. Next to him. His wife. Bianca.

“Merry Christmas!” Howard said before Jane could speak. When she saw the pair approaching her, she wanted to run, wanted to hide, wanted to be home already.

Howard was smiling, Bianca was smiling, but Peter wasn't. Did this have to be Bianca? Couldn't it be a cousin? A sister-in-law? Somebody else? Please?

Jane made sure her mouth was closed as her father said, “You remember my daughter, Jane?”

Peter's smile looked like a grimace. Good. At least he was suffering here too. He reached out and shook Jane's hand. Shook her hand!

“This is my wife, Bianca.”

Jane may or may not have shaken Biancas hand. Later, she would try to recall it. Bianca brought some kind of traditional Swedish noodle dish. Jane took it (heavy!) to the kitchen, gave herself three seconds to breathe deeply before she returned to the living room where Howard was chatting about the cold, the day, the season with Peter and Bianca.

Bianca. She was small and spare. Jane thought she looked like a good athlete. She wore a Hillary-style hair band. She was blond. Maybe even sun-bleached. Lines were imprinted deeply on her forehead and around her mouth. She was bouncing with energy. Her voice was high and sparkly She was perky. Perky, perky, perky.

“How are your parents doing?” Howard asked Peter. “I would have dropped in to visit with them today, but we had quite a lot of guests today! Didn't we, Jane?”

Jane felt the tension in her neck as she nodded a little too quickly. She heard Bianca speak.

“They would have come with us, but this is a little too late for them! Peter here kept making us wait and wait and wait to come over here. I told him, I said, ‘I think we're waiting too long to visit anybody' but he kept making us wait!”

Because of Jane? Because he expected her to be gone by now? Because she told him that she would be gone by now? Oh, why wasn't she gone by now?

Jane heard conversation floating around the room, but found herself tongue-tied. Christmas. Travel. Work in the city. Later, she would try to revise the evening in her imagination. She could have gone to the kitchen and hand-washed the dishes she had loaded into the dishwasher. She could have gone outside to turn the decorations on. Or off. She could have claimed to be tired, which she was, or ill, which she wasn't. She could have missed all of this. But the conversation rolled along without her. “The city. The village. Neighbors.”

Jane surfaced completely as she heard Bianca exclaim, “Oh, you're
that
Jane. You're the one who's adopting a baby from China. Good for you! I think that's super!”

Howard sat up and looked at his daughter as if he were looking at a stranger. Peter must have understood, because he said, “Oh. Did I say that? I may have gotten confused. I work with so many— I mean, Jane is kind of a common name, and, I think you're confused and …”

Biancas perkiness overrode him.

“No. It's Jane. Your neighbor. And she's adopting a baby. Aren't you? Aren't you adopting a baby?”

Jane had been holding her breath since Bianca first said the word “baby” Howard's face looked like it belonged on Mt. Rush-more: large, gray, and cold.

Peter looked at Jane helplessly, while Bianca said, “Single motherhood! Wow! You know, I was raised by a single mom. My aunt. She
taught me how to be independent, and I've never regretted it. And won't it be nice to have a kid to keep you company? Super!”

There was a long silence. Bianca looked at the sad and angry faces around her. Howard stood up and said, “Company? You're going to have a child to keep you company?”

“No. Dad. I'm not. I never said that. I mean—I am adopting a baby. That part is true.”

Howard was shaking his head. Peter rose quickly.

“It's late, and I think that maybe we should head home.” Yes, their work here was done. It was time to leave.

Howard saw his guests out the door and went directly to bed without another word on Jane's adoption. Jane retreated to her room. She stayed awake in the aggressively shiny room and decided that it was now legal to hate Bianca, or at least actively dislike her.

…

The next morning, over stove-cooked eggs, Jane urgently needed to talk to Howard. She had the Dad-I-Made-a-Big-Decision speech polished and ready.

Before she could start it, Howard said, “Jane. About last night— tell me it isn't true. You can't be considering adopting a baby? From China? You would never do anything so foolish, so selfish. Tell me I'm right, Jane.”

Breakfast was starting to burn. Jane's hands were damp. She dumped the eggs onto a plate, but half of them missed. She tried to focus on the cleanup. Howard was studying her face. He was stern. Jane made more of a mess as she cleaned up the eggs.

“Dad. I am. I've already sent my dossier to China.”

“Well. I don't know what that means. But I know that this is a mistake, Jane. A very grave mistake. But you don't have a baby yet, so it can't be too late to put this notion away and stop it all.”

“I don't want to.”

“I'm sorry, Janie. I know this isn't what you want to hear, but you shouldn't go through with this adoption. You mustn't.”

She couldn't speak. He could.

“Have you really thought this through, honey? After all, you're an unmarried woman. All alone. You don't know what you're getting yourself into.”

Jane still couldn't speak. He took her silence as a kind of agreement, and so he went further.

“And I'll let you in on a little secret: The rewards of parenthood are not all they're cracked up to be. Look at your mother and Sheila. They used to be thick as thieves, then Sheila went off and did what she did. Do you think we deserved that? I don't. But that's how it is when you're a parent. It's grossly unfair, the whole package.”

“I didn't know you felt so”—she searched—“un-rewarded.”

“That's not it. Not at all. You're proving my point, Janie, if you could just hear yourself. Being a parent is all about giving and giving and giving. It's hard work and it's arrogant to think you can do it alone. I love you too much to stay quiet about this. Tell me you'll think about this, Janie. Just give it some thought.”

“Dad. This is not for you to decide.”

“I wish it were. I'd make a better decision than you're making.”

His voice was gentle and quiet. He sounded right. And he sounded reluctant. She wanted to quote his speech about how much Betty loved being a mother, but she was undone. Her bones were mush. Her teeth were jelly. He had the Irish-arguing gene too, and he was good at it. He'd had more practice. If this were a debate, Howard would have been the winner, Jane the loser. And so Jane returned to the city bathed in pain.

…

Sheila called to thank Jane for the extravagant gifts. The kids were wildly excited about Christmas. They had made a special “I Love You” wreath for their stepmother, and Sheila was overcome with delight.

“I think they really do love me. I can feel it. Or maybe it's just
how much I'm loving them. Either way, it's so great. Oh, Janie, I can't wait until you're a mom too, and we can talk about this stuff. This is the best Christmas of my life.”

Jane said nothing about her Close Encounter with Peter & Wife, nothing about Howard's lecture/argument/judgment. Not today.

…

Jane, Teresa, and Karen had exchanged gifts at Teresa's very swanky holiday party. All three friends gave each other picture-frame ornaments for next year's trees. It was their “Gift of the Magi” moment. Karen read great meaning into this overlap. They made plans to visit Megan and her baby as soon as they could locate some frankincense, gold, and myrrh.