Heads or Tails (19 page)

“This is weird, this not knowing, this limbo,” I finally said. “It’s hard to go on with our regular lives and also hard not to…bond.” It was a statement, an immolation, but also a question.

“Maybe,” he said, rising slowly from the floor, “maybe we should keep her.”

That afternoon, I drove to the Target on Masonic. We needed a host of oddball items — bottle nipples, batteries, wrapping paper, Special K and diapers — so Target was the obvious one-stop shop. In what I’d come to think of as my former life, I’d never get within ten paces of the place on a weekend, when both the store and the parking lot were nutty. But I couldn’t go after work on a weekday since Mercedes needed to be relieved by four-thirty and there was no way I was schlepping a baby to Target, a place that could easily overwhelm me when I was by myself. That day, Jesse said he’d stay with GiGi during her nap while I went out.

I wandered the aisles, picking up what we needed and, of course, many things we didn’t, including small tupperware containers I’d seen moms using for Cheerios (a food I planned to introduce next week), a box of Cheerios, a flannel blanket that looked too cozy to pass up, and a scented candle to mask those blowout baby poops. It was dark in the store, as rain pelted the asphalt outside. I meandered through the aisles, dodging toddlers darting in front of my cart yelling, “Can we get this?” while holding up a Dora the Explorer DVD. And I reflected on the morning’s conversation with Jesse, one that just weeks before would have been unthinkable.

“
Keep
her? What are you talking about?” My arms were crossed and I leaned forward, incredulous.

He shrugged sheepishly. “I don’t know. She’s got no one right now — not her one and only parent, not her one and only grandparent. She just has us.”

I snorted as if to say, “Poor kid!”

“Seriously, Hill. We’re actually doing okay at this and — I know it’s bizarre — but I’ve come to kind of, I don’t know, enjoy her company.”

I knew what he meant. Sure, she was just a baby. But she was still a person, a companion of sorts. In just a few weeks, I, too, had grown accustomed to her — her habits, her emerging personality. It was simply impossible not to delight in her growth. Most of it was just normal infant development. But part of me wondered if she wasn’t blossoming because she was finally getting the attention that babies require. And she’d gotten it from us — Mercedes, too, of course, but mostly from me and Jesse — a fact as astonishing as the development itself.

“Jess,” I said, taking a step backward, “she’s
Margot
’s daughter.”

“I know —”

“Plus, we’re not baby people!”

“Correction: we thought we weren’t baby people.” As if to introduce Exhibit A, he lifted GiGi from the sofa, tossed her above his head and caught her, his hands leaving her for just a millisecond. She shrieked and cackled. “Maybe the best way to help Margot is to relieve her, to help her undo her mistake. Isn’t that what she really wanted? ‘
Take my baby
.’”

I shook my head vigorously. “GiGi is not a mistake!”

Jesse leaned back as if I’d struck him, and the baby flinched. My vehemence took even me by surprise. But GiGi’s situation called to mind what I was to my parents — at best, an unexpected complication; at worst, something thoroughly unwanted.

“Margot wasn’t in her right mind,” I continued, lowering my voice. “She’s sick right now, an honest-to-goodness illness. But even if she’d really meant it, you know my own fucked up history. You know I have no model for parenting. ‘Benign neglect,’ being raised by, by an
employee
!”

With a dispirited sigh, he put GiGi back down on the sofa. “You’re right. You’re right.” He nodded and retreated into the kitchen.

I felt enveloped by a strange sense of betrayal, not unlike how I felt when Arlen had announced that our only choices were to get married or give an unwanted baby up for adoption. Stranger still, I wondered how Abe would react in this very situation, deepening my sense of betrayal — of my
own
betrayal. Abe seemed wholly unlike both Arlen or Jesse or any other man I knew, in ways I still couldn’t pinpoint. He was mysterious yet stable, settled but at the same time he invited adventure. I’d still not mentioned him once to Jesse. Or Sarah. Or anyone.

In Target, I placed my items on the check-out conveyer and wondered whether we even
could
keep GiGi. Just thinking about it made me feel profoundly disloyal to Margot and to Jean. Especially to Jean. She’d taken such good care of me at my life’s darkest point. She turned everything around by supporting me, loving me, not judging me, which allowed me to have the life I was supposed to have — until now. But trying to convince Jesse that it wasn’t possible felt wrong too. Mostly, I just felt stunned that I was in this dilemma — about keeping a
baby
.

I loaded the car, grateful that the downpour had momentarily halted. Passing through the Panhandle on the drive home, my phone rang. I expected it to be Jesse or maybe Sarah, who’d invited the three of us to her house for Sunday Soup Night. But when I answered, I heard a raspy, unfamiliar, “Hilly?”

Margot.

I veered onto Waller Street and yanked my car into an illegal spot next to a fire hydrant.

“Oh my God. How are you?” My hands trembled as I shifted the car into park. The rain had returned in earnest. Drops the size of nickels oozed onto the windshield, obstructing my view in milliseconds.

“I’m okay.” She sounded distant, removed. “How’s Gretchen?”

I straightened in my seat. “Mar, she’s great, actually. She’s doing great.” Inexplicably, tears formed and my voice failed and I feared I’d have to explain my emotion.

“Great.” Her tone was stiff, making it hard even for me, her best friend, to discern what she was feeling.

“Are you back home now?” I asked, not sure what I wanted her answer to be.

“Not yet. But my social worker thinks I can go home before too long.”

I wondered what that meant. I’d already had Margot’s baby far longer than I ever expected. Would it be another few days? A month? What was safe — for Margot and the baby? I thought of what Sarah had told me about her friend-of-a-friend who’d developed postpartum psychosis. At the same time, the morning’s conversation with Jesse rose to the surface of my brain once again and I quickly shoved it back down. That Margot — my brilliant, driven, radiant friend — had a social worker upended my equanimity.

“That’s great,” I said, thinking that if there was a “great” drinking game, someone could get drunk off of this conversation. “Are you…are you on medication?” It was an awkward and personal question, but fair given the circumstances, and certainly one I would have felt comfortable asking the old Margot.

“Yeah. It’s a cocktail of sorts. We’re trying to figure out the best combo before I can go home.” She coughed and sniffed. Her speech pattern was slow and labored. Despite the awkwardness of the situation, I had the urge to reach through the airwaves and wrap my arms around my dearest friend.

“Good. How’s your mom?” I stretched my neck so I could observe myself in the rear-view mirror. My face was pale.

As Margot filled me in on Jean, I turned the ignition back on and pulled away from the curb, driving the five or so blocks to our flat on Frederick. The rain had slowed but still came down in loud drops. Knowing that we’d be heading out to dinner at Sarah’s before too long, I parked in the driveway instead of the garage and remained in the car as we finished the conversation. Jean was better after her stroke, Margot reported, but not yet well enough to visit her daughter. My heart was sore for both of them. They really only had each other and right then, they were both sick and, as a result, alone.

“Is Gretchen there? Can you, maybe, put her on the phone?” Her request was tentative. And even though the words were right, her tone carried a hint of force, of dispassion. But nonetheless she was asking about her daughter, something that was inconceivable just a few weeks ago.

“I’m, um, I’m in the car.” I turned my gaze away from the living room window, trying to ignore the fact that in less than a minute I could be inside and holding the phone up to GiGi’s ear. Plus, I told myself in justification, she was probably still napping. But I didn’t want to go in and find out for sure. My possessiveness felt foreign and disquieting, and yet undeniable. My love for Margot and my love for Jesse were colliding and I felt sick. Acid swam inside my belly, creating an ache that I somehow welcomed. It served as a penance, of sorts.

“Okay.” She sounded almost relieved.

“I —”

“Tell her—”

“Sorry, you go.” We were talking over each other in a nervous, overly polite manner inconsistent with the fact that we’d been best friends for decades.

“Tell her ‘Mommy loves her.’ And, Hilly?”

“Yes?” I shifted in the front seat, feeling jittery and suddenly very stifled by the confines of my car. I’d never felt so confused. I desperately wanted Margot to get better. But, I was ashamed to admit, I didn’t.

“Thank you.”

Thursday after work I was eager to get home to try a bib on GiGi that I’d picked up at a boutique on Divisadero during lunch that day. It read, “Those dumb asses put my cape on backwards.” I couldn’t wait for Jesse’s reaction when he saw GiGi wearing it.

But as soon as I walked in the door, I heard Mercedes screaming. “Oh no! Oh no!”

I ran towards her voice and found her in the kitchen, kneeling on the floor, trying to corral dozens of vitamins that were rolling across the tile in different directions. GiGi was coughing and sobbing.

“What happened!” I shrieked.

“I’m so sorry,” she blurted, frantic. “I put her on the floor here while I went to the bathroom. She can sit up by herself now. Somehow she opened this door.” Mercedes whipped her head towards the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink where Jesse kept his vitamins and supplements.

I raced over to the baby and thrust my index finger into her mouth and swept around. It seemed clear.

“Jesus Christ!” I picked her up and flung her over my shoulder and blasted out the front door. I left without my purse or my keys. We lived less than a half mile from UCSF hospital. I bolted.

I kept hearing “ohmyGodohmyGod” like a metronome as I ran. Within four blocks, I realized I was out of breath because the phrase was coming from my own mouth. With five or six more blocks to run, I needed to conserve strength. GiGi weighed nearly nineteen pounds when I’d stepped on the scale with her a few days before. And I’d lost much of my fitness in the nearly four weeks that she’d been living with us. My legs wobbled. Yet my stamina felt boundless. I sensed that I could run all the way to Los Angeles if it meant keeping her safe.

My work flats slapped on the concrete as I flew, adding to the disturbing cacophony of GiGi’s coughing and crying. I couldn’t tell, though, if she was crying because she was ill or because I was so hysterical.

Please, please, please
, I thought.
Please.

I forced myself not to plead out loud, to preserve all my energy for this mission and for whatever was to come. Drivers honked as I darted through crosswalks with cars half-way through the intersections. I whacked several people with my shoulder weaving through sidewalks. Looking back, my urgency was far less about my responsibility to Margot, though that was certainly there, and instead much more about my personal attachment to GiGi, who was in danger.

When I arrived at the UCSF entrance on Parnassus Street, I nearly slammed into the automatic glass doors that opened far too slowly for the emergency I presented there. I took a half-second pause, jerking my head right and left searching for the ER entrance. An elderly guard stationed at a worn faux-wood podium took one look at my frantic arrival and wordlessly pointed to his left.

I blew down the hall. My hair was damp from sweat and the early evening drizzle, and stuck to my cheek. By this point, GiGi had vomited a milky substance on my shoulder and continued to cough. Once through the side doors to the ER, everything took on a foggy, surreal feeling. Whereas on the ten block run to the hospital I’d been deeply aware of minute details, everything from the grey gum splotches on the sidewalks to the varying colors of briefcases of departing N Judah commuters, once I was amidst the safety of professionals, I lost the particulars and instead floated through the next several minutes.

Sensing my panic, the intake woman behind the desk stood as I raced towards her. I held GiGi under the armpits and thrust her toward the woman.

“Adult vitamins and supplements,” I spat out, breathless. Looking back, I’d probably completed the ten-block, up-hill trip in fewer than seven minutes. “Don’t know how much.”

The woman nodded and whisked the baby behind a blue curtain. “Wait,” she instructed me over her shoulder.

I lined up my forearm with the edge of the intake counter and took a step backwards, forming an L shape with my body by resting my head on my arm. I heaved to catch my breath.

“OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod,” I resumed in a whisper. And then in my head added,
Please, please, please.

Moments later, the woman returned to the desk and said, “A nurse is with her now. She’s not choking so there’s no immediate danger. We’ll get you back there in a moment to figure out what she consumed, but you said vitamins, right? No aspirin? Anything like that?”

My mind flashed to the cabinet under the sink, which in addition to big tubs of Costco vitamins that were too tall for our bathroom cabinet, was cluttered with sponges and liquid dish soap and multi-purpose cleaners. In my head, I said a prayer of thanks that the baby didn’t have the manual dexterity to unscrew those bottles. And no aspirin. I shook my head.

“Okay. Just a couple of quick questions. We’ll get full registration later. Name?”

“Mine or hers?” I was still gasping for air as I spoke, my mind spinning ten different ways to the worst possible outcome.

“Yours.”

She handed me a clipboard with several forms attached.
Oh shit
, I thought. I didn’t even know GiGi’s exact birth date, let alone her Social Security number.