Heads or Tails (23 page)

A few minutes later, I pulled out a small tupperware of blueberries, GiGi’s favorite snack. I’d come to slicing them into quarters after learning from the ER doctor about the harrowing size of a baby’s windpipe.

The air was indeed breezy and, as I tugged the hood of my sweatshirt over my head, the December wind struck me as slightly ominous. GiGi would soon need true winter clothes — a baby parka, mittens, maybe even a hat that Frank’s husband Rod could knit — for our annual New Year’s trip to the mountains.

The next Saturday morning, after the low-lying fog had lifted and the sun emerged, I gathered GiGi in the stroller for a walk. Having officially foresworn the triathlon, walking with GiGi had become my primary physical activity. And I didn’t mind.

It was the kind of morning I loved. My to-do list was surprisingly short. I just needed to vacuum the back seat of my car (I now regretted the times I’d silently judged Sarah’s car, with its wrappers and crumbs), pop into Walgreens for tampons, dental floss and baby wipes, and reply to a few non-urgent e-mails. Otherwise, the day was ours. Jesse would be meeting up with us after his training swim and we planned to take GiGi out to lunch for the first time — to Burgermeister, our favorite. If it warmed up enough, we’d even sit outside.

I headed west on Frederick and considered my route, ultimately deciding to turn into Golden Gate Park from Lincoln. There was, it seemed, a grasping in the air. The joggers, the Frisbee throwers, the kid baseball players, the dog walkers. Everyone seemed to be collecting the unseasonal, glorious weather, drinking it up, hoarding it. It was mid-December, more than six weeks since GiGi first arrived in San Francisco, and it was about to turn biting cold. You could feel it.

As we turned onto the park road leading to the bocce ball courts, my cell rang. Expecting it to be Sarah calling about our plans to grab coffee the next morning, I was already wearing my headphones and I answered the call without first looking at the screen.

“Hilly, it’s me.”

Margot.

I paused so abruptly that GiGi jerked in the stroller and let out an aggravated yelp.

“Is that Gretchen?”

Who?
I thought. And then everything fell on top of me like a shoddily erected tent.

“Margot, how are you?” I began to shake. I leaned forward to smooth GiGi’s black hair, as if she were the one who needed calming.

“I’m better.” She indeed sounded more like herself, more like the Margot I knew than she had since before she was pregnant. Self-assured. Chirpy.

“That’s, uh, that’s great.” I sucked in a loud breath.

“Have I caught you at a bad time? You sound distracted.”

“Oh, no. I’m just —. I’m just out on a walk.”

Just then, GiGi kicked her legs the way a horseman would spur a horse. I resumed walking, though my legs quivered. The sun’s rays were too bright, like keen blades. I squinted, trying to minimize their sharpness.

“How’s Gretchen doing?”

“She’s, uh, she’s great.” My voice cracked and I hoped the ambient sounds of Golden Gate Park masked it.

“So it looks like I get to go home soon — probably within a week.”

“Margot, that’s wonderful.” And I meant it. I’d come to love caring for her daughter, to thinking of her as my own. Yet I still wanted Margot to be well.

“My mom’s getting a nanny lined up so I can go back to work.” I felt a pang of betrayal from Jean, which was both unfair and illogical. As if psychically hearing my thoughts, Margot added, “She said to tell you she’s sorry she hasn’t called. Making these arrangements for me is about as much as she can manage right now, physically speaking. Between both of our illnesses, we’re just trying to get right-side up.”

It was the first time that Margot referred to what she’d been going through as an illness. I asked about her treatment (“they finally got the meds cocktail right,” she explained) and her longer term plans for taking care of herself (“therapy — and yoga, if I can stand it; I haven’t touched my toes in about eighteen months”).

I had the urge to run. I’d felt the same urge before, soon after GiGi first arrived. Then, I’d wanted to remove her from my everyday life, to halt the way her arrival had disrupted everything, exposing my flaws and Jesse’s. I’d wanted to whisk her to a holding pen of sorts until Margot got better. A modern day Middle Passage.

But now, I wanted to run for wholly different reasons. I wanted to hide GiGi under my coat and run away with her
and
Jesse — this time, to keep us together. I wanted to run so I didn’t have to give her up. The compulsion to drop the phone and ditch was so strong that I had to stop and press the phone against my ear with both hands, forcing myself to hear what for weeks I’d longed to hear — but now dreaded.

“Hilly, are you crying?”

“I’m just…really happy that you’re better.” That was true, but it wasn’t why I was crying. It felt a discomforting stew of guilt and disappointment and shame. GiGi pitched forward to pick up Gavin, whom she’d tossed onto the concrete. I stopped, wiped him off on my shirt and handed him back to her.

“Do you think —? I know this is a lot to ask and you’ve done so much for us already. But would you be able to bring Gretchen back to New York when I get the official green light to go home? I’ll pay for your ticket, of course. And, I should say, your other ticket and all the other expenses you’ve incurred. I just, I —”

“Of course,” I interrupted. “I’d be happy to. Just let me know when you’re ready.”

The question was, would
I
be ready?

We did go to Burgermeister that day, but for an early dinner rather than a late lunch. After Margot’s call, I’d turned around and headed straight home. Jesse arrived soon after and I filled him in on the latest development. His face registered surprise and then disappointment, the two emotions that I, too, felt the most prominently. But my emotional landscape was also laden with guilt. Margot was my friend. It was Margot I was supposed to be helping. Yet if I was honest, deep in the recesses of my brain, I’d not wanted her to get better so that I could somehow keep her child. What kind of friend did that make me? Everything — my brow, my heart, my stomach — twisted and pinched.

We ordered turkey burgers, French fries and shakes and sat outside even though it was so chilly that the patio was devoid of other diners. But that’s what we’d decided earlier. Normally I preferred a mocha shake but I thought GiGi might like to taste one so I got vanilla instead. And it turned out, I had no appetite anyway. She couldn’t quite figure out how to use the straw so I peeled the plastic lid off the cup, shook a little of the shake toward the edge and brought it to her mouth. Her head sprang back from the cold but then she licked her lips and exclaimed, “Mmm…MMMM!” Her enthusiasm contrasted notably with our own sighs and monotone conversation. Then she leaned forward for more.

“It’s been a nutty couple of months, Stevens,” Jesse said.

I shrugged. Through sheer will, I suctioned tears back into my eye sockets. It was a skill I’d perfected. I was not a crier. I looked up to the sky to help them roll back in. Jesse sensed that I was on the verge of breaking down, of letting those tears spill into the red basket housing my turkey burger, from which I’d taken a grand total of one bite. He handed GiGi a French fry and then one to me but I shook my head. As she chewed, she wrinkled her nose in apparent approval of the salty treat.

We sat in silence for a few more minutes. I continued to give GiGi sips of my shake. Jesse told me the story of his poop turning kelly green when he was nine and his mother’s frantic call to the pediatrician’s office, where the receptionist asked, “Has he had a Shamrock Shake from McDonald’s?” It was March and the office had been flooded with similar calls. I’d heard the story a dozen times. I raised my cheekbones in a weak smile, grateful for his effort. His kindness magnified the guilt I felt in tearing GiGi from him. And of my transgression, however minimal, with Abe. Soon, I sensed, nothing would ever be the same. Because of Gigi, of Abe, our marriage taken a sharp right turn and yet Jesse had no idea.

I got up from the table to grab some extra napkins from inside. As I walked back out, Jesse was holding a French fry horizontally in the space between his upper lip and the bottom of his nose, like a mustache. He said something to GiGi that I couldn’t hear but caused her to break into fits of rowdy laughter. I paused in the doorway to watch. He spoke again and this time she brought her hand to her face, covering her mouth precisely the way I’d seen Margot do hundreds of times. My breath caught and my heart hung suspended over decades of memories. In a moment that had otherwise been solely about me and Jesse, GiGi’s gesture was so clear, so very crisp in its Margot-ness. It was in that singular moment that I finally realized the painful but wholly immutable fact: GiGi was not my child.

The next afternoon, I took GiGi to Laurel Village, known to locals as “stroller village.” Complete with two gourmet markets (including Cal-Mart, which sold those killer avocados), healthy lunch spots, two kids clothing stores, a Starbuck’s and a Peet’s and the all-important wine shop, Laurel Village was a mom’s paradise. As I’d discovered in the last couple of months, it was a particularly great place to entertain both adult and baby for a couple of hours. In addition to the easy parking — a rarity in San Francisco — it also had a book store with a huge children’s section.

GiGi and I stopped into Peet’s first. I ordered a chai latte for myself and Madelines for her. I parked her stroller next to a small round table and brought her into my lap. While she nibbled, I rested my chin gently on the top of her head and thought about the discovery I’d made earlier that morning. Jesse had already left for tri training and I was hunting around for the baby nail file. (Soon after coming to live with us, GiGi had sliced the skin near the corner of her eye with a rough fingernail. I was too nervous to clip her nails myself and asked Sarah to help. She explained that baby nails should simply be filed, not cut. Yet again, Sarah for the parenting win.) That morning, I couldn’t find the small-scale metal nail file in the bathroom or in the kitchen near the baby bathing supplies. With GiGi tucked under my left arm, I’d gone around the house lifting stacks and opening random drawers. In the bedroom, I searched my nightstand and then Jesse’s. When I opened Jesse’s drawer, the nail file rolled noisily to the front of the drawer, which was otherwise empty. Vanished was the framed photo of Marigold, otherwise ever-present since I’d known Jesse.

Stunned, I put the baby in the Pack ’n Play and sat on the bed, fingering the baby nail file and studying the empty drawer. The nail file planted there was like a secret message from Jesse — a silent assurance — and it was just like him to communicate something so powerful that way. I stood up and walked over to the closet. Slowly, I scooted clothes to the side to gain access to the plastic drawers on the floor in the back, the ones where he kept mementos, those obligatory but uncharged reminders of things past, the drawers accessed only to put things
in
. There, alongside his high school yearbooks and a tangled pile of finisher’s medals from our races, was Marigold’s photo.

At the milk and sugar counter, two moms with small boys wearing soccer uniforms were chatting about kindergarten admissions. I’d recognized some of the names — Live Oak, Friends — from when Sarah had endured the competitive process with Henry and Lily.

“That’s your first choice, right?” one woman said, corralling her shaggy-haired boy by placing a palm atop his head.

“Probably. But our preschool director says we still shouldn’t write a first-choice letter.”

As I listened, I realized how far I’d been living from these women who were otherwise my neighbors and my contemporaries. Until GiGi came along, I’d had virtually no knowledge of their shared experience, having been solely focused on the Painted Lady house and reviewing plans for other prospective projects, the day-to-day details of my work as well as tri training with Jesse. Before GiGi, the world of these women had seemed uninteresting, even uninspired. But now, I was tempted to approach these women and ask why Friends was their first choice. I wanted to know. Once again, I realized that caring for GiGi had introduced me to parts of myself, to interests and questions I didn’t even know I’d had.

But I didn’t insert myself into their conversation. Instead, when GiGi finished her snack, I swept Madeline crumbs into a napkin and returned her to the stroller. With Margot’s call the day before, I knew that a trip to New York, while not yet scheduled, was in our not-too-distant future. GiGi had long outgrown the clothes that Jean had packed for me and she needed to return to Margot in something other than Sarah’s boy-centric hand-me-downs. We left Peet’s and walked east along California to Gymboree.

As soon as we entered the store, a salesperson pointed us to the right and back, where the baby girl clothes were displayed. I strolled around a circular sale rack but they were filled solely with the last remnants of summer stock — mini sundresses and shorts. For GiGi’s last days in San Francisco, let alone for New York, she needed winter clothes. I wanted to buy her everything — the knit pink tights with red hearts, the blue and white cabled hat with tassels hanging from the ear flaps, the lavender denim overalls. Yet I was unlikely to see her in any of these outfits for more than a wear or two. She was going home. My throat constricted at the thought and I leaned down to kiss her cheek. She grinned at me, held up Gavin and yelled, “Raaah!” before returning him to her mouth.

I moved on to the sweater section and held up to her body a purple cardigan with a white and yellow yoke. She looked me in the eye, raised her arms and said, “Up.”

At the tiny-voiced command, a mom next to me whipped her head around and looked pointedly at the two of us. Her wide eyes and raised eyebrows wordlessly conveyed her sentiment: “Impressive.”

“‘Up?’” I repeated with not a small measure of pride in her early speech. “You most certainly can come up.”

I unbuckled GiGi from the stroller and carried her on my hip as we meandered through a section of fancy plaid dresses obviously intended for Christmas day, which I realized was less than two weeks away. Under the sharp artificial light, I glanced at a couple of price tags and moved on. As we shopped, I draped a few items I intended to purchase on top of the stroller. Periodically, I hiked GiGi higher on my hip. She reached up and twirled my hair in one hand, still clutching Gavin in her other.