Heads or Tails (6 page)

But before I could explain how little Jesse would or could help in this situation, Jean continued. “It doesn’t matter. Even if he won’t help and you have to hire a babysitter during the day, you’ll be there for Gretchen more than Margot or I can be right now. You’re family to us and that’s enough.”

My thoughts were scrambled as I struggled to understand, to accept what she was asking of me. I leaned back to spy how Margot was doing in the living room. She’d fallen asleep on the couch, her hair fully covering her face like a shroud.

“Jesus, Jean.” I quietly pulled out a chair and sat next to her at the kitchen table. I reached out a hand and awkwardly patted the baby on the head.

Postpartum depression effects.

I typed the query into Google on my phone. I was back at the hotel, trying to come up with alternatives, a way out. Unfortunately, everything I learned narrowed rather than expanded my options.

In the crucial first months of a baby’s life, I read, a lack of attachment, particularly by the mother or a motherly figure, can annihilate a child. Kids adopted from overcrowded East European orphanages where they had no loving caregivers grew into five-year-olds who destroyed property and were violent towards everyone. One child shit around the house and then smeared it on the walls. Jean hadn’t been exaggerating. This was no joke.

As hard as I searched for a different result, every article about postpartum depression and infant attachment pointed to the same, irrefutable conclusion: bringing Margot’s baby home to San Francisco was the only way.

Chomping on room service French fries, which had accompanied my chef’s salad, I considered phoning Rebecca. Maybe I could tell Jean and Margot that I’d take care of the baby but instead secretly bring her to Massachusetts to live with Rebecca’s family for a week or so. But as much as I wanted to take that easy way out, I knew it wasn’t right.

The hotel room was stuffy. I yanked off my fleece sweatshirt and cracked a window. Once up, I began to pace. The pleasing sparseness of the room was in stark contrast to Margot’s apartment, which had been cluttered with baby mats, bulk diaper boxes, bouncy seats and other infant paraphernalia. Outside, a delivery truck beeped its reversal into the hotel’s loading dock.

As I paced, I reminded myself that I had every right to be leery of taking care of a baby. I knew in my bones that I’d make a terrible parent. I’d had no true example of my own. I liked to joke that my own parents’ parenting philosophy could be encapsulated in two words: benign neglect. Occasionally I wondered how different they would have been if Julia hadn’t died. Or if she — or I — had never been born.

I often joked that although my parents and I lived in a predominately white, upper-middle-class suburban town, I was essentially raised by default by an African-American woman from Alabama. Virginia was our live-in housekeeper and, truth be told, my primary caregiver, even though that wasn’t part of her job description. While she was hired to keep house and prepare meals, she obviously had had some effect on me from the earliest days. This was evidenced by my first complete sentence: “Lawdhammercy Jesus, I done lost my shoe.” As funny as stories like that were, I could never repeat them because they sounded racist. But that’s precisely how she spoke.

Like Sarah, Virginia had been a stickler for order and routine. She hated when I left my backpack, school books and shoes strewn about the dining room. “Little Miss,” she’d yell upstairs to me once I’d moved on from homework to listening to music or talking on the phone. “Get your boonie down here now,” she’d holler. “You messin’ up things. Immuna be fixin’ dinner and I need that dining room table!” The summer between sophomore and junior years, Margot visited me for a long weekend and Virginia’s harsh manner terrified her. I was so used to it I hardly noticed.

On about my eleventh pass around my room at the Hyatt, my phone pinged with a text from Sarah. “Call me when U can — did some research for U.”

I dialed her immediately.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

I explained Margot’s overreaching request. “It’s just bananas,” I concluded, looking for confirmation about the absurdity of the situation.

“Holy cow. Well, I hate to say it because I know you’re legit freaking out, but taking that baby away from Margot is probably a good idea.”

“What do you mean?” I pressed on my stomach, which was gurgling with acid, with the heel of my hand.

“After we spoke earlier, I told a friend at school drop-off about you going out there to help Margot.
She
told
me
that in the worst cases, postpartum depression can morph into postpartum
psychosis
.”

“Shit.”

“Right? So I read up on it. I don’t mean to be telling tales out of school but my friend also told me about
her
friend’s sister whose children had to be taken away from her because of it.”

“What happened?”

“It’s almost too terrible to say out loud. But suffice it to say that she hurt her kids — and one almost didn’t recover. And then, I know this is going to freak you out, she slit her own wrists. Her husband found her and she lived. But still.”

I collapsed on the bed, trembling. I’d read all about how postpartum depression can be catastrophic for a baby. And now I learned that it could turn into a life-or-death situation for Margot too. “I’m in over my head.”

“I know. But getting that baby away from Margot and getting Margot into that facility is what’s best for everyone in that family. Including Jean.”

“I don’t even know the first thing about what to bring home with me, other than the baby herself. Margot’s in no shape to tell me either. Her whole freakin’ apartment is in disarray. There’s a pile of baby clothes with tags still on them, newborn gear still in boxes, a half-constructed swing. I don’t what a baby eats or wears or what. Sarah, the baby sleeps
on the couch
.”

“Jesus.”

I took a few steps into the bathroom and quietly spit into the sink in an attempt to rid the sour taste from my mouth. I lay back on the bed and fanned the neckline of my t-shirt open and closed to dry my perspiration.

“Okay, look,” she said. “That’s the easy part. Grab a handful of onesies, enough diapers to get you home — that could be about fifteen. Ask what brand of formula she’s on. Honestly, that’s all a baby needs. That and some affection.”

“So I’ve heard.” A siren screeched outside the hotel. I cupped my free ear to muffle the harsh sound.

We hung up and I rocked back and forth on the bed, debating how I could communicate to Jesse the absolutely absurd thing I was about to do.
Forced
to do. When I checked the time and realized he was surely in the middle of a lunchtime training run, I was relieved. It gave me a legitimate reason to deliver the fraught news by text rather than having a full-blown conversation. Now that I’d reluctantly conceded what I had to do to help Margot, I couldn’t have Jesse talking me out of it. Assuring myself that I’d be back on training runs myself in no time, I thumbed out a short, matter-of-fact text.

Margot was sick, I explained. I had to babysit for a few days. To make it easier on everyone (though doubt swirled around my mind as I typed), I’d be bringing the baby back to San Francisco. I concluded with, “It’ll be about a week.”

The thing about friends is that though they usually arrive in a limited number of ways — people you meet in school or at work or through mutual friends — eventually they’re slotted into distinct categories. You might have your tennis friends, your meet-once-a-year-for-coffee friends. There are those people you almost never see in person but who nevertheless remain fond friends because you shared a summer camp bunk all through middle school. There are friends who make you think, “I want to be more like her.” There are friends who have such big personalities, who take up so much energetic space that you learn to see them in only the smallest of increments and in the company of others so that they don’t just suck the life out of you. There are friends you confide in too early, revealing your harsh thoughts, your personal secrets, who you later slowly back away from, embarrassed by your disclosures. The friends you text whenever you stumble upon When Harry Met Sally on TV and you watch the rest of the movie together virtually, texting each other the best lines moments after they’re spoken. “Six years later you find yourself singing Surrey with the Fringe on Top in front of Ira.”

And, importantly, friends also get tiered, with fewer and fewer reaching the elite upper ranks. The friends you spend Thanksgiving with, the friends you call when your power goes out and you need a warm place to sleep, the friends you can fart in front of. The friends whose secrets you protect. The friends who helpfully inform you when you’re screwing up your life by settling for that job or that boyfriend. The friends who sing your praises to others when you’re not even there.

Since we met in college, Sarah and I have been each other’s wing woman, speaking by phone at least four times a week, bouncing the smallest and biggest of ideas and concerns off each other. Our texts have become pure shorthand, indecipherable to anyone else. The other day, she pinged me, “TJs. Uptown Girl. 4 hours. Ack.” And only I could clearly understand that to mean that Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl plagued her as an annoying ear worm since she heard it while shopping at Trader Joe’s four hours earlier.

Sarah and I had come to have a sixth sense about the other’s needs. Although I couldn’t relate to her experience with motherhood, the slightest lilt in her voice one morning shortly after Lily was born told me that even though it was just eight in the morning, she was already struggling to stay awake. So on my way to work, I stopped by her house bearing her favorite “half-caf” latte as well as two packages of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and the latest issue of
US
magazine. When she opened the door and I handed her the goodies, her drowsy eyes filled with grateful tears.

I was as close to Sarah as I was to Margot — they were certainly both in the same tier, my highest — but in a wholly different way. I didn’t see or talk to Margot nearly as often, but she was my history. She lived with me at Egan Academy at a time when my sense of self developed and then peaked. In fact, it was she who helped me understand who I was and that I could be loved, an essential fact I hadn’t learned from my own parents, who were too burdened with grief to attend to my emotional development. When we lived together in the dorms, Margot somehow knew when I needed to be alone and when to insist that I join everyone for an excursion to the movies to see Tom Cruise in Cocktail. She knew when to plant raspberry Pop Tarts in my desk drawer for me to discover the night before my much-feared chemistry exam. At a time when I was formulating who I was, Margot quietly proved my lovability, something that had previously eluded me due to the sorrowful emotional distance of my parents. At home, my parents and I were like hotel guests, polite neighbors who didn’t really know each other. In contrast, Margot and my other Egan friends were strangers who unhesitatingly took me in, like I was an ill wanderer needing nourishment and convalescence and the ministry of others.

Given my lack of siblings, friends had always taken on an extreme importance to me. And because of that, if a friend violated or disappointed me, they were cut off. One strike, you’re out. Hearing stories of friends that I’d sliced out of my life with the precision of a surgeon, Jesse sometimes jokingly referred to me as Hard-Hearted Hillary. But it was precisely because I’d go to extremes not to disappoint close friends that I became so profoundly hurt whenever they disappointed me, when they did things I found unthinkable, things that were against my constitution to do. The college roommate who declared to others in hushed tones that my then boyfriend was “kind of a loser.” My best elementary school friend who teased me for riding bikes after school with my next-door neighbor, who happened to have Down’s Syndrome. One false move and those once-friends were dead to me. I wasn’t mean, I didn’t retaliate, I just disappeared. I purged.

In addition to helping nurture my sense of self, Margot also brought me Jean, who was slotted into a friend tier all her own. But to label Jean a friend was to diminish how she made me feel — worthy and lovable. She was a mother figure who never tried to mother me, but instead gently and non-judgmentally cared for me even when I’d made horrible mistakes. That I thirsted for such belonging was a comment on the depths of my parents’ remoteness. That as a teenager I finally found belonging in Margot and Jean was the reason I was about to take my adult life in a wholly unthinkable direction.

“Lemme guess,” the cab driver said in a jarring tone that bordered on disdain. “You’re from New York.”

The San Francisco Peninsula fog whipped around me, tossing my curls this way and that. A rope-like section wrapped across my face like a mustache and prevented me from responding. Speckles of mist and dew covered me and the baby. When we spoke briefly that morning, Jesse had offered to pick me — us — up from the airport. But I assured him that a cab would be fine. I didn’t want to start these next few days with him thinking that he’d be expected to help. This was my burden, my mess.

“Here in San Francisco,” the cab driver continued, hands on his hips, jutting his chin towards the car seat resting on the curb. “We follow the rules.”

“I’m from San Francisco. I’m just arriving back from a trip.”

“Great. So where’s the car seat base? I’m not like those New York cabbies. The ones who let people buckle their babies on their laps. That’s no better than a human air bag!”

“I —”

“You’ve. Got. To. Install. The. Car. Seat. Properly.”

The poor baby had been in that car seat for nearly the last six straight hours. I’d taken her out just once on the plane to change a diaper. I wasn’t even sure that she needed it but I decided I’d better preempt a need. Plus, the woman who sat next to me seemed like a mom herself so I figured I’d have a built-in helper whether she wanted to pitch in or not. Amazingly, I’d been able to handle it on my own.