She glanced across at Harlan, wanting to share the joke, but he wasn’t smiling. He looked nervous. She needed to do something about that.
The doctor, whose name was Veronica Mansfield, which made her sound like a character on a soap, said, “So you’ve had one previous pregnancy, and one child, who’s now …” She looked up. “Nineteen.”
She hesitated. Why?
Oh. “My daughter’s with me,” Jennifer assured her. “Not given up for adoption or whatever. You don’t have to be tactful. She’s graduating from high school with high honors this week, in fact, and heading to the University of Washington this fall in engineering.” Which the doctor didn’t need to know, but which she was telling her anyway. She was telling anybody who asked, and now, apparently, people who hadn’t asked at all.
She shouldn’t have been a good mom. She had been anyway. From now on, she was pointing that out.
The difference between being ashamed of your past and proud of it, it seemed, was your point of view. Had you been weak to get into a bad situation? Or strong enough to move on from it?
“Congratulations,” the doctor said, possibly looking a little startled, though with that kind of eyebrow arch, who would know? Probably startled at Jennifer’s burst of confidence, though, like when you were sitting next to somebody in a waiting room and they struck up a conversation and pulled out pictures of their grandchildren when you just wanted to worry about your bladder infection.
“So,” the doctor went on, “you had a pregnancy at age fifteen, which can be a pretty risky business. Any problems there?”
“No,” Jennifer said. “Or this time, either. A little tired and sick at the beginning, and that’s all. I seem to be good at being pregnant.” She’d never been a serene person. Why was she feeling serene now?
“Technically, you’re higher risk,” the doctor said. “As you’re of what we call advanced maternal age. Although you’re just …” She consulted her tablet again. “Thirty-five in four days. Happy birthday. Barely geriatric.” With a smile, because it was evidently a joke. Ha, ha. “We’ll keep a good eye on you, though. The conditions we watch for are the same as with a very young girl, interestingly enough, but you seem to be in good shape so far. Your weight gain is just fine at eight pounds, so is your blood pressure, and you’ve had the chromosomal testing already. Call the office right away, though, if you’re experiencing any excessive swelling, headaches, blurred vision, or dizziness, so we can check your blood sugar and blood pressure.”
Well, this was extremely cheerful. She asked Harlan, “You OK?”
He looked up from where he was typing on his phone. Wait. He was texting?
“Yeah,” he said. “Just getting all that down.”
Oh. He was taking notes. She said, “Hey, look, it all worked out before, and now I’ve got you watching out for me, right? I’m fine.” She needed to be holding his hand. He was definitely nervous. She was supposed to be the worrier. Why wasn’t she worried?
Maybe because she was the one who could feel the baby, and he felt strong. He felt like his father’s son.
“So,” the doctor said, “let’s do some measuring, and then we’ll take a look.” Harlan still looked apprehensive, and Jennifer asked him, “Could you come hold my hand?”
The doctor looked up, and Jennifer said, “I’m a little nervous.” She wasn’t. She was nothing but excited.
A measuring tape, that was all, and Jennifer told Harlan, “She’s comparing how big I am now to a month ago.”
“First appointment with her?” the doctor asked, and Harlan said, “Yeah,” and nothing else. Which was fine, too. No matter how chatty Jennifer got, she wasn’t going to be sharing their interesting path to childbirth. Nobody needed to know about that but the two of them.
“Measuring like twenty weeks,” the doctor said when she was done. “And now we’ll take a look. You had a sonogram previously, I see, and the heart and organs looked fine there on the 2D, but I like to do my own on the 3D machine, especially with a higher-risk pregnancy.”
Jennifer could feel Harlan’s hand tensing in hers. “It’s OK,” she told him. “Relative risk, that’s all. You’ll feel better when you see him. Just wait.”
He wasn’t a nervous guy. He was the opposite of a nervous guy. But ever since he’d walked in here with Jennifer and she’d lain down on that table, his heart had been racing. And now, as the doctor smeared goop on her round belly with a squeeze bottle, he was having trouble controlling his breathing.
Fourth quarter, he told himself, and gripped Jennifer’s hand. Even though it wasn’t anywhere close to the fourth quarter. It was about the second quarter. By the fourth quarter, he was going to be … going to be …
Going to be passing out, that was what.
The doctor was moving a paddle over Jennifer’s belly now, and Jennifer was peering at the screen of a machine at the foot of the bed. She said, “I’ve never had a 3D sonogram before. This is so exciting. Usually,” she told Harlan, “it’s just this grainy black-and-white thing, but this will be almost like a picture.”
He was looking, but he couldn’t see anything. Just a series of yellowish blobs. The doctor said, “Placenta. Umbilical cord.” He saw that, he guessed. At least, he saw a thick, twisted cord. So much bigger than he’d have expected it to be. It looked like a rope. The doctor kept moving the paddle on Jennifer’s belly, and he could tell Jennifer was holding her breath.
“Breathe,” he told her.
“You breathe,” she said. She’d been calm and chatty through all of this, like it was no big deal. Now, he could tell she wasn’t, and that wasn’t all right.
He hauled his chair over so he was sitting by her head, smoothed her hair back from her face, and said, “Hey, baby. It’s OK.”
“I just realized,” she said, her voice choked, “how much I want this.”
“Yeah,” he said, and kissed her forehead. “Me, too.”
When she’d first told him, his world had come crashing down. Pretty soon, though, he’d realized what his duty was, and he’d done it. Because he couldn’t stand to be the kind of man who didn’t.
When had he started wanting it? He couldn’t even say. All he knew was—he wanted it now. He was waiting and waiting, feeling Jennifer waiting, and nothing was happening.
Maybe you had to see something slipping away to realize how badly you needed it.
Come on, he prayed. Come on.
The doctor said, “Ah. Here we go.”
He was right there on the screen. A little Martian, his head too big for his body, his nose a flat blob of a thing, his chest sunken, his limbs skeletal. The dark triangle on his head that would be where the bone of his skull was still forming. The soft spot, that was called. He’d read about it.
The baby had his thumb in his mouth, and his skinny legs were kicking. Exactly like Harlan had pictured him the other night, and he had a moment of vertigo, like he couldn’t tell what was reality and what was his imagination.
That had been the moment. That had been when this whole thing had become real for him. He’d seen his boy, and he’d wanted him.