“You could just tell her you're having a baby.”
“Why?” But even she knew it was a stupid question.
“What are you waiting for?” He looked her dead in the eye, and for once fear touched her heart. He looked hurt as well as angry. “Are you waiting for him to come back, so you can clean it all up for them?” He had hit a nerve and he knew it.
“Maybe I was at first …and now it's all so damned complicated. How can I ever begin to explain it?”
“You're going to have to eventually …” unless Steven came home …but he wasn't going to get into that again with her. “Look, it's your life. They're your parents. I just don't understand what you're doing.”
“Neither do I sometimes,” she admitted to him. “I'm sorry, Bill. Everything got so screwed up when he left, and I didn't tell anyone. I was too embarrassed to at first, and then it was too late, and now it's ridiculous. Hell, half the people at work still think I'm cheating on my husband.” She smiled at him, and he pulled her closer to him.
“You drive me crazy sometimes, but maybe that's why I love you.”
“And that's why Harry loves Helen, who was best friends with …”She started to laugh and he swatted her behind with the kitchen towel as he put the last dish away.
“Stop that! It's beginning to sound like the begats in the Bible.”
“I'm sorry, Bill …sometimes I make a real mess of things.”
“We'll get it all sorted out sooner or later.” He believed that they would, but he was beginning to hope that it would be sooner, rather than later.
THE LONG THANKSGIVING WEEKEND WENT MUCH too quickly. And there was so much to talk about, now that the boys knew Adrian had moved in, and that she was having a baby. Adam was particularly fascinated with it, and wanted to touch her stomach to see if he could feel it move, and he was thrilled when it kicked repeatedly and he felt it. He turned wide eyes to her as Bill smiled at them.
“It's neat, isn't it?” It filled Bill with wonder too, each time he felt it.
And they were highly amused when they all went for a walk in the park, and before they went, try as she might, Adrian could not tie her own sneakers.
“I feel as though I'm leaning over a beach ball.”
“So do I,” he whispered as he knelt to help her with her shoes. They still made love whenever they had the time and the energy, but for the same reason she couldn't tie her shoes, it was rapidly becoming something of a challenge. “You know, this is something that could only happen to me,” he laughed as he finished tying her laces, and sat down on the floor looking up at her. She was peering at him over her enormous stomach.
“What?”
“Falling in love with a woman who is eight months pregnant.”
She chuckled, seeing the humor of it too. It was certainly a most unusual courtship. “Maybe you can use it as research for the show. Maybe Harry could desert Helen and she could fall for someone else,” she suggested cheerfully, putting on one of his sweaters.
“No one would believe this,” he grinned, and they went out to play ball in Penman Park with Adam and Tommy.
The next day, the boys flew home, and the house seemed too quiet again without them. But now there was a lot to do before the holidays. The newsroom was going wild, and the cast of his show always seemed to get more than a little worked up before Christmas. The pressures of their own lives and the imaginary traumas of the show seemed to combine to make them all come slightly unglued. And Adrian was trying to get the nursery ready too. Every night between the two shows, she would sit for hours, making skirts for the bassinet, or trying to figure out how to hang the curtains.
“Here, let me do that!” Bill was always chasing her off ladders or wrestling with assembling the crib himself. And then they would look at each other and laugh. It was all getting very exciting. And the boys were excited too. They hadn't seemed to resent the baby at all. They were too sorry for Adrian being abandoned by her husband, and too pleased at the idea of sharing the wonder of the baby. Now every time they called, the first thing they asked was whether or not she'd had it. But Bill promised they would call immediately, and the boys would be the first to know. They were hoping for a boy, but Bill secretly wanted a girl, not that it really mattered.
They attended their first Lamaze class after Thanksgiving. Adrian managed to sign up for one at the hospital that started right after the evening news show. And they appeared with a dozen other couples, all of whom, save one, were first-time parents. She felt a little strange being there, and she felt awkward about doing exercises and doing Lamaze with a roomful of strangers. But Bill and her doctor had insisted that it would help her.
“Help me do what?” she argued with him on the way over, eating a turkey sandwich that was left over from lunch. She would have to go right back to work after the class, for her late broadcast. “The baby's going to come out anyway, whether I huff and puff or not.” All she knew was that Lamaze had something to do with breathing.
“It'll help you relax,” he said calmly.
And then, almost jealously, she looked over at him as she ate the pickle. “Did you do this with Leslie?” It was beginning to irk her that he had done all this before, and he seemed to know a lot more about the mysteries of her pregnancy than she did.
But he was noticeably vague. He didn't like comparing his previous life to this one. This one was different from anything he'd ever shared with anyone, and it was unique. “Yeah …sort of …” was all he would say, but he continued to insist that the natural childbirth class was worth doing.
“I still think I'd rather have the baby at home.” It was a refrain he'd heard before, and wouldn't even let her consider.
They parked in the hospital garage, walked into the hospital, and followed a number of extremely pregnant-looking women up to the third floor, where they all gathered with what the lecturer referred to as their “significant others.” They were invited to make themselves comfortable on the floor, where they sat cross-legged on exercise mats, and introduced themselves, and their husbands. There were two teachers, a nurse, two girls who didn't work, a secretary, a postal employee, a swimming instructor who looked as though she was in fantastic shape, a hairdresser, a musician, and a woman who tuned pianos. And their assortment of mates was equally diverse. If anything, Adrian and Bill were the most sophisticated, and the most successful, but they just said they worked in TV, in the production end, and no one was impressed. The only thing that they all had in common was their pregnancies. Even their ages were widely different. Of the two women who didn't work, one was nineteen and still in college, and her husband was only twenty. And the postal employee was forty-two, her husband fifty-five, and this was their first baby. And somewhere in between was a range of people in their twenties and thirties, of various sizes and shapes and interests. Adrian was faintly intrigued with them, and she spent more time looking around than exercising until they were invited to stop for a “coffee break.” The women drank sodas and water, while the men drank tea and coffee. And everyone looked more than a little nervous.
The instructor addressed all of them then and assured them that if they practiced enough, the breathing techniques would really help them. And to illustrate her point of how well it could work, she showed them a film of a natural delivery using Lamaze, from beginning to end. And as Adrian watched the woman on the screen writhe in pain, she gripped Bill's hand in horror. It was the woman's second child, the instructor said. The first had been a “medicated birth,” she said with disdain. And this one was supposed to be a great improvement. They could hear every push and groan as she labored on the screen, and Adrian found the blow-by-blow descriptions of what was happening to her anything but comforting. She looked as though she were going to die, and finally, using the pant-blow technique, and then pushing until her face was dark red, there was a long, reedy wail, and a terrible series of grunts and screams, and a tiny red face appeared between her legs and she started to cry as she smiled, and everyone in the delivery room exclaimed as her baby was born. It was a girl, and the woman lay back victoriously as her husband beamed and helped cut the cord. And then, as the lights went on, the movie was over. Adrian looked horrified by what she'd seen and they didn't say another word until they left and were back in Bill's car on the way to the station.