“I can’t see!” Maddy cried. “I want to see my baby!”
“It’s a boy,” Kira was saying, and Maddy was crying because this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, Kira wasn’t supposed to be the one to tell her the gender, they had planned that Steven would tell her, but he wasn’t here. “He’s perfect,” Kira said.
“What’s going on? Tell me what’s happening.”
“They’re cleaning him.”
A minute later, a nurse was holding the baby, swaddled, against Maddy’s cheek, since her arms were still strapped down. She wanted to break out of the straps and touch her son. Her son and all she could do was smell him. He was tiny and scrunched, with dark hair. Blinking, dazed. Not crying anymore. He was in as much shock as she was.
She kissed his cheek, rubbed her cheek against his. Ran her lips over his hair. “I want to hold him,” she said, and she began to weep from the frustration of not being able to.
“You’ll see him very soon,” the nurse said. Maddy kissed him again, but the woman was taking him away. Dr. Baker knew she was on Zoloft, it was in her files, and Maddy had worried about the birth before, the possibility of withdrawal symptoms for the baby. Now he had been early on top of that.
“Kira, go with the baby,” she said. “Don’t take your eyes off him. I don’t want him to get switched.”
“Your baby is not going to get switched.”
“Just go. Make sure he’s okay.”
Maddy could hear Dr. Baker talking to the surgical assistant as she stitched her up. Something about plans for Memorial Day weekend. She couldn’t move her arms. She had given birth, and the baby was on another floor, probably, where was he? She felt a flood of grief for her mother, who had gone so early, was not here now, when she needed a mother. She missed her father, too, but it was her mother she yearned for, wanted in this room with her.
She remembered her wearing glasses in the morning, she wore glasses when she first woke up and a dark purple robe with two white stripes, and she was squatting beside her in Maddy’s bedroom in Potter so their faces were level, and she said, “Is that so?” It was all Maddy remembered, “Is that so?” and the warmth in her mother’s eyes.
All these years when people asked about her, she said she didn’t remember much, she diminished it, but this was the hole in her life, always had been. To have to learn about tampons from her father. Later, when she lost her virginity to that asshole at Dartmouth, she’d stood in the shower and cried, feeling the burning, regretting that she had done it. She had wanted a mother then, wanted her mother to explain why it had been so awful.
And she wanted her now to tell her it would all be all right, she would get better. Just like her baby needed his mommy, she wanted hers. There was no one here to hold her. She was an orphan and she was alone and her husband had let her give birth without him.
A recovery room. The compression boots made loud, mechanical noises as they rhythmically squeezed her calves. A nurse sat by her, watching TV. They were waiting for a complete blood count, she said; Maddy couldn’t be moved until they got it. Kira came in. She said the baby was in the NICU but looked fine. “You should go back and touch him,” Maddy said. “Don’t leave him all alone in there.”
“I feel like I should stay with you,” Kira said.
Zack came in, and Maddy shooed Kira away to the NICU. “Congratulations,” Zack said.
“Have you seen him? He’s so beautiful.”
“I came straight to you. They’re trying to get Steven on the radio. No one’s picking up.”
“What about the Coast Guard?”
“My mother tried, but they won’t send out boats because they say it’s not an emergency.”
“Your mother couldn’t convince them?”
“She’s working on it.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s born.”
Zack looked out the hospital window, feeling numb. His mother had been his first call. Five minutes passed and ten, and he called back and she said the guys at the yacht club were trying to get Steven on the radio. As soon as she told Zack, he knew. The radio was off.
“How can they not reach him?” Maddy asked. “He told me he always has it on.”
“I just don’t know,” Zack said, and felt worse than he had after telling her Kira was going to do Walter’s movie.
Maddy was pale and sad, so frail in her gown and the weird boots that kept pumping. She looked off to the side, and then seemed to muster all her strength and said, “I had to have a C-section.”
“Look on the bright side. You get to keep your vagina nice and tight.” The nurse visibly pretended not to hear this.
“Please don’t make me laugh. My stitches will come out.” Then she started to cry.
As he put his hand on hers, he felt disgusted with Steven. Steven was a selfish prick and had been as long as Zack had known him. Zack had tried to warn Maddy in Friedenau, but it hadn’t worked, and looking at her now, he felt it was his own fault. She had been invited to that dinner party in Mile’s End only because he’d called Bridget. Maddy never would have met Steven if it weren’t for him.
This was why, when they’d walked in the cemetery, he had tried to convince her to stay away. But at that time they hadn’t been friends. He hadn’t wanted to come across as a meddler. And he had worried she would relay their conversation to his mother, who had already signed her. He had tried to warn Maddy without warning her.
So many signs over the years. From before he was old enough to know what they meant, until later, when he was.
The funny expression on his mother’s face when she would read the gossip items hinting at affairs with men. “I can promise you, Steven is not your father,” Bridget had said.
The bad first marriage and the way Steven never talked about his wife, the parade of pretty young things afterward. The women always just right. Hyper-feminine. With their fake boobs and their blowouts and their Kewpie eyes.
Zack had never known for sure, but he had ideas. One night, it must have been senior year of high school, Steven had come over late. Steven and Bridget talked for a long time; he was upset about something. After he had left, Zack went down to the kitchen to get food. His mother was alone at the table and looked sad. “Is he okay?” Zack had asked.
“He’s going through a hard time right now. Personal stuff.”
And then Zack had blurted it out: “How come he’s not married?”
“I’m not married.”
“I mean, how come he never stays with one girl?”
“Steven isn’t like other men,” she had said, and her eyes lingered on his just a beat too long.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that he doesn’t think about marriage the way other men do.”
In Berlin, Zack had hoped Maddy would be smart enough to get it, even if she didn’t get all of it. Later, after the wedding, he concluded that she was more complicated than he had thought. If not a contract, then an agreement.
And when it became difficult to reconcile his instincts about Maddy with the idea of an arrangement, he worked out other explanations in his head: He had misunderstood all these years and Steven didn’t like men, or he liked both, or Maddy had changed him.
Because if he did like men, and Maddy didn’t know, it meant she had been duped. By Steven. Or his mother. And if Steven could do such a horrible thing, Zack didn’t want to believe that Bridget could. In business she had lied and deceived, but to take another person’s life, to use someone as a tool . . . it meant she was a monster.
Maddy found the NICU frightening, wholly abnormal, and too bright. Tiny babies in incubators lined up, all out of the womb too early, purple and skinny, with tubes in them, these bodies so small and weak, hooked up to the big machines. Kira was at the baby’s incubator, with a slim, middle-aged pediatric nurse named Lillian. Maddy had already spoken with the neonatologist, who told her there were no signs of withdrawal in the baby, but they were monitoring him. Maddy was relieved to hear that but was agonized by the two tubes going into his tiny hand. “What are those?” she asked Lillian.