“One is antibiotics and one is an IV drip. He had some respiratory distress and we want to make sure he’s breathing properly. Do you want to hold your son?”
Lillian lifted the lid of the incubator and took him out. Put him in her lap. She put him to her breast. Lillian demonstrated the football hold. If Maddy held him like a football, to the side, his body wouldn’t put pressure on her sutures.
It was hard to coordinate the nursing with the tubes and the monitor strapped to his body, but Lillian and Kira helped her. The baby flailed but took the breast. She had been cut open, catheterized, and shaved, she had morphine and antibiotics in her blood, but her baby was nursing.
“He’s perfect,” Kira said softly. Maddy stroked his little head.
“Have you picked a name yet?” Zack asked.
“Jake,” Maddy said. “Jake Weller Freed.” She hadn’t been certain until she said it. He was going to have her last name, and her father’s. The baby was hers.
She looked down at the baby’s little head. The eyes so black. The mouth working hard on her nipple. She wanted to fatten him up so they would let them both go. “He looks like you,” Kira said.
“No, he doesn’t,” she said. “He looks like him.”
Maddy was in the NICU, nursing Jake, when she looked up to see Steven standing there. It was a day later. She hadn’t even heard him come in.
“You missed it,” she said dully. “I told you not to go and you went.” Lillian looked up and then down. There was a handful of other parents in the room, but they were focusing on their newborns. It was one of the few times Maddy had been around Steven when no one seemed to notice him.
“I’m so sorry, my love.” He leaned down, kissed her head. “They reached us on Catalina and I flew. I got here as fast as I could.”
“Why didn’t you take your phone, like you said?”
“I left it in the car, at the yacht club.”
“And the radio?”
“I thought it was on, but it was off. I feel awful. You had a month before the date. I had no idea he’d come early.” He gazed at him on her breast. “He’s perfect.”
“They want to keep him here longer. I’ve been pumping my milk so I can nurse him when we get out, so my supply doesn’t go down. It’s so complicated.”
“Hey there, buddy,” he cooed softly, running his finger down the baby’s cheek.
“I named him after my father,” she said. She handed him the baby and Steven took him, sat in another chair, gently avoiding the tubes. “Jake Weller Freed.”
He looked a little surprised but then said, “Jake Weller Freed. I like it.” He rocked the baby and touched her arm. “Are you in a lot of pain?”
“I’m on Percocet. I don’t know how long they’ll let me take it. I can’t believe you missed the delivery. What’s wrong with you? Who are you?” Her voice came out demented and shrill. She didn’t care. In every other room of Cedars-Sinai, there were probably bisexual actors in shouting matches with wives recovering from emergency C-section births that the men had missed.
“I shouldn’t have gone.”
“You care more about Ryan than me.” She kept her voice low so the others wouldn’t hear, but she was livid. “You’re in love with him.”
“Nothing you said is true. He’s my friend.”
This tiny helpless thing was counting on the two of them to help him live. How could they do that when they were so far apart? If Steven loved her, he never would have left. Or maybe he had already left her, years ago, on the boat trip to Cabo, and she hadn’t wanted to see it.
“I don’t want to be with you right now,” she said. “I want to get to know my son.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s okay. Should I go home or—”
“I don’t care anymore. Just go.” He gave her an odd look as though about to say something, and then gently handed her the baby and went out.
The morning they left the hospital, Maddy had clothing and heels brought in, and a glam squad for natural-looking hair and makeup. Flora had arranged everything so the media knew when the family would be coming out and no one outlet would have “the first shots.”
Dozens of photographers were gathered outside behind the stanchions. It would be an orderly affair. When the time came, Steven and Maddy posed outside with Jake in her arms and Steven’s arm around her. Flora was there, overseeing everything. As agreed, the photographers refrained from yelling their names so as not to upset the baby. All Maddy could hear were the digital shutters clicking. They posed for several minutes. Maddy smiled wearily, playing the role of exuberant new mother. It was all cream blush, all fake. No one knew Steven had missed the birth.
But he had missed it, and every day since, she had been replaying the delivery, rewinding to the moment when she had the dream and imagining that her water had not broken. She wanted to fix Jake’s birth so he hadn’t come early and she’d delivered him naturally, in the birthing room they had toured, with the tub and the wood paneling. In this vision of the birth, Steven was there, and he caught the baby and cut the cord, and afterward she could smell the vernix on Jake’s face. She was broken and imperfect, her body wouldn’t cooperate, a woman’s body was supposed to push. It had been the dream that had started it all, the nightmare and then the broken amniotic sac. She shouldn’t have napped. If you didn’t sleep, you didn’t dream.
3
Who is it?” Zack called out to Natalie from the desk of his new office. They communicated through an open door all day. In September, after two years at the Bentley Howard office in L.A., he had left to launch his own company, Laight Street Entertainment, which he had named after his old block in Tribeca. He had used his trust to capitalize some of it, but the rest came from investors he had met and courted during his time in L.A. Who had been watching him build a better and bigger list, who believed that he could go out on his own at an age when most people would be considered foolish to do so.
When Natalie told him Steven was on the line, he paused before putting on his headset. It had been an insane morning. The script had gone out at five P.M. the day before, and already he had offers from three of the six studios. It was his first submission as independent manager-producer, and he knew the sale price would shape the perception of his company.
Velvet was by a young screenwriter client who had been working on it for a year. It was based on the true story of an Australian jewel thief in the 1980s named Frank McKnight—a tight, edge-of-your seat tale with a coiled, charismatic lead. McKnight was a get for any actor in his mid-thirties. Hyper-intelligent and manic, he had a troubled marriage and a thrill-seeking nature. And he was the greatest fucking jewel thief who ever lived.
The offers that had come in last night and this morning were all in the mid-sixes, which Zack thought boded well. He was hoping for a mil.
He wondered if Steven was putting out a feeler for Zack’s management services. Bridget had folded Ostrow Productions and officially taken over as Apollo Pictures CEO and chairwoman just one week ago. Steven was said to be taking meetings with high-profile agents and managers, but there was no way he would hire Zack. A brand-new company, a twenty-nine-year-old manager, even younger than his wife. Steven wasn’t the kind of person to take a chance, not in work or in life.