Heads or Tails (20 page)

“I, um, I’m sorry. I don’t have my wallet or insurance card or anything,” I said, patting my pockets for emphasis. My skin grew clammy and cold even though I was overheated from the sprint. “I just ran here.”

“Put down as much info as you can.”

I fudged GiGi’s birthday. I realized my own insurance card would be meaningless anyway because GiGi was not, of course, covered by my health plan. It was then that I grew anxious for a whole new reason. I handed the barely completed forms back in.

“I have a credit card number in my phone,” I said quietly, not wanting to draw any extra attention to our situation. “I’ll just pay out of pocket and get reimbursed. Can I just see her now, please?”

Echoes of Rebecca’s warnings about someone taking the baby away rose to the surface of my brain.
How would I explain this? Who
was
I to GiGi? How could I possibly tell Jean that the authorities wouldn’t let me bring her home? What if she entered the California foster care system because of me?
Bile rose in my throat. Behind me I heard screaming.

“My leg!”

I spun around and spotted a ghost-white adolescent limping into the ER reception area, hanging onto his friend, who was carrying a skateboard. Acutely sensitive to noise and movement, my mind captured every detail. The bloody jeans and what looked like bone poking through a tear in denim.

“Dude,” his friend said to the receptionist, “my friend’s leg is wrecked!”

“Yup,” the receptionist said to me, jutting her thumb behind her. “Second triage station on your left. The doctor will collect the rest of your info.”

I darted behind her and found GiGi lying on her back on the examining table. She had a tiny blood pressure cuff around her ankle. My own pulse raced through me. A doctor, who looked young enough to be my son, was peering into her eyes with a light.

“Is she okay?” I pleaded.

He stood upright and turned around.

“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to a beat-up metal chair, and resumed his exam. “I’m just taking a look. Can you tell me what happened?”

I’d heard about these kinds of seemingly innocuous inquiries. Sarah once told me about the time her son Henry sliced his hand on an empty can of black beans when he pushed the recycling farther down into the bin. When the ER doctor asked him what happened, she shot him a fierce look that wordlessly said, “Hen, this is
not
the time to be creative.”

“Um, I don’t know exactly. I came home from work and the babysitter, who’d put the baby down for a moment while she went to the bathroom, discovered that she’d gotten into the cabinet under the kitchen sink and opened some of my husband’s vitamin bottles. There were vitamins on the floor and it wasn’t clear if she’d put any in her mouth.”

“What kinds of vitamins?”

Even though I opened that cabinet several times a day, when I tried to picture the names on the bottles, I couldn’t. “Um, I’ll have to ask my husband but I think it’s vitamin C, glucosamine. Maybe iron? Magnesium? I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”

“Do you know — were they capsules? Gel caps?”

What am I doing with this baby?
It had to be the next question. I shoved my shaking hands into the pockets of my down vest. In my right pocket, I touched something hard. Gavin, I realized. Before I’d darted out the door with GiGi, I must have grabbed Gavin. How had I thought to do that? I half stood and leaned towards the examining table, handing him to the baby. Her eyes, which were red-rimmed from crying, crinkled into a smile. As always, she shoved the top of his plastic hair into her mouth.

“Well,” the doctor said, flinging his stethoscope back around his neck. “A couple of options. The most immediate danger — choking — seems to have passed. That’s lucky because, as you know, she doesn’t have enough teeth to properly chew something as large as an adult vitamin. A baby’s airway is about as wide as your pinky finger.”

He displayed his own pinky to show me how narrow a space we were talking about. I shuddered.

“Since we don’t know whether she managed to eat anything, we don’t know whether she’s ingested dangerous amounts of the vitamins or supplements.”

My heart burned behind my ribcage.
Jean. How will I explain this to Jean?

“Right now, she’s not showing any signs of it. Her heart rate and blood pressure are normal. I’m reluctant to put her through the trauma of pumping her stomach only to be rewarded with Cheerios.”

I flopped back into the chair, my head tilted back, my eyes shooting skyward. Instinctively, I pressed my palm to my heart. Just then, a nurse scraped the privacy curtain in our triage area aside. “Excuse me, doctor,” she said urgently, “when can I get this room?”

“When do you need it?”

A woman moaned loudly.

“Right now. I’ve got a miscarriage here.”

He nodded and held up his index finger to indicate he’d only be a moment more.

“Look,” he turned back to me. “I want you to sit in the waiting room for the next ninety minutes. If she shows any signs of being off in any way, let us know. But I’m thinking she’s going to be fine.”

A surge of unspeakable relief consumed me as powerful as the irreversible need to vomit. As I stood to pick up the baby, my knees buckled. I quickly righted myself, hoping the doctor didn’t notice. My thoughts remained jumbled. I approached the examining table to scoop GiGi up. At the same time, I wanted to be held too.

“One more thing,” he continued in a scolding tone. “You have an eight-month-old. It’s time for you and your husband to baby proof your house. Next time you might not be so lucky.”

You
, I thought,
have no idea
.

I returned to the reception area and paid the bill, both agitated and amazed that somehow I’d gotten through the experience without having to tell anyone that GiGi was not my baby.

The next day, I stayed home from work. As the ER doctor suspected, GiGi was fine and that night, she slept like a rock. And after the streaks of adrenaline had worked their way through my system, so had I.

Frank was uncharacteristically short with me on the phone that morning when I explained that I wouldn’t be at the site. “Yup, uh huh,” were his initial non-word contributions to the discussion. I didn’t blame him given how preoccupied I’d been in the last four weeks. He softened when I relayed the ER visit.

“Jeez, is she alright?”

I licked a Cheerio and stuck it on the end of GiGi’s nose. We were both sitting on the kitchen floor. We had no high chair, which is perhaps why Mercedes had put her on the floor the afternoon before, leading to the under-the-sink shenanigans. Luckily, Sarah still had her old high-chair and was bringing it over later that day.

“She’s fine. Thank God. I just… Anyway…” I didn’t know what else to say. Everything in my life felt swollen with uncertainty, every sentence I uttered seemed appropriately punctuated with ellipses.

“How long are you in this situation? And by you, I mean me,” Frank said.

“I still don’t know.” I wanted to tell him about the call from Margot as well as Jesse’s astonishing suggestion that we somehow try to make this arrangement permanent. Jesse, of all people. I wanted to ask Frank, my wise colleague and my old friend, what he thought was best for the baby. Was keeping the baby with two non-family members who’d long professed to have zero interest in children better than rejection, or at least disinterest, by her own mother? But after yesterday’s fiasco, I wasn’t sure we were any more capable than Margot. I couldn’t raise these questions with Frank, though, because Mercedes arrived just then and I could hear Jorge speaking Spanish in the background.

“Okay, well, things are popping,” Frank said. “Gotta go. Can’t promise I won’t call you later with questions. Given the upcoming holidays, I’m concerned we may have a shortage of tradesmen in the next couple of weeks. Yet this client waits for no man.”

“Be my guest.”

We hung up and I let Mercedes take over with the baby, which she did with renewed vigor. “Oh, my nina, my nina,” she said, stroking her forehead. It was hard to know whether to be upset with her over what had happened the day before. The bottom line was that the baby was ultimately my responsibility. Not Mercedes’s, not Jesse’s. Mine.

Still, I decided to stay home, both to observe her caregiving as surreptitiously as possible and also to wait for the arrival of the baby proofer Sarah had recommended. I was paying a premium not only for the rush service of having someone install baby-proofing items I was probably capable of installing myself, but perhaps more for his expertise in knowing what, exactly, to baby proof and with what device. I hadn’t dared tally up the expenses we’d already incurred in the last four weeks. Thankfully, Jesse hadn’t asked me to.

Later that morning, while the baby proofer drilled and hammered, sounds that were soothing only to a general contractor like me, I reviewed subcontractor agreements at the kitchen table. Mercedes and GiGi were in the living room with the TV on. It had been on, I realized, for about forty-five minutes.

“Hi, um, Mercedes?” I said from the doorway.

She was sitting cross-legged on the floor with GiGi in her lap. They both looked up.

“Um, how about a story?” I asked tentatively. “Instead of TV? Or we have some CDs in the bedroom.” Sarah had loaned me Free To Be You and Me, which I thought was maybe a little advanced for GiGi, and a collection of Schoolhouse Rock hits, to which Jesse and I found ourselves singing along, surprised that we could recall every single word of the educational jingles from the seventies.

“Oh, sure. Let’s go, little nina.”

I returned to the kitchen, pleased — maybe even a big smug — that I’d encouraged a more nurturing activity. I remembered Sarah once deriding her workaholic neighbor, a mom who’d never once accompanied her child to a dentist appointment, instead always sending the nanny. I doubted whether I could withstand the judgment that seemed to accompany parenthood. Or the guilt.

My cell phone rang.

“Hi, Mom,” I answered.

“Hi, honey.”

She proceeded to tell me about my father’s recent check up and how he’d lowered his cholesterol thirty points simply by eliminating cheese from his diet and increasing their nightly constitutional walks to forty-five minutes from twenty.

“That’s great,” I said, scribbling questions on Post-Its and affixing them to architectural drawings.

“That baby back with Margot?”

A stab of fluttery electricity shot into my lower abdomen. I consulted my computer to get the date. Sure enough, my period was arriving right on cue, though I’d been so preoccupied with the baby it still took me by surprise.

“Um, not yet,” I said. “She’s still not well enough. Margot, that is. Not GiGi.” I stood to stretch and began to pace softly around the flat. Outside our living room window, fast-moving fog blew wrappers and dead leaves along the sidewalk.

“What’d you just call her?”

“Oh, GiGi,” I said, my nerve endings firing the way they sometimes did when it came to my mother. “Her name’s Gretchen but we shortened it to G and then we, uh, lengthened it to GiGi.”

Her response wasn’t what I expected. “You know that GiGi was Virginia’s nickname, right?”

I halted mid-stride and sat back down at the table. I’d never heard anyone call Virginia anything but Virginia, except her sister-in-law, who’d called her “Sister.”

“No, I didn’t. Who called her GiGi?” I set down my pen and pressed the heel of my hand into my belly right over where it hurt, right over what I suspected was my left ovary.

“It was her childhood nickname. Ask Daddy about it. Sometimes she’d get mail from old relatives in Alabama and it was always addressed ‘GiGi Richmond.’”

“Wow. What a coincidence. I had no idea.”

“Indeed. So tell me how you’re making this caring-for-your-best-friend’s-baby thing work in your real life.”

Leaving out the drama of the previous afternoon’s hospital run, I told my mother about the routine of sorts that we’d gotten into. But as I spoke about GiGi, I found myself flooded with memories of Virginia. They were memories that had come piecemeal in the last few weeks, but were now returning all at once. Now, they weren’t so much memories as a sweeping collective…feeling. Of continuity, safety, comfort, discipline, understanding. This twisted, complicated, interlocking web of emotions, I realized, was probably what most people felt when they thought of their families of origin. I’d seen it before in Jesse when he was with his parents, a mixture of nostalgia and relief and longing. I’d always insisted that I just didn’t have those feelings, given my own emotionally distant parents. It was the same reason I always insisted that I’d had no parenting role models. But in talking with my mother and in being shot repeatedly with memory arrows, I realized that in fact I
had
had a mother figure.

Virginia was different from traditional parents and outwardly harsh. “I’mmuna get me my fly swatter and whoop your boonie ‘til it’s so red it rangs like a doorbell,” was a common admonition when I misbehaved. And another hilarious anecdote that I wouldn’t dare tell others for fear of sounding racist. The phrase had returned to me the other day when GiGi had deliberately — I was sure of it, given her naughty but hilarious grin — waited to pee until
after
I’d removed her diaper.

But I realized now that there were so many little signs — signs that perhaps I’d missed intellectually, but signs I’d obviously felt — proving that Virginia cared about me. Like that in eight years of schooling before boarding school, she’d never, not once, been late to meet me at the bus stop after school. That every Monday morning, she left open her tattered copy of the Better Homes & Gardens baking book and silently pointed a stern finger at it, indicating that I was to pick a cookie recipe. By Monday afternoon, they’d been baked, the so-called “cookie of the week.” That on my birthday, she’d purchase helium balloons in a number that equaled my age and demanded that I stand on the front lawn holding all of them like a bouquet of flowers so she could snap a picture with her old Instamatic camera. How she yelled at me when I arrived home from a friend’s house after dark, because she’d been worried.