Heads or Tails (24 page)

I finally selected three outfits, figuring that one would be her special “going-home outfit.” With a piercing sadness, I realized that it was a different kind of going-home outfit than usually purchased in this kind of store. Usually, going-home outfits were for newborns leaving the labor and delivery hospital.

We got in line behind two mother-daughter pairs. The woman immediately in front of us held a baby I guessed to be about four months old. She wasn’t all that much younger than GiGi but she seemed so tiny and far less animated.

GiGi noticed the baby too and yanked her torso forward trying to touch her, the way she’d done with some of the animals at the zoo a few weeks before. As she leaned, she maintained her grip on my hair, which pulled against my scalp. Eventually realizing that she wasn’t going anywhere, GiGi brought herself back upright against my hip. With her middle finger, the one Jesse and I referred to as her “impolite finger,” she pointed to the woman and the baby and announced, “Mama.”

I sucked in my breath, hoping that it wasn’t audible to the other customers.

“Mama,” GiGi said again with authority, the way she touched the appropriate body part when Jesse asked her questions like, “Where’s your nose?”

She’d never once called me Mama.

I realized then how truly perceptive she was, how that even though I’d begun to think of GiGi as my own and was still secretly tempted to make that happen, she knew a real mother and daughter when she saw one.

“She’s such a good baby,” the woman next to me whispered.

The hum of the plane’s engine had lulled GiGi right to sleep. That, and the fact that we boarded at almost eleven at night, hours after her normal bedtime. She’d fussed a bit in the United boarding area and I received more than one wayward glance from fellow waiting passengers who were obviously concerned about how close our seat assignments were to theirs. But she’d fallen right to sleep after take off, drool springing from her plump, rosy lips onto my shoulder. I felt a possessive — and, admittedly, irrational — pride in the compliment, as if GiGi’s good-naturedness was a credit to me. But after caring for her for two months, who was to say, really, that it wasn’t?

“Thanks,” I mouthed back to the woman, who was clearly relieved by the baby’s slumber. She replaced an ear bud and shut her eyes, settled for the cross-country journey.

For my part, I was uncomfortable. My shoulder ached and I was hungry. But I was reluctant to disturb GiGi by shifting her or reaching for the granola bar in the diaper bag underneath the seat in front of us. Plus, these were my last hours with her. I wanted to cling to her, to rub her chunky legs, pet her hair, smell her smell. I’d deal with my sore shoulder later.

I took a deep breath and slumped back into the seat. Swaths of fake light peeped around the aircraft, illuminating smudgy spots on the bottom of the upright tray table and the creases in the well-worn airline magazine in the seat pocket that even my empty stare couldn’t miss. Gingerly, I reached up and pressed a few buttons on the screen in front of me, scrolling past the Major League Baseball channel and Food TV reruns, settling finally on the real-time map of the plane’s trajectory. Discovering that we were already over Wyoming enhanced the hovering, transitional feeling that nearly overwhelmed me. For a moment, a moment that I lingered on as long as I ethically could, I contemplated calmly approaching the cockpit, announcing that I’d changed my mind and politely requesting that they please turn the plane around because GiGi and I wanted to stay together in San Francisco after all.

Home. Thinking about it made me weary and achy. The wounded look Jesse gave us before he drove away from SFO’s departures terminal was as fierce as the relief I experienced that time years ago when I’d gotten my period after all. The tearful kisses with which Mercedes covered GiGi on Friday, the day I’d received the official call from Jean that Margot had been discharged from her program and that it was time to bring the baby back home.

The sorrow of giving this beautiful baby back, of not raising her, bubbled just underneath my skin and magnified with each minute and mile flown. Strangely, it also finally revealed to me the depths of my own parents’ grief in losing Julia. Their distance from me would always hurt. Their coolness was not forgivable, but it was at least understandable in a way that it never had been before — the not wanting to get close, their determination never to love that powerfully again. I, too, now doubted whether I could ever love like this again.

Hours later, we landed at JFK at six-twenty in the morning, yet it seemed like a far greater shift of time than simply three hours ahead. We’d traveled thousands of miles, but as I made my way through the terminal I felt that I hadn’t yet landed. I was still hovering, between a before and after, between an ending and an uncertain beginning.

The doorman at Margot’s building was the same one who’d greeted me two months before. He gaped when I emerged from the cab with GiGi.

“Is that —? Is that Miss
Gretchen
?”

Inwardly, I winced. I still hated that name.

“The one and only.”

With a respectful nod, he held open the front door and then pressed the elevator button without first calling Margot. That I’d be welcome was undisputed. After all, I had her daughter.

This time Margot herself answered the door and seeing her was like an “After” picture to the “Before” I’d witnessed eight weeks earlier. Her blond hair was clean and pulled into a slick pony tail. It was still morning-dusky out, but already she was smartly dressed, wearing jeans, a loose tank and a yellow cardigan.

“Oh,” she cried when she saw me standing there with GiGi beside me in the stroller. She clutched my shoulders and pulled me towards her. “Oh,” she said again. She released me and placed her palm on my cheek, then kneeled down to be eye level with her daughter.

“Hello, my sweet, sweet girl. Hello.” She gently squeezed the baby’s toes between her two palms, like a sandwich.

GiGi, who’d acquired a healthy skepticism of strangers in my care, looked up at me. I nodded. “Mama,” I said, placing my hand on Margot’s shoulder. “That’s GiGi’s Mama.”

The baby reached her arms toward me to be picked up. Margot stood up and took an accommodating step back.

“She’s just tired. We had a long flight,” I explained nervously as I unbuckled GiGi from the stroller.

“Of course.” She stroked the baby’s head as I slung her over my shoulder in a way that had become so second-nature. I saw the suppressed jealousy in Margot’s manner — the pursing of her lips, the averted gaze. I’d suppressed that same jealousy many times myself whenever I sensed that Margot and Rebecca’s bond was gaining strength. “She looks so good,” Margot cooed.

Inside, Jean was on the couch, looking far better than I’d expected. It was a measure of how bad things had been that she actually looked better than the last time I’d seen her, even though she’d suffered a stroke in between.

“How are you?” I asked, placing my hand on her knee.

“I’m better now. We’re both better now. All of us.”

Together, we grew teary and I grabbed hold of her hand. She squeezed mine in return and whispered, “You’re a good friend, Hilly. A good one.”

I tried to put the baby on Jean’s lap but GiGi turned away, nuzzling into my collarbone and poking a button on my cardigan. I relished in her affection, knowing that these were my last moments with her. But her attachment also made me feel oddly guilty, that by loving her I’d unwittingly turned her against her own family.

“Mar, I’ve got a package of Madelines in my purse. She loves them —”

“Got it,” she said, her tone matching the can-do spirit that had always been a hallmark of Margot’s personality. My body warmed with relief in seeing it.

Once GiGi ate her snack, she allowed me to put her down and delighted in the play mat in the center of the living room floor. It was similar to the hand-me-down I’d borrowed from Sarah, but it was a newer version, with different bright pink and green fabric animals that crinkled when squeezed. For several minutes, we silently watched her play. The shades were up and warm sunlight began to slowly cover the room. GiGi’s hair shined like black marble in the light. Soon, she moved onto a green plastic ball covered with dull plastic spikes. She rolled it against the bottom of the sofa and squealed when it bounced and rolled back to her.

“Baaa!” she announced and I knew that she was saying “ball.” But I didn’t explain.

Margot got down on the floor and, guiding the ball with her hand, rolled it up GiGi’s body to the top of her head. “This is your ball, your green ball,” Margot explained. GiGi clapped.

“She’s a great kid,” I whispered to Jean, keeping my gaze down to my hands, which were folded in my lap. My breathing was slow and two months of unparalleled fatigue began to settle over me.

She patted my knee. “She’s open to being loved,” Jean said. “Just like you were when I met you, Hilly.”

Periodically, I snuck glances around the living room and I went to the bathroom even though I didn’t need to go just so I could inspect the conditions. Unlike a few months before, everything was tidy. A hearty supply of toilet paper stood at the ready under the bathroom sink. Dish towels folded into neat rectangles rested on the kitchen counter. The bed was made. The apartment had lost the stale odor that had been inescapable on my last visit.

“I’m going back to work in ten days,” Margot said proudly. “I’ll spend that time getting reacquainted with Gretchen. Then I’ve got a wonderful nanny lined up. And I’m going to take Fridays off. Rebecca’s coming next weekend to spend the day with us.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. I meant it. My friend was healed. She had support. Though it felt as though my skeleton was cracking and peeling, GiGi was home and that was what was right. As if she could sense my anguished resolution, Jean squeezed my hand again.

“I just, we just can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done,” Jean whispered, turning my chin with her hand so I was forced to look away from GiGi playing on the floor and into her eyes. “I know what you’re giving up today, how hard this is. I can see it.”

I didn’t know what to say. In this case, “you’re welcome” seemed as much of an understatement as Jean’s “thank you” felt to her. But then the right words came. “Jean, after everything you’ve done for me, it was a privilege.”

When the anticipation of my separation from GiGi began to hurt, began to feel like that searing abdominal pain that accompanied the appendicitis I’d had as a child, I said, “Well, I’m going to check into my hotel.” My voice revealed chips and cracks that I tried to cover with a cough. I didn’t ask if I could stay with Margot and she didn’t offer. We all instinctively knew, I think, that it would be better for GiGi to slip back into her life with her family, unconfused by my presence. “She’ll need to eat soon,” I added, glancing awkwardly at a non-existent watch on my wrist. “She’s eating solid food now. I’ve put some jars in her bag there. Sweet potatoes are her favorite.”

“Those were once Margot’s favorite, too,” Jean said.

I’d always known — and feared — how a baby can change you. But through GiGi, I learned that staying who you are — maybe even enhancing who you are — can, in fact, be compatible with motherhood. Yes, caring for a child shrinks your life. But with a baby, life also expands and explodes. It challenges and humbles.

I dropped to my knees, took GiGi’s pudgy face between my fingers and kissed her on the lips. Still entranced by the rolling ball, she wriggled from me and blew a raspberry.

“Goodbye, G,” I whispered unhurriedly, my voice fracturing again. “You’re home now.”

I perched on the edge of the bed in my hotel room at the Hyatt where I’d stayed two months before. The same agitation, the same bewilderment overcame me as it did back then but for wildly different reasons. Without GiGi, I felt aimless. Yet having been responsible for her for so long, I still remained on high alert. I kept glancing around the room for her, forgetting that she was no longer my charge. I also kept checking the time as I’d been doing for weeks to maintain her feeding and nap schedule.

My room was on the second floor and the sounds from the street just below were unmistakably New York. Horns, shouting, jackhammers, music. Like almost everything about Manhattan, it was both electrifying and enervating. And it surprised me how much energy the rest of the world seemed to have when, for me, time was standing oddly still. Part of me wanted to dash out and join the masses in life — without the burden of a baby — and part of me wanted to cocoon under the covers and grieve a loss that I felt I wasn’t even entitled to.

Instead of either, I turned my phone over and over in my hand, wondering whether it was still too early to call Jesse back in California. I longed for him. But I also hoped he was sleeping in, something we hadn’t done much of in the past two months.

At the same time, I wanted to put off our next conversation. Unwittingly and unwillingly, I’d hurt him. I’d brought a baby into our marriage without his consent. And then, after he’d fallen for her, I snatched her away. Once again, I experienced the new and sad understanding of how my parents suffered after losing Julia, how their hearts could so completely and irrevocably harden after a shattering loss. I desperately didn’t want that to happen to me and Jesse.

I checked the time again and gasped in surprise when the phone actually rang right as I glanced at it. It wasn’t Jesse, but Sarah.

“Did you make the exchange?” she said in a mock drug-dealer voice that under other circumstances I might have found clever.

“Uh huh,” I responded, unsuccessful in hiding my dejection.

“Oh, Hillary.”

And finally, finally I broke into sobs.

“I just, I don’t know,” I said, unhelpfully. My grief was confusing — ill-placed and yet wholly earned. I wanted to bury my face in Sarah’s wild, frizzy hair.

“You don’t have to know. Just feel what you’re feeling. It’s all okay. You’ve been in such an unusual situation. A whole host of emotions are likely to come up.”