Heads or Tails (25 page)

“Yeah.” I walked into the bathroom for a tissue. I shivered and rubbed my own arms and legs to get warm.

“How was Margot?”

I smiled through my tears. “She was good. A bit tentative, but she’s like a different person from when I first came here to help.”

“You’re confident she’ll be able to take care of GiGi?”

“Yeah.” I crinkled the tissue and blotted my eyes. My jaw was sore from clenching for hours in such an unusual kind of grief. “Yeah. And Jean’s on the mend too. They’ve lined up a nanny. It’s all good.”

“And you? How are
you
?”

“I just…” I cried some more. “It’s like I’m in shock or something. I feel naked or empty without the baby. And it’s only been a couple of hours.”

“That’s understandable. No good deed goes unpunished, right? How was Jesse?”

“Super sad. I feel so guilty. He was so upset when I first brought the baby home. She disrupted our lives. Our routine, our finances, our training, our intimacy. But then —.” I got a second tissue from the bathroom. Sarah didn’t even know about Abe. “Well, now I’ve just ripped her from him.”

“I know. Sometimes life surprises us. This is a weird twist on that adage about learning to want what you have instead of having what you want. Here, you guys learned to love something you never wanted in the first place. When do you come home?”

“My flight leaves tomorrow afternoon.”

“Are you going back to Margot’s?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I want to but I —.” I broke down. “I just can’t say goodbye to GiGi again. It hurt too much to do it once.”

I couldn’t believe I’d come to love a baby so much. And what I’d feared — that I’d let down a child — had come true, but not in the way I’d always thought. Not by a lack of love, but by an abundance of it.

“That’s probably wise. You’ll likely feel more resolved in the morning and you don’t want to disrupt any emerging serenity, to poke the bear so to speak.”

I squeezed my eyes and tears spewed. “I just want to know… Will I know… Will I get some sense of how it all turns out? With GiGi, I mean.”

“Hillary, of course. Margot’s your best friend. I hate that she holds the title, but whatever. She’s your best friend. She wanted you to take her baby when she was impossibly sick. And you gave her everything she needed. You’ll know everything about GiGi. She hasn’t died. It’s not like what happened with your sister Julia. GiGi is just back with her family.”

I nodded, even though Sarah couldn’t see me. She was right. And it was true — I’d given GiGi everything she needed. About that, I was both astonished and proud.

“Do you think…Will she ever know how much I loved her?”

Will she know how much she changed me?

An unseasonal burst of cherry blossoms guided my path through Central Park, as if spring were already emerging from the depths of early winter. Flowers along the path shifted from burnt oranges to pinks and deep reds.

It was late morning on Sunday, the day after GiGi returned home to Margot. I slept unexpectedly hard, given the inner turmoil I felt when I laid my head down. The solid rest shifted everything for me, which shouldn’t have surprised me since a good night’s sleep had been Virginia’s cure-all tonic for everything from menstrual cramps to plantar warts. That night, I’d dreamt not of GiGi but of Abe. It wasn’t a romantic or sexual dream. Instead, it was a piecemeal, floaty dream of him knocking on the door to our flat with Truly by his side. Flanked by two suitcases, as if he were heading out for a long journey, he handed me Truly’s leash and said simply, “I trust you.”

That morning, I jogged a different route than I had on the last visit, winding this time around the Great Lawn and Turtle Pond. About ten minutes in, I grew calm and focused, pushing my long sleeves up my forearms. I ran with an alert gaze, faster than I had in months, with an acute sense of purpose. The run was more of an exhalation, an emergency escape hatch for energy and emotion than a workout. Amidst the hurt and loss, my heart also bloomed with a new, hard-fought insight. Because of GiGi and Abe, the bounds of my loyalty — to Margot and Jean, to Jesse — had been stretched and strained. But they had survived.

I had a host of options for spending half a day in Manhattan before my flight, including, of course, visiting with Margot and Jean and the baby. But I didn’t want to confuse things — for GiGi or for me. And instead of taking in a museum or going shopping, a run just felt like the right, most familiar thing to do. The cherry blossoms and the temperate weather were like Mother Earth’s confirmation of my choice.

About a mile into the run, I paused behind the Met to peel off my fleece. Though I hadn’t called home yet that morning, I imagined that Jesse was perhaps running at the exact same moment on an early morning training with our tri group.

As I moved through the park, of course I thought of GiGi. I wondered whether she’d respond to being called Gretchen. I realized that I probably should have told Margot or Jean about the failsafe teething remedy I’d eventually devised — frozen bananas — because GiGi had a molar coming in on the bottom left. I considered and then dismissed the option of phoning to tell them.
They’ll figure it out
, I thought. And somehow I knew they would.

As had happened so many times in the last few months, thinking about GiGi led me straight into reminiscences of Virginia. For decades, she worked for my parents. But, I’d come to realize, she was also family. She wasn’t my mother or even motherly, but she’d cared deeply for me. Her adages and admonitions swirling through my brain during the last eight weeks proved that she’d impacted me. My own mother had kept her distance, but I’d still managed to forge a meaningful connection with a mother-like figure. Before GiGi arrived, I hadn’t realized how much Virginia had influenced me, how much I’d loved her stern, stoic ways. My bond with Virginia wasn’t traditional and certainly not obvious, but it was there. That morning, I no longer felt stung by my months with Gigi. Instead, I was grateful for what she’d unwittingly taught me about myself. Caring for her had also allowed me to give something to Margot and Jean, to finally repay them for everything they’d done for me, especially for showing me that I was lovable.

A half-mile later, I paused to shed yet another layer, the top of two long-sleeved racing shirts. I’d spent many moments recently questioning what family really was, turning the notion around, examining it in different ways, like a specimen in a lab. For years, Margot and Jean had been like family to me, and in just the shortest time, so had GiGi. I wasn’t bound by my parents’ shut-off style, I discovered. Family connection wasn’t lost for me. Dispassionate parenting wasn’t a gene I’d inherited from my parents. I could stop the cycle. As Jean had once wisely insisted, “Nothing will ever be the same. But it can be better.”

At the West 77th Street park entrance, I slowed my pace and then began to walk, hands on my hips, my breath heavy and deep. With perspiration and energy emanating from my skin, I felt refreshed and centered, as my emotions, my thoughts and my body integrated.
This feeling
, I thought,
this is why we started running in the first place
.

I made my way towards the hotel and my phone rang. It was Jesse. Seeing his name on the caller ID, my solar plexus warmed through my cooling skin. Though neither of us had welcomed the situation, taking care of a baby had ultimately not distanced us but in fact had returned us to each other, had brought us closer than any triathlon could. It astonished me and yet also struck me as wholly inevitable.

“Whodda thunk,” Jesse had said the night before I left with GiGi. With her playing on the floor between us, we discussed then how our lives had been upended and how remarkably our perspectives had morphed in two short months. Together, we’d shifted and re-aligned our perspective on children, surprising us both, though neither of us had dared to speak the words out loud. But maybe now I had the courage to define what we felt together, to give it a name.

“Hey,” I answered.

“Hey, Hill. I just finished a run.” His low, deep voice traveled through my whole being, reinforcing the plain fact that love was not a zero-sum game. My math had been dead wrong. How could I have spent so many years believing otherwise? I wanted to love Jesse wholly — and maybe even create someone new with him. A new person between us — not one for me to disappoint, but to love.

“Me too,” I said.

“Whodda thunk.”

We were both quiet for a few moments and I reached into the side pocket of my running pants, fingering the memento from our time with GiGi. Perhaps it was selfish of me to keep it. But touching Gavin’s hard plastic head filled me with such a sorrowful, expansive, poignant joy that I was sure GiGi would forgive me.

“So,” he finally said, “everyone at training was talking about the Napa Valley Tri coming up in April. The early bird deadline is Monday. Should I sign us up?”

“Mmm, I don’t know,” I said, grinning so broadly that a man wearing headphones and dance-walking towards me on Central Park West pointed his finger and winked at me as he crossed my path. “Maybe there’s something else we should do together. Let’s flip a coin.”

1. Have you or has anyone you’ve known suffered from postpartum depression? If so, how was that experience similar to or different from Margot’s?

2. What role does duty play in this story? Did Jean and Margot ask too much of Hillary? Should Hillary have set better limits, notwithstanding her feelings of gratitude towards them? Did she, in fact, owe them?

3. What would have happened to Jesse and Hillary if GiGi hadn’t entered their lives?

4. Should Hillary have told Jesse about kissing Abe?

5. Did you have compassion for Hillary’s parents despite how they made her feel growing up?

6. If Hillary and Jesse do, indeed, have their own baby, what kind of parents will they be?

7. And just for fun, if this story was made into a film, who should play Hillary? How about Sarah? Jesse? Abe? Margot? Jean? Frank? Rebecca? Virginia?

Many, many thanks to the generous and talented readers of this novel’s early drafts: Kelli Herzog Anderson, Amy Doan Mason, Kerryn Schwarz, Sheila Gordon, Allison Gruettner Stuart, Jill Chanen, Dana Fox and Mary Hossfeld. Adair Lara got me on the right path by expertly evaluating my plot outline.

I am profoundly grateful to my husband for unfailingly supporting me whenever I want to try something new, including writing a new story. And, finally, I’m just not a good enough writer to express how deeply I adore my children — but hopefully they already know.

A “recovering” lawyer and longtime legal affairs journalist, Leslie A. Gordon lives in San Francisco with her husband and children. This is her second published novel. Learn more at
http://www.leslieagordon.wordpress.com
.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales or actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.