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“It means that you can buy as much as you want and he isn’t going to care.” Mariya presses the card into my hands and reaches for the laptop. “Okay, so what’s first on the list? Cribs? Bassinets? Those little sucker things that take care of their boogers?”
“All of the above,” I admit. “I don’t have anything. We’ll need car seats so we can get them home from the hospital. That should probably be first on the list. And clothes. Blankets, too. Oh, and hats! I think babies’ heads get cold.”
Maybe I should add “reading every baby book in existence” to my to-do list. The last time I held a baby was when I babysat for my neighbors when I was sixteen. And it wasn’t even a baby. The kid was three years old and almost potty-trained. I don’t know if I’ve ever even held an infant before.
I shove the laptop towards Mariya. “I don’t actually know what I need. Is there a list somewhere? Maybe we should look this up. Or wait until your mom gets back. She raised three kids. She probably knows what to?—”
“The last time my mother held a baby was when I was one. She is not a fount of information.”
“Yeah, but she still knows more than us.”
“We have the internet at our disposal. Everything we could ever want to know.”
I reach for the laptop. “You’re right. I should look up how to do infant CPR. What if they choke on something? I didn’t become a lifeguard because I didn’t want to do the CPR training. What was I thinking? If something happens and I don’t?—”
“I’m pressing pause on this freakout.” Mariya circles her finger in front of my face. “Now is a time for mindless buying. No panic attacks, no researching how to get a Lego brick out of your kid’s windpipe. Right now, all you are going to do is put everything your pregnant heart desires into a shopping cart and not panic, okay? This is supposed to be fun.”
I blow out a long breath and the tension in my chest eases slightly. “Okay. I can do that.”
“Great. Because we have a lot of damage to do. First things first, do you know the genders yet?” She pauses, holding up a finger. “I really hope you don’t. Because if I find out that you know and didn’t tell me, I will have to take my credit card and leave on principle.”
I laugh. “No, we don’t know yet.”
“Thank God. Gender-neutral color schemes,” Mariya says with a nod. “Got it. Do you want to find out or are you going to wait until they pop out and be surprised?”
“I want to know. I could have found out a couple months ago with a blood test, but… I don’t know. I got scared.”
“Worried you’d find out you were having an alien?” Mariya asks in all seriousness.
I elbow her in the side. “No. But I was worried about getting too attached to them.”
“They’re your babies. You’re supposed to be attached.”
“I know. But the more I know about them, the more it will hurt if something goes wrong.”
“I don’t think knowing what’s between their legs would soften that blow, Loon.” Mariya squeezes my knee. “If you want to know, I think you should find out. Don’t live your life in preparation for worst-case scenarios. In our world, the worst case can be pretty damn bleak.”
Mariya makes a good point. And as I scroll through page after page of gray and yellow gender-neutral baby clothes, the decision cements in my mind.
By the time Yakov and I are lying in bed hours later, I know what I want.
“I’m going to ask Dr. Jenkins to tell me the genders,” I announce.
Yakov drops his phone in his lap and turns to me.
“I didn’t want to find out because I didn’t want to get too attached to the babies and then be devastated if anything happened to them. But I’ll be devastated if something happens to them, either way,” I babble. “I figure I might as well get to know them as much as I can now and make the most of it. Just in case.”
Yakov nods but doesn’t say anything. The silence stretches so I decide to fill it.
“I’m not doing this because I think anything bad is going to happen, obviously. But if it does, I want to know I gave them my all.” I try and fail to blink back tears. They roll down my cheeks as I ramble on. “I wouldn’t be a very good mom if I held my babies at arm’s length so I wouldn’t get hurt, right? So I should find out. We should find out.”
Finally, he takes my hand. “Do you want to know or do you think you should want to know?”
“Both,” I answer quickly.
“You were pretty set on not finding out before. What changed?”
“Well, I was shopping today and there were so many cute baby clothes, but I couldn’t buy them because I don’t know what we’re having.”
