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‘Mommy, are you in there?’ It’s Amy, pressed up to the bathroom door by the sounds of it, her lips against the keyhole.
I take a quick breath and slip the folded check into my pocket. ‘Yes, sweetheart.’
‘Can I come in?’
I flush the toilet to make it seem like I was peeing instead of staring at my blood money and then I unlock the door. Amy stands there, looking surprisingly tearful. She doesn’t like to cry. ‘What’s wrong, baby?’
‘I didn’t like her.’ She hurls herself at me, throwing herself into my arms, and I hold her close, stroking her hair, my chin resting on top of her head.
‘Why not?’
‘Because she didn’t like us.’
A chill steals through me at that stark statement. She sounds so certain. ‘Why do you say that, Amy?’
‘Because.’ Amy burrows closer, making me wince. ‘She just didn’t. She kept looking like she thought everything was yucky.’
Tears blur my eyes and I clench them shut. I think of Grace’s luxurious apartment, the carpet that was so deep I sank into it up to my ankles. It even smelled expensive, like lemon and leather. She must have thought our house was the crappiest of crap. And even Amy noticed. How come I didn’t? Or did I just not want to see?
‘It doesn’t matter, Amy,’ I say, wanting to mean it. This is our home, and we’re a family. That’s what matters. ‘Grace is going to take good care of the baby, and I know she already loves her so much.’ I think of Grace’s hand on my belly, the little kick into her palm. She loves this little girl, but so do I. ‘That’s all that matters, sweetheart.’
Amy twists away from me, angry again. Of all the girls, she’s taken this the hardest: fighting it, fighting me. Emma’s just been silent and Lucy doesn’t really understand. But Amy… Amy has tested me, taunted me. She’s either hurling an insult or trying my patience, saying the cruelest things because she knows they cut the deepest.
Yesterday she called Lucy retarded, just because she doesn’t know her letters yet. I yanked Amy over to the sink and threatened to squirt dish soap into her mouth.
‘Don’t use words like that,’ I snapped, surprised and shamed by my own sudden rage, ‘or I’ll make you drink this whole bottle.’
‘I hate you,’ Amy screamed, twisting away from me, and I let her go. I knew where her anger came from, but where was mine boiling up from? I had to control it. I might have been hurting, but her pain mattered more.
‘I don’t want her to have the baby,’ Amy yells now, and then she runs into her bedroom and slams the door so hard it feels as if the whole house shakes.
I start running the bath for the girls, trying not to let her words hurt, even though they’ve already cut me to the quick, so I am raw and bleeding. I want to savor these children I do have, because I love them so much, even when they’re angry. I want to absorb their confusion and grief and anger, because I understand why they feel it. I feel it too.
And so I pour half a bottle of shampoo into the running water for a bubbly treat, and then call the girls for their bath.
Lucy fights me as I take off her clothes, but the sight of her toddler belly with its sticky-out belly button makes me smile. Amy, her anger forgotten for the moment, struts around our tiny bathroom, doing rock star poses stark naked, which probably should alarm me, but doesn’t. She’s got so much confidence, and I just hope she’s able to hang onto it, make her way in this world in a way I never did.
Emma, I notice with a pang, is getting too old to take shared baths with her sisters –there is a fuzz of hair between her legs and she crosses her arms protectively over her barely-there breasts. How can my big girl be growing up?
I feel the baby kick, and I place one hand on my belly as I hold a wet and squirming Lucy with the other, trying to wash her hair.
Half an hour later the girls are all clean, their hair in damp, dark blonde ringlets, their faces freshly scrubbed, dressed in their pajamas, my favorite time of day. They run into the living room in search of Daddy, and Kevin pretends to be surprised by the sight of them and then gives them all a tickle so they scream with laughter, which makes my heart swell with love and gratitude. I have so much. Far too often I feel like I have too little, but right now I think of Grace, alone in her big, empty apartment, and I know I’m lucky. I’m blessed.
Of course it doesn’t last. Amy knocks Lucy over by accident and she starts wailing, and then Amy flounces off, refusing to apologize because that’s just how she is. Emma slips away like a shadow and gets her library book, burying her nose in it. I give in to Lucy’s wailing and put on a Paw Patrol DVD, which Kevin complains about because he was, he says, about to watch the baseball game, even though it isn’t an important one.
‘Just for five minutes, before bed,’ I plead, wondering why I have to beg for something like this, and then I go into the kitchen and see all the dirty dishes piled up in the sink from dinner. The baby kicks again, hard, right into my pelvis, a flash of pain. I turn on the tap. At least I had that moment.
The next few weeks slide by in a tired haze. Now that I’m firmly in the third trimester I’m uncomfortable and emotional, and I’m also very, very pregnant. My bump precedes me into a room, and it feels so overwhelming, so obvious, like the biggest thing about me.
Normally around this time I’d be getting excited. I’d have brought out the baby clothes, washed and ironed them, put them in a drawer. Kev would have found the old infant car seat in the basement, probably covered in mildew because we wouldn’t have cleaned it properly before putting it away. I always mean to, but I never do. I would have washed it in the backyard with the hose, spraying the girls as they played around me. Everyone would have been excited, hopeful.
Now this baby feels like a ticking time bomb that everyone can hear. No one talks about when it will come, but I think about it all the time. Will I hold her, or will I just ask the nurse to take her away? Will I look into her face? Do I want to? Can I bear not to?
When I am thirty-four weeks Tina calls me to discuss the birth plan. ‘Would you like Grace to be there?’
I picture Grace standing by my bed, her arms folded, tapping her foot as I writhe and scream and push. Or will she be leaning forward, eager for that first glimpse of my baby, her daughter? Which possibility feels worse?
‘I don’t know. Does she want to be there?’
