The Other Mother. Кейт Хьюит

Rob says as she brings the salad to the table in their little dining nook. He puts his arm around her and for a second she stills, as if she’s taking strength from that little caress. I see Rob’s face soften and I know he must feel protective of her since the last failed attempt at IVF. Watching them like this gives me a funny little ache, because I’m happy for them and yet somehow sad for myself.

      They’re the ones who should be celebrating an unexpected pregnancy, a miracle. Not me.

      I’m still thinking like that as we eat our salad, and I don’t pay too much attention to the conversation about a film festival Rob is judging, one of his hobbies.

      “What’s up with you, Alex?” Martha asks as we finish the salad. She nods towards my plate, and I realize I’ve put all the bits of blue cheese to one side. I had the most ridiculous thought that blue cheese would be bad for the baby. I don’t know why I’m thinking this way, why part of me is acting like I’m actually going to keep it.

      “Sorry,” I say. “Tired.”

      “Hard week at work?” Martha asks with that teasing smile that lets me know she doesn’t really take my job seriously. She’s never said as much, but part-time barista work at thirty-five is pretty sad in her eyes. I know Martha feels I could have made more of myself; I went to a good college, I’m from an upper-middle-class home in Connecticut, I’m fairly smart. In Martha’s world I’m a failure.

      “Yeah, work, I guess,” I say, trying to smile, because Martha has brought out the main course and it’s fish. It’s a fancy kind of fish, tilapia or something, in a lemon and herb sauce, but the smell of it is crazy intense. It smells like week-old mackerel to me and before I can help myself, before I can say anything more, I’m lurching upright and running to the bathroom off the front hall.

      As I’m puking into the toilet I realize I haven’t even managed to close the door behind me, and Martha and Rob can hear everything.

      I flush the toilet and rinse my mouth out, wash my face. After a few seconds I walk back into the dining room. Rob is looking bemused but Martha has gone very still, very alert. “Stomach bug?” Rob suggests, sympathetically, and I nod. Martha says nothing.

      I don’t eat any of the fish. In fact, my little puking episode pretty much puts a damper on the whole evening, which is to be expected. I do manage a few forkfuls of rice, and I pass on the dessert and coffee.

      “What about some ginger tea?” Martha suggests. “It’s supposed to settle the stomach.”

      “I’m fine,” I say. “Really. It was just a one-time thing.”

      And still Martha says nothing.

      I have this horrible feeling she knows, and I feel worse for trying to hide it from her, although, really, I didn’t exactly have time to tell her. Still I feel a certain cool kind of assessment coming from her, and I don’t remember what we talk about for the rest of the evening. Not much, anyway.

      I’m exhausted by the time I head home on the subway, and then take the 14th Street crosstown bus all the way over to Avenue C. I live on the top floor of an old tenement building, which is as bad as it sounds, although I’ve never minded before. At least I have my own place.

      Yet now as I climb the stairs I’m thinking all kinds of ridiculous thoughts. Like how hard these stairs would be if I were nine months pregnant. And how there is no way I could haul a stroller up six narrow flights.

      It’s past eleven by the time I finally get back to my apartment, and I see it all through this new lens of quasi-motherhood, these critical and despairing eyes I don’t like. It’s one little room, about fifteen feet by ten, with a tiny sink, a two-burner stove, and a mini fridge tucked in one corner. The bathroom holds a shower stall and toilet, no sink, and besides the futon, a table, and a bookcase I have no real furniture. I keep my clothes in a jumble of plastic crates stacked on top of one another.

      I sink onto my futon, and I no longer have the strength not to think about it. Not to realize how ridiculous and impossible and stupid this all is, to contemplate for one second the possibility of actually having this baby. Of being a mother.

      I don’t even want a baby, do I? I’m pretty sure I don’t. Yet this isn’t even about want; it’s about something deeper, something fundamental and biological. This might be my last chance. My last chance for a life I never even wanted before.

      Three days go by and I still don’t call that number.

      Chapter 3

      MARTHA

      Alex is pregnant. It beats like a bass drum through my mind, giving me a headache. Alex is pregnant. I count the symptoms silently, the throwing up being the most obvious one of all. She took one look at that fish and heaved. But there were others, I think as I lie in bed next to Rob that night. She looked pale, drawn. She put all the blue cheese in her salad to one side. She seemed a little dizzy when she stood up. She’’s pregnant.

      I haven’t told Rob my suspicions, and I don’t intend to, not yet. He’d probably be happy for her, the way he’s happy for everybody, and her fertility would highlight my own failure as a wife, a woman.

      I am furious that I can’t get pregnant after five years of trying and Alex can just fall into it. It’s probably a mistake. Alex isn’t seeing anyone as far as I know, and her life isn’t exactly set up for a baby. I can’t imagine her as a mother.

      And then I realize that maybe, probably, she won’t have it. It’s early. She could still have an abortion. She probably will have an abortion.

      And I feel a chill enter my soul, a terror I don’t understand. I know, on a purely analytical level, that what Alex does with her pregnancy has no bearing on my life. Yet I can’t escape this inexplicable fear that slips coldly through me, that somehow her ending this pregnancy will end something for me.

      It’s absurd, because everything’s already ended for me.

      I feel Rob’s hand rub my back, sleepy, half-hearted. “You okay?” he asks, and I wonder why he is asking. Am I tense? Can he feel it? He’s been so careful with me since the last IVF attempt, and I felt as if we were moving on. Just a little, but my soul was healing.

      Now everything feels ripped open and raw.

      “I’m fine,” I say, and Rob rolls over and falls fast asleep, slack-jawed and snoring. I lie there, staring up at the ceiling, everything in me tight and taut and angry. And all I can think is, Alex is pregnant. Pregnant. And I’’m not.

      Alex and I have been friends, first by default and then by choice, for over twenty years. Our parents are neighbors in the same Connecticut suburb; they’ve been friends for even longer than we have. When we were growing up we were thrown together at all those awkward family functions, dinners and drinks parties and days at the beach. At first we circled each other warily, too different from one another to attempt to find any common ground. Alex is younger than me by a year, but in junior high she seemed cooler. She had the indifferent air of a rebel, even though I don’t think she actually did anything that rebellious. Still, I was the do-gooding people-pleaser: I got straight As; I had braces; I wore knee socks pulled up high until seventh grade. Alex seemed cool to me.

      Looking back, I know Alex intimidated me; she was friendly but also indifferent, dreamily in her own world. I think even then I was both jealous of the kind of comfort she had with herself, and grateful for her overtures of friendship—playing video games in her family’s basement, wandering over to our neighborhood playground to hang out on the swings—even as part of me resented it, and the fact that I needed it, that I was the needy one.

      Then my braces came off and I lost the knee socks, I grew three inches and two bra sizes and in tenth grade I was suddenly, superficially cool. It was a low-grade kind of thing; I was never in the actual popular crowd. But I had a boyfriend, I got into Yale, and my father bought me a navy-blue Mazda convertible for my seventeenth birthday. I was cool