Heads or Tails (9 page)

I shrugged. “We’re not baby people.”

“Not yet,” she said with a pointed glance.

This was familiar shtick. When Henry was born, Sarah asked me to be his godmother.

“I don’t have to, like, take him if you die, do I? That’s old-fashioned, right?” I’d replied.

She’d rolled her eyes at me. “How about, ‘Oh, I’m flattered!’ Really, it’s a convention meant to honor
you
,” she said, draping her arm around my shoulder. But then she added, “However, I am going to put you and Jesse on our list of guardians — after grandparents and our siblings, of course — in case we go down in some plane crash without the kids.” I’d started to protest when she shook her head at me, “A, it’s not going to happen, and B, if it did, I have full confidence in your abilities.”

That morning with Gretchen, Sarah and I walked downstairs to the garage so she could properly install the car seat in my Acura. She also lugged an old stroller from her SUV. “It’s an umbrella stroller — not ideal for her age. But beggars can’t be choosers!” Outside our open garage, a street cleaner inched its way up the street, stirring up leaves and debris and leaving behind a lingering ammonia smell.

“That brings up a dumb question, but one I should probably know the answer to,” I said, remembering the woman I sat next to on the plane from New York. “Everything happened so quickly in New York. I didn’t learn much more about Gretchen beyond how much formula she drinks. And now I realize there were important questions I didn’t even think to ask. Most notably: do you have any idea how old she is?”

Sarah whooped out a laugh. “That is an excellent point. Can’t you just ask Margot’s mom?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t talked to Jean since I got home.”

“What? Why not? This isn’t the ’90’s. You can call or text her — even from your car,” she said sarcastically.

I shook my head a second time. “With her Parkinson’s, Jean has limited capacity. I don’t want anything — not even a phone call from me — derailing her from the primary mission: getting Margot checked into that treatment program and on the road to recovery. The sooner that happens, the sooner this baby gets back where she belongs.”

“Makes sense,” Sarah said circling around me in an effort to appraise the baby, similar to how a used car dealer might survey a vehicle for dings and scratches. “She’s a big baby. Did you say she’s just starting to sit up?”

I nodded. She stroked the baby’s head and then patted and lightly squeezed different parts of her body.

“Strong legs, babbling. Um, my guess is maybe seven, seven and a half months?”

I nodded unable to confirm. I’d already wracked my brain trying to remember when I’d received Margot’s text just minutes after delivery. Was it March? April? I wanted to go back and check on my phone to verify but I just hadn’t had time. I’d probably deleted it anyway. I was pretty unsentimental about things like that. Margot couldn’t believe that I’d ditched all the yearbooks from Egan except the one from senior year, just like my mom had unceremoniously tossed our decades-old collection of Christmas tree ornaments, including the personalized ones and the handprint ones I’d made in preschool.

“Before you go,” I said to Sarah, who was buckling herself into her car, “one last question. How different, exactly, is parenting from what I’m doing?” I shifted the baby from my right hip to my left. She burped, and spit-up rolled out of the corner of her mouth. I looked away. “I’ve had Gretchen here for less than two days and I’ve practically been brought to my knees by anxiety, fear and…,” I hesitated, struggling to label what I felt, “…and boredom.”

She regarded me, partly amused, partly smug, partly wistful. “It’s exactly the same, Hill. Exactly the same.”

I met Jesse in the blandest of ways, but in a manner that foretold our compatibility. We were in line at Marina Super, the small but expertly stocked neighborhood market on Chestnut Street. I’d popped in after work just to pick up some yogurt and a couple of apples so I hadn’t bothered to grab a basket. But as I wandered through the aisles, a few more items appealed to me and I cradled them in my arms, barely containing everything as I stood in the check-out line.

“I eat them right out of the jar,” said a low, sexy voice.

I turned around and spotted Jesse, who’d apparently noticed that we’d both picked up a somewhat obscure item: pickled jalapeño peppers. On first glance, he struck me as thoroughly pleasant, not drop-dead gorgeous and certainly not the opposite. And that wound up being a pretty spot-on description of his personality too. He was a fun, sincere man, but also pleasingly mild, not like some of the oversized-personalities some of my friends married, the kind of men who exhausted me. That day, he wore jeans, a light blue button-down shirt and brown loafers. A navy messenger bag was slung across his torso. He wasn’t tall but he was taller than me. And something about him emanated solidity.

But I didn’t understand his comment and replied with a quizzical look.

He pointed to the jar about to topple off of the pile of produce bags and yogurt containers in my arms. “The jalapeños.” There was that husky voice again, the voice that served as a surprising counterpoint to his mild-mannered appearance. To this day, his voice remains one of my favorite things about him. “I eat them right out of the jar.”

Just then, the conveyer belt rolled forward, allowing me to lean over it and gently dump the contents of my arms, including the jalapeños, onto it, making a clackity sound. I thrust my lower lip forward, blowing bangs out of my eyes.

“I put them on veggie burgers,” I said.

In unison, we both added, “You have to get the ‘tamed’ jar or it’s—”

“—too spicy.”

We laughed and I was struck by how warm his smile was, how the corners of his mouth turned way up, like how someone might draw a smile. I paid with cash and took my time neatly folding the money and the receipt into my back pocket hoping that we’d have the opportunity to walk out together. Jesse seemed to be speeding up his transaction for the same purpose.

As we lingered outside the store with our grocery bags, I learned that we lived in the same neighborhood (which wasn’t entirely surprising given that at that time the Marina was a hotbed of twenty-something yuppies). And in addition to jalapeños, we both liked dim sum for breakfast, reading the New Republic, and rollerblading, even though by then the recreational sport had long been out of fashion.

A few weeks later, after we’d been on several dates, we discovered more commonalities: a taste for homemade minestrone with crusty bread, a desire to someday travel across the country in a rented motor home, a love of after-dinner walks even in the rain, and, importantly, an unconventional desire not to have children. At that age, when everyone seemed to be pairing off and procreating, that last one was a surprising affinity. Sometimes you meet someone who lets you not only be yourself, but discover yourself. It was like that with Jesse. He gave me the unexpectedly lovely feeling of
wanting
to grow old.

Before long, we’d introduced each other to our favorite pastimes. For me, that was hockey, a remnant from my years on the East Coast. Even though Arlen had turned out to be the source of much pain for me, I just couldn’t let go of hockey after I ejected him from my life in high school. Something about the wild devotion of hockey fans thrilled me. For one of our early dates, I took Jesse to a San Jose Sharks game. At first, he had trouble even following the puck, but before long, he appreciated the game as much as I did. Many of our vacations over the years were driven by hockey match-ups we wanted to see: the Sharks against the Ducks in Anaheim, the Washington Capitols against the Rangers in New York.

Whether on the road, at the “Shark Tank” at HP Pavilion in San Jose or in our living room, we wore matching jerseys and waved homemade signs. (Jesse was always particularly clever at crafting funny signs. We ended up on TV more than once.) During the day, we sometimes e-mailed each other posts from the various hockey blogs we followed. I loved how our passion for the sport set us apart from the far more common San Francisco Giants and Forty-Niner fans. In our opinion, hockey was the sports enthusiast’s best-kept secret. It was fast-paced and required tremendous skill. There was little as exciting as a buzzer goal triggering sudden death overtime. The player injuries, the broken bones. The drama was addictive. At each Stanley Cup, I always cried when the players skated around with the trophy. It was one of the very few exceptions to my not-a-crier identity. The poignancy just struck me.

A few months into our relationship, when I suggested to Jesse that a bare shelf in his living room was the perfect size for a small fish tank, he jumped right back into one of his abandoned childhood passions: aquatic fauna design. Soon after setting up that first tank, he was designing others and keeping tank logs. Before long, he had four, including a thirty-gallon planted tank with African cichlid fish and cherry red shrimp. He began attending acquascape conferences across the country, sparking more hobby-related travel for us.

As close as we were, as much as we shared, one thing — one person — still came between us: Marigold.

When I first learned her name, I wanted to laugh out loud at the absurdity of it.
Marigold?!
I wanted to howl. But I couldn’t, given that she was dead.

Then, once I learned more about her, I understood that her seemingly silly name actually fit her exquisitely. In the one photo Jesse kept of her, the silver-framed picture that decorated his nightstand until the day we moved in together, Marigold was simply luminous. Blond, long-legged and radiant, she often went by “Mari” —
merry
, for God’s sake. And she was.

They met senior year of high school, when her family moved to Jesse’s town, and they continued dating all through college even though they went to school a hundred miles apart. From discreet and seemingly off-hand conversations I’d actually strategically planned with Jesse’s oldest friends over the years, I’d come to learn that Marigold had majored in Sanskrit to supplement the yoga teacher training she’d completed the summer after high school graduation. She read up on Hindu gods and adjusted her life according to moon cycles, assuming near mythical status in my mind. She’d apparently been so unlike my practical, sensible, very secular Jesse, and I couldn’t help but wonder if somehow, some day they’d have eventually grown apart. Yet I also worried that no matter how many years passed, I could never measure up to her.

It must have been shocking that someone so very alive, someone pulsing with such a cosmic, magnetic kind of energy, could vanish so suddenly. They were twenty-two when the accident happened. They’d graduated from college three months before and had just returned from six weeks of European travels during which Jesse had proposed to her in Belgium. (They’d been in Paris two days before, Jesse once told me, but he’d believed it was far too cliché to propose to someone as unique as her there.) They were on the verge of starting their grown-up lives together, he at an advertising firm, and she teaching twelve classes a week at a new yoga studio where she’d already amassed groupies. Every aspiring yogi at the studio wanted a body like hers, her long legs, her incandescent skin. Everyone wanted to gracefully glide into handstands precisely like Marigold.

They were visiting the central California coast, scoping out potential wedding venues near Carmel. He’d been at the wheel when they were side-swiped from the right by a drunk truck driver. Not a thing about it was Jesse’s fault, but he suffered from survivor’s guilt, and, apparently, PTSD, I learned from his friends. Marigold had been nearly decapitated by the truck’s front grill. Pieces of her skull and face landed in his lap.

Like my parents, Jesse had loved and lost. I was to Marigold what I’d been to Julie — the next thing. It took Jesse nearly a decade to even consider a new relationship. That he’d chosen me was flattering and terrifying.

Jesse still received holiday cards from Marigold’s parents and her sister Iris (of course her name would be Iris). Iris’s children were GAP Kids picturesque, all flaxen hair and sapphire blue eyes. They were so unlike how any kids we would have would look, with my dark curly hair. Every December, Jesse tossed the holiday card in the big bowl in the living room with all the others — the cards from fraternity brothers, from my Egan friends. But I still wondered if, when he was alone in the house, he pulled them out and studied them, imagining. I’d done it myself and I’d never even met her.

Marigold cast a faded yet lingering pall over our marriage, admittedly more for me than for Jesse. He mentioned her occasionally (“Marigold hated cilantro”), and once in awhile I did too, if only to produce evidence that I wasn’t insecure about her, even though I was. I struggled to overlook his history with her and I managed to do so most of the time, perhaps because our relationship felt deeper than just a love affair. I relished the conspiratorial nature of our coupledom — the shorthand, the multilayered communication executed solely through facial expressions from across the room, the “I was
just
thinking that exact same thing” synchronicity. We were always so aligned. We’d love the movie that was universally panned or walk out of the city’s hottest restaurant dissatisfied and incredulous that it had won so many awards.

Of course, even in the early days of our relationship, Jesse did things that got on my nerves. He ate noisily. He was slow to apologize, though he invariably made his way around to it before it was too late. He threw out the newspaper instead of recycling it.

But I knew these things were largely superficial and that our core similarities made our relationship work. No, more than that — they made us
special
. Our commonalities felt like a prenuptial agreement of sorts, an unspoken but understood promise, the guiding principles of our marriage.

That I’d now brought a baby into our lives, even though it was someone else’s and for a limited time, felt like a huge violation. A broken pledge. A breach of contract.

I stood outside our front door, my hand still on the knob, overcome with an unsettled feeling, leaving Gretchen with Mercedes. She wasn’t even my baby so it surprised me how odd I felt. Or maybe it was precisely because she wasn’t my baby that I was nervous about leaving her with a stranger. But Sarah trusted her and I trusted Sarah. Plus, I simply had to get back to work, baby or no baby.