Mother Load (8 page)

“Who’s casual? I’ve read this last paragraph nine times and I still couldn’t tell you what it said.” Then she cracked a smile and clutched Lily’s hand. “Trust me, I’m as excited as you are.”

“I can’t believe we’re actually about to meet our baby.”

“Ruby.”

“Stop saying that. It might be Ralph and he’ll have a complex all his life because you really wanted a girl. Besides, we aren’t going to know the sex today.”

Anna sighed and closed her magazine. “I promise not to give our baby a complex if you’ll stop calling him Ralph.”

“Deal.” A wave of giddiness bubbled up inside her and she nearly lifted out of her chair. “I’m excited. How can you just sit there?”

“What else can I do? I didn’t bring a car to play with.”

It so happened Lily carried one in her purse in case she found herself waiting somewhere with Andy, and she produced it only to see Anna roll her eyes. “You asked.”

The minutes seemed like hours, but finally the receptionist, a young Latina woman, appeared and led them to an examination room. Her nametag read Marisol, and she seemed as excited as they were. Bubbling nonstop about their hectic morning in the clinic, she fished a gown from a drawer, slapped it into Lily’s hands and rushed out the door, closing it behind her.

“Is it my imagination or are the women who work here happier than Disney characters?” Lily asked.

“They make dreams come true. That’s got to be the best job in the world.” Anna took her skirt and folded it neatly. “Can you imagine how exciting this was for Kim and Hal after trying for eleven years?”

“I don’t know how they stood it. We almost went crazy after just eight months.” Left unsaid was that Kim had also suffered two miscarriages. Lily could hardly bear to think about losing this baby, but it was in the back of her mind every second of every day. Only three more weeks and they would be past the period of greatest risk.

She had just gotten seated at the end of the examination table when a sharp knock sounded on the door. It was Seon-Lee, the blood technician, a thin Asian woman who, like Marisol, was all smiles. “I vant to drink your blood.”

Lily laughed and held out her arm. Looking at Anna, she asked, “Do you get the feeling this woman likes her job too?”

Anna had already looked away, squeamish at the sight of the needle going into Lily’s arm. It was hard to imagine how she would handle cutting the cord in the delivery room.

Beth entered just as Seon-Lee was finishing up. “Today’s the big day, ladies. How’s the morning sickness?”

“Nauseating.”

The doctor grinned broadly, instantly forming crow’s feet beside her deep-set brown eyes. “Yep, you’re definitely pregnant, all right. Let me start with a quick pelvic check. You know the drill.”

Lily found the stirrups with her heels and sucked in a deep breath as Beth entered her with a gloved hand.

“Normal, normal, normal.” And just like that she was finished, snapping off the glove and tossing it into a bin. “Let’s have a listen, shall we?”

Lily tried not to breathe as the fetal stethoscope slid from point to point around her abdomen. Beth frowned and repositioned the device several times, apparently oblivious to Lily’s rising panic.

Anna had left her chair to stand beside them. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, indeed. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty fantastic.” She positioned the piece and offered the ear buds to Anna. “Go ahead. Hear it for yourself.”

Anna did and her face lit up in a brilliant smile. “Oh, my God. That’s our baby.”

Lily could hardly wait for her turn. “I want to hear it too.” She curled forward so the ends of the stethoscope would reach her ears and heard the furious fluttering for herself. “It’s so fast.”

Beth folded the instrument and set it aside. “Like I said…normal. The fetal heartbeat is about one-sixty.” She then smeared Lily’s belly with cold gel, one hand hovering near the dial on her display. “Let’s have a peek, shall we?”

“Are we looking for anything in particular?” Anna asked, her eyes transfixed on the blank screen.

“Nah, this is just a routine check. Sometimes we do these to verify the due date, but we know exactly when the embryo implanted so there’s no guesswork there. Once in a while something will pop up that we have to keep an eye on, but we don’t have any risk factors here so I’m not expecting anything hinky.”

Though Lily appreciated the reassuring tone, this was anything but routine to her. She gripped Anna’s hand and took a deep breath in anticipation of the image coming to life. Wavy green lines appeared against a black background as Beth slid the transducer across her belly.

And suddenly there it was—their baby, its head dwarfing its tiny body.

“Congratulations, ladies. It’s now officially a fetus.” As her left hand waved the transducer, her right moved a pointer to various spots on the screen. A small white image near the center of the kidney-shaped mass pulsated. “See the heart?”

Lily stared mesmerized at the rhythmic swelling and falling, fascinated at the proof of life.

“Is that a foot?” Anna gestured to a hook-like appendage jutting from the bottom of the curve-shaped blob.

“It…is…indeed,” Beth answered tentatively, wiggling the transducer to try to bring the image into focus. “Let’s see if…”

Lily held her breath for Beth to finish her thought but she didn��t. Her eyes remained riveted to the screen as the wand crossed her stomach, revealing a new angle from near the top of the baby’s head.

Beth’s forehead wrinkled pensively. “Usually I can look straight down from here, but your baby’s turned to the side a little bit.”

“Is that okay?” Lily asked, aware of the shake in her voice but unable to control it. She reached for Anna’s hand and gripped it tightly.

“Sure, they wiggle a lot. Better get used to it.” Beth moved the pointer to the edge of the womb. “The placenta’s forming normally, and”—she marked two points on the screen to measure—“it’s a bit longer than we usually see at eleven weeks…almost four and a half centimeters.”

Anna chuckled and gave her hand a confident squeeze. “No way Lily’s going to make a big baby. I bet this one’s mine.”

“I always said it could be, but the size at this point isn’t usually predictive of birth weight. We’ll see some rapid growth over the next few weeks, but the real weight gain and lengthening happens in the third trimester. If you want this for your Christmas cards, I can have Marisol print it out for you.”

“That would be the perfect way to tell people,” Lily said, her stomach still roiling from Beth’s hesitation.

“So what are you girls doing for Thanksgiving? Big turkey plans?”

“We were planning to go skiing in Tahoe with the family,” Anna replied, “but there’s no snow in the forecast this year.”

“So we’re going to Tahoe to not ski,” Lily added. “Which means we’ll eat too much, watch UCLA smear Cal in football—I hope—and chase three kids through the house.”

Beth turned off the display and wiped Lily’s belly with a towel. “If it makes you feel any better, I probably would’ve advised you not to ski anyway. Not that hurtling down the mountain is bad for you. It’s the sudden stops.” She pulled a digital voice recorder from her pocket and spewed what seemed like hundreds of words in a matter of only seconds. “Schedule with Marisol to come back in three weeks. I’d like to have another look.”

“That’s only fourteen weeks,” Lily said anxiously, sitting up and pulling the shift across her waist. “I thought the second one was supposed to be at sixteen.”

“It usually is, but when these bashful babies turn away from us, I like to go in for another look so I can see from the top down.”

Her reasoning did little to assuage Lily’s concern, since Beth had said a sonogram wasn’t absolutely necessary in the first place. Now all of a sudden it was imperative she have another in only three weeks.

A knock sounded and Seon-Lee leaned into the room with a sheet of paper. Beth looked it over and grinned wryly. “From the looks of your blood results, I’d say Thanksgiving looks like a good time to share your little secret with the family.” With her characteristic broad smile, she congratulated them one last time and left the examination room.

Lily stared numbly at the closed door. Even with Beth’s promise they were safe to tell their family and friends, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss.

Piece by piece, Anna held out her clothes so she could get dressed. There was nothing about her look that suggested concern.

“Did you get the feeling there was something Beth wasn’t telling us?” Lily asked as she wriggled into her skirt.

“What do you mean?”

“Like she kept…I don’t know, not finishing her sentences or something. I don’t get the big deal about the baby turning and having to see the top of its head. I think there’s something wrong.”

“If she was worried about something, would she have said it was okay to tell people?” Anna gripped her shoulders firmly. “Would she be printing off pictures of our baby to send to our friends on a Christmas card? I don’t think so.”

Lily let out a deep sigh as Anna drew her into a hug. She resisted at first, almost refusing to be mollified. But as she let herself relax, the moment took on the familiar feel of countless others they had shared when sadness and doubt had consumed her—the day her mother died, the night she came to the house to make amends for her problems with alcohol, and all the weeks she ached to bring Andy into their home. Each time Anna had reached out to give her strength.

And she always made everything okay.

Anna loved the way her sporty Z8 turned heads, even on the lot at Premier Volkswagen, where her staff had seen it hundreds of times. If it was possible to fall in love with a car—and as far as she was concerned, it was—the Z8 was a machine that could steal your heart. Only a few thousand of the concept cars existed, produced almost a decade ago over a three-year span to celebrate the 507, BMW’s classic roadster. She almost hated taking it out on rainy days like this one, but the detailers back at her BMW lot would clean it up the minute she returned.

The very idea of giving up her Z8 for a sedan was laughable. Auto collectors had offered her up to three hundred thousand dollars for this vintage vehicle, but she wouldn’t bite. At least they understood its worth. To Lily, it was just a car to go from Point A to B, but to Anna it was the pinnacle of both design and performance in automation. If they had room for a third car in the garage, she would gladly pick up another, something that would hold a car seat for the baby and a booster seat for Andy. Though he no longer required a booster according to California law, he still liked using one whenever he was relegated to the backseat so he could see out the windows without straining. He wasn’t the sort of child who busied himself with toys or games in the car. He wanted to watch the traffic so he could see what others were driving. Anna understood that perfectly because she had been the same way as a child.

She pulled into her usual space next to her father’s Imperial Blue 760Li sedan and turned off the engine, making no move to climb out into the rain. The events of the morning had taken a toll and she needed a moment to regroup. Beth’s request that Lily return for a second sonogram had scared her half to death, but when she saw how frightened Lily was she had tamped down her own fears and gathered herself. Lily seemed to feed off her reaction to things, and staying calm would go a long way toward keeping her worries at bay. Once they parted in the parking garage Anna dropped the façade and mentally ticked off the things that had set her on edge—Beth’s puzzled demeanor as she fumbled to find their baby’s heartbeat, her apparent surprise at the size and shape of the image they were seeing, and the way she seemed to hesitate when they asked questions. None of it added up to panic, especially since she had given them the go-ahead to share the news of their pregnancy, but something was…what word had she used…hinky.

The rain let up for several seconds and she made a mad dash to the back door of the showroom, unable to avoid splashing through a large puddle that had gathered directly behind her car. With soggy feet, she carefully crossed the tile floor of the showroom, where Marco Gonzalez, her VW sales manager, had arranged their flashiest lineup—the CC, which was Volkswagen’s largest sedan, the Beetle convertible, the SUV Taureg, and…a minivan?

“Hey, Anna.” Marco greeted her with a broad smile. With his short dark hair and brown eyes, he cut a handsome figure in his starched white shirt and striped BMW tie. He set the perfect example of professionalism for his sales staff with his appearance, expertise and friendly manner, and Anna often imagined Andy would develop that same look when he got older. Marco was only thirty-four years old, but he had grown quickly into his job soon after Anna acquired the dealership and ushered the rude, lazy Tommy Russell out the door. She had been impressed with Marco’s enthusiasm and passion for cars, and especially by his hunger to learn everything he could about the car business. For the past three years he had matured under her father’s tutelage, and now it was time to move him up.

“Marco, what’s this?” she asked, gesturing toward a white Routan, Volkswagen’s seven-passenger minivan. “Since when do we park minivans in the showroom?”

“Since this is the vehicle more people want to see and they don’t want to get wet looking at it.”

“People are buying these?” She poked her head in through the open side door and looked around. “You could carry a whole soccer team in here.”

“That’s the idea. Families like them because the kids can spread out. Look.” He pressed a button on the rear console and a screen lowered just behind the front seats. “Just load a favorite movie right here and all the kicking and whining stops. My wife and I are thinking about getting one too.”

“Why? You only have two kids. You could go anywhere in the CC, or you could get one of the SUVs. You like driving too much to get a minivan. They’re so…pedestrian.” Which was another way of saying she would rather walk.

“Maybe, but to quote Lourdes, ‘Not everything is about me,’” he said with a laugh. “She likes the idea of giving the kids their own space so they won’t be picking at each other all the time. Plus, she can carpool two more kids, which means she won’t have to drive as often. I’m sold on it. We’re just waiting for a red one with all the features we want.”