Belly Up Read online

  “First of all, I’m glad you found Jack. That must be a relief. The worry doesn’t do you any good and now, one way or the other, you’ll have an answer.”

  I managed a tiny nod and he squeezed me.

  “Good. Now for the rest of it—you’re gorgeous. I’ve told you before, I don’t care that you’re pregnant. It’s not why I don’t... Do you think that’s why we’re not sleeping together? We should have talked about this, I think.”

  I didn’t say anything. He stroked my hair and kept right on hugging me.

  “I never have,” he said quietly. “With anyone. It’s not that I don’t want to. I do. I think about it a lot. It’s just something I wanted to wait to do with someone special. You are special, and maybe—probably, even—it’ll be you I want it to be with. But this isn’t about you or your body at all. You’re great. It’s about me and my body, and what I want for it. Does that make sense?”

  “You’re demisexual,” I said. “Demi. You need the attachment before the sex stuff comes into play.”

  “Yes, I think that’s a term I’ve read about and it sounds right. Does that help you understand?”

  I was so relieved by the answer, I burst into tears. He shushed me quietly and scooted back onto my bed so he could haul me into his lap. He was as strong as he was tall and wide, and so I sat there, cradled and adored, with my boyfriend whispering in my ear how beautiful he thought I was, how everything was going to be okay, how much he looked forward to seeing me every day and how much he liked my family.

  If the talks with my mother and grandmother hadn’t been enough to convince me that I didn’t need to consider Jack a part of the package deal with my baby, how cherished and cared for I felt in that moment would have.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Jack took his sweet time getting back to me. It wasn’t like he was ghosting me—he sent me a few brief messages to say hold tight, working on it and this is hard thanks for patience, but holding tight and patience were not my strong suits. I was eager to find out what he wanted to do. I assumed the holdup was that he hadn’t told his father yet, or that he had and they were losing their minds about it, but neither scenario was particularly reassuring. I did my best not to dwell, though, continuing along my gestational journey one cheeseburger at a time.

  Which was a lot of cheeseburgers. I’d remained a big fan throughout the pregnancy, to the point I’d probably never want to say the word cow after Cass was born.

  While I waited for Baby Daddy to get his crap together, I worked on getting myself into a Lamaze class. I couldn’t find an in-person place so late, but I was able to find an online class that’d help. Dr. Cardiff had warned me about them filling up fast. It’d just slipped between the cracks of high school and pregnancy and doctor’s visits and new boyfriend.

  I was the busiest-not-busy person in the world.

  I was okay with the online class, though. The less huffing and puffing I had to do in front of strangers, the better.

  “I can do it online,” I announced to Devi. “I should start it next week.”

  Devi peered at me over her phone, smiling. She’d come over after school for a spa day, which was, essentially, her slathering herself with various goos and then chasing me around until I sat still long enough for my own goo-fest. I’d drawn the line at snail cream. She said it was super hot in Korea.

  I said I was super okay not being in on the new, exciting snail secretion trend.

  “My skin feels like a baby’s butt, I’ll have you know,” she said.

  “Did you hear me about the Lamaze class?”

  “Yeah, sure, but I hadn’t gotten past the snail thing yet. You compliment my skin all the time and I’m telling you, it’s the snail. It’s ethically harvested snail goo, bee tee dubs. They don’t puree snails. That’d be animal cruelty.”

  I blinked at her.

  “Devi.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you like this?”

  She grinned.

  “There’s no one left to stop me. Anyway, what they do is they put the snails on a screen and then shine a light on them that makes them happy. The snails happily secrete on the screen, and then they collect the leavings and make skin care with it. So really, you’re using the snail version of pixie dust on your face. It’s magical.”

  “So you’re saying they get the snail excited, it uhhh...spurts and then you smear it all over your face.”

  “DON’T MAKE IT WEIRD. IT’S HAPPINESS SECRETIONS. IT’S DIFFERENT.” She paused. “Oh, and if Jack doesn’t call Lamaze dibs, I’ll be your coach.”

  “You would?” I hadn’t considered that I’d be there with anyone other than my mom, but the idea of it being Devi—of it being my best friend who’d been my best friend since pudding cup days—made a lot of sense.

  “They’re going to assume we’re together,” I said. “When two queers are anywhere together, we must be dating, ’cause that’s how it works for the straights, right? Whatever. I’ll have the hottest girl in the room, either way.”

  “You really would,” she said. “And you know why I’m hot? Snails. Snails all over my face.”

  I stared at her.

  She grinned back.

  Five minutes later, I had snail secretions on my face. True fact: snails do, in fact, make your skin feel like a baby’s butt. I was a convert, but for the first application, I winced and whined a lot. Devi called me a baby. Then she took the snail stuff off and put a mud thing on and it hardened until I looked like Pennywise. I was five minutes shy of finishing my clown-bake mask when we heard the clatter from the other room. There was a loud thud, a crash and Mormor shouting, “Attans.”

  I didn’t speak much Swedish, but the swears I knew by heart.

  Devi and I rushed out of my room and into the hall. Mom was at work for a few hours yet, so it was just us and my grandmother. Mormor was in her craft room, a place I associated with the West Wing from Beauty in the Beast because I’d been forbidden to go in there upon penalty of death. The last petal had fallen off her rose a while ago, leaving her in her perennially salty meat suit, but apparently there were still things to protect in her craft sanctum; the warning she’d issued when we’d moved in almost the same as it’d been when I was five and visiting with Mom.

  “Mormor? Are you okay?” I asked, knocking.

  “Yes, yes. I’m fine. Just a little spilled paint. Be careful when you open the door.”

  Open the door? I’m allowed in there?

  It was likely a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and so I took the invitation, less because I was worried about my grandmother’s well-being—she’d told me she was okay despite the crash—but more because maybe I’d be able to see what magical things she had hidden inside.

  The door opened.

  My breath did, in fact, catch in my throat.

  It was a nursery.

  There was another small bedroom next to Mom’s that I’d assumed would be the baby’s space. But Mormor had instead converted her own craft room to accommodate my sprogling. The walls were painted rich navy blue and there were gold-foil stars of varying sizes everywhere. These weren’t the sticker decorations you could buy on the internet, either. She’d hand-stenciled about a trillion of them, along the tops of the walls and curving down around the corners of the room. It must have taken her forever to finish them all, but somehow, I’d never caught her in there.

  “When? Oh, my God, Mormor. This is beautiful,” I said.

  Devi nodded. “Wow, this kid’s super lucky. Really nice, Mormor.”

  Mormor sniffed and mopped up a small puddle of spilled gold paint, her smile tight. “Thank you. Little Star needs her space. And it’s getting cold out. The yard work is over for the season. I have time during the day when you’re at school.”

  I was emotional. Again. I battled the tears, managing to keep them at bay, but Devi knew. Sh
e patted my shoulder and pulled me in for a half hug. I collected myself so I could help Mormor clean up the paint, but when I tried to stoop from the waist... Nope. No go. I couldn’t do it. The belly was in the way and I was stuck hovering halfway to the floor. I reached for the door frame, intent to kneel and try to help that way by going on my hands and knees, but Devi shouldered past me.

  “No way with that stomach. I got this.” Devi grabbed the paper towels and mopped at the paint. Luckily, Mormor had prepped the room with a plastic drop cloth before work, so the disaster hadn’t impacted the Berber carpet.

  “You’re the best,” I said. “Both of you.”

  Devi flashed me a smile. It made her Pennywise mask crack.

  “Except when you do that,” I added. “That’s terrifying.”

  “So’s your face.”

  Considering I was as bemasked as Devi, she wasn’t wrong.

  “Girls.” Mormor shook her head and dumped her soiled paper towels in the garbage. She eyed the walls, assessing her work with a thoughtful nod. “How about you wash your faces, I change out of these overalls and we go to Ikea? I think it’s time to pick out some baby furniture.”

  * * *

  Going to Ikea for not-Swedish people is a harrowing experience. It’s big, it’s crowded. The overhead lighting is brutal and gets you sweaty fast. They’ve set up the aisles so you’re essentially stuck in a mouse maze and the only way out is to pass their Idaho-sized home goods section full of baskets, art and candle tchotchkes you can impulse buy for a buck.

  Going to Ikea with your Swedish grandmother? An altogether different, and somehow more aggravating, experience. Not only did you have all that other stuff to contend with, but you had Mormor’s strange Swedish pride, too. At everything. The vast and varied, yet somehow stylistically the same, furnishings became indicators of superior Swedish design, instilled in us by our Viking ancestors. Kitchen cabinets with choose-your-own hardware were a sign of our cleverness. Vikings did, after all, invent the comb, the tent and the magnetic compass, Mormor informed us.

  Bet you didn’t know Vikings had skills beyond just raiding and pillaging.

  They were big on spatial efficiency and modular home living, too.

  Devi and I slogged along behind her, carrying the obnoxious yellow bags with the blue handles while Mormor chattered on and on through the aisles, pushing her cart and smiling. I wasn’t going to rain on her parade—she’d painted me a nursery, after all—but there were times when I considered perhaps diving into a Kvikne wardrobe with two sliding doors and lots of interior storage space in hopes of meeting a goat-man in Narnia.

  “Do you even have any Ikea furniture in your house?” Devi whispered to me.

  “Nope. She like antiques and Americana,” I whispered back.

  “So why’s she so...you know. About Ikea?”

  “Because she’s Mormor,” was the best I had.

  Devi seemed to understand, though. She nodded gravely and continued on. We were deep in the middle of the cement building, so we had no cell service. We took to hitting each other with our empty yellow bags for fun. Every once in a while, Mormor would look back over her shoulder at us, her expression suggesting she did not want to turn this car around, and Devi and I would smarten up for forty seconds before going right back to being brats.

  We giggled a lot in spite of our shared misery.

  At least our skin looked good.

  It took us seventy-three days and nights to get to the baby section, but once there, my reservations about being trapped in Ikea faded. There were ten nursery vignettes scattered around, with cribs and dressers and plushies and soft blankets. I picked up a blanket, and then remembered the navy-blue-and-gold blanket Mormor had been knitting over the past few months. She’d known she was going to decorate the nursery. She’d been planning all along.

  “Thank you again, Mormor,” I said.

  “I like that one,” was her reply, ignoring me to point at a white crib with two pullout storage drawers underneath. I approached and ran my hand over the rails, my eyes skimming the ticket that told me all the ways this was an adjustable bed, to grow with my kid as they went from baby to toddler and beyond.

  “The white drawers or the natural finish wood would look nice with the blue and gold,” Devi offered. “I think I like the white.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t speak. Not then, not when we picked out a bureau and a changing table and an upholstered corner chair so I could nurse. Not when we filled up those tacky yellow bags with baby linens, a mobile and soft stuffed animals.

  I had a nursery. A real live nursery for a real live baby that was coming far sooner than she was not coming, and oh, my God, everything feels so real.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The next three weeks were spent with an Allen wrench assembling furniture. I wasn’t stuck doing it, more surveying the process and bearing witness to oodles of my mom’s go-to swear words and delivering her gallons of much-needed coffee. Mormor had checked out, saying she’d bought the furniture and painted the nursery, so Mom got the pleasure of putting it all together.

  Come to find out, big pregnant bellies didn’t do well with a lot of things that required mobility, including building a crib with eighty thousand modular pieces. It was official. I had popped. Cass was a volleyball-sized impediment to productivity. I could no longer pity Erika from my Saturday group without looking down at my own midsection and RIPing my feet. The backaches were real; so was the need to pee. Dr. Cardiff hadn’t been kidding. The flutterbye baby in my middle, kicking to her heart’s content, meant I was in the bathroom a ton, and that number was only going to climb. “So strap in,” Dr. Cardiff said at my check-in.

  That appointment, she also introduced me to two other OB/GYNs in her practice. I wasn’t sure why until she dropped the anvil on my head of, “In case I can’t be there to deliver Cassiopeia for whatever reason.”

  I must have gone pale at the possibility of having another doctor looking at my baby-distended wahoo, because Dr. Cardiff rushed to reassure me. “I plan to be there, Sara. It’s in case of emergency. I make a wide majority of my patient’s births. But if it happens that I can’t make it, small if, but if, I thought you’d like to know my backups?”

  I didn’t particularly want to meet either doctor, considering they represented my delivery plans swirling down a giant baby-sized crapper, but I sat through short introductions and hollow reassurances that Dr. Cone and Dr. Laghari were so happy to be on my birthing team. Pointing out that they were both men and I really didn’t want a man doctor gazing at my spew parts would have been worthwhile to mention, but I was so desperate to get out of there, I stayed quiet, nodding a lot and miraculously not crying. Well, for a while, anyway.

  I kept it together until the car, and then I exploded. The snot and tears flew, Mom offering me piles of drive-through-window napkins to sop up the flood before we both drowned. She stroked my hair, her fingers getting tangled in my black curls, her words quiet and loving. It was exactly what I needed when I was feeling vulnerable. My mommy comforting me. I was really lucky to have her, and that she was so supportive, and had been throughout my pregnancy.

  In fact, I was so grateful to her, I...cried all the harder. Look, there’s been a lot of crying, I know, but you have to understand your hormones are frantic and weird and unreliable. My brain was a writhing sack of cats far more often than not. I was lucky I could get up in the morning and put on pants without breaking down that everything was awful forever.

  “Thanks,” I warbled, cramming a wad of McDonald’s napkins up my nose.

  “You’re welcome, peaches. It sounds like she’s going to be there, at least. So that’s good.” Mom stroked her fingers down my cheek and tucked them under my chin. “I’m sorry you’re so upset. Is there something I can do that doesn’t involve murder? Mommy doesn’t want to go to jail yet. Mommy has living left to do, and a grandkid o
n the way.”

  “No, probably not. It’s just that I don’t want a strange dude looking at me when I...you know.” The confession made me embarrassed. Dr. Cardiff had been looking up the rude end of me a lot, and yet I still had hesitation when it came to dude doctors, apparently? “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Nah, it’s not. I still prefer doctors who have my junk and understand my junk to the alternative, but I’m going to tell you a secret, and you won’t believe me, but I swear it’s true.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You aren’t going to care. Like, you think you will. Remember when you were freaked about the poop thing?”

  “But I am still freaked about the poop thing,” I said.

  “Well, okay then. I thought we were past that. Oops. But I promise you, you are going to be so busy with getting that kid out of you, you won’t care who sees what. Seriously. No birth is clean or polite. None. And your body is contorting in weird ways and it’s freakish and weird and it hurts and your focus will one hundred percent be on getting through it as efficiently as possible. There were six masked strangers in the room when I had you. Your grandmother held one hand, your dad held the other hand and this army of medical people in a really ugly teal stood there, staring at my parts, and I didn’t care. Even a bit. And then you came out, and you were slimy and wriggly and gross and I loved you immediately.” Mom paused. “It’s consuming, Sara. Totally consuming. The things you think you’ll care about, you don’t care about. It’s secondary to the baby. All you’re going to know is that you need help and there are people there who are helping you. That will supersede everything, I promise.”

  “Look at you, with the fifty-cent word,” I said.

  “I know, right? It’s like your mom isn’t nearly as ignorant as she looks!”