Page 31 of The Lookback

“But what about all the weird stuff?” Beth asks.

“None of it is weirder than me wearing this jumper.” I laugh. “But the decor is all stuff I brought back with me,” I say. “I picked it up in Los Angeles on this last trip, and I didn’t want to leave it back at the house of pestilence, so I brought it here.”

“Youbought all this weird stuff?” David asks.

I widen my eyes and drop my hands to my hips. “Are you saying it’s tacky?” I can’t help it. Right as I ask, I notice a Ross Dress For Less tag on the top of the totem pole, and I cringe. “This stuff cost me an arm and a leg, and my interior designer has been collecting it for weeks.”

No one’s going to believe it. Mandy’s still going to have to spill whatever secret is making her apoplectic, and they’re all going to ask me why I’m making up stories.

Only, for some reason, they do appear to buy my far-fetched claim that all this kitschy, cheap crap is mine. Obviously Abigail, Amanda, Emery, and Maren know what’s going on, but at least everyone else may not need to find out.

Mandy mouths, “Thank you,” when no one else is looking, but then I grab my overnight bag and duck into the bathroom to change. I’ll be stuck wearing a business suit, but anything is better than this far-too-small jumper.

I’ve barely emerged from the bathroom, feeling a little less insane, when my phone starts ringing with a call from an unknown number. Very few people even have this phone number, and I consider not answering, but I did share it with a handful of major stakeholders, so I can’t ignore it entirely.

“I better take this,” I say as I walk out the front door. The porch swing here is my favorite part of Mandy’s house. When I sit down, that weird cardinal flies over and lands on the arm of the swing. I try to shoo it away as I answer. “Hello?”

It tilts its head at me, like it knows something, though what of value a little red bird could know, I haven’t the foggiest.

“Helen Fisher?”

“That’s me.” I really hope this is one of the shareholders, ready to meet. A few more on my side, and my work’s basically done.

“I’m calling because of your insurance physical this morning,” the woman says.

“Oh, no,” I say. “Please tell me they don’t need to redo anything. I’m pretty busy right now, and?—”

“No, no, nothing like that,” the woman says. “But your test results showed that you were pregnant, and on the questionnaire you filled outnot pregnant, so as a courtesy, we always call and notify people of the discrepancy.”

A discrepancy.

Like the height I wrote down being off by half an inch or my weight being low by a few pounds. Or like, maybe my blood sugar’s high. An anomaly. An inconsistency. That’s what she’s saying she’s calling about. She’s just calling to let me know there’s a small discrepancy—nothing major.

I’m just growing ahumaninside my stomach. Carry on.

9

DONNA

My baby hates me.

That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s not entirely untrue either. When Aiden was born, he would curl up against me to nurse. He would wrap his tiny fist around my finger, and he would snuggle in, and when I finished, he’d usually go to sleep.

If he was upset, hungry, sad, scared, or tired, all he needed to calm down was his mother.

That’s what mothers do, they soothe their upset children. It’s our job.

It’s tiring. It’s exhausting. It’s sometimes even demoralizing, but mothers change diapers, we feed, we burp, and we comfort those babies from birth, so we knowjusthow to make them better.

Except with Althea, I don’t have a clue.

I’m not sure whether it’s because she’s not my biological baby, or maybe it’s because she’s a girl? It could be that my husband is actually involved this time, so she splits her time with her dad. I’ve also been really sick with my pregnancy, and Beth stayed around and she keeps offering to help. Will’s mother comes over quite a bit as well. With four different people who all lend a hand, maybe she hasn’t really figured out who she can trust.

But she’s just as likely to cry when I hold her as when anyone else does. She’s just as likely to flail around, turn bright red, and slap at my face as she is to do it to anyone else. At six months old, it feels like my baby, my darling little Althea, doesn’t really likemeat all.

Once she’s done eating, she shoves away from me rather forcefully, knocking the bottle to the floor. While I try to pick it up, she flails around trying to sit up. I twist and tug, trying to pull her against me, but with my huge belly, there’s not much place for her to go, and she wants to get away. She kicks out hard, her small feet slamming into my belly, and I almost drop her.

I know every pregnancy is different. Every baby is different. Every child is their own person, and they all have ideas and interests that we have to discover. Abby talks all the time about how each child is unique. I get that.

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