Page 84 of Maybe in Another Life

“OK,” he says.

Just as I am about to get off the phone, I say one thing, for my unborn kid. “If you ever change your mind, you can call me. If you want to meet the baby. And I hope that if he or she wants to meet you one day, you’ll be open to it.”

“No,” he says.

His answer jars me. “What?”

“No,” he says again. “You are making the choice to have this baby. I do not want you to have it. If you have it, you have to deal with the child not having a father. I’m not going to live my life knowing that any day a kid could show up.”

“Classy” is all I say.

“I have to protect what I already have,” he says. “Are we done here?”

“Yeah,” I tell him. “We’re done.”

We are lost in the maternity ward, and we can’t seem to find our way out. First, we were stuck in the delivery department. Now we’re outside the nursery.

The last thing I want to do right now is look at beautiful, precious babies. But I notice Gabby is no longer behind me. She’s staring.

“We are going to start trying soon,” she says. She’s not even looking at me. She’s looking at the babies.

“What are we going to start trying to do?”

She looks at me as if I’m so stupid I’m embarrassing her. “No, Mark and I. We’re going to try to have a baby.”

“You want to have a kid?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I was going to ask what you thought when you got here, but I didn’t get a chance before the accident, and... and then, when you woke up...”

“Right,” I say. I don’t want her to say it out loud. The inference is enough. “But you think you’re ready? That’s so exciting!” My own ambivalence about a baby doesn’t, for a minute, take away from the joy of her having one. “A little half Gabby, half Mark,” I add. “Wow!”

“I know. It’s a really exciting thought. Super scary, too. But really exciting.”

“So you’ll be... doing the ol’... actually, is there even a popular euphemism for trying to have a baby?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “But yes, we’ll be doing the ol’...”

“Wow,” I say again. “I just can’t believe that we are old enough to the point where you’re going to actuallytryto get pregnant.”

“I know,” she says. “You spend your whole life learning hownotto get pregnant, and then, one day, you suddenly have to reverse all of that training.”

“Well, this is awesome,” I say. “You and Mark are so good together. You’re going to be great parents.”

“Thank you,” she says, and squeezes my shoulder.

A nurse comes up to us. “Which one are you visiting?” she asks.

“Oh, no,” Gabby says. “Sorry. We are just lost. Can you point us back to general surgery?”

“Down the hall, take your first right, then your second left. You’ll see a vending machine. Follow that hall to the end, take a left...” The directions go on and on. Clearly, I took us much farther away than I meant to.

“OK,” Gabby says. “Thank you.” She turns to me. “Let’s go.”

We go past what looks like a neonatal unit, maybe intensive care. And then we go through double doors and find ourselves in the children’s ward.

“I don’t think this is the right way,” I say.

“She said there was a left up here somewhere...”

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