Five(9)

I like it already, he texts back.

Message sent, she rejoins the party, sits down next to her grandmother, and holds her hand.

“Hello, dear,” the old woman says, and adds with a wink, “Have you tried the finger sandwiches, or has Phoebe gotten to those too?”

Emma smiles. “Nanna,” she says, “I have excellent news. I’m going to have a baby.”

“Tremendous!” Nanna says. “Who’s the fellow then?”

“No, Nan, it’s just going to be me. On my own,” Emma says.

The old woman looks across the room at the childless Anne, whom she has always thought too big for her britches, announcing her engagement on her ninetieth birthday like that, getting married on the anniversary of her late husband’s death. He was a war hero, for God’s sake; the child has no respect. And then at Phoebe, so matronly and dull, with that figure, good heavens, she has no self-control, that one.

Then she looks at Emma, whom she has always loved the most of all her grandchildren because she knows how it feels to be hard to love. Then, looking back at the others for just a moment, she says, “Now that’s the spirit, Emmy. You go give them what for.”

Emma doesn’t need to make an announcement to the family, she just shows up at Nanna’s ninety-third, seven months pregnant, stunning in a pair of Louboutin’s and her same signature black sheath, which now hugs her perfect bump.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” says Anne, pale, shocked, still not pregnant, red blotches crawling across her breastbone at her sister’s betrayal.

“Oh,” says Emma, stroking Anne’s arm, “I hope you can be happy for me. I mean, I know this can’t be easy for you, when everyone around you is getting pregnant and you’re still—”

“Who’s the father?” Emma’s mother says, voice shaking, spitting the words, taking a step toward her daughter. She asked this once before, when Emma was sixteen, when her mother should have protected her but blamed her instead.

“C’mon now, Mum, you know me better than that. What do I need him for? I mean, except for the fucking, ladies, am I right,” Emma says, with a smile like a dagger.

“What is wrong with you, Emma? It’s an actual person! A real baby. Why did you do this?” Anne half shouts, with trembling hands, clenched teeth.

“Well,” Emma says, after a pause, “because I can,” throwing can at Anne’s empty womb like a grenade.

And that is how Emma wins. Or thinks she wins. Because soon she will know what the Annes and Phoebes all around her know, about the primal love for one’s child, the wonder and the terror of motherhood that even Emma will have to feel. But in this moment, all the women in the room, in their lightning-bolt earrings and Disco Mama tees and faux-leather leggings that bunch at the knees, hate her for everything she can and will do without a man. And hate themselves more for everything they do, and will do, forever, because of one.

“You’ve outdone yourself, Emma,” Phoebe says, contemptuously, but also hurt that no relatives at the party noticed her own five-month gestational belly, except for the cousin who assumed she’d gained weight again and tried to sell her some Herbalife.

Emma cradles her bump, kicking up one leg behind her like a forties pinup girl. “Guess I have, Phoebs. This really isn’t as hard as you lot have made it out to be, you know.”

“Just you wait,” Phoebe says, as she locks eyes with Emma, pops a tiny sausage in her mouth, and swallows it. Whole.



* * *





“Gideon?” she asks the air of his empty room.

“Gideon?” she asks the line of her shoes, placed in precise single file, every toe touching each heel, each left shoe followed by a right shoe of a different pair—Chelsea boots, court shoes, stilettos, platform heels—marching through the hallway down the stairs.

“Gideon,” she says, following the line, bleary-eyed, fumbling for her glasses in the pocket of her dressing gown, a familiar clench squeezing her stomach.

“Gideon,” she whispers to herself, rubbing her forehead, trying to wake up, looking for him room by room downstairs. She checks the kitchen, the under-stairs cupboard. She checks under the dining table, behind the sofa in the living room, her heart pounding louder, her breath coming faster.

He is curled up in a ball behind the armchair. She smells him first, ammonia and wet flannel. After consulting with the doctor, they abandoned the nighttime disposable pull-ups. It would not have been her choice, but the doctor said they were a crutch, he needed to feel the consequences to understand. But she knows he understands the consequences very well. Too well.

She gets down on her hands and knees, swallows hard, steadies her voice, moves in close to him, and says, reaching out her hand to the small, pajama-covered dome of his back, “Gideon, darling, Mummy isn’t cross, it’s just it’s the middle of the night and I didn’t know—”

“Knock, knock,” he says, lifting his head out of his folded arms, not looking at her.

“Gideon!” she says, exasperated.

“Knock, knock!” he shouts.

But by the time she says, “All right, who’s there,” she is already bleeding.

“Gideon!” she screams, one hand over the eye he stabbed with the heel of her stiletto, and one hand on his wrist, shaking it until he drops the shoe.