This Story Might Save Your Life(27)

“We can.” He drew the words out so slowly it felt like he was shouting what remained unspoken. Didn’t I want a baby?

I didn’t remind him that we’d already discussed this. That I was worried about what it would do to my health. I knew other women with severe sleep disorders who’d struggled mightily through pregnancy and early motherhood. Was it possible? Yes. In the same way many things were possible for me: With planning. With time. And probably with help, which we couldn’t yet afford. “Can we discuss this later?”

“Later” came the following night while on a double date with Benny and Luna. We’d attended a gallery opening in a warehouse on La Brea for an artist who fashioned sculptures from construction debris and used food wrappers. Drinking cheap wine out of plastic cups, we wandered around the hot room trying to find meaning in heaps of trash.

“Pretty sure this one’s an airplane.” Benny pointed to a mound of rebar and Butterfinger wrappers in the middle of the polished concrete floor.

“Because…?” I saw nothing suggesting airplane.

“Just thought it might spark a discussion.”

“In that case, I have a topic for us,” Xander said.

“How unfair it is that some people are born with extraordinary talent like this while the rest of us are doomed to mediocrity?” Benny said.

Luna elbowed him. “Speak for yourself.”

Xander smiled. “Babies.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Benny’s head angled back, eyes darting between me and Xander. “Is there anything you want to tell us?”

“No. Yes. No.” I tried to laugh. “Xander wants a baby.”

“Now?” Benny asked. “Like, soon?”

“No,” I said as Xander said, “Maybe?”

“Well, that’s…” Luna fixed me with such a penetrating stare I swear she could see straight into my soul. “Do you want a baby?”

At the time, I couldn’t yet answer that question, and Luna knew it. Perhaps to save me from saying something stupid, she added, “I certainly don’t.”

Benny whipped around. “What?”

“What what?”

“Never?”

Luna’s head angled to the side. “I take it you do.”

“Well, I mean.” He shrugged, clearly befuddled. “Not now.”

“Then how do you know you’ll want one later?”

“How do you know you won’t?”

She raised a defiant eyebrow. “Are you suggesting I don’t know myself well enough to make an educated decision about this?”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

Xander laughed so loudly everyone in a twenty-foot radius turned to stare. It defused the tension such that Benny returned his attention to me. “What about your sleep disorder?”

“I’ll take nights,” Xander said. He must have heard himself, because he quickly added, with another laugh, “And when that fails, we’ll hire a night nurse.”

The whole idea sounded impossible, but Xander wouldn’t let it drop. After a few months, it began to feel inevitable. We’d be walking to a restaurant, having a perfectly adult conversation, when a stroller would pass by, and all at once he’d be making faces and raspberries at the confused child, and I’d be left standing next to the new mother with my still-flat belly, apologizing for interrupting their walk. He was absolutely obsessed.

I can hear you all cooing as I write this.

I can also predict your next thought: Wait. They don’t have a baby.

I divulge a lot of personal information on the podcast. For better or worse, you know all about my childhood crushes, my food obsessions, my mental health misadventures, even the toenail fungus I’ve been fighting since episode 157. I’ve talked without thinking so many times I occasionally worry my filter is broken. But the one topic I’ve shared nothing about is babies.

People speculate. I can’t blame them. I speculate too. If a person is of a certain age and without progeny, you find yourself wondering why. It doesn’t matter if they’re happy, or lonely, or married, or divorced, or neurodivergent, or neurotypical, or psychopathic, or telepathic, or rich, or struggling to make ends meet, or none of the above, or some of the above. You wonder. You wonder why they’re of that certain age without progeny.

I am of that certain age. And I did get pregnant.





Benny Abbott


Day Two

Luna drives the four of us back over the hill in her twenty-year-old Honda CR-V. It smells the same, like lotion and leather. “I can’t believe you still have this car,” I say without thinking, still trying to process what we’ve just learned.

“What are you talking about? It’s practically brand-new.”

Her house is like this too. Full of worn-but-functional furniture. Never mind that she can afford better. It takes a lot for her to admit when things have run their course. They first have to break.

I stare out the side window.

The moment we hit my driveway, Mallory hops out and makes a beeline for her own car.

“I need a shower,” she says over her shoulder. I think she’s crying.

Quinn looks to me as if asking for help, but I’ve got nothing. “I’ll call you later.”