Manhattan had been exciting. Even at seven months pregnant it was exciting. Before she had arrived she had not even really been sure of the relationship between New York and Manhattan, whether they were the same place, how they fitted together. Now here she was, amazed at how much like the movies it all looked, young enough to be pleased with herself for that insight. She was never quite sure how he’d managed to get her a work visa so quickly, but Ned always had a way of getting the things he wanted.
A fortnight passed, a fortnight of long meetings and snatched lunches – great doorstop sandwiches, delivered to their rickety desks – and rides in yellow cabs.
And then late one afternoon as she left the office – it was just her, Adam and Ned in that first-floor walk-up – for the apartment Ned had rented for her, Ned had called her over, glanced again at her midriff and asked: ‘So, Nikki, are you planning to keep this baby?’
And in that moment, as if someone had flicked a switch, she realized both the full horror of her situation and the futility of her coping strategy. No, this was not just all going to miraculously go away and, yes, at some point this baby was actually going to come out. And be a person. With a mother. A person who would eventually want to know who its father was.
No, she was not planning to keep this baby. She. Just. Could. Not.
Ned had arranged everything.
Renting a little house for her upstate when she was a few weeks away from her due date, booking the car that took her to the hospital. Sending those flowers, those enormous looming white lilies, for when she was discharged. He’d tried to sit down with her and go through all the paperwork. The agency was a private one, that was how it worked in America; he’d shown her the brochures – they promised to place the child with a loving family who could provide a safe, comfortable home, a loving and nurturing environment. There were pages he’d flicked through about their vetting procedures, their criteria. Pictures of beautiful homes, happy babies, on every glossy page. Her throat ached, turning the pages. Her heart ached, every time she thought about it. Inside her the baby kicked, and hiccupped, and wriggled.
A closed adoption, that was what she’d asked for, when the options were explained to her. Was that because Ned had made it sound like the most sensible thing for both of them, Nikki and her unborn baby? Afterwards, although she’d been sore for a week or so, cried and slept at weird times of the day and night, it all started to feel fuzzy, as if it had all happened to someone else. She asked Ned if she could come back to work, and was comforted by the fact she had something to return to, something she seemed to be good at.
None of them mentioned it again.
She did think about Ron – once or twice she had even seen him, across a crowded room in one of the clubs, at a launch party, on TV at some premiere, or stumbled upon one of his movies on TV, and felt a curious mixture of emotions.
She thought about the child too, her boy, out there somewhere, wondered which of the two of them he might look like. And then she told herself he was better off not knowing any of it. But sometimes, just sometimes, she saw someone out of the corner of her eye, a boy, a teenager, a young man and it struck her that it could be him, that the chance was slim but it was not impossible that it actually was her son. And that even if that boy, teenager, young man was not her son, he was out there somewhere. Someone with his life and his hopes and his dreams and perhaps even his own family now. Someone she would almost certainly never meet and who would almost certainly never meet her. And that was a strange feeling.
It was even stranger to think that she had no photograph, had never had a photograph of him, had never named him, could barely even remember him – a weight in her arms at the hospital, a howling red thing, born with a great thick head of dark hair slicked down against his scalp, chubby little legs. She could remember the nurse telling her not to worry about that little red mark on his eyelid, and those patches – the two dark patches, one on his calf and one on his shoulder – that they’d probably all fade with time. And she remembered wondering why the nurse would think that mattered to her, and then realizing that she did care, it did matter, and then wondering what that meant. And she remembered being exhausted, and sleeping. And she remembered waking, and the baby being gone.