“Problem?” she echoes with narrowed eyes.
I glance at the other two and move so that her body blocks the gesture I make over my own abdomen.
“Ah.” She smiles. “Thank you.”
The sun falls on her, coaxing red highlights from her dark hair, pointing out the freckles across her nose. All at once, I see all the ages she has been: the small, aloof girl I first met, the child who brushed my hair; the weary, hungry girl who came to us after her mother’s death; the vigorous eight-year-old who made forts and bossed her sister around; the fourteen-year-old who already had substance issues I didn’t take seriously enough. Love like an ocean fills me, moves through me, uncontainable, inexpressibly huge. I have loved her just this much since the very first moment we met, as if we were on our hundredth life together, as if she had been born to me in another dimension.
“A tablespoon steeped in hot water for five minutes,” I say. “You can add as much honey as you like.”
She hugs me. “Thank you, this was very sweet. I love you, you know.”
“I know. I love you, too,” I say, and close my eyes and smell her hair and am so grateful that she’s alive and here in the world that I almost swoon with it. To avoid showing any of that, I pull away, pat her shoulder. “Call me when you get back, okay?”
“Yes. I promise.”
I wave to the others. “I have to meet Kara,” I say, and don my sunglasses. Shoulders straight, I leave her. To her own choices, her own friends, her own everything, even if it breaks my heart.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Maya
The doctor’s office is filled with well-tended women at various stages of pregnancy, and I halt just inside the door so fast that I can feel Norah screeching to a stop behind me. I turn around and head back into the white-painted hallway, sweat breaking on my neck. “This is a mistake.”
“Which part?” Norah asks. “The baby or the office?”
I look through the sidelight window beside the door. “Look at those women.” I think of them in perfectly furnished homes, with husbands waiting at night to see what the doctor said. They’re all wearing yoga pants that cling to their toned bodies and T-shirts that tuck around the baby bump for utmost adorability. A roar fills my ears. “I can’t go in there.”
“Okay,” she says, and there’s nothing pro or con or über-patient about the word. It’s just a word of agreement. “Is there somewhere else you’d feel more comfortable?”
My heart is beating a little too fast, and that noise is still filling my ears, but . . . “Rory will be so disappointed in me if I don’t keep this appointment. It will seem like before, when I was always unreliable.”
She nods. Her braid is like silk falling over a tanned shoulder as she peers into the room. “I could just go in and wait in the room and you can stay out here if you want.”
The alternative gives me space to breathe, as if I’m in a cage, but one with an open door. A woman about my age comes out, her very round belly pushing ahead of her. She looks tired and her face is spotted with red blotches. “Hi,” she says.
“Not far away for you, huh?” Norah asks.
“Maybe today,” she replies wearily, holding up crossed fingers.
“Good luck,” I manage. She waddles down the hall, her hand on her lower back. “I guess I can go in.”
I’m still jumpy and uncomfortable, but it’s uneventful. Norah reads on her phone and I leaf through a magazine about expectant mothers, and the reality of everything starts to hit home. I’m pregnant. That will end in a baby. In between will be a growing belly. Waddling.
By the time the nurse calls my name, I’ve worked myself into a state of anxiety, high enough that my hands are shaking, and right on the edges of my eyelashes are tears ready to spill at the slightest provocation.
But I also have to show up for this. I know how important it is to tell the truth, too. I had a long talk with Deborah after Ayaz left, and while she gently chided me about getting involved with anyone so early in sobriety, she focused mainly on the pregnancy news. With her I could say the things I’m terrified about—how long I’ve been pregnant, how long I might have been drinking, how that might affect the baby.
I spill it all to the doctor, a woman in her fifties with short, no-nonsense hair colored bright red. I like her immediately, and that makes it easier to tell the truth. Which she seems to take in stride. “Well, let’s see where you are before we worry too much about the rest. What did you do to your arm?”