The Baby Plan by Kate Rorick (6)

NATHALIE CLOSED THE CAR DOOR AFTER ANOTHER long day on her feet. No one ever seemed to realize how much standing went into teaching. She knew one teacher in the math department that developed the habit of giving out weekly quizzes to his classes on staggered days, so he could guarantee he would get to sit for at least twenty minutes every day. Of course, he then had to grade the quizzes, but there were trade-offs in everything.

Today’s trade-off for Nathalie was, after a long day on her feet, to attend a disconcerting doctor’s appointment.

Not that it was a bad appointment. But, as Nathalie was finding out, every step of this baby business had . . . bumps.

It always felt soothing to walk into Dr. Duque’s world. It was clinical, clean, and straightforward. Like the logical part of the brain, but with pictures of happy, healthy babies on the walls. Nothing here was chaotic, or even in disarray. The admin nurse worked diligently and quietly behind the desk, and even the other patients were as docile as cows. Nothing to do but be patient.

Because, as Dr. Duque often said, there’s no rushing a baby.

Soon enough Nathalie was led back to the intake area. The nurse asked the usual questions: How are you feeling? Any odd symptoms? She was weighed (oof), her blood pressure taken (not too bad, considering her long day at school), and her urine collected.

She was getting really good at peeing into a cup.

But the soothing blues of the waiting room and the calming routine of the doctor’s office were overridden, when the doctor finally walked into the room.

Who was not Dr. Duque.

Bump number one.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Keen,” said the chipper woman who entered the office. Really, she was a girl—younger than Nathalie, younger than possibly Lyndi, with multiple earrings and the side-shaved head look that Nathalie saw on some of her cooler students and that she secretly envied. “Dr. Duque had a family emergency, so I’m covering for her today.”

“You’re a doctor?” Nathalie blurted out.

“Yup!” Dr. Keen grinned. Thank God she didn’t have braces. “Went to school and everything.”

“When?”

“ . . . Recently. So, Mrs. Kneller . . . Nathalie?”

She pronounced the h in Nathalie, like “path” or “wrath” . . . and causing the usual twinge of annoyance that Nathalie had endured her entire life.

“It’s Ms. Kneller,” she corrected. No need to get into the long debate about how she was really Mrs. Kneller-Chen and how fun that was to always explain. “And it’s Nathalie,” she said, pronouncing the hard t. “My mother’s French-Canadian, so the spelling . . .”

She let the sentence drift off, as Dr. Keen nodded, and diligently marked it on her chart. In fact, she was marking everything down on her chart.

“So, your blood pressure looks good. Your weight gain normal. How are you feeling?”

“Oh, you know . . .” Nathalie shrugged, mildly amused by getting the banal question for the second time that visit. “Fine.”

“Because if you have any odd symptoms, now’s the time.”

“Well . . .” Nathalie said. “How would I know what’s odd? And what’s normal for pregnancy? This is my first, and everybody responds differently, right?”

“True.” Dr. Keen nodded enthusiastically, her eyes wide. “For a basic, general rule—any ‘odd’ symptom would be ‘pain.’ Of any kind. But as for everybody being different, there’s a lot of evidence that pregnancy symptoms are often genetic.”

“Genetic?”

“Sure—your mother, grandmother. Your pregnancy is likely to have similarities to theirs.” When Nathalie didn’t say anything, Dr. Keen jumped in with a rush of words. “Morning sickness for instance, if your mother wasn’t much affected, you’re less likely to be, too. Water retention, even some food cravings are passed generation to generation. So if you’re curious about the ‘oddity’ of a symptom, you could ask your mother—”

And another bump. And this was a big one.

“No. I can’t,” Nathalie replied immediately. “She’s not with us anymore.”

“Oh,” Dr. Keen said, blushing to her multipierced ears. Then she made another note on her clipboard. “Well, why don’t we run through some regular symptoms, you can tell me if you have them, and we’ll decide what’s odd?”

Nathalie nodded, happy to move away from the topic of her mother.

Dr. Keen then proceeded down a massive checklist of pregnancy symptoms that even Nathalie, in her extensive research and planning, had not encountered.

“Spotting?”

“No.”

“Swelling of the ankles or legs?”

“No.”

“Flatulence?”

“Not . . . more than normal.”

“Moles or dark spots growing?”

“They do that?”

She would give this to the young doctor: she certainly was thorough.

Once she was done, Dr. Keen looked up from her clipboard with a big bright smile. “Let’s see what’s going on in there!”

This was Nathalie’s favorite part of these monthly appointments. She unbuttoned her pants, shrugged them down just enough to expose her lower stomach. Cold jelly was smeared, as Dr. Keen flicked on the ultrasound machine. Then, she gently ground the detector (wand? Is that what it was called?) into Nathalie’s belly, watching the screen patiently for an image.

“There we are,” Dr. Keen said finally, and turned the monitor so Nathalie could see.

And there it was. At fifteen weeks, the head of the baby was enormous compared to the rest of the body—but for the first time, it looked like a baby. Previously, it was far more peanut-shaped. She’d even taken to calling it “the Peanut” in her head. Guess that would have to change now, she thought, enjoying that sharp thrill of relief at seeing the image of her baby. Proof that something was really going on in there, and holiday pie wasn’t the only cause of her pants getting tighter.

Proof that everything was okay, and that the baby was exactly where it was supposed to be.

Dr. Keen hit a couple buttons, and the ultrasound machine printed out a small photo. She handed it to Nathalie.

“Thank goodness,” she breathed.

“Thank goodness?”

“Just . . . I had a bad experience with my previous pregnancy, thank goodness everything looks normal.”

Dr. Keen’s youthful enthusiasm dropped, as her eyes fell to the clipboard. “Right, I see you had a tubal pregnancy. That must have been hard.”

“Yes,” was Nathalie’s only throaty reply.

“Your chances of miscarriage go down dramatically in the second trimester, but again, if you have concerns, or if there’s a family history of later miscarriage—”

Nathalie just shook her head. And surprisingly wise beyond her years, Dr. Keen closed her mouth. She made a last few marks on her clipboard as Nathalie wiped away the jelly residue and buttoned up her pants.

“Last thing—your blood test results from last time are back. The results for the baby are normal—you’ll still want to do the nuchal fold screening, I assume, just to be safe?” Nathalie nodded. A check went onto the chart. “Aaaand do you want to know the sex?”

“Yes . . . wait, no!” Nathalie replied. “Um . . . can you put it in an envelope? So my husband and I can find out at the same time?”

Dr. Keen nodded, her earrings jingling. “Well, then let’s get you a printout of the results, and something to put it in.”

As Nathalie left the building, clutching the ultrasound photo in one hand, and the burning envelope that contained her baby’s sex in the other, her mind reeled with Dr. Keen’s litany of questions.

She had all the books. All the information available in the world. But she still had questions. And apparently, she would never get answers to those questions, because they had left the world with her mother. Nathalie’s grandmother had passed a long time ago, and hadn’t had any children other than her mom. There were second cousins somewhere in the wilds of Montreal, but Nathalie had never met any of them. Finding them on Facebook and then asking personal questions about their pregnancies—if they’d had any—seemed a bit rude.

Maybe her dad would remember, she thought. He went through the pregnancy, too—albeit slightly removed. Yes, Nathalie thought, as she pulled into her driveway. She’d ask Dad. If anyone would know, it would be him.

So, she had a smile on her face as she walked into the dark house. It always felt good to have a plan. She flipped on the light, and called out a “hello?” just as a matter of form. David obviously wasn’t there. He was working late again.

Normally, Nathalie appreciated the quiet. She would curl up with a book, or start dinner, or she could pour a glass of wine (well, now ginger ale) and do some grading. But at that moment, the quiet loomed.

But before she could combat the quiet by running straight ahead with her plan, the plan came to her, as her phone rang, her dad’s number popping up on the phone.

“I was just thinking about you,” she said, all smiles as she answered.

“You were?” Kathy’s voice answered back. “How sweet!”

Nathalie’s smile froze. She hadn’t really spoken to Kathy since Thanksgiving, almost two weeks ago now. Not for lack of trying on Kathy’s part—seriously, Nathalie’s voice mail was maxed out by her stepmother’s high-pitched, fast-talking messages that she could barely discern, and gave up trying to do so after a couple seconds.

She always intended to call Kathy back, but everything got so hectic in the stuffed few weeks between holidays.

At least, that’s what she told herself.

“Sorry I’m using your dad’s phone—mine’s getting checked out at the store. I swear I haven’t been getting any of my calls.”

Yes. That was obviously exactly what was going on here.

Kathy’s voice singsonged in her ear. “Sooo . . . how are you feeling?”

“Oh. You know. Fine,” Nathalie replied. Kathy never asked after her health. Ever since she’d been a kid and was the only one to avoid the sixth-grade mono epidemic (mostly because she was diligent about hand washing and not because she hadn’t kissed a boy yet) her father and Kathy viewed her as indestructible.

However, this was the third time today she’d been asked, and was beginning to suspect “how are you feeling?” was the new “hello.” At least for the foreseeable future.

And as Kathy seemed to be waiting for more, Nathalie added, “I haven’t had any morning sickness in the past couple weeks, so . . . you know. Pretty good.”

“Wonderful!” Kathy exclaimed. “So you should be in good shape for Christmas!”

“Yes, of course I will,” she replied as she put her bag down at the table. “David and I are looking forward to it.”

In truth, she was far behind on her Christmas shopping. It might only be the first week of December, but usually by this time she had her cards done, their place decorated, and most everything but stocking stuffers purchased. But she would absolutely have everything done by Christmas Day. She’d just been a little distracted.

This time of year was also crazy at school. What with shortened attention spans for the holidays, midterms, and she was assigning a big paper tomorrow that none of her students would be happy about, save the overachievers. And her overachieving seniors were all worried about what college they were going to get into.

And oh yeah, she was currently growing a fetus. She needed to set up a nursery. And a 529 plan for the baby’s college. And talk to David about getting a will and trust.

If he ever got home from the office, what with all their pre-end-of-term work. There was a company his company was in negotiations to buy, and he was killing himself over it.

Come the Christmas break, everything would be better. They would drive up to Santa Barbara, spend Christmas Day with her family, and then continue up the coast for their real vacation, and Nathalie’s surprise gift to David—taking that trip to Monterey that they missed the first time around.

“ . . . And so you’ll be able to stay an extra couple days for the party!” Kathy was saying.

“What party?”

“The gender reveal party!” Kathy’s chipper voice was making her wish for a glass of wine instead of the ginger ale she went to the fridge to pour herself.

“Gender reveal party?”

“Yes! I’m inviting everyone. All your old friends from school, any friends you want to have from work, and of course my book club.” Then a pause. “You do know what a gender reveal party is, right?”

“Of course I do,” she replied. And she did. Vaguely. In theory. She’d never been to one, but she’d been lurking in pregnancy and mommy forums enough for the past three years to know what this latest fad in prenatal celebrations was.

A gender reveal party was when instead of just having the doctor tell you “it’s a boy/girl!” when they A.) Got test results back, B.) Saw—or didn’t see—a penis on the ultrasound, or C.) Pulled the child out of you kicking and screaming, they would send the gender results to a bakery. Yes, a bakery.

Which would bake a cake with either a pink or blue center, so when you cut into it, you would discover—along with everyone else with you at the time—the gender of your baby.

“You want to throw me a gender reveal party?” she said, her voice cracking a little, as she sat down at the table, ginger ale in hand. Indeed, she was even getting a little misty. “I . . . I don’t know what to say.”

She never expected that Kathy would want to throw her a party like this. They had never been close. Kathy had come into Nathalie’s life less than a year after her mom’s death. And they’d tried to find a footing then, but Nathalie was still a kid who was processing the stages of grief, and Kathy was a woman who’d never really dealt with a child before.

Then, within a year of marrying her dad, Lyndi was born, and suddenly Kathy had a baby that she could learn to parent from the ground up, not someone halfway to adulthood that required more complex interactions. Thus, theirs had always been a cordial coexistence. Kathy tried to guide Nathalie, Nathalie tolerated it, but basically figured out how to raise herself.

But now . . . maybe with the baby coming, they would finally find a way to bridge the gap between them.

“You just get your doctor to put the gender results in an envelope and give it to me,” Kathy was saying, “and I’ll do the rest.”

“Right,” she said, looking down at the envelope on the table, with the gender results in it. The prescience of her stepmother was, at times, astounding.

On the one hand, she’d really been looking forward to sharing this moment with David today. Something to hold between them.

But on the other hand, Kathy was reaching out . . . and it’s not like she and David wouldn’t be together when they found out the sex—they would just also be surrounded by friends and family.

“So, what do you say?” Kathy asked, breathless.

“Um . . . sure.”

“Wonderful!” Kathy trilled. “I have to call your sister, let her know you’re in!”

“In?”

“Of course, sweetie—Lyndi’s as excited as you are about the party for you two! Don’t forget to mark your calendar!”

As Kathy hung up, a shot of cold settled into Nathalie’s stomach. Of course. The party wasn’t for her. It was for them. For Nathalie, and for Lyndi.

As if they were having a baby together, instead of one of them planning their lives around this momentous occasion, and the other one falling on her apparently-not-gay roommate’s penis and ending up pregnant.

Nathalie hadn’t spoken to Lyndi since Thanksgiving either. She could once again blame this on the hecticness of the postturkey/pre–candy cane life, but the truth was, she didn’t really know what to say.

What she wanted to say was . . . a hundred different things. All variations on “what the hell are you doing?” but she knew she couldn’t say that. Not with the fact that she was pregnant, too.

Except, she was pregnant with a husband, a mortgage, and a plan for how to care for the child for the next two decades. She was ready for this baby. There was no way Lyndi could say the same thing.

She knew it wasn’t fair. But it was all she could think about when it came to her sister at the moment. Just how completely crazy the situation was. How totally unfair.

But then again, her sister was the one person she knew in a similar boat to hers. And not just the pregnancy.

So she texted a number whose last conversation was listed as almost two weeks ago.

It was a couple seconds before Lyndi wrote back.

Another long pause while Lyndi typed.

Nathalie’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head.

The dots loaded slow again, in an annoyingly huffy manner, or so Nathalie perceived.

Nathalie resisted the urge to throw her phone across the room.

More dots. Rage-inducing dots.

“Well, thank goodness for that,” Nathalie grumbled to herself.

She quickly switched the phone into phone mode, and called up Dr. Duque’s office. It took her three minutes to explain the situation. It took the nurse another two to fit Lyndi into a recently abandoned appointment slot. Five minutes Lyndi couldn’t find in her busy schedule to, you know, attend to her growing child.

She texted the address and phone number while the loading dots anticipated Lyndi’s response.

And all of a sudden, Nathalie found her heart breaking a little bit for her sister. Lyndi hadn’t even thought about “that stuff.” She just assumed everything was going to be fine. Because that’s who she was. Everything was always fine for Lyndi. But now, she was facing the same uncertainty that Nathalie had for the past three years.

Her response came by rote. By twenty-four years of being the protective older sister.

And the phone fell silent.

But the silence didn’t remain. Because it was only a few ticktocks of the clock on the mantel before Nathalie was pleasantly surprised to hear the key slide in the front door.

“Oh,” David said as he came in and saw her sitting at their newish IKEA table. (The chairs had been taken back. Until she chose a replacement they were using the folding chairs from the garage.) “Hey—I didn’t think you’d be home.”

“I didn’t think you’d be home yet either,” she said, rising and smiling.

“Yeah, I have to wait for signatures from Japan before I can proceed on to the next thing, so I decided to come home at a normal hour.” He placed a perfunctory kiss on her nose. “I thought you had a thing.”

“If by ‘thing’ you mean a doctor’s appointment, yes I did.”

“Gotcha.” He nodded, looking askance, like his eyes couldn’t focus on anything that wasn’t paperwork. “How’d that go?”

“All good,” she said. “Baby is still in there. Test results came back normal from last time.”

“Great,” he said on a sigh. Then he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and just held her there for a second. Her head in the crook of his neck, his body lined up against hers.

It felt wonderful. This, she thought. This is what I needed. And David, somehow had known it.

They stood there for a little bit, until David leaned back.

Not willing to let the closeness she’d been missing go quite yet, Nathalie held on to his arm.

“So what do you want for dinner? I can make anything—or call anyone. Thai? Also, I was hoping to talk to you about setting up the 529 plan. I can do it myself but I wanted to get your opinion on which one was best. Also, who should we talk to about a will—should we get an estate-planning lawyer or do you know someone in that field? And you’re not going to believe this, but Kathy called, and she wants to throw us a gender reveal party over Christmas. I couldn’t quite figure out how to say no—”

“Honey,” David said, his eyes falling toward the dormant TV in the living room. “I know we have to talk about this stuff, but do you mind if I just . . . de-stress a little first?”

“Xbox?” Nathalie said, nodding. “Sure. No problem.”

“I’ve been on the phone half the day talking, I just want to shoot aliens for a little while. Do whatever you want for dinner.”

“Got it,” Nathalie said, stepping back. Then her eyes fell to the table. Where the envelope with the gender of the baby sat next to the ultrasound photo.

She picked one up.

“Here’s the ultrasound picture. Looking less and less like the Peanut and more and more like a baby.”

She handed it to him, and then crossed to what was currently the office and would soon be the baby’s room, letting the door slip shut behind her.

It was only a couple of seconds before she heard the Xbox start up and the theme music of David’s current favorite game.

Then, she slid in front of the desktop computer, and opened up the internet.

Maybe someone on here could show her comparative models of various 529 plans and which one was the best.

But somehow her fingers took her not to college savings plans, but to the mommy forums she’d lurked in for so long.

And for once, unlurked.

Does anyone know about gender reveal parties? My family wants to throw one, I’d like to know what to expect.

And she waited. It was thirty seconds before the first response popped up. Then another and another and another.

• OMG my gender reveal party was AMAZING. It was super fun the first of many celebrations for you and your LO! We had the most delicious ake—here’s the bakery’s link.
• Ugh, total waste of time and money. I wanted one but everyone else was not enthusiastic. So when the cake came out blue, everyone was like . . . so? Big disappointment.
• Enthusiasm matters. If your family wants to do it for you, consider yourself lucky. It’s for them anyway, not really for you. Enjoy it!
• DON’T DO A CAKE! It’s so passé now it’s almost retro. Besides, not everyone can eat it, with dietary restrictions. My friend had the best gender reveal, setting up exploding glitter balls on a timer, so everyone was drenched in pink sparkles at the same time. Here’s a website with a ton of ideas!

Tentatively, Nathalie clicked on the link. And her eyes bugged out of her head.

Anything that could be pink or blue was pink or blue. And some things that really, really shouldn’t have been.

There were baked goods, of course: cakes, cupcakes, cake pops with centers dyed the color associated with your child’s genitalia. There were also stuffed croissants, stuffed donuts, stuffed pork tenderloin—anything that could be stuffed, basically, could be cut into and presto! The big reveal.

There were things that exploded, too—glitter balls. Confetti that could be loaded into a cannon and shot at the crowd (Where was this crowd? A stadium?). You could put balloons in a box and then open it, releasing them to the sky where they would inevitably end up in the gullet of some poor bird. You could load up squirt guns with colored water and have guests shoot each other, while wearing white T-shirts. Or if the party had a younger contingent (or the young at heart! the website exclaimed) you could use Silly String. There was something Nathalie couldn’t exactly determine, but they looked like colored roadside flares.

There was even one couple featured who filled a box with colored chalk, and shot the box with a sniper rifle, revealing the gender in a cloud of dust, while the event was photographed in diffused natural light.

Nathalie closed the computer window. For a moment, she was afraid that the pink or blue glitter had somehow leaked out of the computer and spilled onto the desk.

As she brushed nonexistent glitter off the keyboard, Nathalie knew one thing was clear:

Kathy must never, ever know about anything on that site.