Chapter 8

8

Fox, come see.” It was the third huge box your mother had sent since we told them about the baby. She was relentless in her excitement and called every week to see how I was feeling. I pulled out fancy swaddle blankets and knitted newborn hats and teeny-tiny white sleepers. At the bottom there was a separate package on which she’d written “Fox’s Baby Things.” In it was a worn teddy bear with buttons for eyes, and a threadbare flannel blanket with silk trim that once had been ivory white. A small porcelain figurine of a baby boy sitting on a moon with your name in delicate gold script. I lifted the teddy to my nose and then to yours. You reminisced. I half listened but my mind was elsewhere, searching my past for the same kind of familiar tokens, blankies and stuffies and favorite books, but I couldn’t find any.

“Do you think we can do this?” I asked you over dinner that night, pushing my food around the plate. I could barely stomach meat since I’d become pregnant.

“Do what?”

“Be parents. Raise a child.”

You reached over and smiled as you stabbed my beef with your fork.

“You’re going to be a good mother, Blythe.”

You traced a heart on the top of my hand.

“You know, my own mother . . . she wasn’t . . . she left. She wasn’t anything like yours.”

“I know.” You were quiet. You could have asked me to say more. You could have held my hand and looked me in the eye and asked me to keep talking. You took my plate to the sink.

“You’re different,” you said eventually, and hugged me from behind. And then, with an indignation in your voice that I didn’t expect: “You aren’t anything like her.”

I believed you. Life was easier when I believed you.

Afterward we lay together on the couch and you held my belly like the world was in your hands. We loved waiting for her to move, staring at my stretched skin, the blue-green hue of the veins underneath like the colors of the earth. Some fathers talk to their wife’s belly—they say the baby can hear. But as we watched for her to show us she was in there, you were quiet and awestruck, like she was a dream you couldn’t believe was real.