Heads or Tails (4 page)

Once in my room, I tore off my clothes and stood dead center debating whether I should take a shower or go for a run first. A wave of exhaustion swept over me as I remembered my fitful sleep on the plane and I contemplated taking a nap before either other option. But then I recalled Jesse’s disappointment over the training I’d be missing that weekend. So I rallied for a run, grateful that I’d remembered to toss workout clothes into my luggage at the last second. I hoped a run would help alleviate my cramps too.

Riding down the elevator with only my phone, my ID and the hotel key card in the waistband of my running pants, I realized how different my life was from what Margot’s had become. With an infant, she could no longer work late, go on a date or dart out for a three-mile run without having to make child care arrangements first. It’s why the lives of mothers always seemed so small to me. And yet another reason I sought to avoid that shrinkage. Jesse and I enjoyed our freedom. I enjoyed my own independence.

Pushing through the lobby’s revolving doors, a whoosh of crisp late October air blew bangs out of my ponytail, but also helped awaken me. I began a light jog towards Central Park. The early morning crowd there was akin to what I’d see at Golden Gate Park back home: elite runners with water packs on their back, twenty-somethings sleepily walking Chihuahuas and Labradoodles, gardeners in brown city uniforms operating noisy lawn mowers and leaf blowers.

About fifteen minutes later, I was mid-way through the Jackie O Reservoir loop when my phone rang. It was Sarah.

“How’s your
best
friend?” she greeted sarcastically.

I’d known Sarah for more than twenty years. We met while waitressing together in college when I was a junior at UC Davis and she was a senior at Sacramento State. We both moved to San Francisco after graduation and she remained my best friend there. As close as we were, she always knew that my Egan Academy friends, especially Margot, occupied an immovable place in my heart. She knew that Margot helped me become my best self back in the eighties, that Margot — and, by extension, Jean — had filled a gap in my life. They’d become the family who loved me unconditionally when I was certain my own family couldn’t.

I’d texted Sarah from SFO the night before to let her know I wouldn’t be able to meet up for the Sunday morning coffee date we’d planned. I talked to or texted Sarah just about every day and saw her several times a week, far more often than I saw or spoke to Margot. But despite the contact and proximity, Sarah frequently joked that nobody could unseat my Egan friends. Over the years, between my wedding and Margot’s regular visits to San Francisco, Sarah knew and liked Margot herself. But she still teased me about a manufactured friendship hierarchy that Sarah — not I — had constructed. Whenever I visited Margot or vice versa and Sarah got jealous, I always assured her that she and Margot were
both
my “chosen sisters.” But it was a jealousy I could relate to. That’s how I felt about Rebecca too.

Normally, I’d fire back at Sarah with a sarcastic comment of my own (“Keep trying, biatch,” or something of that nature). But I was too emotionally weary and too winded from my run to craft a snappy reply. “You know, I’d do the same for you,” was all I puffed out.

“What, did you
jog
to New York?”

“Nope,” I gasped, my chest tight. “Just running now through the park.” I slowed my pace so I could speak easier and catch deeper inhales. “What time is it there?”

“Zero dark thirty.” Sarah always woke a half hour before her husband and two young kids to read the
Chronicle
and watch Good Morning America while sipping coffee in total privacy and quiet. “Why aren’t you with Margot?”

“Oh my God, Sarah. What a mess.” I told her about the chaos of Margot’s place, about Jean’s weight loss and illness, and noted that I was deep into a problem that I questioned I could even solve — and I hadn’t even seen Margot yet. “I don’t get it,” I said. “My cousin had the ‘baby blues’ but got over it after a couple of months. Plus, Margot went to the ends of the earth to have this baby.”

Sarah snorted. “That doesn’t make any difference. Don’t you know about Brooke Shields?”

“What does she have to do with anything?”

Sarah dove into teacher explanation mode, something she relished in, which is why she was such a natural mother herself. “Brooke wrote this book,” she began, as if she and the Suddenly Susan star were old friends. “It was all about her own postpartum depression. It was fascinating. She almost drove herself — and her baby — into a concrete wall! I’m telling you, she had bats in the belfry.”

When it was just us, Jesse referred to Sarah as “Sayings Sarah” because she peppered nearly every conversation with little idioms and phrases. Amazingly, I’d never noticed before Jesse pointed it out. But he was exactly right.

“Jesus.” I bit my lower lip.

“I know! But the point is, just exactly like Margot, Brooke had
wanted
that baby. She’d gone through multiple rounds of IVF, the whole shebang.”

“Wow.” I wound my way around the Great Lawn, grateful to have Sarah’s wise company during this run.

“I saw her on Oprah,” she continued. “The way she described it was horrible. The gnawing doubt, the fear of never bonding, the lethargy, the hopelessness. It was subtle but insipid. Like death by a thousand paper cuts.”

“So what do I do? What helped Brooke?” I asked, as if I, too, were on a first-name basis with her.

“Meds. She needs meds. It’s a bummer, especially if she wants to breastfeed. But she needs a pharmaceutical jolt to knock her out of this. Then lots of therapy. Lots. The guilt…”

“Jean, her mom, says Margot’s milk, um, dried up or whatever because she’s hardly eating. So she’s not breastfeeding anymore.”

“Okay, so in a way that’s good because she can get on some powerful meds. So first up, get her a therapist, not just a psychologist — one who can prescribe.”

I wondered how I could accomplish that Herculean administrative task by Sunday. I’d always loved that Margot was an only child like me because I didn’t have to compete with sisters for her affection. But for the first time, I wished that she had a sibling who could help get her better. “What about the baby?” I asked, shoving sweaty curls that escaped my ponytail back behind my ears.

“What do you mean?”

“Jean can’t take care of the baby anymore. She’s aged so much. It’s horrible. She shakes all the time. I was worried she’d drop the baby.” I fought to keep my posture from collapsing. “It was just…bad. And she’s a widow. There’s no one else.”

“Jeez. Sounds like it. For now, giving Margot space from that baby will probably be helpful — and not bad experience for you.” Sarah was always trying to convince me that despite what I’d always believed about myself, I
would
be a good mother. She swore that if Jesse and I agreed to have a baby, she’d get pregnant with her third kid just so we could share the experience. I’d told her to go ahead and donate her crib and baby clothes because it wasn’t happening. “How long can you babysit in New York?”

“Flying home Sunday night,” I said, turning a corner near the Loeb Boathouse and heading back towards my hotel. “How long did it take Brooke to recover?”

“Hill,” she said, “you don’t want to know.”

Showered and changed and back on West End Avenue, I nodded at Margot’s doorman, who once again led me to the elevators without calling upstairs first. He seemed to sense that my presence signaled an urgent situation. Or maybe he’d even witnessed it himself the last couple of months.

In the elevator, I tried to ignore the throbbing hormone-induced headache and engage in some self talk. It was a technique I’d learned from race training. The messages were jumbled — a mixture of “You can do this” and “It’s not that bad”— and actually resembled the pep talks I gave myself before grueling hill repeats on rainy Sunday mornings. I blew out a deep breath as the doors opened on Margot’s floor.

I tapped at the door, a bit more forcefully than I had a few hours before. I imagined myself a kind of drill sergeant, one who would whip the apartment — and Margot — into shape. (Hadn’t Sarah once talked about going to something called “baby boot camp” after her daughter was born?) In the next few hours, I planned to roll up my sleeves, scrub and tidy Margot’s apartment, force her (and maybe Jean) into the shower and start making some phone calls to find Margot a therapist. Refreshed from my run and buoyed by my conversation with Sarah, I was determined to reverse Margot’s course. If anyone could do it, I could. I was Margot’s closest friend. My chest expanded as I inhaled deeply, attaching my sense of duty to every molecule. When it came to friends, I could stretch my personal limits beyond previous measures.

Once again, Jean answered the door, this time holding a crooked and wrinkled index finger to her lips. She let me in and I took wide steps into the entry way. I stood with my hands on my hips, taking in the scene the way the commander of an army battalion might assess the barracks.

The shades were still drawn so the daylight that managed to seep inside was thin and cast a muddy, grey hue on the walls and furniture. It felt as if the sun had given up on this place. The baby, I noticed, was asleep on the couch, her right cheek smooshed into the cushion, her hair matted from perspiration. I knew a grand total of nothing about babies, but I did know that Sarah, a stickler for routines, hated that kind of thing. Babies, she always insisted, should nap in a consistent place, preferably a crib. Not in a mother’s arms, not in the parents’ bed and certainly not on a couch in the middle of the house. “Otherwise,” I imagined her saying, “it’s like the tail wagging the dog.”

“Where’s Margot?” I mouthed to Jean.

She put her palms together, placed them against her face and tilted her head, indicating that Margot was asleep. By then it was twelve-thirty.

“Again?” I mouthed.

“Still,” she whispered.

In the kitchen, I surveyed the scene — the bottles, the wrappers, the pile of poop-stained onesies on the floor in the corner. A foot-high stack of
New York Times
, still logged up in rubber bands, covered half the kitchen table.

I smoothed down the front of my shirt and started at the sink. I plugged it up, turned on the faucet and squeezed out the dregs of liquid soap from a near-empty plastic bottle I found in the cabinet underneath. As the sink filled with water, I collected mugs and bowls from the overflowing dish drainer to put away in the cupboards to make room for the next batch of dishes I was about to wash. Jean cleared space on the nearby counter and tore long swaths of paper towels to supplement the space in the dish drainer.

“I didn’t get a chance to tell you earlier,” she said, “but I’ve done a little legwork.”

I scrubbed a particularly gnarly plate caked with what looked like week-old macaroni and cheese. I silently held my breath from the stink.

“There’s a facility up in Harlem that specializes in postpartum depression.”

“Great. Let’s get her in,” I said, feeling buoyed that perhaps I was going to be able to right Margot’s course after all.

“I’ve tried. But she hasn’t agreed. I can’t send her there without her consent. Neither can her OB.”

“What do you mean ‘send her there’?”

“It’s a live-in treatment center.”

“Oh,” I said, cocking my head in confusion. “Live-in — can she bring the baby?”

Jean shook her head. I raised my eyebrows.

“I know. It’s kind of bizarre. A live-in treatment center for postpartum depression that doesn’t allow babies. It sounded weird to me too but her doctor said it’s excellent, the city’s best. And,” she hesitated, “I guess in most cases there’s another parent or family member who can care for the baby.”

I nodded. When Margot got pregnant, we remarked how lucky she was to have the resources to raise a child all on her own. Even though her years of hard work on Wall Street may have prevented her from meeting a man to marry, she was proud that her career most definitely hadn’t prevented her from fulfilling her lifelong dream of becoming a mother. But I guess neither of us imagined that she’d need a partner for something like this.

“As I told you,” Jean’s voice shook. “I’m just not able to care for Gretchen anymore. Even if I wasn’t sick, I’m too old. This is hard work.”

As if on cue, the baby woke in the living room, alerting us with an irritating squawk. A cloak of exhaustion descended over Jean’s whole body as she turned to get her.

“There, there, that’s Grandma’s girl,” I heard her say as she gathered the baby from the couch. She brought her into the kitchen and I continued to scrape crusted food off plates. Since Margot apparently hadn’t been eating, I realized these must have been Jean’s own dishes that she’d been unable to keep up with.

As we talked, the baby regarded me curiously, like she hadn’t seen something or someone new in a long time. Her eyelashes, I noticed for the first time, were impossibly long, as long as fake eyelashes you might buy at a drug store. Her cheek bore seam lines from the couch and her jet black hair remained stuck to her face. It struck me then how hard it must be to have a baby with a sperm donor. You were forced to make solo decisions on behalf of another person — in this case, a person who looked wholly unlike you. Margot probably constantly wondered who, exactly, this person came from. Gretchen was likely a persistent, nagging reminder to Margot that she was alone.

“Hilly,” Jean said, holding the baby around the belly in front of her own. “I can do this for, like, one more day.”

“Why doesn’t Margot just hire someone? Why don’t
we
just hire someone? A nanny?” I asked, quickly calculating in my head that if I could convince Margot to go into the treatment facility that afternoon, we’d still have two days to find a caregiver before I left. There had to be some fancy Upper West Side nanny service that could arrange something like that on the double. “She has the money.”

To my surprise, Jean shook her head.

“It’s not about the money. Gretchen needs more than a nanny. She needs a
connection
. She’s already lived most of her little life without one. I’ve only come in full-time in the last couple of weeks. And it was…bad before then.”