Adela
“He loves me, Noni. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is you’re too young to know nothing about love. And even if you did, today don’t got nothing to do with love. It’s about you and that baby.”
Noni wrung her towel and swung it over her shoulder. She’d just gotten out of the shower and her robe was still on, the entirety of the hang in her left breast visible, and she was following me around the house as I packed my bag, went looking for my shoes.
A month ago, I would’ve been on Noni’s side. A month ago, I wouldn’t have even let Chris come to my sonogram. But then the Girls looked at me like I was a dead fish too rotten to even bother eating and I missed having someone’s hand to hold. I missed Chris. We made up in the Waffle House parking lot and he kissed each of my temples, played with the small hoop of my earring, and promised to give us a good life. And I believed him.
I set my jaw. “Well, he loves me and the baby. It’s just a doctor’s appointment, why are you so upset?”
Noni followed close behind me as I exited the kitchen to the dining room. “Your daddy left you with me and I promised I’d take care of you. You think I can just let you go to a sonogram with some boy I don’t know? You’re thirty-eight weeks pregnant, Adela.”
I found my slides under the coffee table and slipped them on. It was too hot for sweatpants and I was too big for my shorts, so I was wearing a huge dress I sewed myself last week. It looked like a tube, but at least I could feel the air coming up through it.
“Chris is a good guy and he’s got a car and he’ll bring me right home after. It saves you a trip to Tallahassee and it gives him a chance to see his baby. Don’t you want that?”
Noni flung the towel on the floor. “He is not that child’s daddy. He’s some boy you picked up from Lord knows where and sure he’s pretty, but the pretty boys are the most dangerous ones and everybody knows it. Especially one way too old for you. What is he, twenty? Twenty-five? It’s not normal for somebody like that to want a pregnant girl, Adela.”
I stopped and looked back at her. “You don’t think somebody could want me?”
Her glare eased up and her head tilted. “That’s not what I said and you know it. Just let me take you. I got myself smelling fresh and everything.” She smoothed the edges escaping her wig cap.
Noni didn’t think anyone could want me, looking like this. Smelling like chlorine and pickle juice. “You’re not that different from Dad at all.”
I slung my bag over my shoulder and hurried to the front door, slamming it in Noni’s face behind me. By the time she got the screen door unlatched, I was already in the passenger seat of Chris’s car, and before he could squeeze my thigh the way he always did, I was telling him to drive and we were off on the slow crawl of the highway, Padua passing us by before I even noticed the turn of pines to bending oaks.
Chris held my hand the whole time we sat in the waiting room, which ended up being an entire hour because I got the time wrong and made us arrive far too early. It didn’t matter, though, because Chris wasn’t mad. He loved me the way the Girls couldn’t. Unconditionally, without pause.
I was pretty sure he loved me more than anyone else in the world ever had, more than any coach or friend or mindless crush. Even with all his faults, I knew that we were meant for each other and he was going to stand by me, the way anyone who really cared about me would. He would take care of me and our baby and that was enough, I’d decided. That would have to be enough.
When Chris glanced over, his eyes stayed stuck on me. That was what I reminded myself of when I forgave him: he might not want to be a parent who holds a screaming child or wakes up in the middle of the night, but he would love me, so I could do it. He would love me, look at me, adore me even when I was crusted with fatigue and soggy in breast milk. Wasn’t that enough?
“Woods,” a woman in scrubs called.
I pushed myself into a stand and held on to Chris’s hand as we followed her through the door and down the hallway.
“Nice to see you again, Adela. I’m Melissa and I’ll be your nurse for the day. I know you make a long trip, and we try to do your labs on the same day, but it might take an hour or so for the phlebotomists to return from their lunch. Good news is, we’ve got a TV in the waiting room.”
Melissa was the same nurse as last time, her hair a new shade of burgundy, but her face still plump and young. She never judged me to my face and so I liked her.
Melissa made me step on the scale and I choked on the number. I’d never been so heavy before and I wasn’t sure it was all the baby. What if this was my body now? What if Chris hadn’t realized I could grow big and not deflate?
“Alright, Adela, you just sit down here and we’ll take your blood pressure.” I sat down in the plastic chair and she wrapped my arm in the band, and the machine turned on and squeezed until my arm went numb. Just as I thought I couldn’t stand it any longer, the band loosened, and I was free.
“Looks great. We’ll get you all set up in the room now.”
She led us farther down the hall and into an empty room. There were so many brochures, so many photos of small white babies and mothers with sparkling teeth.
I sat down on the examination table and Chris sat in the empty chair. Melissa began tapping at the computer and after verifying my name and birthday, she turned to Chris.
“It’s nice to meet the father. How you feeling, Dad?”
I could tell this made Chris proud and I couldn’t help feeling a sense of accomplishment too. I’d put together a whole family, someone my baby would call Dad.
“Ready to see babygirl,” Chris said.
Melissa smiled. “Well, we’re going to get Adela in a gown in just a minute and then we’ll get to it, but we just need to go over some things first, mm-kay?”
Chris nodded.
Melissa turned to me. “Everything going okay in the pregnancy? Feeling movement? Any new symptoms?”
Chris cut in. “Yeah, we feeling the baby. She’s kickin’ like crazy.”
I nodded. “I’m just worried because I’ve been getting these nosebleeds every night and then I wake up and I feel like my eyes are, like, swollen shut.”
Melissa nodded, typing even as she stared at me. “The nosebleeds are very normal at this stage, just sit up, pinch your nose, lean forward, and let it pass. As for the swelling, you’re what, thirty-eight weeks now? Some edema is very typical toward the end of pregnancy and as long as your blood pressure is looking good, we’re not worried. I’ll make a note to the OB and when you meet later, you can talk about some options for symptom management.”
“Okay.” I’d already forgotten what she said to do about the nosebleeds and I wished Noni was here to take notes. “I just really don’t want to have to do bed rest and miss the last two weeks of school.”
Melissa laughed. “You’re the only teenager I’ve ever had who doesn’t want a doctor’s note saying they don’t have to go to class. Unfortunately, we can’t exactly predict when your baby wants to make an appearance. Your OB can discuss induction with you if you’d like, as well as her colleague in your county’s L and D unit, who will most likely be on call for the birth. For now, let’s get you in this gown.”
Melissa opened a drawer and pulled out a paper gown. I was up to the XL drawer and I hoped Chris didn’t notice.
“I’ll let you put that on and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Melissa shut the door behind her, and I stood, turned my back to Chris even though he’d seen me naked so many times before, and pulled my dress off. I tied the gown in the front and then sat back on the table, pulling the other paper sheet over my lap.
“You excited?” I asked him.
When I looked up, though, Chris’s face was a labyrinth of lines and his eyes were a glossy prism. He looked like he was solving a math problem and getting all mixed-up.
“Chris?”
He snapped his head up. “Thirty-eight weeks,” he said. “I’m not a genius or nothing, but thirty-eight weeks ago was almost two months before we got together. I heard of it being off a few weeks and all, but months? You don’t mistake months.”
I tried to stay calm, shrugged. “It happens. Maybe they got the wrong date.”
Chris shook his head, looking everywhere but me. “I thought you was looking bigger than you should. I didn’t wanna say nothing, but it’s not normal to not fit no clothes if you only seven months. You bigger than Simone was and she had twins up in there.”
I wanted to hide behind a curtain the same spearmint green as the one in the hospital, but the paper gown was too small and my protruding belly button poked out and I was so exposed. “Stop, Chris.” I couldn’t hold back my tears for long.
“Me stop? You’ve been lying to me for months. That’s not my baby.”
“No, she is. She’s yours,” I pleaded. “You promised.”
Chris stood, twitching at the joints. “I promised I’d take care of my child. That’s not my child, not my problem. You can’t be out here expecting me to raise somebody else’s baby. Fuck that.”
He paced to the other side of the room and kicked at the metal drawers till they dented. The ring echoed through the room and then a knock came on the door, Melissa walking in with her cheeks still raised like there was something to celebrate.
“Please, Chris,” I begged. “She’s yours in every way that matters.”
“She ain’t mine. I already got kids, real blood, Adela. You go be somebody else’s skank-ass baby mama.”
I tried to stand but I couldn’t lift myself off the table without exposing everything. “Don’t do this. You drove me here. Don’t go.”
He walked out like he didn’t know me at all, like I was the ghost he ignored in the corner of a dark room, pushing Melissa into the wall on his way out. My whole body felt like it did during the blood pressure machine, squeezed so tight my skin tingled and I wasn’t sure I could make it another moment. But it didn’t release like the machine. It was a tight fist still clenched around me, and he was gone.