My husband walked into my recovery room nine hours after I gave birth, bent over the bassinet and let go of the balloon he’d bought in the gift shop downstairs. Then he looked at me like I’d stolen something from him and said, “You weren’t supposed to get one of these.” I thought he meant our daughter. He didn’t.
Tomasz and I tried for three years before she came.
Two losses. One at eleven weeks, one at nine.
After the second, I quit buying tests in packs of three, because the two spares would sit under the sink and stare at me.
Then one Tuesday in February I bought a single one at a gas station and took it in the staff bathroom at the dental office where I work the front desk.
Positive.
I set it on his keyboard while he was on a work call.
He read it, muted the call and put his face against my stomach for a long time.
“Don’t get excited,” I said. “Not yet.”
“Too late,” he said.
He’d kept his head shaved down to stubble since before I met him. He said hair was a waste of fifteen minutes every morning, and I never asked again.
Labor started at 4 a.m. on a Thursday at Sacred Heart in Allentown.
Twenty-six hours later I was still pushing and nothing was moving.
Then the monitor by the bed started making a sound the nurses didn’t like.
Rosanna, the night nurse, looked at the screen and reached for the wall phone in the same motion.
“We’re going back,” she said.
Tomasz stood up so fast his chair hit the window.
“Going back where?”
“Dad, I need you to stay right here.”
He grabbed the rail at the end of my bed.
“Is she okay? Are THEY okay?”
Nobody answered him.
The last thing I saw before the mask was ceiling tiles sliding past, one of them with a brown water stain shaped like Ohio.
Then nothing.
Our daughter came out at 6:52 that morning, eight pounds even, furious.
They kept her in the nursery four hours for observation, and by the time she got to me, Tomasz had gone home to shower.
“He sat out in that hallway on the phone with his mother half the night,” Rosanna said. “Only place he could get a signal.”
I didn’t think anything of it.
I lifted her out and counted her fingers twice.
She had a full head of dark hair, which surprised everybody, and right above her forehead, a little left of center, one tuft of it was white. Not blonde. White, like somebody had touched it with a paintbrush.
“Look at that,” Rosanna said. “She came with a racing stripe.”
I kissed it. I thought it was the best thing on her.
At 10:15 Tomasz came through the door with a coffee in one hand and a silver balloon that said IT’S A GIRL in the other.
He was grinning so hard his eyes had gone small.
“Hey, Mom,” he said, and kissed the top of my head.
She’d fallen asleep again, so I’d put her back down. He set the coffee on the tray table and went straight for the bassinet.
He bent over her.
For a second his whole face went soft.
Then it didn’t.
His shoulders came up toward his ears. His hand opened. The ribbon slid off his fingers and the balloon floated up and bumped the ceiling and stayed there.
“Tomasz?”
He didn’t move.
“Babe. What is it?”
He kept staring down at her. One hand went to the top of his own head and pressed flat, like he was holding something in.
“You weren’t supposed to get one of these,” he said.
“One of what?” I said. “A daughter?”
“No.” He finally turned around, and his face was the color of the blanket. “THAT. Put her hat on.”
“What?”
“The little hat they gave you. Put it on her. Please.”
“She’s asleep, Tomasz.”
“I don’t care. COVER IT UP.”
I pulled her out of the bassinet and against my chest before I’d even decided to.
“She is nine hours old,” I said. “What is wrong with you?”
He sat down hard in the chair by the window.
He put both palms on his scalp and pushed, like he was trying to fold himself in half.
“Nothing’s wrong with her,” he said into his knees. “It’s from me.”
“What is?”
“I’ve shaved my head since I was fifteen, Gianna.”
“I KNOW that.”
“You don’t know why.”
He dragged his hand back over the front of his scalp. Right above his forehead, a little left of center, the stubble came in pale. I’d had my hands on that head for six years and never once looked at it in the light.
“So it runs in your family,” I said. “So what?”
“Because there’s only supposed to be one other person alive who has it.”
My mouth went dry.
“Who?”
He didn’t answer.
“Tomasz. WHO?”
“I was nineteen,” he said. “I told myself it was finished.”
“What was finished?”
He opened his mouth.
Behind me, the door opened instead.
It was his mother. Lorena, in her good camel coat, holding a gift bag with pink tissue sticking out the top.
She wasn’t alone.
Next to her stood a girl of maybe fourteen, tall and thin, in a gray school hoodie, both hands jammed in the front pocket.
Her dark hair was pulled back tight.
And right above her forehead, a little left of center, one streak of it was white.
She didn’t look at me.
She didn’t look at the baby.
She was looking at Tomasz.
Lorena had a hand on the girl’s shoulder, and her mouth was set the way it got at Thanksgiving when somebody brought up money.
“I told you this day was coming,” Lorena said. “I wasn’t going to keep lying to her too.”
Tomasz stood up. The chair scraped.
“Mom. Not here.”
The girl took her hands out of her pocket.
“Hi,” she said to him. That was all.
I held my daughter tighter and looked from that white streak to the one against my chest and back again.
“Tomasz,” I said. “Who is she?”
He didn’t say a word.
He just put his hand back on top of his head.
Above us the balloon turned slowly on its ribbon against the ceiling, and nobody reached up for it.
Room 412
“Her name is Josephine,” Lorena said. “She’s his daughter. She’ll be fifteen in March.”
Tomasz kept his hand where it was.
Fifteen in March. I did the math the way I do insurance dates at the front desk, backward from today, and it put him at nineteen. I was nineteen, he’d said. I told myself it was finished.
The baby started rooting at my collarbone. I found the call button on the bed rail and pressed it with my thumb, because it was the only thing in that room I knew how to work.
“You don’t keep a child standing in a doorway,” Lorena said to him. “Not today. Not this one.”
“I asked you on the phone, Mom.”
“You’ve been asking me for fourteen years.”
Josephine had stopped looking at him. She looked at my wristband, then at the balloon, then at my face, slow, like she was checking me against something she’d been told.
“You’re Gianna,” she said.
Nobody in that room had said my name since she came in.
“How do you know my name?”
Second Saturdays
I met Tomasz six years ago across my own front desk. He came in with a cracked molar and paid in cash, and he had that stubble then, and he made a joke about how he’d save on shampoo till he died.
Every second Saturday of the month, he drove to his mother’s in Bethlehem. Twenty minutes up 22. Her gutters, her storm windows, the sump pump that quit every spring.
I went twice the first year. After that he stopped asking me along.
“She’s easier one on one,” he said. “She gets weird with company.”
So I saw Lorena at Thanksgiving and at Easter, and I sat in her kitchen with a plate on my knees, and I looked at her refrigerator. A crab magnet from Wildwood. A church calendar. And a school sports photo of a girl in a softball batting helmet, number 7, the brim pulled low, her face half in shadow.
“Neighbor’s granddaughter,” Tomasz said, the first time I asked. “Mom drives her to practice.”
Then there was the money.
On the fourteenth of every month, $640 went out of our joint account by autopay. The memo line said MOM HOUSE. It had been going out since before I married him. His father died when Tomasz was fifteen, and he said the mortgage had been a mess ever since, and he was the only one who could carry it.
When the specialist wanted $2,300 for the workup after our first loss, I asked him if we could skip one month of it. Just one.
“That one doesn’t move,” he said. He didn’t even look up from his laptop.
At our wedding at the VFW hall in Emmaus, four years ago, Lorena came alone, sat at table three in a blue dress, and left before the cake. Tomasz said weddings were hard for her since his dad.
And the Saturday I lost the second one, at nine weeks, it was the second Saturday. He was at his mother’s. I called him from the bathroom floor and it rang out twice. He came home after nine at night with grass on the knees of his jeans and held me until I fell asleep.
I’d forgiven him for that a long time ago.
Now the girl in the doorway was waiting for an answer to a question I’d asked her.
Behind her the door swung in again. It was the day nurse, answering my button.
Six hundred and forty dollars
He was young, with a lanyard full of pins, and he read the room in about half a second. Kyle, his badge said.
“Everybody okay in here? We like to keep it to two visitors with a new baby.”
He looked at Tomasz, because Tomasz was the man standing up.
“They were just leaving,” Tomasz said.
Kyle took one step toward Lorena and opened his hand at the hallway, polite, the way you’d show somebody out of a dentist’s chair.
“Nobody’s leaving,” I said.
Kyle stopped. He checked my band, my face, the baby. “I’ll be right outside,” he said, and he went, and he left the door open a crack.
Tomasz came around to my side of the bed. He talked to me low and fast, like Josephine and his mother weren’t four feet away.
“It’s child support. Okay? That’s what the six-forty is. Her mom is Hillary Pappas, we were together senior year and the summer after, and she didn’t want me in it. I didn’t fight her. I pay, I stay out of it. That was the deal.”
“Fourteen years,” I said.
“I was a kid. I didn’t know how to tell you. Every year it got harder to tell you. I’ve barely been in a room with her, Gianna. I swear to God.”
I looked over at Josephine. She had her hands back in her pocket.
I wanted it to be true. A mistake at nineteen, a check every month, a man who couldn’t find the words. I could have lived inside that one. People do.
“Then go take her down to the cafeteria,” I said. “Buy her a hot chocolate. Sit with her. She’s standing in a hospital room in her school clothes, Tomasz. She’s your kid.”
He shook his head. “I’m not doing this in a cafeteria.”
“I don’t want a hot chocolate,” Josephine said.
She took one hand out of the pocket and pointed at him with her chin.
“That’s not true. What he said. Tell her about Saturdays.”
Number 7
Tomasz said, “Josie.”
That was the first time I’d ever heard him say a nickname for anybody.
“Second Saturdays,” Josephine said, to me, not to him. “Since I was six. He picks me up at Grandma’s and we go to the cages on 22 and he throws me forty pitches, and then we go back and Grandma makes pierogi. He wears a Phillies hat the whole time. He never takes it off.”
The gutters. The storm windows. The sump pump.
“The cages,” I said.
“He taught me to hit,” she said. “I’m good.”
I looked at Lorena. She didn’t look away from me, which I’ll give her.
“Every month,” she said. “Every single one. In my kitchen. And every Thanksgiving I had to take her picture off my refrigerator before you came, and I kept forgetting, and he kept telling you she was the neighbors’ granddaughter.”
“Mom, stop.”
“I didn’t stop for fourteen years. You can let me talk for one minute.”
He turned to me with both hands open. “Gianna. Listen. You don’t know what Hillary was like back then, she’d have taken me to court over every…”
“The Saturday I lost the second one,” I said. “You had grass on your jeans.”
He didn’t say anything for a second.
“She had a tournament,” he said. “In Easton. She’d been talking about it for a month. I didn’t know, Gi. I didn’t see you’d called till the drive home.”
Josephine’s face changed when he said Easton. She looked at the floor.
I looked at her again, at the brim of a helmet that wasn’t there, at the line of her jaw.
She was the girl on Lorena’s refrigerator. Number 7.
The phone in the hoodie
“You didn’t answer me,” I said to her. “How do you know my name?”
Josephine looked at Tomasz. He shook his head at her, one small shake, the kind you give a kid in church.
She took her phone out of the front pocket of the hoodie anyway.
Her thumb went up and up and up, years of it. Then she came to the side of the bed and held it out to me, and I took it with the hand that wasn’t holding the baby.
The contact said DAD with a baseball next to it.
Four years ago, the week of our wedding:
It’s small kiddo. Just family. Gianna’s not ready to meet you yet, she’s funny about stuff like this. Grandma will bring you cake. I promise next time.
Lorena’s blue dress. Table three. Gone before the cake.
Two years ago, a Sunday in June:
Sorry about the tournament thing being weird. G doesn’t want me bringing you around the house. I’m working on her. Don’t tell Grandma, it’ll start a fight.
Last March:
Can’t make Saturday. G isn’t feeling good. It’s not you.
I scrolled to the bottom.
Last night. 2:41 a.m.
She had the baby. It’s a girl. Don’t let Grandma bring you up here. Gianna doesn’t want you there, Josie. I’m really sorry. You know I love you.
And under it, from her, at 2:43:
does she have it
He hadn’t answered that one.
I held the phone and I couldn’t make my hand give it back. Fourteen years she’d been asking to come over, and every time, I was the reason she couldn’t.
Josephine said, “He said you’d leave him if you ever saw me.”
The chair by the window
“Give her the phone back,” Tomasz said.
I didn’t.
“Gianna. Give it back to her. You’re reading it like it’s evidence. It’s not evidence, it’s me trying to keep everybody okay. You think this was easy? Two days a month. Two days. I drove up there, I did it right, I came home, I did that right too. Nobody had to choose. Nobody got hurt. You had me. She had me.”
“She had a Phillies hat,” Lorena said.
“Mom, I swear to God.”
“He shaved it the week we buried his father,” Lorena said, to me. “Everybody at the funeral kept touching his head. You’re your father all over again. He went home and found the clippers. Fifteen years old.”
Tomasz pressed his hand flat on his scalp again, right over the pale spot, and kept it there.
“I had it handled,” he said. “It was handled. And then she comes out with that on her head, and you’re going to look at it every day for the rest of your life, and you’re going to look at it next to Josie’s at somebody’s birthday, and it’s over. That’s what I meant. That’s ALL I meant. I wasn’t trying to hurt the baby.”
“You told me to cover her up.”
“For one day. Until I could talk to you.”
He looked at Josephine. Then he looked at me, and he got calm, which was worse.
“Okay. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll stop the Saturdays. I’ll keep paying Hillary, I’ll never stop paying, but I’ll stop going up there. Josie’s fourteen. She’s got her own stuff, she’s got softball. That’s fair. That’s what you want, right, Gi? It’s just us now. Just us and her.”
He pointed at our daughter.
Josephine put her hands back in the pocket of the hoodie. Lorena’s hand came off her shoulder and went to her own mouth.
Nobody said anything for a while. Out in the hallway somebody was pushing a cart with a bad wheel.
“Josephine,” I said. “Come sit down here.”
She came. She sat on the edge of the bed by my knees, stiff, like it might not hold her.
I picked the little knit hat up off the blanket, the one he’d wanted on her, and I dropped it in Lorena’s gift bag on top of the pink tissue.
Then I turned the baby around so she was facing her sister.
“Gianna,” Tomasz said. “Don’t do this.”
“Go home and get your clippers out of my bathroom,” I said. “And your razor. Today.”
“You just had a baby. You can’t do this by yourself.”
“Second Saturday,” I said, to Josephine. “Next one’s the fourteenth. You come to my house.”
“Mom,” Tomasz said. “Say something to her.”
“Not at my house, either,” Lorena said. “You can stay at the Red Roof.”
He stood there with his coffee getting cold on the tray table. Then he went out, past Kyle in the hallway, and the door closed behind him.
The fourteenth
Lorena’s car pulled up in front of my building a little before noon. Josephine came up the stairs by herself with a Phillies hat on and a bag of pierogi from her grandmother.
The fourteenth had come and gone without the autopay. I’d changed the joint account the week I got home. Tomasz pays Hillary from his own now. I have the specialist’s old bill in a drawer, paid off, a hundred dollars a month at a time, and nobody’s helping me with the 4 a.m. ones.
The shelf in the bathroom where his clippers used to sit is empty. I haven’t put anything on it.
The silver balloon is still in the corner of the living room, low and soft now, tied to the leg of the bassinet with its ribbon. I don’t know why I kept it.
Josephine took her hat off at the door. She hung it on the knob.
She went straight for the bassinet and bent over it with both hands on the rim, the same way her father had, and for a second she didn’t move.
The baby was awake. The white tuft was sticking straight up off her forehead.
Josephine looked over at the knit hat on the dresser, then at me.
“Leave it off,” I said.
She pulled the elastic out of her own hair and leaned down close, streak to streak.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who grew up as somebody else’s secret.
Family secrets have a way of surfacing at the worst possible moment – read “I Made It To Hunter’s Room In Twenty-Six Minutes. She Already Knew My Name.” and “My Husband Kept My Mother’s Letter From Me for a Year”. For another tense story involving a mother-in-law who crosses the line, there’s “I Kept My Address Off Every Record for Nine Years. Then She Called the Sheriff.”.
