It's Complicated Read online

  “Today? You know, you don’t have to spend the whole day with her,” Mike said, his voice so neutral Josie had a hard time reading it on the phone. If they were face to face she could see the way the skin around his eyes wrinkled, the emotion in his irises and pupils, whether his hands were tight in fists or loose and free around his hips. Did he mean he didn’t want her to spend that time with Laura? Did he mean that he was grateful that she would spend that time with Laura? All of this reading of intentions and emotions was making her tired, and she wasn’t even part of the threesome.

  She was, however, a fourth wheel most of the time—and maybe that was why she read intent and emotion into so many things. She was a foreigner in the country of Mike, Dylan, and Laura; culture shock, perhaps, had set in recently along with a healthy dose of jealousy. That was getting tiring, too.

  “Mike, I want to spend time with her. This is important for me too, you know? And I think you guys will be there for the birth and she’ll need you two hundred percent.”

  He chuckled. “And we’ll need you there, too.”

  Her heart swelled at being acknowledged, at being wanted—needed—in the moment that represented the great bridging over for her best friend from “just Laura” to “Laura the mommy.”

  “Thank you,” was all she could think to say.

  “No, thank you,” he said, and sighed. “I guess I need to go let Dylan know, don’t I?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know he’s going to go and buy another eight-foot bunny.”

  “Yeah,” she said. The baby’s room was already filled with toys Dylan had been buying for the past few months, or that his parents had sent. The whole family had an apparent fondness for oversized African animals.

  There was a hesitation on Mike’s end of the conversation. It was melancholic, uncertain, and she reached out to it. “Hey, Mike.”

  “Hmm?” As the conversation continued she could sense him pulling into himself, charging up for the biggest event of his adult life. Hers, too. Hell, everyone’s.

  “It’s going to be okay.”

  “I know.” The smile came back in his tone, an easy, warm baritone that made her feel safe and secure, shaking off her earlier shattering. “It’s going to be great,” he answered.

  “It’s going to be horrible,” Laura moaned as Josie wandered back to the table to find the sundae glass empty and Laura tight-fisted, leaning forward in her seat.

  “What’s going to be horrible?” Josie asked.

  “The birth!” Laura practically shouted.

  Aha. Time for a walk.

  She threw a few bills on the table to cover the check and grabbed Laura’s elbow, helping her to stand. Josie peered at her, staring her down. Laura’s face was more flushed, with a red that crept down into her neck and upper chest, the outer edges of her hairline starting to get wet with sweat. Trying desperately to keep the accusing tone out of her voice, Josie said, “You had another contraction while I was in the bathroom, didn’t you?”

  “I had a twinge.”

  “You had a twinge?”

  “A surge.”

  “Twinge” and “surge” and “pressure” were the euphemisms that a lot of the people in the natural childbirth community had been using for contractions. And Josie got it, she understood. It was a way to train the mind to think of the pain differently. “Searing, fibrous, ripping pain that makes you want to eat morphine-laden donuts and drop acid to avoid it” wouldn’t make anyone want to have a baby, right?

  So surge it was.

  “All right. It wasn’t a surge,” Laura admitted. “It feels like somebody is reaching into my belly, and twisting it, wringing it like you would wring a wet shirt.”

  “And how long did that last?”

  Laura glared at her. “You’re trying to figure this out, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” Time to be blunt, Josie thought.

  “I’m not in labor,” Laura said.

  “And I’m not eighty-three,” Madge said as she walked by.

  Ambling out the front door, Josie kept Laura on track, one step at a time. “Let’s just go for a walk. You’ve got plenty of water in you, plenty of food in you, and a walk will help you stretch out and just be—uh, feel more pleasant.”

  “Okay.” Laura perked up. “And we can talk about the business.”

  “The business,” Josie said.

  “Yes.”

  “The weirdo threesome matching business that you want me to run.”

  “You were listening,” Laura said with relief.

  “Oh, I was listening. That doesn’t mean I agree.” She said it lightly, though.

  Her sarcasm meter had to be dialed down to zero as far as Laura was concerned. So many snappy comebacks, so many wisecracks that just pressed against her lips and teeth. She wanted to make bad, crude jokes about threesomes and dating services. About what was already happening and what was coming. But she couldn’t. Her own coping strategies had to be put on a back burner for her friend.

  Josie calculated out lead time. Mike would need a minimum of a half-hour to forty-five minutes to get into the city to reach the nearest hospital that they could choose in an emergency. This didn’t seem to be an emergent situation, though—not yet. Laura’s contractions were coming at a steady pace, at ever-decreasing intervals, and in ever-increasing duration. By the time it really was time, there would still be plenty of time for Mike and Dylan to get there.

  Early May in the Boston area was a crap shoot. It could be seventy degrees and sunny, or thirty-five degrees, overcast with the lingering threat of very rare snow still in the air. A few years before, one winter had seemed to stretch into three, culminating in a Mother’s Day sprinkling of flakes. This year, though, May had begun spring in earnest. The baby would be born in the perfect month for new beginnings.

  “Did you ever notice how blue the sky is, Josie?” Laura asked as they waddled along the city streets. Passersby shot Laura some very nervous looks, especially the moment her hands cradled the bottom of her enormous abdomen and she shouted, “Oh my God! Make it stop!” If it weren’t really happening it would have made a fabulous prank. Why didn’t we try this before? Josie wondered. A pillow and a loose dress and they could have had some fun poking at worried passersby.

  This, though, was all too real.

  Crouched down in a near-fetal position, amazing even Josie with her dexterity and ability to limbo as low as she limboed, Laura defied gravity as she squatted, the contraction overwhelming her. A placid look and long, even breaths in and out attested to her hypnosis training, but Josie wondered: If it took this much effort to control one of the earlier, deeper surges, what would a tsunami feel like?

  Trying to inject a little humor into the situation, Josie knelt down and sang the limbo song, which yielded only a prompt, ferocious glare from a thoroughly unamused Laura.

  “I don’t think I practiced my breathing well enough,” Laura moaned, the sound of her voice shifting from a groan to a whimper as the contraction peaked.

  “Just take a deep breath in,” Josie intoned, breathing for her, providing an example. Laura followed and then breathed out—and soon the contraction subsided. Josie’s mental math began a steady chatter of alert inside her head. Time to assume they were going in.

  She knew that Laura knew this, that forty-five seconds to a minute, five minutes apart meant that you might want to consider heading to the hospital. She also knew, however, that if she suggested to Laura that they head off to the hospital, Laura would freak. And so, rather than poking the laboring bear, she decided that the most prudent action would be to play along with Laura’s fantasy.

  Walking with as much purpose and gusto as she could muster, Laura managed to get a few leg lengths away, her rounded ass enormous now and stretched by the baby, by the added fluid, by the pregnancy—and not just a few trips to Jeddy’s. But Laura’s time in the gym before the pregnancy showed; Josie still had to hustle to catch up.

  “I think we can do a two-mile
loop. What do you think, Josie?” Laura said, walking so fast that Josie almost burst into laughter at the level of delusion that her friend was in.

  This baby was coming now, and if Laura wasn’t ready, nature didn’t give a shit. Josie sure as hell wasn’t ready. The last thing she needed was to be reminded how far behind she was when it came to love, and relationships, and being a grown-up. Never one to dwell on the long term, she found a balance in life that involved picking a goal, focusing singlemindedly until it was accomplished, and only figuring out how she felt about that goal afterward. Then squaring herself toward the next goal, and moving on from there.

  It's how she had escaped her little town in middle-of-nowhere, Ohio, full of people who lived in trailers and who thought that a high school diploma was a sign of an elite education, a few, though, choosing college. What others thought of as their first two years of college had taken her four, going to classes part-time at the local branch of a smaller state university and then finally transferring to the school where she and Laura had met. Being the poorest kid was something that she was accustomed to but ready to put behind her, so her first goal had been finishing college and getting a degree in something useful, something highly employable. Nursing had been it. Her second goal had been to never, ever have to move back to a place where Friday night fun meant boozing it up at the local VFW and a fancy dinner involved cloth napkins and a higher cut of prime rib, with bits of bacon in the green beans they served on the side.

  It wasn’t that she hated Ohio. Or even her hometown of Peters. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of it, even. It felt more like being born into her community, where having your first baby by seventeen was something that didn’t raise eyebrows and having three before the age of twenty-one was all too common, had been some colossal cosmic accident. Her entire goal in life for the first twenty-four years had been to right that giant wrong. Whether she would still go on to struggle with the many life issues that she’d seen her mother, her aunt, her cousin Darla go through…that was something she didn’t bother to contemplate. She just focused on the fact that having children too young meant that she would have to stay. Now, having spent the last thirteen or more years of her life trying desperately not to get pregnant meant that thinking about doing it on purpose gave her massive pause.

  Her best friend was about to have a baby; colleagues in their late twenties and early thirties were finally setting aside their own birth control and changing patterns that were more than a decade old. It made her feel as if she were missing some sort of alert that every woman but her could hear. Beep beep beep—time to have a baby! Josie didn’t like change unless she initiated the change. While she had control over her own body, right now she was watching her best friend lose complete control of hers, managed and manipulated by a tiny little being within who wielded power like a sociopath in an amnesia ward.

  “Two miles it is,” she said as brightly as possible, trying to point them in the direction of the nearest hospital.

  “You think I’m crazy.”

  “No, I don’t,” Josie said, plastering on another fake smile.

  This one, apparently, was a little too fake because Laura could see through it and she frowned. She stopped, forcing Josie to come to a screeching halt. Laura planted two angry hands on two very lush hips and then lifted one finger and pointed it right at Josie’s nose. “You have no idea what I’m going through right now, so wipe the fake smile off your face and give me a real one.”

  Josie’s face muscles twitched and tinged, and did all sorts of weird things that they’d never done before as she tried simultaneously not to scowl, frown, laugh, or sputter. Whatever mask came out was enough to make Laura burst into uncontrollable giggles and then whoop in a loud, strangled, weird respiratory sound that made her double over again.

  Three minutes.

  Three minutes this time. As Laura struggled to let her muscles go loose and to release the tension through her breath, Josie counted the seconds, hitting thirty, then forty, then fifty. If she didn’t do something to convince Laura to get to the hospital, whatever thin thread of control Laura hoped for in planning her birth, in having it at the hospital she wanted, with the midwife she wanted, with Mike and Dylan and Josie at her side, was about to evaporate. The baby would be delivered here, outside one of the ubiquitous cell phone stores littering this part of the city. And then Josie’s own inner loss of control would begin its lonely process.

  “Laura.”

  “Yes?” she gasped.

  “I think it’s time.” Infusing that statement with as much empathy as possible, Josie felt her voice crack, could hear the change in her tone, and hoped Laura could feel all of the things that words failed to say. A pale hand reached for Josie’s and grasped it, fingernails digging hard into her palm. Josie needed her own breath to control the transfer of pain.

  “I know. I know,” Laura said simply. “I just needed to pretend it’s not about to happen.” Tears started to pour down Laura’s cheeks and dot the fabric of her knees as she rested in a crouched position, her, bloodshot eyes so bright and green they made Josie think of Caribbean waters reflecting white clouds and the air of possibility.

  “Baby’s coming,” Laura said simply.

  “Yes, honey, she’s coming,” Josie said.

  “What have I done?” Laura asked. “Nine and a half months ago I sat in my apartment making you the nine thousandth pot of coffee ever and you made me go on this dating site—”

  “I didn’t make you.”

  “You made me. Don’t try to pretend you didn’t make me.”

  “Okay,” Josie said, humbled. “I did.”

  “You made me write this stupid want ad to go whore myself out.”

  “You didn’t whore yourself out.”

  “To go whore myself out. Hey—I’m the one having the baby, I get to pick what I say. Quit interrupting.” Josie couldn’t argue with that. “To whore myself out and then I go and find Dylan and…and then it turns out that Dylan and Mike...and…”

  Silence.

  Laura stopped talking as yet another wave hit her, and Josie felt the kinetics of the contraction kick into her through the strength of Laura’s fingers, her fingertips pressing their tension into Josie’s wrist and hand. Josie could even sense the layers of her uterus cramping and clamping and pulling, the fibers all acting in whatever strange pattern the body needed to weave in order to push this baby out into the world. If Laura had teleported Josie’s mind into her body she couldn’t have transferred that feeling any better.

  Closing her eyes, Josie saw a red, blooming mist behind her lids, like the audio that Laura sometimes listened to, training the brain to perceive pain in a different way with hypnosis. Josie thought that was a big load of shit, and yet, somehow in this moment of intensity, this pinpoint of biological destiny, that was where her brain went—to that stupid, insipid, ridiculous image of a misty cloud blooming. Maybe, though, just maybe, it was her own internal pain receptors panicking and not some new-agey bullshit…because damn, did Laura know how to destroy her hand or what?

  “We’re going to get you back to my car,” Josie said.

  “Where’s your car?” Laura cried.

  “It’s back near Jeddy’s.”

  “That far?”

  “It’s a block, Laura.”

  “We only made it a block?”

  “Yeah, hon, we did.”

  “No, I was walking…was…no.”

  “It was a long block,” Josie reassured her as they slowly, step by painstaking step, made their way back.

  “Why does it feel like I have a bowling ball between my legs?” Laura said, widening her stance and walking like a toddler with a heavy load in a disposable diaper.

  Because you do, Josie thought, except it’s coming out of your front door later on today. Laura came to a grinding halt and gaped openly at Josie. Oh, shit, she thought, did I say that aloud?

  “I am not giving birth to a bowling ball,” Laura said, her voice trembling. Two pe
ople walking past stopped and gawked at the two of them, then looked at Laura’s belly. It was a couple, a man and a woman, and the woman’s face changed to an expression of sympathy.

  “Dear, I’ve been there. The bowling ball eventually comes out,” she said, and pointed to the man next to her who looked young enough to be her son, a guy in his early twenties.

  Horror dotted his face as he stared at Laura’s crotch and mumbled, “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “But,” Laura said, “it doesn’t really feel like a bowling ball?”

  The woman and Josie exchanged a glance, and Laura began to wail like a small child. “But that’s not true!” she shouted.

  “No, of course not,” said the stranger.

  Oh boy, Josie thought, this is going to be a long birth.

  Chapter Two

  Dr. Alex Derjian watched the scene unfold with a certain level of mischievous pleasure that he hadn’t been able to access in years. He’d done a double-take when the crew walked in through the main emergency doors as he’d been charting, documenting the last hour or so of work on patients. A rotund and deeply pregnant, gorgeous blonde woman was flanked by an incredibly tall Nordic man and a smaller but more muscular Italian guy who looked like he could be on the cover of GQ. And then behind them a slim, tiny, little buzzing dynamo he recognized instantly.

  Josie from the research trial his grandfather was part of. Holy shit, he thought. Of all the ways to run into her.

  The pregnant woman must be her friend…or her wife (if so, his gaydar was broken). He saw one of the certified nurse midwives, a serene and businesslike old hand at all things birthing, meeting up with them. Unless there were complications severe enough to warrant calling him in on a consult—he was one of two residents on call in OB/GYN-- he probably wouldn’t have any contact with Josie or her…whoever the laboring woman was. The only time that midwife would call him in would be in a true surgical emergency.