Page 2 of The Delivery

The dolly and its load hover, poised to enter.

“Where d’ya want it?” he asks.

Behind her, Rebecca hears Maddy’s bedroom door click shut. The autumn breeze blows roughly across her face, bringing up blood in her cheeks.

She looks to Mark. He hesitates too.

“The nursery,” he says.

It is still painted a beautiful blue, though the crib is gone, as well as the optimistic teddy bear, also blue, and the changing table. It’s been eleven months since the miscarriage, but it feels like minutes. They’d had fertility issues before, and the doctor said there’s no more trying now, but that’s okay because they have Maddy, and Maddy is perfect.

Nudged to life, the dolly gives a mechanical whir and progresses toward the laid-open front doors of their home.

They have to step aside to make way.

Chapter 2

Nine Months Before Delivery

It is their first night out since the horror-movie nightmare in the bathroom, red-brown spatter on the matte porcelain floor tiles, Rebecca curled up against the bathtub, sobbing, Mark at a loss, Maddy in the doorway, stimming, the whole house, their whole life, wildly dysregulated.

Rebecca is wearing a little black dress and heels, and it’s been so long since she’s applied makeup that she can feel it on her face. Putting herself together to go out felt mournful and exhausting, but this is what she needs to do as a woman and a wife and a mother and a person who is still alive.

Mark looks sharp in his Ralph Lauren pants and tailored black blazer. They have always been comfortable but are new to having real money. Since the e-news content optimization company Mark works for went public last year, they are spending more freely but are still at the stage where they remember how much everything costs: the aforementioned slacks, her Kate Spade wristlet, their staggeringly overpriced 2,500-square-foot Brentwood house.

They are at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge for cocktails, and Rebecca has already made the requisite joke about Mark’s pants matching the environment, and they’ve ordered the fancy-pants cocktails they can suddenly afford, and the lull has now arrived, the lonely black space of their loss in the midst of all the laughter and tinkling of silverware and piano keys.

At booths and tables all around them, confidence is on peacock display. Dagger slits in sequined dresses. Hollywood agent types in slick suits, mouths rat-a-tatting like machine guns. Well-padded European men luxuriating in velour casual wear, slurping oysters with second wives who are indiscernible from high-class call girls.

It comes on first as heat beneath the bridge of her nose and a quiver in her throat, and then Rebecca is crying quietly. She dabs at her eyes with the black linen napkin the waiter had produced for her to preempt unseemly white lint against her dress.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

Mark rubs the back of her neck. His eyes are pouched from lack of sleep. He looks far wearier than his forty-two years, and she feels that this, like everything else, is her fault.

She lowers her face as their drinks arrive in a flourish to sit untouched on the cocktail table before them.

Mark lowers his hand, and they sit side by side, unsure what to say. The whole outing feels at once carnival-foolish. They marinate for a minute in regret over their choice of environment, and then he says, “Maybe we should get the check?”

“Okay, yeah,” Rebecca says, fumbling out her phone. “And I just want to check on Maddy.”

Maddy is with her favorite babysitter, and she doesn’t need checking, but Rebecca cannot help it. Once you realize that you live in a world where a baby can die inside your body, everything feels unsafe. When their little family of three was on its way to becoming a quartet, the future seemed unbounded, safe, full of hope. Now tomorrow feels thwarted and every tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow after that.

“She’s fine,” Mark says. “It’s good for her to go an evening without touching base.”

Rebecca cradles her phone, the number of Maddy’s emergency cell already called up on the screen, tempting. She knows that the urge to call is for herself, not for Maddy. She knows, too, that it won’t allay her anxiety; it’ll just ingrain the habit of checking-checking-checking. And that she is transferring her grief over the miscarriage into concern about her living child, which is unfair to Maddy and stultifying for herself. If only understanding something could alleviate the underlying compulsion. But no, Rebecca is aware and incapable at the same time. Is she becoming the Devouring Mother she studied in cultural anthropology in college, so desperate to shield her vulnerable child that she’d rather swallow her up than sacrifice her to an uncaring world?

She goes for a half measure, calling up the teddy bear nanny-cam app. There Maddy is, frog-sitting on the foam tiles in her bedroom, wearing her noise-canceling headphones and finishing her Lego giraffe. Babysitter June lies on Maddy’s bed with her legs up the wall and her head dangling backward off the mattress, watching her phone upside down. All quiet on the home front.

Rebecca slips her phone back inside the ridiculous pink wristlet that looked so fetching displayed on the underlit boutique shelf. Now it seems like a prop. Her stomach is a swirling black hole, eating itself from the inside. She thinks of Maddy’s wide eyes, the way she cries after school when Sydney and the other Mean Girls play their Mean Girl games, how she never understands why she doesn’t fit in, why kids revel in petty cruelties, why psychosomatic stomachaches land her with the school nurse three days of the week.

“What if . . . ?”

“What, Beccs?”

“What if I’d watched her food better? All organic or—I don’t know— only farm to table? There’s forever chemicals in everything—bottled water, plastic wrap. Hormones in the meat and chicken, milk and eggs. I could’ve done homemade baby food, spread out her vaccinations. It’s like everything’s trying to poison us, our kids. Big food, big tech, Big Pharma. Her meds—she’s on so many meds, and meds for the side effects of her meds, and she’s just a baby still, just seven, and maybe we—I don’t know, I love her more than anything, and she’s perfect, but what if . . .”

Mark’s head inclines slightly in that graceful manner he has. “No,” he says gently. “Maddy is Maddy. And thank God for that. We couldn’t have done anything different. It’s not your fault.”