How to Bake a Perfect Life (47 page)

Katie is safe, and that’s important. My mother found her, as I guess I knew she would. She’s pretty mighty, my mother. In all of this, I keep wanting her, like she’s my handmaiden or something—Mommy, Mommy, come take care of me—and yet there’s her life going on, taking some new turns, and I would love to hear about them, but maybe another day when I’ll actually remember
.

I am going to be pregnant forever
.

Ramona

  W
e pile into the car—Katie with a big paperback she bought at the drugstore, Merlin with a shiny new harness around his chest to make it easier to let him out to exercise, and Jonah with a bag of candies. The one fly in the whole thing is that my phone is dead, and in all the confusion I forgot to bring my charger. I looked for one in the small town we passed right after I realized it was completely out of power, but no luck. It’s weirdly unsettling to be out of touch. Jonah has his, in case of emergencies, but I don’t have access to the numbers on my phone.

It occurs to me that only a person middle-aged or older would make this mistake. Anyone younger is so attached to her phone she’d probably have spare chargers everywhere—purse, car, whatever.

Anyway, we’re going to surprise Sofia, so it doesn’t matter. I keep imagining her face when she sees us.

We take turns with the radio, Top 40 for Katie, classical for me, some jazz for Jonah. When the radio loses reception, we play CDs from the little suitcase Jonah has brought along.

We sing. We talk, all of us shifting the positions of the passengers and the driver: me and Jonah in front, then Jonah and me, then Katie and me, then Katie and Jonah. The person in the
back sleeps with the dog or reads. It is not the most inspiring landscape, largely empty and windblown, as you might expect of West Texas, but I am still cheered by the simple act of travel.

We arrive in San Antonio at eight p.m. I’m not sure exactly where the hospital is, but Jonah finds that information on his phone, and we all agree that it’s not so late we shouldn’t give it a try.

As we enter the hospital, I’m nervous. I take Jonah’s hand. Katie, uncharacteristically, takes my other hand. A volunteer at the visitors’ desk tells us it’s almost too late, but we have fifteen minutes. That’s long enough.

In the elevator, we are quiet. The hospital is settling in for the night, with nurses talking quietly at the station and visitors saying their goodbyes. Most of the doors are propped open to show burn patients in various states of wrapping. They watch television, sit with friends or parents. A pair of toddlers play hide-and-seek in the waiting area, a mother bent into a phone nearby. She looks exhausted.

Katie stops as we near Oscar’s room. Her hand is on her belly, and she’s panting softly. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“You don’t have to.” I don’t let go of her hand. “If you aren’t ready—”

A woman comes out of a room just ahead of us with a bundle in her arms, and even though I can’t see her face, I recognize my mother’s style at a hundred paces. A crisp sleeveless blouse, white trimmed with peach accents, and peach capris, and—

She’s carrying a
baby
. “Mom!” I cry out without thinking, dropping both Katie’s and Jonah’s hands.

Lily turns, her mouth falling open for a second before she gets the biggest smile on her face. “Well, look who’s here,” she says in a mom-to-baby voice. “It’s your grandma.”

She brings the baby over, and it’s plain he’s a boy—a big, hearty creature, with giant hands and a headful of black hair. “Oh!” is all I can manage as she nestles him into my arms. His
face is bruised and a little swollen from the trauma of birth, but his eyes are distinctly, clearly the same color as Katie’s and Oscar’s. He yawns and then looks at me, calmly and easily, and in that very second I am smitten. Falling down the rabbit hole of love all over again. It makes me dizzy, and, helplessly, I look up to find Jonah’s face. He smiles broadly.

Breathless, I bend back over the baby, kiss his forehead. “Hello, little man. What is your name?”

“Marcus Gallagher Wilson,” my mother says. “He was nine pounds, fourteen ounces.”

I blink at her. “What? How is my daughter?”

“Fine. That child was born to have babies, Ramona. We’ll go see her in a minute.” She lifts a hand, scoops Katie into our circle. “Come see your brother.”

She edges closer, all limbs and bristling joy and fear and anticipation as she bends in to look at him. “Oh,” she cries. “He’s beautiful!” At the sound of her voice, his head whips around. Babies are not supposed to be able to track, but this one knows that this voice matters.

“He knows his sister is here.”

“Look at his fingernails! Oh, and look at his palm!” She touches him reverently.

“He needs to go back to his mommy right now,” Lily says, and gives us directions to the maternity ward. “Come find us when you’re done.”

“Is Oscar awake?”

“Yes. Only one at a time.”

“Okay.”

Katie looks at the door.

“You’re his blood,” I say. “His only daughter. You go.”

She swallows, smooths her hair. And opens the door.

Katie

  I
t’s kind of dim in the hospital room, only the light from the television flickering. Katie’s heart is pounding really hard, so hard that it’s making her hands shake, and she feels like she might cry.

In the bed is a person under the blankets. There are a lot of bandages, around arms and a head. His head turns and he sees her. “Katydid!” His voice is just the same. He sounds shocked.

She stands by the door, not sure what to do exactly. It’s been more than a year since she’s seen him, anyway, since before his last deployment. “Hi, Dad.”

“How did you get here?”

“Ramona.”

He is in the shadows. Katie can’t see much, really. She feels frozen where she is. “Did you see your brother?”

“Yeah, he’s really cute.”

“He looks
just
like you. Except you were always more of a girly-looking thing than that. He’s a bruiser.”

He sounds exactly the same. Exactly, exactly the same. Without knowing that she would, she says, “I’m mad at you, Dad. I’m really mad that you tried to kill yourself.”

“Baby, come here.” His tone is the one you don’t disobey, and it pulls her across the room to his side. “Give me your hand.”

She raises it and he takes it in his left. His right is bandaged, and it is the right leg that’s missing beneath the blanket. His forehead is not messed up and his eyebrows are growing back in, like they were singed off. She can’t see his nose, but all of a sudden she’s not afraid anymore. It’s like Ramona said. Somebody else all burned and scarred would freak her out, but this person in this bed is looking at her with her dad’s eyes and talking to her with her dad’s voice.

“I was wrong,” he says. “I was being a coward. I’m sorry.”

And at that, Katie splits open like an overripe watermelon. “I went to see Mom, and she stole all my stuff and left me in this creepy park, and I didn’t know where to go or what to do.” She’s crying now, and her dad is holding her hand really tight. “And she’s not ever going to be well, even though I wanted her to be, and I need you to be alive, or I won’t have any parents at all.”

There are tears in her dad’s eyes. “I promise you, Katie, that I am not going anywhere. And if I look as if I’m going to, you just take my leg off and hit me with it, all right?”

She laughs and has to cover her face, because her nose is getting all snotty.

“Give me a hug, Katydid, and then I gotta get some sleep.”

She sniffs hard, then gingerly presses her cheek into his shoulder. But he lifts his left arm and grabs her tight. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Dad.”

Sofia’s Journal

J
ULY
15, 20—

I am a mother!!!!! That backache turned out to be labor, and by the time I got to the delivery room, I was in transition, so he was born two hours later. Big baby! They got him cleaned up and weighed and all that, got me all cleaned up and stitched (ow, it hurts to pee!!!!!!!!), and then they brought him back to me, all wrapped in a little white blanket. His poor face is smushed and his ears are all battered, but they said he’ll be fine in a day or two. I nursed him and nursed him and nursed him, and he took to it like a champ, no problem at all. But then, I would guess he had to be pretty hungry. Nearly ten pounds! Holy cow
.

He’s fussing again. Gotta go
.

Ramona

  I
spend the morning of my birthday with Sofia and Marcus. My daughter is beaming, awash in hormones and love and the possibility that life might work out all right. Nursing her son, her hair tied back in a ponytail, she says, “I had no idea you could feel love like this. I mean, I love Oscar, and you, and drinking margaritas, and all kinds of other things, but …” She shakes her head. “Nothing ever felt like it was going to swallow me whole.”

“I know.”

She looks at me. “It must have been so hard for you, Mom. You were so young.”

“No. There was a day, when I first met Jonah, that I was in the record store and he played a record of Spanish guitar. You started to dance in my belly, and that was it. When I saw your face, it was like I already knew you, that you’d been in my world forever.”

She nods, cupping the baby’s head with her hand, ruffling his hair. He makes snorting sounds as he gulps milk. “Yes. Exactly.” Leaning back on the pillows, she says, “I love the way Jonah looks at you.”

She met him this morning, before he went out to do mysterious
things, as my mother and Katie had done. He took her hand and gave her his gentle smile and said, “At last we meet,” which made her laugh.

“How does he look at me?”

“What, are you kidding? You haven’t seen it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. Maybe you should notice.” She strokes the baby’s cheek. “Even better is how you look at him.” She smiles her old-soul smile. “Like he’s the morning.”

I cover my face. “How embarrassing.”

“No. It’s great. He’s the one, you know.”

“The one?”

“Yeah. The. One. The one you’ve been waiting for. The one you want. The one from every song ever sung about love.”