Cleo leaned against the nurses’ station and thought it might be the only thing keeping her from complete collapse.
“You’re not looking so great yourself, and I don’t mean that disrespectfully, ma’am,” the nurse said. She reached out and pressed the back of her hand against Cleo’s forehead.
“No, I’m fine. I’m just . . . I haven’t had time to eat all day. And obviously, I mean, this news, while I was at work.” Cleo started quietly crying. She didn’t even have to ask what was wrong with her—crying in public! She would normally be eviscerated for such a thing, but she found that she couldn’t care. She knew what was wrong with her: her son was in emergency surgery and her blood sugar was dropping by the second and whoever the fuck said anything was weak about tears? “Do you . . . I mean . . . do you need my insurance or whatever?”
“Oh, ma’am.” The nurse’s name was Mariann. Cleo stared at her ID and wondered if maybe there actually were signals from the universe. Mariann opened the little swinging door to the back of the nurses’ station and ushered her inside. “Come on, let me feed you. We have cookies. A lot of them.”
“You don’t have to—I mean, thank you, but I know you have work to do.”
“Girl, we all have work to do. You do yours for me, just like you did when you filmed that teacher of yours, and I do mine for you, just like I am now by giving you some coffee and Oreos, and maybe I can rustle up some Jell-O. In fact, I know I can. The nurse on the shift before me hoards it. No one really knows why.”
“Thank you.” Cleo bowed her head and found that she couldn’t stop crying.
“No woman is an island,” Mariann said as she rubbed Cleo’s back. “Even VIPs like you.”
The surgery had gone well, the doctor told Cleo. They’d gotten to the appendix in time, well before it burst, and now it was just the standard recovery—rest and TLC for a few weeks.
The doctor kept addressing Cleo as “Mom,” as in, “Mom, can you give him some TLC for a few weeks?” and Cleo very much wanted to direct him to use her name—she was more than just Lucas’s mom!—but after neglecting her son and his (now) obvious fever and his (now) obvious distress, she didn’t have the heart to push it. She’d thought it might have been a bit of spoiled food! She’d thought maybe he just wanted a mental health day! “Mom,” the doctor was implying, was a compliment, and she didn’t need to fight every ingrained battle when she knew the surgeon didn’t mean anything by it other than that she was Lucas’s caretaker, even when she hadn’t been a very good one.
Lucas was still groggy, so Cleo sat with him, enveloped by the quiet tranquility of his room. She held his hand, which was bigger than hers now and warm and occasionally trembled when, she supposed, he dreamed, and which he’d never allow her to do if he were awake. It was just the two of them, as it nearly always was. Cleo squeezed her eyes shut and rested her head on his bed. She was so weary from everything. Maybe that’s just how it was, with their little compact duo bracing against the world, but maybe it was also that it was so often just their little compact duo period.
Fifteen years ago, Cleo didn’t tell a soul about her pregnancy. At some point it became obvious in the late summer when she was entering law school, but Columbia was a fresh start—she literally didn’t know anyone—so she didn’t have to explain herself other than the occasional, “No, no partner, no husband. I’m doing this alone.” She called Georgie around the holidays when she was about eight months in and said, “Um, so I’m having a baby,” and it was clear from her reaction that Georgie didn’t know if she should be hurt that Cleo hadn’t told her earlier or overjoyed that her twins would have a new cousin.
Her labor came two weeks early. Because Cleo was Cleo, she had a birth plan lined up and a bag at the ready. She hadn’t taken a birthing class because she figured women had been doing this for centuries without learning how to breathe and push properly, and beyond that, she didn’t want to be the only one to