Free What We Have by Amy Boesky

hell
    I wanted to stay like this forever, in between, not one thing or another. Not one, not two. Inside of me, the baby pulsed: Every second of every minute of every hour, the baby was growing, cells multiplying, limbs lengthening—I didn’t have to move an inch, lift a single finger, and so much kept happening.
    The baby was good company, even though I didn’t know much about it yet. Boy or girl? Its features in my last sonogram were soft and blurry, like someone caught off guard, moving before the camera snapped.
    I tried not to notice he or she wasn’t moving again. Knuckling it from either side, I tried to picture health. Wholeness. Peace .
    One more knead, and the baby popped back into motion, like a giant cork.
    All will be well, little one , I crooned, almost believing it. We needed no words. We breathed, we turned, we slept. Cell by cell, we grew larger.

Birthday (I)

    SUNDAY EVENING, UNUSUALLY MILD FOR December. Jacques and I were in bed, talking before sleep. We’d had dinner that night at Dave and Lori’s, whose baby girl was ten months old. She’d sat through almost all of dinner in her high chair, burbling at us, so solid and human-looking. Dave and Lori looked like they had life all figured out. Our “lead indicators,” Jacques called them. We spent most of dinner asking for advice, and then, finding the advice overwhelming, trying to ignore it.
    This was the stretch of time—between the end of the semester and my due date—I’d blocked out for getting ready for the baby. I had it written in my day planner in capital letters, with a long arrow to show how much time I had. GET READY FOR BABY—————, right there from December 3 to December 31.
    There are lots of ways to get ready for things. My focus was on the baby’s room.
    Our house was narrow and tall, and we’d decided to put the baby in the middle room on the third floor, the one with the fan-shaped window and distant view of the aviary. In the mornings you could hear birdcalls, which I figured the baby would like.
    The room was mostly done. We’d set up white shelves in the closet, scrubbing the walls with Fantastik. Every few days I added something: a small stack of towels. A Kleenex box. We had royal blue carpeting installed, hung up blue-and-yellow borders, and fitted in a fresh white bureau and changing table. Everything was there but the crib, which had been on the top of my to-do list for weeks. I’d actually found one that seemed perfect a few weeks earlier at Baby World in northern Virginia—simple, white, pristine—but Jacques, who likes comparison shopping, still wanted to check out a few other possibilities.
    Why couldn’t we just get the one at Baby World? It was perfect.
    For someone prone to criticism, I’m easily satisfied when it comes to material objects. Many of them strike me as ideal, just the way they are. Not Jacques. He likes the hunt.
    “What’s wrong with the one we saw?” I asked on Saturday, my first weekend since the semester had ended. After hours of lying on the couch, coaxing the baby to turn, I was ready to get out a bit.
    “Oh,” Jacques said, deep in the paper. “I still want to check out a few other options.”
    “ What other options?” I asked. Was he thinking maybe something that rocked ?
    I set my jaw, the way I do when I want something to happen now and he wants to delay just for the sake of delaying.
    The crib wasn’t the real issue, though we ended up arguing about it that afternoon. A new problem had inserted itself into our lives.
    A job had turned up in my field in Boston.
    I say this like the job found me, instead of vice versa, and in fact, this wasn’t true. In September, when I did my usual quarterly scan of the Modern Language Association job list, there it was—a job in Boston. In my field. Given that I knew who was teaching seventeenth-century at every British university in Boston, this qualified as a near miracle. I called Annie immediately to read her the ad, just