LITMIR.BIZ

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shrieks were silenced.

      “You know, you could have taken the battery out,” Becker said sardonically. He had been watching me with an odd smile on his face, and he hadn’t offered to help. Not that there was much he could have done, I suppose, but he could have offered to hold it while I was making its formula stuff. It shrieked louder if you put it down. But no—he just sat there with his arms crossed, watching me.

      “If I’d done that, Eddie would flunk his course,” I said. “I told him I’d look after it.”

      “Your grip on reality appears to be getting loose,” Becker said. “Here you are, playing baby dolls in a shack in the bush, and meanwhile, there’s a real baby growing inside you, and you’re planning to go on a trip to God knows where, and once again, all you’re thinking of is yourself and nobody else.”

      From that point on, the conversation degenerated into a childish shouting match that did neither of us much credit. If the baby had been out and about at that point, instead of being safely wrapped up in its placential duvet, I think we might have torn the poor thing to pieces, each tugging at a limb like toddlers fighting over a toy. While we were yelling at each other, I recalled that old King Solomon story, the one about the mothers fighting over a baby before King Solly suggests that it be chopped in half to let each person have a bit. If I had been there, I’m not sure that even then I’d have been willing to let go of my share.

      Luckily, we had reached the dessert stage by that point, so I can’t say that dinner was ruined, although my stomach was distinctly unsettled by the time he stomped out, leaving half his apple pie uneaten on the plate. It didn’t go to waste, though. Moments later, I found myself finishing it off—after all, I was eating for two.

      After Becker had gone, I found Lug-nut and Rosie curled up together on the bed in the lean-to bedroom, their ears laid back and their eyes wide, tails thumping in that “it wasn’t my fault” kind of way. I telescoped forward to a day when the kid would be present in body as well as spirit, a hearing, thinking person whose parents had just been shouting at each other. Becker and I argued a lot, there was no doubt about it, and while we always made up at some point afterwards, the process of disagreement was rarely conducted in a mature fashion. I knew how damaging that kind of atmosphere could be to a child—how small people naturally assume that the tempests raging in the household are of their own making, how they slip into the self-assigned role of scapegoat, of perpetrator. Heck, I read the newspapers, I know how it happens. Becker and I didn’t need to come to blows in order for the climate between us to reach the level designated “emotionally traumatic” by the authorities. Abusive, even. I curled up on the bed beside the dogs and stroked their fuzzy heads and spoke soothing words to them.

      “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay, it didn’t have anything to do with you.” Then it occurred to me that I couldn’t say the same thing to the little fetus currently doing multiple-cell gymnastics in my belly. I placed my hand over the general area—which at thirteen weeks was already beginning to swell, a pleasant tightening, as if the muscles were binding together like some kind of protective armour. The argument I’d just had with Becker had everything to do with the baby—or at least we wouldn’t have had such a nasty one if the baby wasn’t a fact. If I married him, was that likely to change, or would we still grapple with control issues at every turn, bickering like children over every diaper change, every new tooth, every aspect of the process? If I were to capitulate and do what Becker wanted, tie the knot and move in with him, ditch the conference and concentrate on motherhood to the exclusion of all else, including my work and my independence, would that guarantee a healthy, well-adjusted child? Would the child’s mother then become a faceless wife, an acquiescent brood mare? Okay—I know that those are extreme notions, and quite unfair to Becker, but I’m only telling you what I was thinking. Chalk it up to hormones. The fact is that while I had decided to have the baby, I was determined to have it on my own terms, and my fight with Becker had finally clued me in to the hard fact that I couldn’t do the motherhood thing entirely by myself. There was one all-important factor that had only just registered. The baby itself. Himself? Herself? Whatever—no woman is an island. At least, no pregnant woman is. She’s an archipelago.

      Whatever decisions I made in the next seven months had to be made with the understanding that for the next twenty years or so, my choices would be affecting two of us. Three, perhaps, if I loosened my hold on the reins enough to let the child’s father have a vote, but those choices could no longer affect just one person only. This hit me with such profound force that it took my breath away.

      I patted my belly. “Sorry about all that,” I said to it. “I’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen again. In the meantime, how ’bout another piece of pie?”

      Before it could answer one way or another, the automatic baby, forgotten in the corner, started howling again. Sibling rivalry is a terrible thing.

      Five

      Nearly every new parent feels exactly the same way you do. A baby changes everything, from your lifestyle to your schedule to your desire level. But you can get the old magic back with a little attention and some tricks from other parents who’ve been there.

      -From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide

      We were having the weirdest winter on record—ridiculously mild, with hardly any snow to speak of. Oh, we were blessed with a couple of inches of the white stuff at Christmas time, a kind of cosmetic icing that fell thick and wet and broke tree branches with its weight, but it disappeared under a warmish rain by New Year’s Day. In the second week of January we had a thaw (which was redundant, as there was nothing to melt) that made it feel like March, with blue skies, a lemon-yellow sun and enough warmth to fool the trees into setting leaf buds. George said he’d never seen anything like it, and the weather-gods must have arranged it in order to make things easy for me, pregnant and barefoot up in my cabin.

      And truly, the lack of snow and mild temperatures did make it easy. It was quite cold enough to need the woodstove, of course, but there wasn’t that feeling of being in danger of freezing to death overnight. When the temperature drops to more than twenty below zero Celsius, some of us get that tight, back-of-the-throat fear that makes you stuff the wood box before bed, then worry all night that the wretched thing is going to overheat and fry you in your sleep. There was none of that—the red juice in my thermometer rarely fell below minus five Celsius. Because there was no snow, the travel along the hill path from cabin to farmhouse and driveway was no trouble at all, except that I found that my centre of balance had shifted. Walking on a slope, even a gentle one, with some recently gained frontal poundage put everything a tad off-kilter, which meant that when going downhill, I had to lean back very slightly, as if I were carrying a heavy basket of peaches.

      A couple of days before Christmas, Becker took me out to dinner before hopping on a plane to Calgary to spend the weekend with his son, Bryan and his ex-wife, Catherine. He said he had stuff to do concerning his father’s estate, and initially, I felt no jealously about this. I hadn’t seen much of him since he’d returned from the funeral, anyway, as he was spending most of his time in Toronto on his airport security assignment.

      We’d gotten together for meals and the occasional movie when he was in town, of course, but the distance between us was growing as quickly as my belly was, and we hadn’t made love since I’d told him about my pregnancy.

      “I feel like you don’t want me near you any more,” he had said to me in early December. “It’s like you’ve got a part of me inside you now, and that’s all you want.” I could have replied with a similar remark—that I felt he didn’t want to touch me any more, now that my body was preoccupied with knitting together the cells of his progeny, but I didn’t say it. Anyway, I was frankly not interested in sex—so maybe it was my fault after all. The more remote we became, the less we talked about it.

      George, Susan, Eddie and I would be celebrating the holiday together, as we had done since Eddie had come to live with Susan. We were all able to steer more or less clear of the Christmas imperative that makes some households vibrate with tinsel and tension from November 1 to December 25. I’d had trouble choosing a Christmas gift for Becker, though. I

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