Page 36 of The Wrong Track

“Hey,” he said, and limped quickly to the bed. “Are you guys ok?”

I nodded and tried to calm down. “Just fine. How did you get here?”

His mom walked in behind him. “Hello, Remy,” she said coolly. “Good morning.”

“Hi, Charlene.” She was eyeing me and I was aware of how I must look, my hair in a nest around my head, swollen eyes. Swollen boobs, swollen stomach. I cried harder.

“Remy?” Tobin sat on the bed. “Are you in pain? Can I get you something? Can I do anything?”

What I somehow wanted was to have him put his arms around me and tell me again that it was all going to be ok. Once before, Hazel had let me cry on her shoulder. She’d patted my hair and said, “Oh, we can fix this!” and I had kind of believed her.

“It’s hormonal,” Tobin’s mom said now. “That’s all.” She walked to look at the baby, quiet for the moment in her plastic bed. “This is her?”

I nodded and used the hospital gown to wipe my face, and Tobin announced, “That’s Ella.” He looked over at her and smiled. “Did she sleep? Did you?” I shrugged. “Here.” He put a bag on the bed. “Haze helped me a little.”

I gratefully grabbed a clip for my hair and the clothes, mostly Tobin’s. “I’ll change and we can go. I really want to go,” I said, and he didn’t argue.

A little while later and not soon enough, his mother pulled up in front of the hospital in Tobin’s car and I shakily got out of the wheelchair, the baby in my arms. There was a seat in the back, all strapped in, and he saw me looking at it.

“You didn’t have a chance to get a lot of stuff,” he explained. “I made some calls around to my family.” Between the two of us, we managed to secure the baby into that seat but by the time we did, she was screaming.

“I don’t know what’s wrong. I changed her and fed her,” I said. I caught his mom’s eye in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t do anything to make her cry,” I promised all of them.

“Babies cry a lot,” she told me. “You have to be prepared.” I watched her lips turn down.

I totally wasn’t prepared, of course. I’d done nothing, nothing at all. I hadn’t even gotten a car seat. I turned to look out the window and willed myself not to cry again. What had that ever solved?

Because I was looking so hard out of the window, I saw Tobin’s house the moment we turned onto his street. “What is that?” I asked. There was a big, pink and white sign in the yard: “WELCOME HOME, ELLA!” Balloons were tied to his porch, too, and were waving wildly in the chilly wind.

“Haze and her mom are really excited and my cousin Annie got involved, so it blew up,” he told me. He turned in the seat and grinned. “Wait until you see the inside.”

I still felt shaky as we walked in from the garage. Hazel and her mom, Miss Monica, were in the living room beaming in happiness. The whole place looked spotless—I checked and the underwear that Lulu had tossed into the corner had disappeared.

“Welcome home, Ella!” Hazel said, just like the sign.

“Thank you,” I told them.

“Go look at your room,” Tobin said, so I walked down the hall.

“Annie said that the guest room is your atelier, so we made this a bedroom and a nursery,” Hazel explained. “Annie has such great taste.”

It was beautiful. They’d moved my bed into the corner and made it look like a cloud with a fluffy spread and lots of pillows and the red and white quilt folded neatly at its foot. Then in the corner, there was a crib, a rocking chair, and a changing table. There was also a bookshelf with little, thick books, and “Ella Margaret” painted on the wall with flowers around it.

“Annie’s daughter is really artistic,” Hazel went on, pointing to the mural. “She wanted to do more, but she didn’t have time. Look!” She pulled open the top dresser drawer and it was full of tiny clothes. “There have been a lot of new additions to the Whitaker family lately, and everyone had things to give,” she told me. “And we also went shopping a little.”

I looked down at the baby. She was such a lucky girl, I thought. “Thank you,” I said, my voice very whispery and scratchy. “Thank you so much. I don’t know what to say.”

“It was fortunate that they were able to do all this for you,” Charlene pointed out, “since there was nothing here. You were eight and a half months pregnant, with nothing—”

“Ok, Mom, can you come outside with me?” Tobin interrupted, and they left.

“She doesn’t understand that it’s complicated,” Miss Monica told me gently.

No, it was very simple. I had a baby that I’d been trying to run away from. Now she was here, and there was no getting away from that fact. I looked at her and tried to feel again that she was lucky. She had all these people who wanted to help her, to make her life better.

But she also had me as a mother. The poor little thing.

Chapter 8