Sing You Home Read online

"It's the principle, Zoe," my mother says. "I'm just glad you finally got off your high horse."

  "No horses," I say. "I'm just not in the mood to fight until it's time to leave for my baby shower."

  My mother opens her mouth to respond, then snaps it shut. For a half second, she contemplates going along with the ruse, and, just as quickly, she gives up. "Who told you?"

  "I think the pregnancy is bringing out a sixth sense in me," I confide.

  She considers this, impressed. "Really?"

  I walk into her kitchen to raid the fridge--there are three tubs of hummus and a bag of carrots, plus various indistinguishable clots in Tupperware containers. "Some mornings I wake up and I just know Max is going to say he wants Cap'n Crunch for breakfast. Or I'll hear the phone ring and I know it's you before I even pick up."

  "I used to be able to predict rain when I was pregnant with you," my mother says. "I was more accurate than the weatherman on the ABC news."

  I dip my finger into the hummus. "When I woke up this morning, the whole bedroom smelled like eggplant parmigiana--you know, the really good kind that they make at Bolonisi's?"

  "That's where the shower's being held!" she gasps, amazed. "When did all this start?"

  "About the same time I found a Kinko's receipt for the invitations in Max's jacket."

  It takes my mother a moment, and then she starts to laugh. "And here I was planning the cruise I was going to take after I won the lottery with your number picks."

  "Sorry to disappoint you."

  She rubs her hand over my belly. "Zoe," my mother says, "you couldn't if you tried."

  Some cognitive scientists believe human response to music provides evidence that we are more than just flesh and blood--that we also have souls. Their thinking is as follows:

  All reactions to external stimuli can be traced back to an evolutionary rationale. You pull your hand away from fire to avoid physical harm. You get butterflies before an important speech because the adrenaline running through your veins has caused a physiological fight-or-flight response. But there is no evolutionary context within which people's response to music makes sense--the tapping of a foot, the urge to sing along or get up and dance, there's just no survival benefit to these activities. For this reason, some believe that our response to music is proof that there's more to us than just biological and physiological mechanics--that the only way to be moved by the spirit, so to speak, is to have one in the first place.

  There are games. Estimate Zoe's Belly Size, a purse scavenger hunt (who would have guessed that my mother had an overdue utility bill in her bag?), a baby-sock-matching relay, and, now, a particularly disgusting foray in which baby diapers filled with melted chocolate are passed around for identification by candy bar brand.

  Even though this isn't really my cup of tea, I play along. My part-time bookkeeper, Alexa, has organized the whole event--and has even gone to the trouble of rounding up guests: my mother, my cousin Isobel, Wanda from Shady Acres and another nurse from the burn unit of the hospital where I work, and a school counselor named Vanessa who contracted me to do music therapy earlier this year with a profoundly autistic ninth grader.

  It's sort of depressing that these women, acquaintances at best, are being substituted for close friends. Then again, if I'm not working, I'm with Max. And Max would rather be run over by his own lawn-mowing machines than identify chocolate feces in a diaper. For this reason alone, he is really the only friend I need.

  I watch Wanda peer into the Pampers. "Snickers?" she guesses incorrectly.

  Vanessa gets the diaper next. She's tall, with short platinum blond hair and piercingly blue eyes. The first time I met her she invited me into her office and gave me a blistering lecture on how the SATs were a conspiracy by the College Board to take over the world eighty dollars at a time. Well? she said when she finally stopped for a breath. What do you have to say for yourself?

  I'm the new music therapist, I told her.

  She blinked at me, and then looked down at her calendar and flipped the page backward. Ah, she said. Guess the rep from Kaplan is coming tomorrow.

  Vanessa doesn't even glance down at the diaper. "They look like Mounds to me," she says drily. "Two, to be exact."

  I burst out laughing, but I'm the only one who seems to get Vanessa's joke. Alexa looks devastated because her party games aren't being taken seriously. My mother intervenes, collecting the diaper from Vanessa's place mat. "How about Name That Baby?" she suggests.

  I feel a twinge in my side and absently rub my hand over the spot.

  My mother reads from a paper Alexa has printed off the Internet. "A baby lion is a . . ."

  My cousin's hand shoots up. "Cub!" she yells out.

  "Right! A baby fish is a . . . ?"

  "Caviar?" Vanessa suggests.

  "Fry," Wanda says.

  "That's a verb," Isobel argues.

  "I'm telling you, I saw it on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire--"

  Suddenly I am seized by a cramp so intense that all the breath rushes out of my body.

  "Zoe?" My mother's voice seems far away. I struggle to my feet.

  Twenty-eight weeks, I think. Too soon.

  Another current rips through me. As I fall against my mother, I feel a warm gush between my legs. "My water," I whisper. "I think it just broke."

  But when I glance down, I am standing in a pool of blood. Last night was the first night Max and I ever talked about baby names.

  "Johanna," I whispered, after he turned out the light.

  "Sorry to disappoint," Max said. "But it's just me."

  In the dark, I could see his smile. Max is the sort of man I never imagined would be attracted to me--big, broad, a surfer with a shock of blond hair and enough wattage in his smile to make grocery clerks drop his change and soccer moms slow down near our driveway. I was always considered smart, but by no stretch of the imagination am I a looker. I am the girl next door, the wallflower, the one whose features you cannot recall. The first time he talked to me--at his brother's wedding, where I was filling in for the lead vocalist in the band, who'd developed a kidney stone--I turned around, certain that he was speaking to someone else. Years later he told me that he never knew what to say to girls but that my voice was like a drug; it had seeped into his veins and given him the courage to come up to me during the band's fifteen-minute break.

  He didn't think a woman with a master's degree in musicology would want anything to do with a college dropout / surf rat who was scraping together a landscaping business.

  I didn't think a man who could have taken home his pick of anyone with two X chromosomes would find me even remotely attractive.

  Last night he put his gentle hand over our baby, an umbrella. "I thought talking about the baby was bad luck."

  It was. Or, at least, it always had been, to me. But we were so close to making it to the finish line. This was so real. What could possibly go wrong? "Well," I said, "I changed my mind."

  "Okay, then. Elspeth," Max said. "After my favorite aunt."

  "Please tell me you're making that up . . ."

  He laughed. "I have another aunt named Ermintrude--"

  "Hannah," I countered. "Stella. Sage."

  "That's a spice," Max said.

  "Yeah, but not like Ground Cloves. It's pretty."

  He leaned over my belly and pressed his ear against it. "Let's ask her what she wants to be called," Max suggested. "I think . . . wait . . . no, hang on, she's coming in loud and clear." He looked up at me, his cheek still against our baby. "Bertha," he pronounced.

  The baby, as if to comment, gave his jaw a swift kick; and I was sure at the time that this meant she was fine. That it hadn't been bad luck at all.

  I am being turned inside out; I am falling through blades. I have never felt so much agony, as if the pain is trapped under my skin, and trying desperately to slice its way out.

  "It's going to be all right," Max says, clasping my hand as if we are about to arm-wrestle. I wonder when he arrived. I wonder w