Amy Sohn - The Actress

“Look on the bright side. You get to keep your vagina nice and tight.” The nurse visibly pretended not to hear this.

“Please don’t make me laugh. My stitches will come out.” Then she started to cry.

As he put his hand on hers, he felt disgusted with Steven. Steven was a selfish prick and had been as long as Zack had known him. Zack had tried to warn Maddy in Friedenau, but it hadn’t worked, and looking at her now, he felt it was his own fault. She had been invited to that dinner party in Mile’s End only because he’d called Bridget. Maddy never would have met Steven if it weren’t for him.

This was why, when they’d walked in the cemetery, he had tried to convince her to stay away. But at that time they hadn’t been friends. He hadn’t wanted to come across as a meddler. And he had worried she would relay their conversation to his mother, who had already signed her. He had tried to warn Maddy without warning her.

So many signs over the years. From before he was old enough to know what they meant, until later, when he was.

The funny expression on his mother’s face when she would read the gossip items hinting at affairs with men. “I can promise you, Steven is not your father,” Bridget had said.

The bad first marriage and the way Steven never talked about his wife, the parade of pretty young things afterward. The women always just right. Hyper-feminine. With their fake boobs and their blowouts and their Kewpie eyes.

Zack had never known for sure, but he had ideas. One night, it must have been senior year of high school, Steven had come over late. Steven and Bridget talked for a long time; he was upset about something. After he had left, Zack went down to the kitchen to get food. His mother was alone at the table and looked sad. “Is he okay?” Zack had asked.

“He’s going through a hard time right now. Personal stuff.”

And then Zack had blurted it out: “How come he’s not married?”

“I’m not married.”

“I mean, how come he never stays with one girl?”

“Steven isn’t like other men,” she had said, and her eyes lingered on his just a beat too long.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he doesn’t think about marriage the way other men do.”

In Berlin, Zack had hoped Maddy would be smart enough to get it, even if she didn’t get all of it. Later, after the wedding, he concluded that she was more complicated than he had thought. If not a contract, then an agreement.

And when it became difficult to reconcile his instincts about Maddy with the idea of an arrangement, he worked out other explanations in his head: He had misunderstood all these years and Steven didn’t like men, or he liked both, or Maddy had changed him.

Because if he did like men, and Maddy didn’t know, it meant she had been duped. By Steven. Or his mother. And if Steven could do such a horrible thing, Zack didn’t want to believe that Bridget could. In business she had lied and deceived, but to take another person’s life, to use someone as a tool . . . it meant she was a monster.

Maddy found the NICU frightening, wholly abnormal, and too bright. Tiny babies in incubators lined up, all out of the womb too early, purple and skinny, with tubes in them, these bodies so small and weak, hooked up to the big machines. Kira was at the baby’s incubator, with a slim, middle-aged pediatric nurse named Lillian. Maddy had already spoken with the neonatologist, who told her there were no signs of withdrawal in the baby, but they were monitoring him. Maddy was relieved to hear that but was agonized by the two tubes going into his tiny hand. “What are those?” she asked Lillian.

“One is antibiotics and one is an IV drip. He had some respiratory distress and we want to make sure he’s breathing properly. Do you want to hold your son?”

Lillian lifted the lid of the incubator and took him out. Put him in her lap. She put him to her breast. Lillian demonstrated the football hold. If Maddy held him like a football, to the side, his body wouldn’t put pressure on her sutures.

It was hard to coordinate the nursing with the tubes and the monitor strapped to his body, but Lillian and Kira helped her. The baby flailed but took the breast. She had been cut open, catheterized, and shaved, she had morphine and antibiotics in her blood, but her baby was nursing.

“He’s perfect,” Kira said softly. Maddy stroked his little head.

“Have you picked a name yet?” Zack asked.

“Jake,” Maddy said. “Jake Weller Freed.” She hadn’t been certain until she said it. He was going to have her last name, and her father’s. The baby was hers.

She looked down at the baby’s little head. The eyes so black. The mouth working hard on her nipple. She wanted to fatten him up so they would let them both go. “He looks like you,” Kira said.

“No, he doesn’t,” she said. “He looks like him.”

Maddy was in the NICU, nursing Jake, when she looked up to see Steven standing there. It was a day later. She hadn’t even heard him come in.

“You missed it,” she said dully. “I told you not to go and you went.” Lillian looked up and then down. There was a handful of other parents in the room, but they were focusing on their newborns. It was one of the few times Maddy had been around Steven when no one seemed to notice him.

“I’m so sorry, my love.” He leaned down, kissed her head. “They reached us on Catalina and I flew. I got here as fast as I could.”

“Why didn’t you take your phone, like you said?”

“I left it in the car, at the yacht club.”

“And the radio?”

“I thought it was on, but it was off. I feel awful. You had a month before the date. I had no idea he’d come early.” He gazed at him on her breast. “He’s perfect.”

“They want to keep him here longer. I’ve been pumping my milk so I can nurse him when we get out, so my supply doesn’t go down. It’s so complicated.”

“Hey there, buddy,” he cooed softly, running his finger down the baby’s cheek.

“I named him after my father,” she said. She handed him the baby and Steven took him, sat in another chair, gently avoiding the tubes. “Jake Weller Freed.”

He looked a little surprised but then said, “Jake Weller Freed. I like it.” He rocked the baby and touched her arm. “Are you in a lot of pain?”

“I’m on Percocet. I don’t know how long they’ll let me take it. I can’t believe you missed the delivery. What’s wrong with you? Who are you?” Her voice came out demented and shrill. She didn’t care. In every other room of Cedars-Sinai, there were probably bisexual actors in shouting matches with wives recovering from emergency C-section births that the men had missed.

“I shouldn’t have gone.”

“You care more about Ryan than me.” She kept her voice low so the others wouldn’t hear, but she was livid. “You’re in love with him.”

“Nothing you said is true. He’s my friend.”

This tiny helpless thing was counting on the two of them to help him live. How could they do that when they were so far apart? If Steven loved her, he never would have left. Or maybe he had already left her, years ago, on the boat trip to Cabo, and she hadn’t wanted to see it.

“I don’t want to be with you right now,” she said. “I want to get to know my son.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’s okay. Should I go home or—”

“I don’t care anymore. Just go.” He gave her an odd look as though about to say something, and then gently handed her the baby and went out.

The morning they left the hospital, Maddy had clothing and heels brought in, and a glam squad for natural-looking hair and makeup. Flora had arranged everything so the media knew when the family would be coming out and no one outlet would have “the first shots.”

Dozens of photographers were gathered outside behind the stanchions. It would be an orderly affair. When the time came, Steven and Maddy posed outside with Jake in her arms and Steven’s arm around her. Flora was there, overseeing everything. As agreed, the photographers refrained from yelling their names so as not to upset the baby. All Maddy could hear were the digital shutters clicking. They posed for several minutes. Maddy smiled wearily, playing the role of exuberant new mother. It was all cream blush, all fake. No one knew Steven had missed the birth.

But he had missed it, and every day since, she had been replaying the delivery, rewinding to the moment when she had the dream and imagining that her water had not broken. She wanted to fix Jake’s birth so he hadn’t come early and she’d delivered him naturally, in the birthing room they had toured, with the tub and the wood paneling. In this vision of the birth, Steven was there, and he caught the baby and cut the cord, and afterward she could smell the vernix on Jake’s face. She was broken and imperfect, her body wouldn’t cooperate, a woman’s body was supposed to push. It had been the dream that had started it all, the nightmare and then the broken amniotic sac. She shouldn’t have napped. If you didn’t sleep, you didn’t dream.

Who is it?” Zack called out to Natalie from the desk of his new office. They communicated through an open door all day. In September, after two years at the Bentley Howard office in L.A., he had left to launch his own company, Laight Street Entertainment, which he had named after his old block in Tribeca. He had used his trust to capitalize some of it, but the rest came from investors he had met and courted during his time in L.A. Who had been watching him build a better and bigger list, who believed that he could go out on his own at an age when most people would be considered foolish to do so.