Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - The Nest

I was born in Dublin, Ireland. (Lie. She was born in Bayside, Queens, but between her hair and brownish-greenish eyes she looked like she could have been.) Nobody ever guessed Ireland was the lie; they always went for the pig.

The first participant that morning to stand in front of the room and read his truths and lie was a new hire from the Interactive Group. A gaunt twentysomething, wearing a vintage-looking cardigan and Clark Kent eyeglasses that magnified his smudged eyeliner. He had a tattoo of a squid down his left forearm. He stood, stoop shouldered, and introduced himself.

“Hey. I’m Gideon and okay, well, here goes.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and read from the paper on the table in front of him in a quick, even monotone.

“I nearly died from overdosing on pills. I nearly died from bleeding out. I nearly died from autoerotic asphyxiation.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Cheryl jumped up, waving both hands before anyone had a chance to respond. “Thank you, Gideon, for your candor.” She paused for a beat. “But I guess I should have spelled out the guidelines a little more clearly. We want you to reveal something interesting about yourself, but nothing quite that personal in nature and, please, everybody, nothing sexual. Think professional .”

“Sorry,” Gideon had said, shrugging idly. “Clinical depression and suicidal ideation are more common than most people realize, and they’re both a really important part of who I am.”

“I understand.” Cheryl kept a smile affixed to the lower half of her face. “We’re just going for something a little lighter here.”

“The lie was autoerotic asphyxiation,” he’d added. “FYI.”

STEPHANIE OPENED HER MOLESKINEand tried to tune out the rest of the room as Cheryl asked for someone to read their four words. She started making a list of things she needed for dinner.

“You said not to self-edit,” an amiable guy spoke from the other end of the table, “so this is what I’ve got: Fat. Happy. Golfer. Husband .”

Her cell phone, sitting on the table in front of her, started to vibrate. Without even looking at the number, she waved at Cheryl. I have to take this, she mouthed and left the room as quietly as she could. Relief.

She looked down at the incoming ID: Beatrice Plumb.

Standing in the hallway outside the meeting room, Stephanie was surprised to find how happy she was to hear Bea’s voice. She’d begged off the phone quickly, telling Bea she wanted to talk but was in a meeting (true) and couldn’t stay on the phone (true) and that, yes, Leo had mentioned something about new work but they’d both been incredibly busy and maybe they’d talk about it tonight (lie).

Bea sounded so anxious that Stephanie found herself feeling protective, maternal almost. She didn’t know if Leo had read Bea’s stuff; she doubted it, but she could ask. She briefly wondered why Bea had handed the pages to Leo and not her, but then again — they probably weren’t new pages, they were probably old pages that she was passing off as new and Leo wouldn’t know the difference. Stephanie would remind Leo to read them, and she would help him come up with something to say to Bea, something nice and noncommittal. She’d put it on her list.

Back in the conference room Gideon was up again, this time reading his four words ( musician, pessimist, wizard, Democrat) . A slight wave of nausea roiled her stomach; she sipped the lemon water she’d brought into the meeting. She was going to have to eat something soon.

She slid her phone out of her jacket pocket to check the time. Once it was in her hand, she couldn’t resist opening the app she’d downloaded that tracked the development of the baby based on due date. This week your baby is the size of an apple seed! This week your baby is as big as an almond. This week an olive! She hit the button and watched the photo appear of what her embryo looked like at nine weeks — like a tiny bay shrimp, a curled crustacean with an immense head and sci-fi budding arms. As she did almost every time she looked at the eerie images, she felt herself blush. It was unseemly, really, how addled she found herself to be forty-one and single and accidentally pregnant by Leo Plumb, beyond a shadow of a doubt the most irresponsible and least paternal of all the men she’d ever loved in her entire life.

She knew it was crazy, told herself a million times a day that it was crazy, but she found she couldn’t completely suppress a few fleeting moments of optimism — about the baby for sure, about Leo, maybe. She was surprised by how responsible he’d been lately, how present . He helped around the house. He seemed to be working every day and was enthused about meeting with Nathan. He read all the time. Nothing in his behavior made her believe he was anything other than completely clean and sober. She couldn’t help but wonder if everything in her life had been pitched toward this moment — agency sold, money in the bank, some time on her hands, a seemingly renewed Leo in her bed, trying to make some kind of amends to someone or something. That she was on the receiving end of this newly burnished Leo, the very thing she’d desired and abandoned as so much wasted effort all those years ago — Leo in the living room scribbling on a legal pad, Leo in her bed in the morning running a finger down her back, Leo in her kitchen every night, closing a book and pulling her onto his lap — well, she’d decided not to question it. She’d decided to selfishly, greedily, take it. All of it. Maybe even this new wrinkle, the unexpected residue of the power outage.

Over the years, she’d considered having a baby with any number of people. Marriage was not part of her plan; she wasn’t against it, she just wasn’t for it. She treated her occasional yearning for a baby the same way she treated her occasional yearning for a dog. Let it linger and wait to see if it passed, which it always did, which she took as a good sign. Because other things she desired (her house, a particular author signed, a midcentury table in good condition) didn’t flit through, they planted themselves until she turned desire into ownership. That her fleeting thoughts of motherhood never truly haunted her the way, say, her quest for the magenta peony bushes in her yard did was comforting as she imagined her ovaries surrendering the final vestiges of fertile eggs into the hinterlands of her reproductive system.

THEN THE STORM.The expected-unexpected arrival of Leo. The power outage. Leo. A little too much wine (hers), the familiar mouth (his). Leo had seemed the tiniest bit broken. She made him laugh. They talked. He took her wrists and circled them with his thumb and forefinger, pulling her to him (the way he had that first night their friendship became something else, the night he turned to her in a hidden booth at a small burger joint and said, “I’ve been wondering what you keep beneath your blouse”) and then he’d two-stepped her across her kitchen, in the dark, under the moonlight, and kissed her with such acquisitive purpose, she thought she might combust. Leo. What else was there to do when the lights were out — wind howling, branches splitting and falling — but fuel the fire, let him lift the sweater over her head, unzip her pants, and fuck her silly under the unblinking, marbled gaze of Lillian.

She looked back down at the list she’d written. Her four words. She was going to have to talk to Leo very soon. Whatever he said, whatever his reaction, the decision was hers . This belonged to her. She took the cap off her pen and crossed out single, wrote mother .

It didn’t look terrible.