I
The baby arrived four and a half months later, exactly on his due date. And yes, it was a he, just as Simi had suspected. They named him Trevon Oscar Abijeet Lopez. Their favorite name, and then a little something from each of them. They quickly learned that they would have to explain how his name was pronounced, because people wanted to call him Trayvon, like the hoodie wearing Floridian shooting victim.
“No, it’s Trevon, rhymes with Devon,” Simi became accustomed to saying to nurses, pediatricians, and county records clerks. It wasn’t difficult for her to become accustomed to doing, after all, she’d been doing it all her life with her own impossible-to-pronounce-by-white-people name.
She loved the name ever since she’d first heard that her conductor’s grandson had been given it. It might be due to the respect that man had earned in her eyes, but she thought it was simply because it had a nice ring to it. And it was relatively unique still, although Oscar said they’d probably discover that it was the most popular baby name for boys this year, and Trevon would have to spend his whole life being called Trevon L.
Simi didn’t want that. Not for her little miracle baby. He was special. They’d tried for years to conceive, and then turned to fertility treatments, though still unsuccessfully. At last, as they’d completely given up hope, Simi started vomiting up her breakfast each morning. She’d stayed home from work thinking she had the flu at first, but as it persisted, and her period also grew later and later, she’d rushed to the store for a test, while desperately trying to subdue her excitement. She’d been wrong so many times in the past, she didn’t want to get her hopes up and have them crushed again.
Finally, though, after all these years, her hopes were confirmed instead of crushed. There was no miscarriage, no problems, no complications, and nine months later, Trevon arrived, a perfect squalling angel.
Motherhood suited Simi like nothing ever had in her life. She’d worked and struggled so long and hard to become the cellist that she was, holed up in her room alone, practicing for hours while her sisters and friends played in the streets or gossiped about boys. It had been such a struggle that only her extreme stubbornness had made it possible for her to succeed. But motherhood? It was easy, natural, as if she were made for it, despite what her reproductive system had tried to tell her these last twelve years.
Just being with her child gave her such great joy. Whether feeding him; changing him; holding him; soothing him; singing to him; or, at last, playing to him on her cello--not to the fetus within her, but to him; she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face. She was radiant with joy.
Oscar wasn’t a natural, however. He seemed to be pretty clueless when it came to child-rearing. The baby griped each time Oscar would dress him, and understandably so, considering that half the time his arms were stuffed in the leg holes and vice-versa. It seemed like every single time Oscar was tasked with changing Trevon, they could count on a blowout later on, when poop leaked past the edges of a twisted, incorrectly placed diaper.
It didn’t stop him, however. No matter how many difficulties he had, Oscar couldn’t be anything but happy with his son. Oscar found that holding Trevon in his arms at the end of a day of trading on the options floor for Goldman Sachs brought him back down to the ground, to reality. The stress from the noise and urgency of his job would just leak out of him like a water balloon with a hole. Soon, he could shrink back down to normal size, and feel himself again, and it was through no other method than simply holding his darling baby in his arms.
Granted, life wasn’t perfect. The baby seemed to know exactly when to cry to ruin things for them. Just at the right time in the movie they were watching, or just when they’d made it to the critical moment in their lovemaking. It seemed to Oscar that they hadn’t had sex for months. Even the slightest cry would remove all sexual desire from Simi immediately, like a popped bubble, it was gone in an instant, and couldn’t be remade.
But those were small concerns. On the whole, Oscar and Simi had never been happier than they were with Trevon as a part of their family.
They even forgot about the day when the music room had filled with rainbows that seemed to emanate from Simi’s pregnant belly. That is, until it happened again.
Oscar was in bed reading the newest George R. R. Martin novel that had just come out the month before. It hadn’t been his plan to spend the evening in Westeros. He’d had much more lascivious plans, brought on by the sight of Simi’s swollen breasts pressing into the fabric of her shirt much harder than they ever had before, but Trevon had different ideas. Oscar spent the better part of an hour soothing him back to sleep, and returned to find Simi snoring in a loud and most unladylike manner.
He’d grumbled at the loss of his opportunity, and then, remembering the new Song of Ice and Fire book, sat down to read. He wasn’t even finished with the first chapter, when he noticed the room growing lighter.
END OF DAY TWO
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