Chapter Text
“What do you think about Francesca?”
“You’re out of your goddamned mind,” Jennifer replies, wearily looking at him from her chair. She knew sleeping with him would be a mistake, knew it in her bones, but after she was raped it…
She needed to feel something. And she knew in her bones that he’d sleep with her if she only asked. She knew, in some deep part of herself, that he’d only hurt her if she asked. Asking was the hardest thing she’d done aside from not telling him, from not being able to explain why she curled up on the chaise lounge in her office after they’d finished, and sobbed while he knelt on the floor with his hand on her back and concern in her eyes, feeling his cum leak out of her and on to the cool leather.
“She’s my kid too.”
“Oh, so we’ll play, what, happy fucking families? You’re married. You have children. I have a son in college. You’re my patient. This situation is impossible, Anthony.”
“You never used to swear in our sessions.”
“I guess being pregnant with your child has changed me. Arguably for the worse.”
She knows it’s unfair, that she’s being snippy. They keep circling around this argument—what to do about the baby—and Jennifer knows she should have terminated. All signs pointed to it. And yet, she wanted to tell him, wanted him to know, as if the knowledge would have for Tony all the therapeutic benefits she couldn’t seem to give him, to make him better. And she knew that if she did, she would have the baby. There was no telling him and then snatching it away from him, if he wanted it; she knew that once she told him it would be his decision.
That fact makes her a little sick. Everything makes her sick now, and it’s not just the pregnancy.
“Jen, I love you.”
“Be that as it may, I will not ruin your family’s life, and mine, and I won’t ruin my career. I worked so hard…”
When Jen was in her second year of residency and Jason was two, she found out she was pregnant. The decision was so obvious to her and Richard, what to do—if they had the baby, Jen would have to quit her residency or at least take time off, with no guarantee she’d ever be back where she started. The abortion was easy enough, but the time never seemed right once she was establishing her career, and by then Jason was in fourth grade and inertia kept them going. She thinks sometimes about what she gave up to get where she was; she’d always known in her bones that she wanted to be a mom, and the reality of only having Jason sometimes made her bereft. He would have been an amazing big brother.
But now he was an open sore of rage at the world. Powerless to avenge her. And maybe angry at having to be confronted with his mother as, simultaneously, a sexual being and a victim. What a Freudian two-for-one.
“As far as the world will know, I had a one-night stand. Easy enough. I found out when it was too late to terminate. That’s the narrative, alright?”
“So, what, you’re going to have my fuckin’ daughter and I don’t even get the courtesy of being on the birth certificate?”
She sighs. “In all honesty, my ex-husband will probably want to be involved. If you love me the way you keep insisting you do, you’ll understand.”
He loves her; they cannot be honest with each other. Jen will never, not ever, tell him about the rape, and she knows she can never hear about the things that truly keep him up at night.
“I worry I couldn’t even tell you her name. I worry about what you’ll do. Anthony, I worry about you.”
She knows she’ll probably name her daughter Vivian.
He stands up, and she can’t tell if he wants to fuck her or kiss her or choke her. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever knocked up besides Carmela, you know.”
“I didn’t know.” Jennifer eyes him wearily, afraid of what he might do. She can’t read his mood, not right now, not like this.
“She wanted me to get snipped.”
“I did know that.”
“Do you wish…do you wish I’d done it?”
Jennifer catches herself blinking away tears, finds that the words are stuck in the back of her throat. He kisses her forehead and walks out of her office.
It would have been easier, Jennifer reflects, to have shoved her fingers in a light socket than told Elliot she was pregnant. The look on his face—confused and salacious all at once—could have won acting awards.
“Did you intend to become pregnant?” His voice is that same measured, even tone he always uses.
“Not especially.” She shrugs one shoulder, knowing that she is being petulant but unable to make herself do anything about it.
“Jennifer, will you keep the baby?” Elliot is doing exactly what she would do: Asking short questions in the hope of eliciting something meaningful, some flicker of emotional insight into the patient to guide them through this.
“Haven’t decided.” At the time, that was true—Jennifer was only about ten weeks pregnant, and all her options lay before her like a buffet she could not comprehend.
“This is a difficult question, Jennifer: Is Richard the father?”
“I don’t know who the father is.”
It’s that last point that arrests him, and she feels his gaze drag over her as if trying to imagine her in the center of a pornographic gang-bang. Sexual dreams between patient and doctor are normal—part of the transferential process, of making a close connection. If Elliot has never had one of her before, she has a feeling this is going to be his lucky night. She also catches the way his gaze arrests.
Elliot’s voice is even, measured, as if knowing they are in the precipice of a crisis. “Jennifer, is this pregnancy a product of your rape?”
“I don’t think so,” she says quietly. “I was tested at the hospital and by my gynecologist at a check-up, and both were negative.”
But the possibility hangs between them, sticky and heavy, and neither of them knows what to say. “But if it’s not the rapist’s, it can’t be Richard’s, because we haven’t slept together since shortly before.” The galling fact of being informed that there were two semen samples inside of her, when the hospital results came back to her, as if she was unaware of her own sex life. As if it was something to be shamed by—the virgin who was a whore all along.
“I didn’t know you had been sexually active since the rape.”
“I didn’t know I needed your permission.”
“Jennifer, I’m being serious. You experienced a trauma.”
“What, you wanted to be the one to spread my legs and coach me through my first time after?”
Elliot takes an exasperated sip out of his water bottle, sighing like she's being an intractable child. “You know the risks of re-traumatizing yourself. You’re what, three months pregnant? You were raped six months ago. And you’re saying you don’t know who the father is. That suggests a level of risk-taking that is uncharacteristic for you.”
“I thought you said I loved danger. Couldn’t get enough of it. The thrill of being terrified, and none of the consequences."
“And this is a consequence. Being pregnant unexpectedly by someone you can't even name is a consequence of risk-taking behavior. I’m worried about you, Jen.”
They sit in silence for long moments. Jennifer places her hand protectively on her abdomen.
“You’ll have to go off the Ativan.” She nods. “And you have to stop drinking.” She glares.
Jennifer lets Anthony convince her that she could have him over for dinner. “Hand to God,” he says, “I’m not going to hurt you. I would never hurt you, Jen, you have to know that.”
She can’t say to him, is too afraid to say to him, that he already has, in ways he doesn’t even know.
At halfway through her pregnancy, Jen is all the familiar things: Hungry and horny and starting to want to nest. Absentmindedly cradling her stomach with her palm when waiting in line at the grocery store. Free from wine, her skin is glowing; free from dye, strands of silver hair are starting to show. There’s a flat-pack box with a crib in it, and next to the couch, a basket of baby clothes.
He surveys her living room, her kitchen, while she stands in the kitchen, pasta boiling away on the stove. “You’re going to be disappointed in my cooking,” is all she says.
And Tony Soprano looks at her, barefoot in her cuffed maternity jeans and a loose tee shirt, and he wonders if he’s ever seen someone look so disarmingly beautiful in his life. “Madone, Jen. You could never disappoint me.”
He is fascinated with her body—so fascinated that she lets him ease her out of her shirt after dinner and mouth at her swollen breasts, lets him slide a hand under the waistband of her jeans and finger her to completion on her couch until her hips twitch and tears drip from the corners of her eyes.
What stays with her, even while his thick fingers are still inside of her pulsing cunt, is the way he spoke to her all through it. “Such a good girl,” he whispered into her hair, “such a good girl getting so wet for me, so hot for me. Such a good girl letting her little pussy cum. Such a good girl, Jen.” Her hormones are so erratic, it’s never been easier for her to climax, but when she’s trying to catch her breath he bundles her into his lap and peppers kisses on her face. “Jennifer, you’re so good.”
He ate the food without complaining about it, and she found herself wondering what life could have been like.
Some nights, Jennifer sits cross-legged on the floor of the nursery. It used to be her guest room, but she’s since had the walls painted mint green and moved a white plush rocking chair into the room. “You’re the only girl in my life, you know?” She whispers this, hand on her stomach. “You’re the only girl I have.”
She thinks of so many things she wants to say. “It wasn’t fair that after I was raped I had to spend so much time consoling men. It was a thing that happened to me. It didn’t happen to them. It wasn’t even about them.” She thinks about stairwells. She thinks about teaching her daughter to walk up and down the stairs, bent over, holding her little hands. She thinks of raising a daughter who never knows to be afraid of stairwells.
Jen takes a sip of tea, holds the mug in her hands, heavy and sure. “I don’t know how to raise you. I don’t know how to help you be better than me. I’ve never done this. I’ve never done this alone.”
Sometimes in these quiet moments she feels the baby move, press against her hand, and she smiles. “You and me, Viv. You and me.”
Richard is the one who comes to the hospital for her when she goes into labor at thirty-six weeks. When he arrives, she’s laying on her side, gripping her taut stomach. “Why couldn’t you wait,” she grits out.
“You asked me to come in, Jen?”
“I’m talking to the baby. Why couldn’t she wait? It’s too early.” Richard sits on the edge of the hospital bed and rubs her back.
“Jen, it’s all going to be fine. You’re going to do great.”
Her mind flashes white with the pain of contractions. They’ve already had so many conversations about who the father of the baby is, and she keeps demurring. She knows that Richard will make is own uneasy peace with whatever reality he needs—the baby is his, or it isn’t. Once they discovered it wasn’t the rapist’s, his shoulders seemed lighter.
When she comes back to reality, he’s still talking.
“People do so many things, don’t they, to try to go back, to fix things. You put on cream for wrinkles, or take supplements promising to fix you, pray to God for all your sins, whatever. We’re always looking for minor miracles. But Jen, a second chance? That’s the real miracle.”
In the final throes of labor she squeezes his hand so hard her nails break the skin, and when the baby is born and settled and resting on her mother’s bare chest, Richard tousles a hand through Jennifer’s hair and kisses her cheek.
“A second chance, Jen. A miracle.”
“Can I hold her?”
Jen looks at her son, who is looking into the bassinet in her bedroom, where little Vivian is staring wide-eyed up at her big brother.
“Sure, honey. You know how?”
She watches him scoop her gently, laying her in the crook of his arms, and Jen feels such an enormous rush of feeling she has to put her hand over her mouth in case her heart falls out. Jason smiles, makes silly faces at his little sister, who looks at him like she’s trying to memorize him.
“Oh, Jason…” she whispers.
“I always wanted a younger sibling,” he says quietly, his voice raspy and rich and tight. “I just didn’t expect to have to wait twenty years. And I assumed if I did, Dad would end up getting someone pregnant, not you.”
He seems to know she’s full of shit when she says she isn’t sure who the father is, except that it isn’t her rapist. And why wouldn’t her smart, perceptive boy not see through that lie? Once, after he’d been drinking, he even said something to the effect that he was surprised she got back in the saddle so fast, as if she’d been expected to shut herself in a convent to keep the world out. And equally—although Richard has been kind about the baby, characteristically protective and patriarchal once he was done telling her to stop lying to herself—Jason knows intuitively he’s holding his half-sister. And he knows his mother knows where the other half of her came from.
A week before she was raped, she had slept with Richard, after they disagreed over dinner at his house, and it’s not like they used protection—so in a way, there’s no way of knowing, and between that and the rape and her story everyone seems very content to grit their teeth and say, This is Jennifer’s daughter, and how she got into this world is nobody’s business but her mommy’s.
Excluding her rapist had actually been very easy; she had carried his DNA under her nails and inside of her all the way to the hospital that evening, after all, and even if it couldn’t protect her it gave her peace of mind while she held Vivian and thought, I don’t know what I will do if you are his after all. And Jen thinks Richard is perhaps content to presume that Vivian could be their baby as a testament to his virility if not the baby in front of him.
“She’s really cute,” Jason says, softly. “I was almost thinking the next baby I met would be mine.”
“Don’t you make me a grandmother, I just had a baby,” Jennifer laughs. “Oh, Jason.”
“What’s it like?” And she sees in her beautiful boy’s eyes, this little boy she read to and held and bandaged, that he means, What does this mean for me?
“I have gotten so used to loving you—Jason, my brilliant son, my sensitive son, my English major far beyond my comprehension—and you’re an entire person. You are a whole being. And I forgot what it’s like to very fiercely love someone that is pure potential. It’s just very different.”
Viv makes the softest little noise, tucking herself into her brother’s arms, while Jen sits cross-legged on her bed. “I know the rape was hard for you, Jase. I’m sorry I didn’t know how to help you through it.”
As if it was a thing that happened to him.
“It wasn’t your job to help me through it, Ma.” He passes her back the baby and sits on the bed next to her, as he did so many times when he was just a little boy, resting his head on her shoulder and extending an index finger for Vivian to hold. “And I’m sorry I made it worse.”
“It wasn’t your job to know how to help me, so I guess we’re even,” Jennifer says, kissing Jason’s hairline, and she feels a powerful sense, for all her many sins, of being forgiven.
She had told Anthony, over and over during the pregnancy, that he was not to buy her anything. “I don’t want to know that someone’s kneecaps were on the line for a changing table, Anthony,” she says wearily, “And I don’t know how I would ever know they weren’t.”
By and large, he’d respected her wishes.
But six weeks after Vivian is born, Anthony calls her. “Can you bring her to my appointment? I just want to see her, once.”
If therapy was like giving birth, surely the process of ceasing her therapy with Tony was going through it without pain relief. “I can’t keep treating you, and I know you know why,” she’d said, swollen with his baby.
“Because we had sex.”
“No—Jesus Christ, Anthony. Because our sessions will turn into some psychotic family court mediations where you will never want to talk about you, everything will be my fault for keeping her from you, and we will never make any new progress.” As if, Elliot’s voice says in the back of her head, she’d been making any progress before.
She’d found him a behaviorist, like she’d promised a year ago. All she asked was that he keep the details of their affair to himself. And Tony had sworn up and down he would. She had to trust him. She didn’t know if she ever could.
It was his last appointment with her, and so she decided, against all her better judgment, to throw him a bone and do what he asked. She bundled Vivian into a soft-knit purple onesie and put a little hat with bunny ears on top of her soft, fragile head, and carried the whole carseat into her office with her. Watching the clock tick down, Jennifer absentmindedly rocked the carseat with the toe of her high-heeled shoe. “Viv, Vivi,” she said in a sing-song voice. “Did you know your mommy is a doctor? I’m a doctor for peoples’ hearts. For what’s in their heart.”
When she hears the door to her waiting room open, she unsnaps her daughter and cradles her, putting soft kisses on her forehead and taking her hat off. “My sweet little one,” she whispers.
And when Anthony sees her, holding her daughter—holding their daughter—Jennifer thinks he might fall to his knees in wonder. “Come on in,” she says with a small smile, and knows it’s the last time she’ll ever say that to him. On the drive over it occurred to her both that she would probably never see him again, and that it was so unlikely she would never see him again. She doesn’t know how to square these competing probabilities.
He’s wearing a three-piece suit, she observes, while he sits in his chair and she stands and sways back and forth with the baby in her arms. “You look very nice.”
“I wanted to make a good first impression,” he says softly, mouth slack with wonder as he cranes his neck to get a peek at the baby.
“I’ll let you hold her—don’t worry. I just want to make sure she’s calm first. She’s never been here before.” Jen offers the baby her index finger to suck on, while she continues rocking. “So.”
“So.”
“She was five pounds, eight ounces. Nineteen inches long. Ten fingers, ten toes. You’ll see her eyes; they’re still very blue. Most babies are born with blue eyes.”
With that, she delivers unto a DiMeo Family street boss the most precious thing in the world, watches his huge hands cup the back of her head so gently. “Hi there, baby,” he says softly, and Jen sits back in her chair, taking in the scene before her.
“I think she has your mouth,” Jennifer says softly. And she thinks she's right, that her baby girl has her father's charismatic pout.
There is silence, so still and so perfect, while Tony Soprano gazes down at his newborn daughter with something like awe. His hands had killed, would have killed for her, and there they are, so clean and strong, cradling a baby.
Vivian coos, and then starts whimpering. “What’d I do?” Tony asks, half in a panic.
“Nothing,” Jennifer says quietly. “I think she’s just hungry. I fed and changed her an hour ago, but at this age, it’s a full-time job keeping her full.”
“Can I feed her?”
“Not unless you have a pair of tits,” Jennifer says absentmindedly. She comes to pick the baby up, and Tony stands awkwardly. “You don’t have to go, if you don’t want to. It’s perfectly normal.”
Jennifer sits in her usual chair, unsnapping her blouse and lifting the cup of her maternity bra. She looks back at Anthony. “In the black bag next to my desk, there’s a muslin cloth. Like a blanket. Do you mind getting it for me?”
He does, and sits on the chaise lounge next to her, taking in this scene of Madonna and Child, Jennifer sweeping her fingertip against the baby’s butter-soft cheek. She sees him reach into his pocket and pull out a jewelry box, and her heart stops. “Anthony,” she starts, imagines flashing through her head of a diamond ring.
“It’s not for you. It’s for her. It was my grandmother’s. My mother was a malignant cunt, you know that. But my dad’s mom, she was a good woman.”
Out of the box, a gold cross sparkles. “It’s very beautiful, Anthony.” She lets him gingerly take the thin chain out of the box and hold it in front of Vivian’s eyes.
“I just wanted to know that she had something of me, yaknow?”
Because Vivian Joy Melfi doesn’t have his last name, will never sit on his knee or kick a soccer ball back to him or wake him up with a nightmare. He knows this.
Tony looks down at the baby, while Jennifer looks at him, and she sees him chewing his lip like he wants to say something and can't bring himself to.
“Don’t leave Carmela, Anthony. I can see the wheels turning. The devastating fact of being alive is that we cannot always hold all the things we want.” She places her daughter in the middle of her lap, fixes her blouse and bra, holds Vivian up so she can see Anthony. Waves her little girl’s hand at a mob boss. Knows with such profound sureness that he will never be able to be a part of Vivian’s life.
Meadow had known a boy her whole life, had loved him, and he’d been killed. AJ is seemingly always about to fall into crisis. She can’t give her daughter a pony. But she can keep her safe from killing and crisis, from the worry that seems so attendant to Anthony.
“And you wouldn’t marry me, anyway.”
“I wouldn’t marry you, no.”
The room goes quiet for a while, and it’s just like the stalemates they have always had.
“I don’t want you to make me leave,” he whispers, and she thinks about ducks. How when the ducks had their babies they became a family. How when she got pregnant, they became a family.
She beckons him to the chaise lounge in her office where he’d gotten her pregnant, holding the baby, and he puts his arm around her shoulders and weeps into her neck.
She knows that if he stays in, he’ll die. Knows it so deeply it almost startles her. She knows that if he tries to leave, he’ll die. She knows there is no way out.
Where do the ducks go in the winter?
“If you ever get out,” she whispers to him, “you can find me.” She knows he never will.
He leans down and kisses the baby on her warm little cheek. Kisses Jennifer on her forehead, her cheek, her lips. “I love you.”
“I know you do,” she says. “And that’s why you have to go. For the love of me, and her."
And then he’s out the door to her office, shutting it with the softest click behind himself, and she thinks he hears him sob.