23750932750

CASSIE
TRACINA PICKED OUT the baby’s name—Rose Nicaud—in honor of the Café, which itself was named
after one of the first African-American female entrepreneurs in New Orleans.
“We’ll nickname her Neko,” she said, cooing into the baby’s tiny forehead, no bigger than a silver
dollar.
To say the baby was small would be to describe only a part of what made her so extraordinary to
look upon. She was almost translucent; a network of teeny pink veins covered her whole face and
body like a pale web, giving her a light purplish hue. When she wasn’t being held, she was splayed in
a portable incubator next to Tracina’s bed, a diaper—the size of a coffee mug—completely
swallowing the lower part of her body, her fists no bigger than rosebuds. Tracina had a private room,
courtesy of her baby’s wealthy father.
“The doctor says she’s going to be fine,” Tracina whispered to me, not because she wanted to keep
the noise down, but because her voice was nearly gone from the screaming during the birth, at
Carruthers and at Will, both of whom she allowed in the delivery room, just in case.
Now Carruthers, the seeming victor, in hospital greens and a cap, had clearly made a home for
himself in the giant armchair, his suit, vest and tie strewn about the place. He slept with his hand
resting protectively on the incubator’s glass cover.
“I might have to stay here for a few more days, but there shouldn’t be any complications,” Tracina
said.
Medical complications, at least.
Everything else I would learn came later, when Tracina and I inched towards a kind of friendship
in the weeks and months that followed the dramatic birth, when I would discover I had a lot more in
common with her than I thought.
She told me her insistence on waiting as long as possible before a cesarean was because she knew
there’d be a test and she wanted to delay Will’s heartache as long as possible. No one doubted she
cared about Will a lot, but it became clear during the delivery and after that Carruthers was the man
she loved. Still, she felt that Will would have made a better father—more reliable, more hands-on,
less complicated with his love for the baby. Carruthers was a high-powered politician; he had a wife
(now soon-to-be-ex) and two college-aged children. And yet, it was touching the way he stayed by
Tracina’s side all night, ducking out to take and receive phone calls, even trying his best to treat Will
with some kindness, though Will struggled to return the gesture.
That’s why she told all those lies. Like me, Tracina didn’t want to be a wedge in someone else’s
relationship. Even though Carruthers had been ardent from the beginning, he just wasn’t ready to
leave. Tracina knew how easy it would be to fall into the role of mistress and she wasn’t having it,
never wanting to hide and lie, especially when Trey was getting so smart, and a good man like Will
was so available. She broke it off completely. Then she discovered she was pregnant. Not having had
a father around herself when she was growing up, she wanted to do everything in her power to make
sure her baby had one who was. And she felt that as long as she kept her mouth shut, only someone
ignorant of her and Will’s family trees would question the paternity just because the baby’s skin might
not perfectly match Will’s. He had two African-American grandmothers; Tracina had white relatives