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In the recovery room, the labor and delivery nurse helped me to learn how to properly breastfeed and burp her. "Do you have a name for her, yet?" she asked.
"I was expecting a boy," I said. "I don't know."
"Oh," she said. "You'll figure it out."
After the breastfeeding, they took her back to the nursery. I took a nap and when I woke up, Rosalie and Emmett were quietly checking their PDA phones for email.
"Hi, Bella," Emmett said. "She's beautiful!"
"Oh, thanks," I said.
"What's the matter? You don't sound very enthusiastic," Rosalie said.
"Let's go see her," Emmett said. I got up out of the bed and put on a robe. We went down to the nursery and they started taking pictures of her with their camera phones. She laid in a plastic crib, screaming and waving her little fists. "She looks like you," Emmett said.
"She looks like Winston Churchill," I said.
"Oh come on, Bella, get excited!" Rosalie said. "It's a baby! A beautiful baby girl, and she's got your lips! And a widow's peak- she's going to have your heart-shaped face! Isn't that great?"
"She's ugly and she looks like me?" I asked.
"She's not ugly!" Rose cried. "She's gorgeous!"
"Mike's very proud right now," Emmett said. Why did he have to bring up Mike?
"Hi, Bella," a deep, velvety voice said behind me.
"Hi, Edward!" Rosalie said, turning around.
"So, I see you gave birth," he said. "Which one is he?"
"It turned out to be a girl, actually," I said. "Second one on the left."
"What's her name?" he asked.
"I haven't named her, yet," I said.
"You'll come up with something amazing," Edward said.
"I don't know what I'm going to do," I mumbled. "I have a pile of blue baby clothes at home."
"Alice will take them all back to Baby'R'Us and Carter's Children's Wear in Port Angeles if you don't want to go," Rosalie said. "Girls can wear blue, anyway."
Rose and I went for a walk through the hospital so I could get some more feeling back in my body after the epidural. When I got back, I overheard Emmett telling Edward that I was going through some depression and not reacting like a normal mother would. Edward told him that they all needed to watch out for postpartum with me. I rolled my eyes. The baby needed nursing, again. I had considered formula feeding, because this might actually be a giant pain in the ass to breastfeed.
I got home from the hospital the next day with my new baby. She still didn't have a name. Thankfully, someone had cleaned up the kitchen.
There was a welcome home party waiting for us. As Rose had said, Alice and Esme had gone to Port Angeles and exchanged all my blue baby clothes and towels for pink and yellow and green. Esme had gone and bought a nice, expensive breast pump for me for when I went back to work so the baby could continue to drink breast milk and not formula.
"So," Angela began. "How is motherhood, so far?"
I shrugged. "I just want a sip of that champagne," I said. "It's been nine months since I've had a drink."
"Here, but you should limit yourself, you know. You are breastfeeding, right?" she asked, getting me a flute.
"Yeah, don't you want some?" I asked.
Angela bit her lip and tears welled up in her eyes. It all made sense, now. She wasn't normally an overly emotional person like this.
"Oh, Ang," I said. "When did you find out?"
"About two months ago," she said. "Jake and I have been keeping it a secret. We think it happened right before Mike died. We didn't want to tell you, it's been such a difficult time-"
"What's been so difficult?" I asked.
"We weren't sure how you'd react," she said, wiping her eyes.
"I'm reacting just fine," I said. "Why is everybody so concerned?"
"It's just the way you're treating your baby," she said. "That's concerning me. You haven't given her a name, yet."
"Fine then, you name her," I replied.
"Bella, you don't really want somebody else naming your child-"
"I can't decide," I said.
"OK," Angela said. "OK, I'll do it."
I talked to a few of my friends from school. A few minutes later, Angela and Jacob promptly approached me. "I've got a name for her. Michelle Jeannette."
"I understand Michelle, but why Jeannette?"
"You were going to name her Eugene. Eugenia's an ugly name, anyways, but now, you can call her Jeannie," Angela said.
"I like it," Jake said. "Little Jeannie Newton. It's cute."
"Alright, I'll name her that," I said.
"Everybody, I got an announcement, the baby's finally been named!" Jacob yelled. The baby began to cry from where she had been sleeping in Carlisle's arms. "Michelle Jeannette Newton. Bella's going to call her Jeannie."
"Thanks, Jake," I muttered, going over to Carlisle to see Jeannie. Carlisle was rocking her, trying to get her to stop crying.
The party went back to normal.
As I was sitting alone on the screened in back porch, sipping some punch, I heard another car come up and I heard two car doors slam. Two people were talking. I looked out to see who it was. It was Jessica Stanley and Edward Cullen. She was holding a diaper genie with a pink bow on it and they were walking so close to each other, it looked like they were together, they were standing so closely. Like, dating together. Alice came out to the back porch and saw what I was looking at.
"Oh, so you're finally seeing the great new couple of Forks," Alice said.
"Well, Jessica seems like a good match for him," I said. Jessica hadn't been raised as poor as most people in Forks. Her father was a dentist, he had money. She never had to work in high school and she had her own car when she turned sixteen, like Rose and Alice. Rosalie's father was a high-powered lawyer in Seattle who came home on the weekends to be with his family. High-paying jobs didn't exist around here.
"I don't know about that," Alice said. "She just doesn't seem that interested in him. She's looking for a better job away from here, if she finds one, I don't think she'll stick around for Edward. They're not official or anything."
"Hmm," I said.
"Why, are you interested in him?" Alice asked. I could hear the excitement in her voice. Alice liked playing matchmaker.
"Alice," I said. "I don't think I'm ever having sex again." I told myself that I could never find anybody sexually attractive after Mike. It was too soon. I had to change the subject. "Has Rebecca been invited?" Rebecca hadn't shown up to the hospital at all. It was like she was ignoring that fact that she had a grandchild.
"I left a message on her voicemail," Alice said.
"Oh," I said. I had left messages on her voicemail for weeks trying to get together with her for lunch just to see how she was doing, but I never got a callback from her. Jessica suddenly appeared on the back porch.
"Hi, Bella!" she cried. She had put the diaper genie down in the house. "I heard you named her!" She bent down to hug and kiss me. "She's such a pretty baby!"
"Everybody says that," I said. "I don't see it."
"You'll see it, soon enough," Jessica said. "Jeannie Newton. It has a ring to it. I love it."
"Who's got her, right now?" Alice asked.
"One of Bella's teacher friends," Jessica said. "You won't have to worry about a lack of baby-sitters."
I hoped not.
