Look what it had wrought.
She fell asleep with laughter on her lips.
Eight
Hattie Scranton, Carol Saxon, Betty Prater, Sally Morris, and Fern Ridley sat in a semicircle around Suki Astor. All eyes like pairs of laser drills were fixed intently on her. Despite this, the petite seventeen-year-old girl with rich, strawberry-blond hair trimmed, cut, and styled with a graceful sweep back, looked as fresh, relaxed, and perfect as she had the day she had her hair done.
Suki wasn’t dressed like this in anticipation of company. Neither she nor her parents had any idea that Hattie and her baby squad would be swooping down on them this evening. Suki was always well put together, fashionable, sophisticated, and certainly not the typical teenage girl. When it came to her appearance, she was rarely taken by surprise. Her girlfriends had long since nicknamed her Chichi.
The Astor family was one of the wealthiest in the community. Philip Astor was the owner of the county’s biggest construction firm. They lived in a virtual mansion, a three-story Greek Revival with four Ionic columns. Built on a knoll overlooking the valley, it looked as if it could be the governor’s mansion. Suki’s room was as big as the master bedroom in any one of the baby squad’s houses. One could almost taste the joy they all felt for having bullied their way into this exquisite home and wealthy family.
Suki’s beautiful black eyes shifted from one scrutinizing face to the other. She tried desperately to look innocent and calm. Her parents hung back near the doorway, her mother pressing her upper lip down over her lower, her arms wrapped so tightly around herself she resembled someone wearing a straitjacket. Her father scowled, indignant, close to a rage, chafing at the bit. He was not used to being told what he had to do or whom he had to permit to enter his home.
However, Hattie had come armed with information she had already browbeaten out of another girl, Shirley Keefer, a far less self-confident teenager who had practically burst into tears at the sight of the squad.
“I will begin by telling you what we know for a fact, Suki, and I will ask you some questions and expect an immediate, honest reply to each one. Is that clear?” Hattie demanded.
Suki nodded and looked again at her parents. This was going to be bad. This was going to be very bad, she thought.
“We know you, Shirley Keefer, Lois Marlowe, Clair Kaufman, and Arlene Letz have been members of what you girls call the Pregnancy Club. We know this has been going on for some time. We know what you do at these so-called club meetings. We have seen those ridiculous pictures of you as well as the others simulating late-term pregnancy. We have confessions and testimony. We know you have violated laws, abused access to information, and actively tried to recruit other young girls. Do you deny any of this?”
Suki gazed at her father. His rage had begun to dissolve into a look of fear.
“I’m not pregnant,” she said in reply.
“We know you’re not pregnant,” Hattie said with a small, tight smile. “We know you just pretend to be pregnant. I’m not going to march you out of this house and have you examined,” she added, sounding very reasonable, almost sympathetic. It had the effect of lowering Suki’s defensive demeanor. She had heard what had been done to Lois, but maybe she could get out of this undamaged after all.
“Lois Marlowe was your leader, wasn’t she?”
“Yes,” Suki admitted quickly. On any other occasion, in front of a different audience, she might resent that. She had just as much to do with the creation of the club, and she had brought in ideas everyone liked and activities everyone performed.
“You met here on various occasions? Most occasions involving your so-called club?”
“Yes,” she said, shifting her glance at her mother, who muffled a cry.
“In fact, your home eventually became the clubhouse, so to speak, right?”
“I guess,” she said.
“You guess? You more than guess, Suki. You know. This is where you simulated a natural birth, where Lois Marlowe pretended to have labor pains, isn’t it?”
Suki nodded. How did they know all this?
Her mother looked so devastated. Her father had transformed from a powerful executive to a very frightened man. He actually lowered his head like someone waiting to be sentenced to imprisonment or death. The sight of his weakening increased the terror in her own heart. She had always believed her father to be one of the most powerful men she had ever known or could ever know.
“Lois had chosen herself to be the pregnant woman, right?”
Whoever told her this was lying to protect herself, Suki thought. The truth was, they had competed for the honor, but again, she did not disagree. “Yes.”
“After that, it was Lois who acquired the prenatal vitamins to continue this awful pretending, is that not so?”
“Yes, that’s so,” Suki said.
“You continued to meet here in this house?”
Suki nodded.
“Where you actually had a doll with a fake umbilical cord. You, yourself, delivered this imaginary baby, cut the cord, correct?”
How did Hattie Scranton know all this? Who gave her so much detailed information? Was she being made the fall guy? Was she going to take all the blame? “We used cards to see who had the highest card and who would be the midwife.”
“Midwife,” Carol Saxon muttered through her clenched teeth. It sounded like profanity when she pronounced it.
Fern Ridley groaned and looked at Suki’s mother, who just shook her head in disbelief.
“You and your club members created a nursery for the imaginary baby in this house as well, is that right?” Without waiting for Suki’s confirmation, Hattie added, “In a moment, you will take us there and show us the doll in a bassinet, won’t you?”
“What?” her father cried, raising his eyes from the floor. “A doll in a bassinet?”
“Well?”
“Yes,” Suki said, her lips finally trembling, her eyes filling with tears. “But that wasn’t my idea.”
“It was Lois Marlowe’s idea, wasn’t it?” Hattie pursued.
“Yes, it was Lois’s,” Suki accepted quickly.
“You sat around and read aloud to each other those X-rated books about infant care, postpartum blues, all of it, didn’t you?”
Suki took a deep breath. Was there anything she didn’t know? If that were true, why were they here? What did they want?
“How could you do this?” her mother asked, starting toward her. “And in our house?”
Hattie held up her hand without turning to her, and her mother stopped abruptly as if she had been slapped. She remained where she was.
“Where did Lois Marlowe get those prenatal vitamins?”
“She said she had gotten them from Stocker Robinson,” Suki replied quickly.
Hattie glanced at the other women.
“Did she trade a music CD for them?”
“That’s what she told us.”
“Did she have an X-rated VRG movie that she had received from Stocker Robinson?”
Suki shook her head. She felt safe about this. No one would have told her that they all had watched those films at one time or another.
“If you lie about any of this, you will pay a very severe penalty, Suki,” Hattie warned.
“She never told me she had traded anything for any X-rated VRG movies,” Suki answered. The care with which she formed her sentences and chose her words was not lost on Hattie Scranton. She studied the girl a bit more. She didn’t want to be made the fool here, to go off armed with misinformation and be shown to be wrong. That could do her and her squad a great deal more harm than doing nothing at all.
“Was Stocker Robinson ever at any of your club meetings?”
“No,” Suki replied quickly, and even grimaced.
“You don’t like her?”
“No one likes her.”
“You wouldn’t make things up to get her into trouble, now, would you, Suki? That would end up being worse for you and your friends, you know,” Hattie warned.<
br />
“I don’t care about her enough to make up anything about her,” Suki said.
It was a good answer.
“Okay,” Hattie said, rising. “Show us the nursery.”
Suki got up slowly. Her mother was crying unabatedly now, and her father’s face was so red he looked sunburned. Without so much as glancing at her parents, she led the women out of her room and up the stairway to the attic of the house. Her father and mother trailed behind, obedient puppy dogs, restrained and defeated by the revelations Hattie easily extracted from their daughter.
Suki flipped on the light and took them to the rear of the large attic, where she uncovered a small bassinet in which a doll had been placed.
All of the women looked at it as if it were really a living infant, their eyes wide, their lips stretched into ugly grimaces of disgust. They saw the baby bottles, the boxes of disposable diapers, the powders and oils, as well as the bottle of liquid infant vitamins.
“We want to know how you acquired each and every item here,” Hattie said. “What store owner in what town sold any of this to you. We want names and dates and times. Is that clear?”
Suki lowered her head.
With her forefinger extended and accusing, she would bring terrible devastation to people who had no idea what she and her girlfriends were up to. They had done so good a job of pretending to be helping legal mothers. Of course, the store owners and sales clerks should have been more careful. They should have not sold these things to them without the proper license cards.
But what could she do about that?
It was save-your-own-skin time. Aside from blaming all she could on Lois Marlowe, who was beyond pain and disgrace, there was little other choice.
“Well?” Hattie pounded.
“Yes,” she said. “I will.”
“We’ll contact you tomorrow and tell you where to be,” Hattie declared. She looked at Suki’s parents. “I’d advise you to get rid of all this immediately.”
“How?” Philip asked. At this point, he wanted to sound as cooperative as possible and wanted to follow any prescribed procedure.
There really wasn’t any precedent for this sort of thing.
“Take it out and burn it,” Hattie suggested with disgust.
The women filed out of the attic, moving with an air of mourning. When their footsteps echoed on the stairway, Suki turned slowly and looked at her parents.
“We’re going to be at the center of a terrific scandal. We don’t deserve this,” her father said.
“It was just for fun, Daddy. We never meant to hurt anyone,” she cried.
“You haven’t hurt just anyone,” he said, his voice in a dead monotone. “You’ve hurt your family. You’ve hurt yourself. Go back to your room. Get more and more familiar with every aspect of it, no matter how tiny. It will be your world after school for the rest of this year,” he said, pronouncing sentence. “Your phone will be gone in the morning. If anyone wants to talk to you, it will have to be through ESP,” he added, and left.
She looked at her mother.
“Lois Marlowe is dead. It could have been you,” her mother said.
“I wish it was,” Suki replied.
Natalie pressed her body against Preston’s and kissed his cheek and his lips. For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to react, but then he turned abruptly and kissed her on her lips, his kiss harder, longer. She felt him stirring with sexual interest.
Suddenly, he paused and pulled back.
“I don’t know anything about this…this natural birth thing, Nat,” he said, nodding at her stomach. “Can we still go at it at this late stage of pregnancy?”
“Of course,” she said with a smile. “And don’t worry. You can’t make another until this one is born.”
He laughed. “I know that much, at least.”
He started toward her again.
Preston had always been what she thought of as a gradual lover, not that she had all that much experience at making love. She had a serious romance in high school that was very passionate but also rather short-lived. Natalie had always been more selective about her boyfriends and her relationships with men. Other girls her age almost reduced love itself to just another computer game, clicking on and off boys the way they would click on and off icons on a monitor. They made sexual activity seem like little more than a handshake. Making love with a man didn’t mean you were serious about him or he was serious about you. People enjoyed one another the way they enjoyed different flavors of ice cream. At least, that was the way it seemed to her. She told herself that was why she had become a romance writer.
In her heart of hearts, she truly believed other women, even men, wanted something more, something deeper and more substantial in their relationships. It was almost an admission of weakness to reveal this, however. The philosophy that governed relationships in this country, this world, was the idea that everything that happened occurred for specific, tangible, and explainable reasons. There was no such thing as kismet or magic between two people. If they were attracted to each other enough to want to marry and live together in the hope of qualifying as parents, they did so because their genetics steered them toward each other. They fit like two well-made pieces of machinery. It made electrical and physiological sense. That’s all.
And yet books like the ones she wrote still had a significant audience, albeit an audience that either had to consider or did consider what she did little more than distraction, the new form of comic book. She wrote with the passion she wanted to see in her own life, and she was eloquent enough to pass that need into her words, into her characters, into her plots.
She tried to employ it all in her own love relationship, but Preston could be close to mechanical when he made love sometimes. He would move over her body as if he were following a schematic drawing, kissing her neck here, strumming a nipple, licking it, nibbling around her breasts, kissing her on the mouth, moving his tongue over hers, scooping under her rear, moving his hands between her legs, moaning almost on cue, doing it all in the same pattern as if he were painting by numbers.
She would tell him how much she loved him and how good he felt to her, and either he would grunt in agreement or he would finally realize he was just going through motions and stop, look down at her, smile, and then say, “I love you more, Nat. You can’t possibly love me as much as I love you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m bigger. I have more love in me to give to you,” he told her, and they both laughed, and their lovemaking was better, really passionate, full of feeling and care, but often it took that little extra effort on her part, that prodding.
“Are you happy with me, Preston? Are you happy I am carrying your baby, your complete and real baby?” she asked when he pulled his lips back from hers this time.
“Yes, Nat. I am,” he said.
“You’re not afraid? You’re not nervous about it?”
“Of course I am, but so what? It makes it all that much more exciting, doesn’t it?”
She tilted her head.
Was he serious? That wasn’t what she thought he would say. She wasn’t sure she liked it put that way. It wasn’t just an adventure, a ride on a roller coaster in some fun park.
He sensed her displeasure. “What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t expect to hear you say that, Preston.”
“I’m just trying to make you feel better, more at ease, Nat,” he said quickly. “Let’s not dwell on it to the extent that it takes us over, or we will make mistakes. Okay?” he said quickly.
She thought a moment and then nodded. Maybe he was right. He knew best about strategy when it came to dealing with people, especially important people. Look at how well he handled the Cauthers. “Okay.”
They kissed again, and they made love until they were both exhausted, breathing hard, sweating with each other’s heat.
It turned out to be wonderful. It was what she wanted it to be, always wanted it to be.
Afterward, he t
urned on his back and looked up at the ceiling. She took his hand and did the same. For a while, neither spoke.
“Sometimes, when we lie quietly beside each other like this, I feel like we’re traveling through space together, moving faster than light,” she said.
“Maybe we are. You heard that lecture last month at the club, the one on quantum energy and the human condition.”
“No, not like that. I mean spiritually,” she insisted. “Out of our bodies completely.”
“Oooooh, Judy Norman’s spiritual voodoo,” he quipped.
“Not just Judy Norman. Me, too, Preston. I believe in much of that, in the unseen, untouchable part of ourselves.”
He was quiet. “I made a call this afternoon,” he said finally. “I’ll hear back tomorrow.”
“A call? What do you mean? A call to whom?”
“To where you have to go, where you’ll be safe, away from prying eyes, away from people like Hattie Scranton and her henchwomen, in particular.”
“Oh.”
“It’s possible you could go tomorrow, Nat,” he said. “Pack in the morning.”
“Tomorrow? So soon?”
“No sense waiting any longer than we have to and taking any chances, Nat. You understand that we will have to have a period without the baby, right? You understand you can’t come home with a child in your arms?”
“Yes,” she said sadly.
“In the meantime, I’ll make out that we’re applying, and soon after you’re back, we’ll have our child. Okay?”
“And our baby will be well looked after?” she asked. “I mean, until he or she is brought back to me?”
“Absolutely. I’ve been assured of that.”
“By whom, Preston?”
“It’s complicated, Nat. If I start giving you all the nitty-gritty, it might spook you. You’ll have to take my word for all this, okay?”
“Okay,” she said in a small voice.
He sat up to lean over and kiss her softly. “It will be fine, Nat. It’s going to be all right. Trust me,” he said.
She put her hand on his cheek. “We trust you, Preston.”
“We?”
The Baby Squad Page 12
