Elodie stares at me, counts a beat, and asks, “Why did you keep it from us, Dad?”
“Girls.” Mom’s voice is also gravelly. “Dad was a lieutenant colonel.”
Dad walks to the window.
“It took years before I got in touch with my troop, my friends from the war. No one talks about what went on. Two of the men have no kids; one had a daughter with spina bifida.” Dad speaks very slowly. “The herbicides, the exposure. It wasn’t your mother who had the problem. She … we … wanted a family.”
“So we were conceived because Mom wasn’t happy,” Elodie says. “And it had to be a secret.”
“She wanted to be pregnant,” Dad says. “Isn’t that understandable?”
“Please stop talking about me like I’m not part of the conversation.” Mom twists her wedding ring. “Please.”
“How about you, Dad? Was it going to make you happy?” My sister sounds too harsh.
“Elodie, don’t do this. Dad loves us, we’re his daughters,” I say.
“I thought I’d have a boy, one boy,” Dad says. “It’s what I expected.”
“Ah, it must have been disappointing. All those sports, booked solid,” Elodie says. “Tennis, winter ski trips, swim meets.”
“Exactly.” Dad keeps looking out the window, as if the view is new. He and Elodie should be on the same side, considering what Elodie and James have done. Instead, Dad continues. “There was your mother’s agenda, too, for her daughters—dance lessons and dresses, certain friends.”
Her daughters. I look at Elodie, who isn’t reacting.
“I was tested for practically three years. Meanwhile, the pressure to have a baby was awful. It was destroying our lives,” Mom says.
“Your mother had to have you, both of you,” Dad says.
Your mother. Maybe Elodie is right on some level.
“Elodie, it’s fine. We got to be born.” I defend them, soapy as I sound. A song starts in my head about no one asking to be born. Saige, from Dirk O, wrote it, and Tyler said she sang it last Thursday. The first night we agreed I shouldn’t go to a club, that I should stay in, get rest.
“Of course I’m grateful, I am,” Elodie says. “But I don’t understand the long-festering secret. You were watching me with my miscarriages and saying nothing?”
Our mother sighs. “You saw with Aubrey today. Sure, some people are accepting, but others are arbitrary.”
“It was a different time. We were encouraged—advised—to keep it quiet. People weren’t doing this as commonly as they do today,” Dad says. “Then with the DNA tests, the stories in the news these past few years, your mother and I began to think about it again, after decades.”
“There was a chance you might find out. I would tell Dad at night; I’d say I was afraid,” Mom says.
“How about with me, Mom? I would have felt less alone, less a failure. Y’know, more identified with Dad,” Elodie says.
“It isn’t quite the same,” Dad says.
“Why would you say that? Why isn’t it close enough?” Elodie’s voice seems too loud for the living room.
“The circumstances. Your problem, my problem,” Dad says.
“You were pregnant, Elodie,” Mom says.
“Mom!” Elodie says. “The babies weren’t viable! What don’t I know about infertility and in vitro treatments?”
I want to protect him, my polished, honored father. My elegant parents, living a lie, choosing the lie. I run my hands over my “bump” for about the sixth time in the last half hour. I promise myself I won’t be rattled by this, I won’t let it affect my cortisol levels.
“Your mother and I are a team. We were engaged before I went to Vietnam and married three months after I got home. In Philadelphia, at the Bellevue-Stratford.”
I nod; I always nod when Mom or Dad talks about their wedding. We’ve heard the ingredients of their romance our entire lives. Mom’s family was distinguished, Dad’s less so.
“Why two different donors? Do you know who they are?”
“Elodie, please!” Mom says.
Dad’s voice is strained. “Because Mom miscarried with the first donor on the second and third go-round.”
“You understand—you are almost eight years apart,” Mom says.
“Elodie, look at what Mom and Dad went through to have us. Isn’t that enough for you?” I say.
“I’d like more information,” Elodie says.
“It isn’t to be talked about beyond these walls,” Mom says.
She practically wraps herself around Dad, who, while not moving, does an invisible wrap back. Their entire life together, they have been cocooned. And good at it.
“I have tried so hard, Mom, that’s why.” Elodie is shaking her head. “Striving to be like Dad. I felt, I don’t know, that something was off.”
“Off?” I tilt my head. “Elodie, this is stressful.” Baby Grace pounds and punches.
“Look at what fabulous daughters you are. What Dad and I did was the best decision of our lives,” Mom says.
“No, Mom, please hear me. Something has been off. I kept wondering what I had done, why no one was quite enthused enough about me. It didn’t seem that Aubrey felt it as much.”
“I didn’t,” I say.
Our father is listening, but for Mom, this deserves only a moment. She purses her lips. “Elodie, this isn’t necessary.”
“Mom,” I say. “We might not agree. Still, let’s hear Elodie out.”
Dad comes to where Elodie stands by the dining room. In the past few minutes, he has become another man, weakened, sorry. What people mean about “before and after” news is announced. News that can’t be tossed or ditched, forgotten or changed. There are the dusty shades of eggshell paint and gentle lights—the living room too tenuous for our conversation.
“My only request,” he says, “is that this isn’t disclosed to anyone. That our secret, your mother’s and mine, is yours—our two daughters’ secret. Sealed, sacred.”
What about James? What about Tyler? Will we not tell them? I can’t be sure. I’d like Elodie to ask about that, yet when I attempt to get her attention, she looks away.
“I understand, Dad,” she says.
“Should we hold hands and swear to one another?” I ask.
“We won’t enforce that,” Dad says. “Your word is your word.”
The room bleaches out; nothing but the four of us fill it. Our mother lifts our father’s hand to her cheek. “I trust my girls.”
“You know that for me”—Elodie moves a foot away from Dad—“it’s fine to respect the secret. As long as you know how I feel about the truth.”
“How is that?” Mom sounds polite.
Again, my sister seems as if she is at the Literary Society, about to introduce a speaker after she makes one important point.
“This truth, for me, changes my life. Someone opened the gilded cage and let me fly out.”
PART THREE
CHAPTER 24
AUBREY
The crazier the glue of my family gets, from our three-way baby to the DNA insanity, the more I come back to Tyler to be safe. Not that he knows it, because the secret keeping has shut me down, subdued me. I miss Tyler when he’s beside me. Tonight, after the damn traffic on 95 South, I’m back. At Keats, a small venue in Miami, I listen to musicians talk about their songs. I push what happened with my family this afternoon in Palm Beach out of my mind. Tyler and I have a young soloist, pop rocker named Celeste, who is first on the roster. We sit with her family and friends, who are overly enthused about her standing in front of fifty guests listening to her gushy tunes.
“I wish she’d sing and they wouldn’t talk,” I whisper to Tyler. He holds my hand, lets it go. “Right, but afterward she does a set at the Bowery at eleven. Okay with you? Not too late?”
“Tonight?” Not only the hour but that I can’t manage much more today. Then I’ve been around so little, he’s been running the business. Celeste, with her reddish waves and flower tattoos, he
r short jeans and boots, she’s mine. I found her. Before I became pregnant, before I had to show up in Palm Beach almost daily. Why do I risk disappointing Tyler, not my sister, my mother?
“Yeah. It’s tonight.” He’s patient, I am able to choose.
“Let’s do it.”
Celeste starts off with a Melanie song, “Candles in the Rain,” a song that my mother used to play for Elodie and me when she drove us around after school. I was only four, Elodie was twelve, already very cool. Mom wore her hair in a bob that frizzed in the Florida humidity. At least it was her real hair color and texture. Music played on cassettes, Melanie and Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley and Joan Baez. I doubt that other mothers with girls at the Academy had the same taste.
“What’re you thinking?” Tyler asks.
I am so tightly wound. “About my mother.”
“Yep. I bet.”
I want to confess: Here’s the scoop about my father, about my sister and me. Except we are sworn to silence. Do Elodie and I get to carry it around like our parents, buried for innumerable days?
* * *
The night long, I’m sleepless. I keep wanting to wake Tyler, to confess, despite the promise. It would be opening a door, taking the lie into another room. It would be wrong. Besides, with Tyler it’s precious—living together, working in the same office. I’m not sure spilling the family story is wisest. I thought when I moved in that he was the one with ghosts of lovers past, a dense history. Yet what I have is a pile of damage that can’t be fixed.
At four A.M. I get up, ready to go to the living room to scroll through emails. I’ll check what was posted about Celeste on Instagram after her performance tonight. Tyler hears me, senses my moving around. He’s half asleep, but his voice is clear.
“Hey, Aubrey, try to get some rest. Tomorrow is the ultrasound.”
* * *
Why do doctors’ offices affiliated with hospitals favor a shade between celadon and mucus green for their walls? Tyler looks brighter and sharper against this background, while I am wan. Worse, as if I might take on the same hue as the walls. A far cry from Dr. Noel’s designer digs for desperate women, an office Tyler has been, thankfully, spared.
“You’re pissed at Elodie.” Tyler speaks quietly.
“I am.” I don’t look up from the paperwork, myriad questions I don’t feel like answering: marital status, spouse’s name, occupation, spouse’s occupation. “She’s planning to meet me.”
“Could be that she’s struggling,” Tyler says.
“Are you making an excuse for my sister?” I place the pen inside the clipboard. “My sister, who has gone AWOL?” Can anyone comprehend how alone I am, waiting for her to show up.
“Have you heard anything?” Tyler asks.
“Texting. She and James are both supposed to be here.” I am almost relieved to be alone with Tyler. Still, she’s very late; they’re very late. A foursome, when it should be a twosome. The two of them or the two of us. Baby Grace flips and turns.
“Before this began, she was—”
“Ms. Cutler?” A technician comes to the front desk. She’s tall, young, and has curly dark hair. Her name is embroidered across the front pocket of her white shirt. Aida.
Tyler and I stand up together. Aida is about to say something, then decides against it. Our vibe, our ersatz family–concocted baby, some signal causes her to open, then close her mouth. Her cover-up is a stilted smile. Maybe Tyler smiles back and I miss it, lost in what’s next.
“Come with me, please.” She turns into a hallway. We follow her.
* * *
Where is Elodie? Were Tyler not with me, I’d feel thrown to the dogs. He squints at the monitor, although I’m not hooked up yet, while I change. Dr. Lieber, studious, probably Elodie’s age, walks in. Aida dims the lights.
“Ms. Cutler.” Dr. Lieber holds out her hand.
“Yes, I’m Aubrey Cutler.” Why do I sound tinny, unconvincing? This can’t be my life.
She’s reading the chart. Without looking up, she says, “You are thirty-two years old and this is your first pregnancy. You are, let’s see, in your twentieth week. Approximately. Please, lie down.”
I do the clumsy climb onto the table and Aida opens my blue hospital gown at the front. The smooth half model of my stomach, my uterus, is a mound, a petite mountain. Beside me, Tyler tenses up, like he’s made of batter board.
The ultrasound whooshes and clacks. Tyler watches the machinery with the kind of fascination he has when a lead guitarist brings out a B. C. Rich.
I whisper, “I’m glad you’re with me.”
Aida gives him a look and he backs away from me. She squirts glop on my stomach and starts moving the wand.
I should be glued to the screen. Instead, I’m worried about when Elodie will fucking arrive. Is she at the Literary Society, bossing Laurie around, yessing women who drop by to collect a book on hold? Has she simply cut it too close with traffic, the Southern Boulevard Bridge up every quarter of the hour? Then again, there’s the chance she’s rushing in to rush out. A scheduled coffee—despite our scheduled ultrasound—with one of her friends, an über-mother who deposits her eight-year-old daughter at the Academy and selective after-school activities. That friend would have a hedge-fund husband or a lawyer or doctor husband whose field is significant. The type of friend who will fish for the nitty-gritty of my pregnancy. A friend who might say, “Elodie, you’ve no idea how children impact a marriage, what a quagmire it is, the schools, other mothers, the children.” Then Elodie could add to what swirls around town—what she knows from the Society, albeit she hasn’t any children. Yet.
“Dr. Lieber, can we wait a moment?” I ask. A trickly qualm begins. Doesn’t Elodie want to do the mother thing, see her baby?
“Excuse me?” Dr. Lieber has taken the wand from Aida and starts circling it around in the air. “Mr. Cutler, what are we waiting for?”
“I’m not Mr. Cutler,” Tyler says. “I’m Tyler Brickland.”
“I apologize, what an assumption,” she says.
“My sister and her husband. The baby is hers. I mean, it’s my egg, her husband’s sperm. I’m a traditional surrogate,” I say.
Tyler puts his face near mine. In the darkened room his teeth glitter. I hold on to his thumb.
“Well, I’m certain you’ve heard from your sister. Close relatives, relatives involved with the baby, aren’t often late.” Dr. Lieber, sounding hurried, motions to Aida, who rubs more glop on me. I don’t want Dr. Lieber to conduct the procedure; I’d rather have Aida do it.
“Just one moment more?” I ask. Tyler takes his cell phone and begins texting. Dr. Lieber shakes her head. “We should begin, I’m afraid.”
For some reason, I wonder what this doctor is wearing beneath her lab coat, if she has any children of her own.
“When your sister arrives, she arrives,” she says.
The plan is set with or without Elodie. I get it: The baby is the baby.
* * *
“I’m heeeere.” Elodie smiles as she stands at the door—one she’s pushed open herself. Her sunglasses serve as a headband, holding back her shock of hair. Hair we thought came from our father. “It’s happening,” she says. “Tyler, you’ve come.”
“I did.” Tyler moves toward the shelf in the front area, where he put his backpack. The room seems more greenish. I don’t see his disappointment, but I know it.
“James is parking,” Elodie says.
Tyler moves his gaze from the screen to Elodie and back. Elodie starts to watch.
A knock on the door, because James has arrived and, unlike my sister, he’s polite; he’s asked someone to lead him to us. A woman technician steps back and James slides into the room; he’s taking his seat in an amphitheater.
“Just in time.” A guest at a party, one the others waited for.
Dr. Lieber frowns. She’s collected, with her smooth reddish hair and lavender-framed glasses. I want her to patch up the situation. A stranger with a wand.
More glop is spread on my stomach by Aida, who then moves to a kind of switchboard. Dr. Lieber and she look at each other, speaking in code. A swooshing sound gets louder, keeps going. “The heartbeat, that’s your baby’s heartbeat.” Dr. Lieber digs the wand in a little. “Here we have your baby.”
“Can you tell the sex?” Elodie asks.
“Wait, Elodie,” James says. “Let’s not—”
“Is it visible?” Elodie asks.
“Before I tell you, please confirm you and your husband are in favor of—”
“We are, we are!” Elodie says.
Dr. Lieber moves the wand with a heavy hand.
“A girl,” she says. “Yes, you’re having a girl.”
A girl. I knew it. A girl. Elodie and I both suck in our breaths and watch our baby float through the space that I’ve given her. She has far-apart eyes; her mouth is open. Her face is diaphanous; her arms are wings.
“Oh, my God, Aubrey!” Elodie says. “A girl! A girl!”
“Oh, my God,” I say. Elodie pushes to be near my head.
“We wanted a girl!” I say. “Look at her!”
“She looks like us, doesn’t she?” Elodie says. “She’s got those thin arms, full lips. She’s long, isn’t she?”
I watch her flip again. “Yes, like us.”
“A girl. A little girl. She’s beyond splendid.” Elodie sounds teary, uncommonly emotional.
Baby Grace. I knew it.
Tyler is captivated, the sloshing heartbeat, the arms batting about inside me. “James, my man, a girl!”
“A girl!” James holds up his hand to high-five Tyler.
“I can’t look for some reason.” He rubs his wrists, as if he has gotten poison ivy but doesn’t remember being out in the field.
“What are you talking about, James?” Elodie is taken out of our shared trance. Undercurrents begin; James shifts out of our circle.
The baby keeps going, dancing in utero.
Dr. Lieber stops, lifts the wand back into the air, where nothing can be recorded or reported.
A Palm Beach Scandal--A Novel Page 19
