by Sarah Morgan
Once, she’d had ambitions, too, but that had been before she’d had sex on a beach and found herself pregnant. Not that she undervalued her contribution to the family. Being a stay-at-home mom had been her choice and from the moment Mack was born, Lauren had loved being a mother. She considered herself Ed’s equal in every way and knew her role was every bit as important as Ed’s. She was the Yorkshire pudding to his roast beef, to use a British analogy, which she always tried to do in order to ingratiate herself with her fearsome mother-in-law, who, even after sixteen years, remained appalled that her precious only son had married an American.
Ed was still sitting on the bed, staring at the floor, and Lauren reached into the drawer by the bed and pulled out the box she’d wrapped carefully.
“Happy birthday.” She handed him the gift and felt a thrill of anticipation. “I wanted to give it to you now because later on it’s going to be crazy here with a houseful of people all wanting a piece of you.”
Ed opened the package and stared at the contents. “You bought me a rain forest?”
“Not a whole rain forest. A patch of rain forest. I know how committed you are to environmental issues. You cycle everywhere, you’re always talking about saving the planet. I thought—”
“It’s a scam, Lauren.” He sounded tired. “I can’t believe you spent money on that. You do realize you’ve probably financed the cocaine industry?”
“It’s not a scam. I’m not stupid.” And he knew it. He knew she’d graduated top of her year at school and had a place at an Ivy League college before her world had crashed down. Ed had been the one to encourage her to pick up the threads of her dream once Mack had started senior school. She’d been studying for an interior design qualification and was finally poised to embark on her own career. When she’d passed her exams, they’d celebrated with champagne. “I researched it carefully. We can visit whenever we like.”
“Right. Because flying to Brazil is great for the planet.” He tossed the box on the bed and she felt her throat thicken.
“I was trying to give you something original and thoughtful.”
“It was thoughtful.” He rubbed his fingers across his chest. “It’s not you, it’s me. Ignore me. I need to start the day again.”
He heaved himself off the bed, walked into the bathroom and closed the door.
Moments later she heard the hiss of water.
She stood there, flummoxed.
This wasn’t about a patch of rain forest. Was he on the verge of a midlife crisis? Was he about to start wearing skinny jeans and have an affair with someone barely older than Mackenzie?
Making an effort not to overthink and overreact, she went in search of her daughter.
She found her in the kitchen, hunched over her phone at the kitchen island. A pair of oversize pink headphones covered her ears.
Mack hated pink. The headphones had been an attempt to fit in with a group at school who teased her for not being girly enough. Mack called them “the princesses,” and they’d made her life a misery.
If Mack heard her mother come into the room, she gave no sign of it.
There was no tray laid for breakfast. No sign of any birthday treat.
Nothing except a single overflowing bowl of breakfast cereal that Mack dug in to.
Lauren tried to work out what she could say without causing an explosion. “Hi, honey. You haven’t forgotten Dad’s birthday?”
Mack looked up from her phone and removed her headphones in an exaggerated gesture.
“What?”
“Dad’s birthday. Today.”
“Yeah?”
“Aren’t you going to wish him happy birthday?”
“Does he want to be reminded? Forty is pretty old. Not quite a senior citizen but that landmark is definitely on the horizon.” Mack took another spoonful of cereal. “I figured he might rather ignore it. And it’s six fifteen. I’m not a morning person. I guess I could have made him tea, but he hates my tea. He always moans that it’s too weak.” She put the headphones back on her ears and went back to Snapchat. Dressed in an oversize T-shirt, she looked younger than sixteen. Her hair was the same sunny blond as Lauren’s, but Mack allowed hers to flop forward in an attempt to hide the stubborn spots that clustered on her forehead. Her braces had come off a few months earlier but she still smiled with her lips pressed together because she’d forgotten she no longer needed to be self-conscious.
It was only when Mack picked up her empty bowl to put it in the dishwasher that Lauren noticed the two pink streaks in her hair.
“What have you done to your hair?”
“I woke up with it this way. Weird, huh? Fairies or gremlins.”
“Mack—”
Her daughter sighed. “I dyed it. And before you flip out, everyone is doing it. All the other mothers were fine about it. Abigail’s mom helped her do hers.”
This was her cue to be like “all the other mothers.” It was a pass or fail test, and Lauren knew she was going to fail. “Why didn’t you discuss it with me?”
“Because you’re such a control freak you would have said no.”
“You have beautiful hair. Is this about trying to fit in?”
“I don’t care about fitting in.”
They both knew it was a lie.
Lauren picked her words carefully. “Honey, I know it’s hard when you’re teased, but it happens to a lot of people and—”
“That does not help, by the way. It makes no difference to me how many other people have been through it.” Nonchalance barely masked the pain and Lauren felt the pain as if it were her own.
“Your individuality is the thing that makes you special. And you need to remember that most people are thinking about themselves, not anyone else.” She decided that this wasn’t the time to raise the school issue again. “I know you’re upset. Has something else happened?”
“You mean apart from the fact that my mother is always on my case?”
“I’m trying to be supportive. We’ve always been able to talk about anything and everything.”
Mack scooped up her phone. “Yeah, right. Anything and everything. No secrets in this house.”
Her tone made Lauren feel uneasy.
“Mack—”
“I need to get ready for school. My mother had a place at an Ivy League college, so nothing short of Oxford or Cambridge is going to be good enough for me. Education is everything, right?”
It was too early in the morning to deal with teenage attitude. Lauren opened her mouth to remind her to wish her father a happy birthday, but Mack was gone.
Another slammed door. Her world seemed full of them.
No secrets in this house.
Feeling a burn of stress behind her rib cage, she took herself downstairs to the basement gym they’d installed and tried to run off her anxiety on the treadmill. She flicked on CNN, giving herself a taste of home.
Storms in Alabama. An alligator thirty feet long in Florida. A shooting in Brooklyn.
A wave of homesickness almost knocked her flat. She yearned for morning runs on South Beach, the smell of the sea, the taste of seafood caught fresh that morning, the sight of the sun setting near her sister’s house in Menemsha.
Twenty minutes later Ed appeared. He was dressed in cycling gear and had his phone in his hand.
Lauren breathed a sigh of relief. This was routine. Ed cycled to the office and changed once he got there, and it seemed that today was no different except that he was running later than usual.
“Have a great day, birthday boy.” When he didn’t answer, she muted CNN and slowed the treadmill until it stopped. “You seem really distracted today. Does it bother you being forty?”
“What?” He glanced up from his emails.
“Forty.” Maybe she’d treated the whole thing too lightly. She needed to make sure he knew he was s
till handsome and desirable. More sex wouldn’t hurt. Sometimes the days slipped past and she’d realize it had been a week. Sometimes longer. The truth was sex between them had always been comfortable rather than urgent.
Was that normal? She had no idea because it wasn’t a topic she’d dream of discussing with friends.
Maybe he was having an affair?
Even though she’d stopped the treadmill, her heart rate continued to accelerate. No. Ed wasn’t like that. They didn’t lie to each other. That was what they’d agreed that first night they’d met. Lauren trusted Ed implicitly.
And they were happy. Happy couples didn’t have affairs.
“Are you worrying about Mack? I know she’s been difficult lately.”
She decided not to mention the pink hair. Let him notice it for himself later.
“All teenagers are difficult. I remember your mother saying your sister was a nightmare.”
Lauren realized she’d forgotten to call her sister the day before. Preparations for Ed’s birthday had eclipsed everything.
“All my mother wanted to do was paint, and she was irritated by anything that disturbed that.” Still, when Lauren thought back to some of the things she’d done with Jenna, it terrified her.
They were lucky to have come through childhood unscathed. Or mostly unscathed.
“She’s growing up.” Ed was calm. “She doesn’t have to tell us every little thing. She’s pushing for independence, and we’ve always encouraged that. And as for being difficult, it’s nature’s way of making sure teenagers want to leave home and that parents are ready to push them out of the door.”
“She’s sixteen, Ed. It’s years until she leaves home. And you know what the school told us. Mack is skipping homework and failing English. She’s always been a straight-A student. English is her best subject.”
Ed frowned. “Physics is her best subject. Last year she wanted to do aeronautical engineering.”
“That was before those girls started teasing her for being like a boy. Remember that horrible Facebook page they set up? Mack-the-man.” She’d been so upset she’d wanted to charge into school and chop off their damn princess hair with rusty scissors. It had taken a lot of maneuvering to have the page taken down and Mack had been left wounded. “She is smart. She could do what she likes, providing she works hard, but that’s the point. She isn’t. If she carries on like this, she’s going to fail her exams.” Unless there was an exam in sarcasm. Mack would ace that.
“There’s more to life than being a straight-A student, Lauren.”
“I know. But I also know how competitive the world is now. If you mess up your exams then you don’t get into a good college, and without a good college you don’t stand a chance of getting a good internship because there are literally thousands of people applying for every position. Sue Miller’s eldest graduated last summer and since then she has put in one hundred and fifty applications and hasn’t had a single interview. One hundred and fifty.”
“Calm down. Mack is going to be fine, Lauren.”
She was irritated that he didn’t even glance up from his phone.
“But what if she isn’t? The school told us she’s not speaking up in class.” And since when had her daughter not spoken up in class? Mack had been speaking up ever since she’d learned how to put two words together. “And then there was that incident a month ago—”
He glanced up. “That was a one-off.”
“She was drunk, Ed! Our daughter was drunk and Tanya’s mother had to drive her home.” And Mack had refused to offer any explanation. She’d shut them out. That had disturbed Lauren more than anything. Was that when Mack had changed?
“Teenagers experiment. Tanya’s mother should have kept a closer eye on the vodka bottle.”
“It wasn’t a one-off. What about the time she took money from my purse? Our child stole, Ed.” What if Mack was experimenting with drugs? The more she thought about the list of possible horrors, the more surprising it seemed that today’s teenagers ever made it to adulthood. “I think she’s keeping something from us.” She recognized the signs, and it made her uneasy. A secret, she knew, could eat away at you slowly. It created a barrier between you and the people you loved.
“Since when do teenagers tell their parents everything? You need to chill. Mack is doing okay. She’s not the problem.”
Lauren stared at him, wrong-footed.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
“You said, ‘She’s not the problem,’ which means something else is.”
“Forget it.” His attention was back on his phone. “I might be late tonight.”
“You’re kidding. Tonight is the party.”
“The—what?” He looked confused and then closed his eyes briefly and muttered something under his breath.
“Your party. Had you forgotten?”
The pause was infinitesimal, but it was there.
“No.”
He was lying, and he never lied.
Who forgot their own fortieth birthday party?
What was on his mind?
“We have thirty people coming, Ed. Friends, colleagues, your mother—” She managed not to wince and Ed nodded.
“I’ll be there. See you later.” He grabbed a bottle of chilled water from the fridge they kept in the gym, and Lauren studied him from the back and wondered if tight Lycra cycling shorts on a man of forty was still a good look.
He slammed the fridge door shut and straightened.
“Thanks for the rain forest. It was a sweet thought and I’m sorry I overreacted.” He kissed her cheek. It was a dry, asexual gesture. “I love you. You’re a good woman, Lauren.”
A good woman? What did that mean?
“Maybe you should take time off. Mackenzie has three weeks at Easter. We could go away.”
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
Lauren watched him leave.
She’s not the problem.
By the time she left the house to meet her friends, she’d persuaded herself that Ed was having an off day and she was having a massive attack of overthinking. She felt invigorated after her workout, happy that everything was on track for the party, and reassured by the fact that Mackenzie had spoken at least eight words before leaving for school. Fortunately the school they’d chosen was close by. One of Mack’s friends lived a few doors away and they walked together.
Most days Lauren managed to resist the temptation to track Mack’s phone to check her daughter was safe.
She buttoned her coat against the cold and walked briskly along tree-lined residential streets.
As someone who had lived her life on an island until the age of eighteen, the prospect of city living had daunted her, but she’d fallen in love with this area of London from the first moment Ed had brought her here. She loved the secret communal gardens, the elegance of the stucco-fronted houses and the candy-colored charm of Portobello Road. She enjoyed browsing in the market for secret treasures and discovering restaurants down hidden side streets. In those early years she’d explored the city with the baby tucked in her stroller, loitered in galleries and strolled through London’s many parks. She’d spent hours in the Tate Modern and the Royal Academy, but her favorite place without a doubt was the Victoria and Albert Museum, which had been a source of inspiration for designers and artists for over one hundred and fifty years.
Lauren could happily have moved in there.
She reached the coffee shop at the same time as her friends.
She went to the counter to order while Ruth and Helen grabbed their usual table in the window. They’d started meeting for coffee when their children had moved to the same girls’ school and conversations at the school gate had become impossible.
She ordered coffees and a couple of pastries for her friends and pushed her credit card into the machin
e. It was promptly declined.
With a murmur of apology, Lauren tried again and the card was declined a second time.
“I’ll pay cash.” She slipped the card back into her purse and scrabbled around for money. Red-cheeked, she carried the tray over to the table and set it down.
“Thanks.” Ruth lifted a cappuccino from the tray. “My turn next time. It’s freezing out there. They’re saying we could still have snow.”
Lauren sank into the vacant chair and unwrapped her scarf from her neck.
The British preoccupation with the weather was one of the things that had fascinated Lauren when she’d first arrived in London. Entire conversations were devoted to the weather, which, as far as Lauren could see, was rarely newsworthy. On Martha’s Vineyard bad weather frequently meant being cut off from the mainland. She wondered what her British friends would have had to say about a hurricane. It would have kept the conversation going for months.
“Did you want to share this croissant?” Helen broke it in half and Lauren shook her head.
“Just coffee for me.” She pulled out her phone and sent a quick text to Ed.
Credit card not working. Problem?
Maybe the bank had seen a transaction that was out of the ordinary and frozen it. She probably ought to call them later.
“I wish I had your willpower.” Ruth ate the other half of Helen’s croissant. “Don’t you ever give in to your impulses?”
Lauren dropped her phone into her bag. “Giving in to impulses can lead to disaster.”
Both her friends stared at her in surprise, and she wished she’d kept her mouth shut.
“Disaster?” Ruth blinked. “You mean like not fitting into your jeans?”
“No. I—” She shook her head. “Ignore me. I’ve had a crazy morning. Busy.” It was Ed’s fault, for making her think about things she didn’t want to think about.
“Ah, yes, the birthday. How was Ed?” Helen picked up her spoon and stirred circles into the foam on her coffee. “When Martin hit forty he bought a sports car. Such a cliché, but I get to drive it so I’ve stopped complaining.”
Lauren sipped her coffee. “Ed seemed fine about it.”
