Not My Daughter

by Barbara Delinsky

One pregnancy could be hidden. Not three.

  One might be accidental. Not three.

  One would quickly be last week's news. Not three.

  "Mom?" Lily's whisper came through the bedroom darkness. "Are you sleeping?"

  "If only," Susan said quietly. If only she could close her eyes and make it all go away--find it was just a bad dream, a relic of the panic from her own past--I can't do this, I'm alone, HELP! No, she was not sleeping. "But you should be," she said quietly. "You're sleeping for two."

  "I'm also peeing for two. Did you talk with Kate?"

  Susan glanced at the door where Lily stood backlit, a still-slim silhouette against the frame. "Only for a minute. We're meeting in the morning."

  "Mary Kate says her mom's really upset. It's the money issue."

  "It's more than that," Susan said. If money ruled the Mellos, Kate and Will would have stopped after the twins. But Kate would be upset, like she was, about the consequences of what their daughters had foolishly done. "Any word from Jess?"

  "No. She's not answering my messages. I think she's mad at me. She told Mary Kate that Sunny went berserk. Jess blames me."

  "Why you?"

  "Because we had agreed not to tell. Only I got pregnant before they did, so I was farther along, and I knew you knew--"

  "I didn't know."

  "You may not have known you knew, but you knew," the girl insisted, "and once I told you, the others had to tell their moms, even though they wanted to wait."

  Susan didn't argue about what she had known when. She was already beating herself up about what she should have seen but hadn't. Girls like theirs didn't do things like this.

  But they had now. And waiting to tell moms? "Funny thing about being pregnant," she mused, wrapping her arms around her knees. "Before long, it shows."

  "But by then, it would be too late to do anything about it," said Lily. "Jess is worried they'll make her have an abortion. If they try, she'll run off to her grandmother. I have no one but you, Mom. If you didn't want me here, I could call your aunt Evie, but she's like, what, eighty now?"

  Susan put her chin on her knees. "Sixty, and you're not calling Aunt Evie."

  "Well, if I had to, I would--or I'd call Dad's sister. She likes me. I mean, it'd only be for a little while."

  "You're not going anywhere."

  "I'm sorry if I've messed things up."

  Susan wanted to say that she hadn't. Only she had. The fact of Susan sitting in bed, missing Lily's warm body but unable to open the covers for her to snuggle, spoke of a huge mess.

  "Don't be angry," the girl whispered.

  "Why not, Lily?" Susan shot back. "My signature accomplishment last year was the establishment of a school clinic where students can be treated for things they don't want to discuss with their parents. That clinic is staffed by a real nurse, with a real doctor on call, either of whom could have given you birth control if you'd wanted to have sex. Do you realize that I pushed for this specifically to minimize student pregnancies?"

  Lily remained silent.

  "Mm," Susan concluded softly. "I'm speechless, too."

  "You're missing the point. This is not an unplanned pregnancy."

  "No, you're missing the point," Susan parried with a spike of outrage. "This town lives and breathes responsibility. This family lives and breathes responsibility. What you've done is not responsible. You can talk all you want about knowing what you're doing and being a good mother, but you're seventeen, Lily. Seventeen."

  "You did it," Lily said meekly.

  And that, Susan realized, would haunt her forever. She had worked so hard to get past it, but here it was again. And now she had no idea what to do. She certainly couldn't call Rick. He had trusted her to raise Lily well, and she had failed.

  Heartsick, she turned away from the door and curled into a ball. She didn't know how long Lily stood there, only knew that she couldn't reach out to her, and by the time she rolled back to look at the clock, the doorway was empty.

  Susan rarely called in sick, but she would have done it the next day if she hadn't planned to meet Kate at the barn. Inevitably someone would see her going there. But Zaganack looked out for its own. If you were sick, people knew. Likewise if you were supposed to be sick and showed up elsewhere.

  The prospect of leaving school at ten kept her going, and when she finally ran down the stone steps and climbed into her car, she felt better for the first time that day. She would have walked if she'd had time; the barn wasn't far, and the November air was crisp, still fragrant with the crush of dried leaves. But she didn't want to lose a minute.

  No ordinary barn, this one had a past. Originally built on the outskirts of town to house horses, it had also hidden its share of escaped slaves heading to freedom north of the border. For years it had housed nothing but cobwebs and mice, but for Susan, Kate, Sunny, and Pam, who saw PC Wool as their own personal ticket to freedom, it held an appeal. When the last of the Gunn family died and the property went up for sale, the women lobbied for the barn. Envisioning it as a tourist attraction, Tanner Perry, grandson of Herman Perry and husband of Pam, had bought it and moved it closer to the rest of Perry & Cass. The tourist part had never quiet materialized, but the success of PC Wool more than compensated.

  Parking beside Kate's van, Susan ran inside, past stalls of raw fiber, shipping cartons, and computers, all the way to the back. There, tubs for soaking fiber and shelves of dye lined the walls. A separate section held newly painted wool, now hung to dry, while ceiling fans whirred softly above. A skeining machine stood nearby.

  Had she not been preoccupied, Susan might have admired a mound of finished skeins. A blend of alpaca and mohair, these were the last of the holiday colors she had conceived the summer before. Rich with dozens of shades of cranberry, balsam, and snow, they were the culmination of a year in which sales had doubled. Not only had PC Wool earned its very own section in the Perry & Cass catalogue, but after becoming the darling of the knitting blogs, it had experienced an explosion in online sales.

  A large oak table stood at the heart of the work space. Old and scarred, it was the same one on which they had put together their first season of colors ten years before. Back then, the table was in Susan's garage and PC Wool had only been a dream, conjured up during child-free evenings with a bottle of wine and good friends who loved to knit. Even now, a large basket in the center of the table held small knitting projects, while the bulk of its surface was covered with skeins waiting to be twisted.

  Dropping her coat on a chair, Susan went to Kate. "Are you okay?"

  "Been better," Kate replied. Her eyes were heavy, her hair a riot of ends sticking up around the bamboo double-pointeds at her crown. She opened her arms.

  This was why Susan had come. She needed comfort. Petite Kate, with her big heart and can-do approach, had always offered that. "If it had to be anyone," Susan whispered, "I'm glad it's you. What are we going to do?"

  Kate held her for another minute. "I do not know."

  "That's not the right answer. You're supposed to say that everything will work out, that this is just another one of life's little challenges, and that what happens was meant to be."

  "Aha," Kate barked dryly, "at least I've raised you well. You can keep telling me that. Right now, I'm not a happy camper."

  "What does Will say?"

  "Pretty much what you just did. But boy, this came from nowhere. How can smart girls do something so stupid?" Reaching for a hank of yarn, she deftly twisted it until it was tight enough to double back on itself. "My daughter's neck," she murmured as she tucked one end into the other.

  "I'll ditto that," Susan said, and the angst of the past thirty-six hours poured out. "I can't get past the anger. I can't ask Lily how she's feeling. I can't hold her. She's been my little girl for so long, but now there's this other ... other ... thing between us."

  "A baby."

  "It's not a baby to me yet. It's something unwanted." She waved a hand. "Bad choice of words. What I meant to say
was that this is not what we needed at this stage in our lives. Lily was supposed to have all the choices that I did not. What was she thinking?"

  "She wasn't alone."

  "Which blows my mind. I've always loved that our girls did things together. They're all good students, good athletes, good knitters. I thought they'd keep each other from doing dumb things." She had a new thought. "Where's Abby in all this?"

  Kate leveled a gaze at her. "Mary Kate refused to say."

  "She's pregnant, too?" Four would be even worse than three--though three was surely bad enough.

  "Mary Kate just stared at me when I asked."

  "Meaning that Abby is either pregnant or still trying."

  "All I know," Kate said, "is that Mary Kate begged me not to tell Pam."

  "But if Pam can keep this from happening to Abby--"

  "That's what I said, but Mary Kate said Abby would do it anyway, and she's probably right. Of the four girls, she's the least anchored."

  Like her mom, Susan thought. She didn't have to say it. Kate knew. They had discussed it more than once.

  "Besides," Kate said, "it's not like Pam can lock her in a chastity belt."

  Susan snorted. "Not many of those around these days, and what do we have instead? The Web. Information enough there to make naive seventeen-year-olds feel they know everything. What was Mary Kate's excuse for wanting a baby?"

  Kate twisted another hank. "She's been a hand-me-down child. She wants something of her own."

  "Isn't Jacob that?" Susan was generally skeptical of high school pairings, but she liked Jacob Senter a lot. He was a kind boy, dedicated to school and devoted to Mary Kate. Lily had no one like that.

  "But between school and loans," Kate explained, "it'll be years before they can get married. She wants something now. Something her sisters don't have." She screwed up her face. "Did I miss this?"

  "She had love," Susan argued in Kate's defense.

  "When I wasn't busy with the others. She has a point, Susie. Her solution may be misguided, but I see where she's coming from. Lily, now, Lily had you all to herself."

  "But only me. She wants family."

  "She has Rick."

  Rick. Susan felt a little tug at her heart. "Rick is like the wind. Try to catch him."

  "Have you called him?" Kate asked cautiously.

  Susan pressed her lips together and shook her head.

  "Do you know where he is?"

  "I can find out." Not that it mattered. His cell number was linked to network headquarters in New York. He could be anywhere in the world and her call would go through.

  Reaching him was the easy part. Telling him what had happened would be harder.

  She practiced on Kate. "When Lily was little, she wanted a brother or sister. That was before she realized her daddy wasn't around. Once she understood that Rick and I weren't together, she turned matchmaker. 'You'd really like Kelsey's daddy, and Kelsey has a sister and two brothers, and they need a mom like you.'" Susan smiled briefly. "It was sweet. Sad. She always wanted a big family, but there's a right way and a wrong way to get it." Grabbing a hank of yarn, she twisted it as she, too, had done hundreds of times. "She keeps reminding me that I was seventeen when I had her, but it's because I was that I know how bad this is. They're not ready physically. They're not ready emotionally."

  "Neither am I," Kate said tiredly. "For years my life was a blur of diapers, runny noses, and interrupted sleep. I hyperventilate when I think of it. I can't go back."

  Susan wasn't as worried about going back as moving ahead. "At least you know it's Jacob. Lily won't tell me who the father is. She says he doesn't know. How crazy is that?"

  "You have no idea?"

  "None." And it bothered Susan a lot. "She told me when she had a crush on Bobby Grant in second grade. She told me when she got her first kiss. That was Jonah McEllis. She gave me a blow-by-blow of her relationship with Joey Anderson last year. And in each case, I wasn't surprised. A good mother would know if her daughter liked someone, wouldn't she?"

  Kate snickered. "Like she would know if her daughter planned to get pregnant?"

  "How did I not see something?" Susan asked, baffled. "I look now, and, yes, there's a difference. Her breasts are fuller. Why didn't I notice before?"

  "They weren't fuller before," Kate reasoned. "Or her clothes hid it. Or you thought she was just filling out. Susie, I'm asking myself the same thing. My daughter is two months pregnant, has been drinking milk by the gallon, has thrown up lots of mornings, and I thought it was the flu."

  Susan actually smiled. Pathetic as the situation was, she felt better. Venting always helped, especially when the person on the other end was in the same boat. Kate would love her regardless of what kind of mother she was.

  "Have you and Lily talked about options?" Kate asked.

  Susan could only think of three, and abortion was out. She reached for more yarn. "I mentioned adoption this morning." She twisted the hank and looked up. "Lily threw the question back at me. Could I have done that? We both know the answer."

  "What was it like?" came a third voice. Sunny unbuttoned her coat as she approached. "Having a baby at seventeen."

  Susan didn't have to pull at memories. She had been reliving the experience in vivid flashes since dinner at Carlino's Tuesday night. "It totally changed my life. My childhood ended--was over, just like that."

  Sunny joined them at the table. Clearly on a break from work, she had her hair in a plum bow that matched her sweater and slacks. "I know you're estranged from your parents," she said to Susan. "I don't know the details."

  That wasn't something Susan dwelt on. "My parents couldn't deal," she said, "so I went to live with an aunt in Missouri while I had Lily and finished high school. Aunt Evie was great, but she had no kids. She didn't know what I was going through, and I didn't dare complain. It was scary. My doctor was one step removed from my father. He delighted in telling me all the risks of having a baby at seventeen."

  "Like?"

  "Like a seventeen-year-old's body isn't ready to carry a baby to term. Like I was at risk for anemia, high blood pressure, preterm labor, and my baby could be underweight and have underdeveloped organs."

  Kate looked frightened. "Is all that true?"

  "I believed it. Now I know that most of these problems arise because teenage moms typically don't take care of themselves. But my doctor didn't say that. I was terrified. There were no classes at the local hospital. I had some books, but they weren't reassuring. I was only seventeen. I dreaded childbirth, and then, if I survived that, I was going to have to take care of a baby who would be totally helpless and who might have developmental issues because I was seventeen."

  Sunny scowled. "There must have been someone who could help."

  "My pediatrician's nurse. She was an angel. I talked with her every morning during call hours. It was like she had two patients, an infant and a seventeen-year-old--well, eighteen-year-old by then. We still keep in touch."

  "Are you in touch with your aunt?"

  "Occasionally. But it's awkward. She never wanted to buck my father, either. The deal was that I'd stay with her until I graduated high school, then leave. My dad put enough money in a bank account for me to buy a used car and pay for necessities until I got Lily and me to a place where I could work."

  "They disowned you," Sunny concluded, "which is what I may do to my daughter."

  "You will not," Kate scolded.

  "I may. I don't believe she's done this. Do you know how embarrassing it is?"

  "Not as embarrassing as when I got pregnant," Susan said. "We lived in a small town of which my dad was the mayor--just like his dad before him--so the embarrassment was thoroughly public. My older brother, on the other hand, was a town hero. Great student, football star, heir apparent--you name the stereotype, and Jackson was it. I was the bad egg. Erasing me from the family picture was easy."

  Sunny seemed more deliberative than disturbed. "What about Lily? Weren't they curious?"

&
nbsp; "My mother, maybe." A fantasy, perhaps, but Susan clung to the belief. "But she was married to my father, and he was tough. Still is. I send cards on every occasion--birthday, anniversary, Thanksgiving, Christmas. I send newspaper articles about Lily or me. I send gifts from Perry and Cass, and yarn to my mom. She sends a formal thank-you every time." Susan held up an untwisted skein. "She thought these colors were very pretty. Very pretty," she repeated in a monotone, startled by how much the blandness of the note still stung.

  "I'm trying to decide if Jessica can survive," Sunny said. "How did you make it with an infant and no help?"

  "I didn't sleep."

  "Seriously."

  "Seriously," Susan insisted. She had learned to multitask early on. "I was studying, working, and taking care of a baby. After I graduated from high school, I babysat my way east. Babysitting was the one thing I could do and still have Lily with me, because I sure couldn't afford a sitter. When I got here, I did clerical work at the community college because that got me day care dirt cheap and classes for free. I was halfway through my degree when I met you two." Their girls were in preschool together. "That was a turning point. Friends make the difference."

  "Exactly," Sunny cried. "If our girls hadn't been friends, this wouldn't have happened."

  Susan was startled. Of the three girls, she saw Jessica as the one most ready to rebel. "If not with our two, then with another two friends," she said quietly.

  Sunny calmed a little. "Tell that to my husband."

  "Uh-oh." This from Kate, and with cause. Dan Barros was mild-mannered, but there was no doubt who ruled the roost. "He's blaming our girls?"

  There was a pause, then a halfhearted "Not exactly."

  "What did he say?"

  "Oh, he doesn't say things. He implies. He infers. I'm telling Jessica that she needs to tell us who the father is, so that they can get married, which would lend at least a semblance of decency to this, but Dan keeps grilling me. 'How did this happen, where were you, didn't you see anything?' Bottom line? It's my fault."

  "It isn't your fault," said Kate, though she was looking at Susan. "Is it?"

  Hadn't Susan asked herself the same question? She picked up a PC Wool tag from a pile that lay beside the skeins. A striking little thing, the tag carried the PC Wool logo, along with the fiber content of the skein, its length and gauge, and washing instructions. "We gave our daughters the know-how to prevent this," she said as she absently fingered the tag. "But they didn't consult us."