by Cara Malone
The last thing Lily got to do with Mercedes before she had to go back to Seattle was a dress shopping outing for Krys and Darcy’s wedding. Lily was a member of the wedding party, along with Chloe and Ivy, Megan and Alex, and all six of them met at a bridal boutique in the city one Friday evening.
It had taken a lot to arrange for all of them to be available, but Darcy had insisted.
“You know I can’t try on bridesmaid dresses in my condition, right?” Lily had quipped when she talked to her about it over the phone. “I’m going to be a completely different size by the time the wedding comes in the spring.”
“I know,” Darcy had said. “But you can pick out a style you like, then get it tailored if necessary. Besides, it’s more about the experience – I’m going to get Krys into a fancy ballgown if it kills me.”
So Lily and Mercedes walked arm-in-arm into the large dress shop in an old building in downtown Chicago. The showroom took up the entire ground floor, the next story filled with bridal gowns like a wedding warehouse. Everything was white, sparkly, and romantic, and as they were guided through the showroom to a private room where the rest of the girls were waiting, Lily gravitated to a full, lacy ballgown on a display mannequin.
“Do you like that one?” Mercedes asked as she caught Lily’s gaze.
“It’s very pretty,” Lily said.
The dress had a vintage feel, with soft lace and a flowing train – exactly the sort of thing she would choose if she ever had the fortune to walk down an aisle. She moved away from it now. Whatever the future held, thinking about wedding dresses right before Mercedes moved two thousand miles away wouldn’t do her any good.
“Come on, I see Chloe and Ivy,” she said. They went into the room Darcy had reserved – a large one with a mirror that took up one entire wall, a platform in the center of the floor for brides-to-be to stand on and admire their dress choices. “Where are Krys and Darcy?”
“Darcy is on her way,” Megan said, getting up from one of the chairs that was pushed up against the wall. “Krys just texted and said she got held up in the ER but she’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“We’re never going to train the workaholic out of Krys,” Lily said with a laugh. “Although I’m sure whatever’s holding her up is important.”
“Should we start looking at suits and dresses while we wait?” Ivy asked.
“Not just yet,” Darcy said, coming through the door and looking a little breathless. She had a big grin on her face as she added, “There’s going to be a small change of plans today.” She stepped aside and six more people came into the room. “Everybody, these are my mom, my dad and his girlfriend, my brother, and Krys’s parents. They just got in from Denver this afternoon.”
Lily glanced at Mercedes, confused, and asked, “What’s going on, Darcy?”
“Have you ever heard of a pop-up wedding?” she asked.
“Oh my god, you’re getting married today?” Chloe squealed, grabbing onto Ivy’s arm.
“Krys was never too crazy about my great big fairy tale wedding idea,” Darcy said. “She was humoring me, but I could tell she wasn’t into it, and I only wanted it so I could make her a princess for a day.”
“Aww,” Alex said, leaning against Megan. Lily felt Mercedes slip her arm around her waist and settled into her.
“I figured we could keep planning some enormous wedding that would put us into debt before we even got a chance to start our lives together, or we could skip all of that – and the waiting – and I could recruit the most important people in our lives to help us make it a day we’ll never forget,” Darcy said. “Krys has no idea, and I want her to think we’re all just shopping for our wedding outfits, okay?”
“Okay,” Lily said. “What do you need us to do?”
“She’s going to be here in about ten minutes,” Darcy said. “I’m going to send our parents into the next room to wait, and then we’re all just going to act normal. Try on outfits. Help Krys find her perfect dress. When she finds the one she wants, that’s when I’ll tell her what we’re really doing here. There’s a minister standing by at Megan and Alex’s new house to marry us, and we’ll have the reception there after the ceremony.”
Ivy reached over and smacked Megan with the back of her hand. “You knew about this?”
Megan laughed. “Yeah, sorry – we couldn’t risk telling anyone else.”
“I love a wedding,” Chloe said, looking like she was about to float away.
“Did you know?” Mercedes whispered to Lily, but Lily shook her head.
“I’m so glad you’re here for this,” Lily said. If she hadn’t extended her sabbatical, she’d be back in Seattle already.
“Incoming,” Megan said, glancing at her phone as a text came in.
“Okay, everybody act normal,” Darcy said as she ushered her family and Krys’s parents out of the room. Lily’s heart was beating a little faster than normal as she tried not to telegraph the excitement on her face.
“Sorry I’m late!” Krys said as she burst into the room like the Tasmanian devil she always was. “Crazy day at the hospital as always – what did I miss?”
“Not much,” Darcy said, coming back from the other room just in time. She’d changed quickly into a pretty, white linen suit and she slipped her arm around Krys’s waist and gave her a kiss. “We were just getting organized.”
“You look great,” Krys said. “Are you thinking of wearing that?”
“Yeah, what do you think?” Darcy asked, taking a quick spin in front of the mirror.
“I think you’d look gorgeous in anything,” Krys said, straightening Darcy’s lapels. “But you’re a knockout in that.”
“Then it’s settled, my work here is done,” Darcy said, shooting a wink over Krys’s shoulder to Megan and Alex. “Now we just need to get you dressed. Our sales associate is around here somewhere, and she pulled a couple of gowns for you based on what you said you liked.”
Lily and Mercedes took seats against the wall, along with the rest of their friends, while Chloe jogged out to the showroom to retrieve the sales girl. When she came back, she had a giant, poofy dress in her arms and the associate had two more in hers.
Krys looked embarrassed to be the center of attention, but Darcy was beaming at her the whole time and Lily was having a hard enough time keeping her own smile to a reasonable, non-suspicious level.
“Is it bad luck to pick out our wedding outfits together?” Krys asked as the associate motioned her over to a small anteroom to change into the first dress. “What if one of these is the one?”
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” Darcy said, shooting her a mischievous smile. Krys narrowed her eyes, trying to decipher it, and then Darcy added, “You’ve already seen me in my suit – I might as well enjoy the dress show.”
Krys tried on the first three dresses, spinning around on the platform and looking at herself in the mirror. She looked beautiful in every one of them, but her eyes weren’t lighting up when she put them on.
“Not your style?” the associate asked. “We have over 1,200 dresses upstairs, so we’ll keep trying until we get it right.”
“I just don’t think I’m a ballgown kind of girl,” Krys said, fluffing out the taffeta skirt of the dress she was wearing. “What about something a little simpler – more like a tea dress?”
“I have some very pretty options like that,” the associate said. “Give me just a minute to grab a few.”
She helped Krys out of the dress and then disappeared into the showroom, swallowed up in a cloud of white fabric. When she returned about five minutes later, she had five knee-length white cocktail dresses draped over her arm, and Krys’s whole face lit up when she saw the first one. It had a boat neck with thin straps that showed off her shoulders, a thin belt with a delicate bow at the waist, and when she tried it on, the room went silent.
“That’s it, babe,” Darcy said.
“Do you think so?” Krys asked.
“Don’t you?” Darcy asked, getting up and goin
g to Krys’s side to look in the mirror with her. While Krys was preoccupied with admiring the dress – and the associate was doing her best to sell her on it – Darcy looked over her shoulder at Mercedes and mouthed, Go get the parents.
She did, and just as Krys noticed that her mother was walking through the door, Darcy took her hand.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Krys Stevens, will you marry me?” Darcy asked.
Krys laughed. “I already told you that I would six months ago. But what are my parents doing here?”
“Will you marry me today?” Darcy asked. When Krys looked at her with confusion, Darcy explained. “I realized that you were right – I’d rather not waste another minute being your fiancée instead of your wife. We don’t need a fancy wedding in order to make you a princess – you already are one in my eyes. All we need is our friends and family. I flew your folks out this morning and there’s an altar set up in Megan and Alex’s back yard, waiting for us if you say yes.”
Everyone in the room was on the verge of tears. Even the sales associate looked misty-eyed as Krys threw her arms around Darcy and leapt off the platform and into her arms.
“Of course,” she said, covering her in kisses. “Let’s get married!”
Megan and Alex’s new house was a cute little ranch in the suburbs of Evanston. It had a big, open floorplan, and they’d transformed the living and dining areas into a perfect wedding venue complete with romantic string lights and tea candles in lanterns all over the space.
Darcy had arranged for everyone to pick out wedding attire from the rental department of the bridal boutique, and Lily chose a flowing, blush pink dress that made her feel feminine and sexy even as she entered her eighth month of pregnancy. Mercedes chose a sharp black suit – she had a definite style preference and Lily was sure she’d seen her in a suit very similar at least a half-dozen times since they met, but she knew what looked good. Those slim lines and her silky lapel made Lily want to tear the suit right off of her.
Everyone gathered in the living room, standing for a short ceremony in which Darcy and Krys promised their hearts to each other and Darcy gifted Krys with a beautiful corsage made of pure white miniature roses before slipping a wedding band on her finger.
Mercedes wrapped her arms around Lily as Krys and Darcy said their I dos, and as the minister announced, “You may now seal your marriage vows with a kiss,” Mercedes kissed the top of Lily’s head and whispered, “I love you.”
17
Mercedes
Mercedes put her trip to Seattle off as long as she possibly could. In the first week of February, she finally had to turn over the keys to her temporary apartment – which had taken her all of an hour to pack up since she’d spent so little time in it. She drove herself to Chicago O’Hare and turned in her rental car, then met Lily at the terminal entrance.
They found a little bistro table near a coffee shop inside the airport and sat together, a somber mood cast over them. Mercedes’ carry-on bag was at her feet, her boarding pass in her coat pocket, and she was holding Lily’s hand across the small table.
“I’m thinking I can wrap up all the odds and ends for the clinical trial in three months – six is the absolute worst-case scenario,” she said. They were words she’d said before, trying to reassure Lily as much as herself that this separation wasn’t going to be the worst several months of her life. “Then I’ll be on the first plane back to you. I’ll come visit whenever I can, and-”
“And when I go into labor?” Lily asked. Mercedes could see the worry written all over her face.
“I’ll do my absolute best to be there for you and the baby,” Mercedes promised. “You’re a first-time mother so the chances that you’ll have a long labor are good.”
Lily snorted, a wry smile on her lips. “That’s not exactly comforting. I just want you to be here.”
“I know,” Mercedes said. “I do, too. And you’ve got your mom in the meantime, plus Chloe and all the rest of the girls. You’re going to be okay, babe.”
“I know I will be,” Lily said, taking a deep, ragged breath. “I always have been fine on my own. I just got really invested in the idea of not being alone when the baby comes.”
Mercedes opened her mouth to reassure her again, for at least the hundredth time in the last month, but what words could she say that she hadn’t already used? They were both doctors and Lily knew just as well as she did that there was no guarantee Mercedes could make. Even if she stayed in Evanston, there was always the possibility that she’d be with a patient when Lily went into labor, stuck in a delivery room or overseeing a cesarean procedure.
“No matter what happens,” Mercedes said, squeezing Lily’s hand, “I will call you every single day. We’ll talk, you’ll tell me everything that’s going on with you and the baby, and we’ll make the time go as fast as we can.”
“Okay,” Lily said. “I love you.”
“I love the hell out of you, Lily Thomas,” Mercedes said. Then she turned Lily’s wrist over and checked the time on her watch. With a long sigh, she said, “I need to get to my gate.”
They stood up and Mercedes pulled Lily into a hug. As people moved through the terminal around them, they stood still and she wondered if she never let Lily go, could they delay her departure inevitably?
Better to get it over with, though – the sooner she left, the sooner she could come back. Even though she was leaving Lily at the worst possible moment, Mercedes walked through the terminal feeling ever so slightly comforted by the knowledge that she’d done what she came to do – her mother was still working diligently with Dr. Silva, Mercedes had managed to organize all the major living areas of her house, and there were no more newspapers sitting on top of the stove, ready to start a raging house fire.
She came to Evanston to fix her mother’s problem, and she’d done that.
Now, she needed to go back to Seattle to fix another problem so she could come back to where she belonged – with Lily and the baby, her new family.
Seattle was cold and gray when Mercedes got off the airplane. There was an icy cold mist coming down outside that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be rain or snow and it slipped down the back of Mercedes’ shirt like a rather passive-aggressive welcome home greeting.
She popped up the collar on her jacket and caught a taxi back to her long-empty house. She could have rented it out and earned a little cash while she was away, but the idea of other people rummaging through her things, deciding where they should go and whether or not to take their shoes off in the doorway was too much to tolerate. The place was dusty and dark when she walked through the door, and when she flipped the light switch on the wall, nothing happened.
“Shit,” she said, carefully stepping out of her shoes. She’d forgotten to call the utilities and have everything turned back on.
Mercedes fumbled her way through the darkness of the rainy afternoon to put her bags down in the bedroom. She lit a few candles that had sat unused on her bookshelf for years, then dialed Lily and put her on speakerphone before she set about unpacking her things and putting them all away.
The phone rang three times, then clicked over to voicemail.
“This is Lily Thomas. I’m not available to take your call right now-”
Mercedes glanced at the time on her beside alarm clock, but the battery must have died while she was away because it read 7:36 a.m. and she knew it was closer to three in the afternoon. Lily was supposed to be on maternity leave now, resting and preparing for the baby, but Mercedes wouldn’t be surprised if she’d gone to the hospital to supervise the setup of the Graft 3D lab, or if Lily’s mother had stolen her away for a last-minute baby clothes shopping trip.
“Hey,” Mercedes said when Lily’s voicemail beeped. “I miss you so much already. I’m supposed to go into the hospital tomorrow morning to assess the status of the clinical trial, and it’ll be nice to be busy, but I don’t know how I’m going to get through the next twelve hours. I’m going to
spend the whole time thinking about how much I wish I was back in Evanston with you. Call me, let me know how you and the baby are doing.”
The voicemail cut off as she was saying and the baby. Mercedes sighed and hung up, then called the electric company as she gathered her dusty sheets off the bed and put new ones on from the closet.
The next morning, Mercedes came into the lab feeling tired and unprepared – not a feeling she was used to in her career. She had been successful in scheduling the electric company to come out and turn on her power in the afternoon, but she’d spent the whole previous night sitting in the dark.
Lily called her back and told her about the framed pictures of bunny rabbits her mother had brought over to decorate the nursery walls, so Mercedes hadn’t been far off in her guess of shopping. They’d fallen asleep together around midnight, playing out the childish game of No, you hang up first until Lily had finally nodded off and Mercedes reluctantly ended the call.
Charlie Knowlton, on the other hand, was not quite as enthusiastic about seeing Mercedes.
She arrived a few minutes after eight a.m. with a pair of coffees in hand – Charlie always took his with two sugar packets and she drank hers black. They’d been trading off coffee duty for close to five years before she had to go to Evanston, and she thought he’d be pleased that she remembered it was her turn.
Instead, he took the to-go cup grumpily from her extended hand and said, “Are you ready to get back to work?”
“Basically,” Mercedes said. “Can we spend some time going over the data this morning? I looked at everything you sent me, but those numbers just don’t seem to add up.”
“The numbers are fine,” Charlie snapped. “I did them myself – all by myself, I might add. It’s the study that’s flawed.”
Mercedes sighed and put her coffee down on the counter without drinking any of it. “I was afraid of that. How bad is it?”
This was the news she’d been trying to avoid ever since the Phoenix conference. The data Charlie had been sending her in emails every week was starting to look bad around September, and it hadn’t improved since then.
