Followers

by Megan Angelo

  “She won’t go through with Atlantis,” Ellis said.

  “That is a stupid bet,” Honey said. “I told you, it appears that her biological mother is there. Marlow wants to find her. Biology is a powerful motivator.”

  “Biology’s power to motivate,” Ellis said, “is precisely what I’m betting on.” It seemed to Marlow his voice was fading. He must have been walking away. “I’m sure she’d like to meet her mother, or whoever this woman is,” he said. “But not at the expense of meeting her child.”

  “Ellis,” Honey called after him. “What if Marlow doesn’t want a child?”

  The question rang in Marlow’s ears as she wrapped her arms around herself. What if she didn’t? What did it say that she didn’t know, that she hadn’t thought once of her eggs, defrosting on the opposite coast? They would not keep forever. Shouldn’t that have made her panic and turn back, as Ellis expected? Marlow felt around in the dark well of her thoughts, searching for instinct. When nothing surfaced, she felt her fury turning on herself for the first time. She dug her teeth into her lip. Decide!

  Ellis had warned her, right up front: he liked exploiting the flaws in things. And now he read her thoughts through the wall.

  “Maybe she doesn’t want them,” he said, and Marlow knew, from his tone, he was smiling. “But she won’t be able to tell. That’s the thing about her, that’s how I know she’ll fall in line. She doesn’t know how to know what she wants. The girl needs some direction.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Orla

  Gros Islet, St. Lucia

  2016

  Orla left for St. Lucia on December 23, the night before Floss and Aston’s wedding. In the dark, per the agreement she had signed.

  Amadou drove her right up to the stairs of the little white plane that was waiting at Teterboro. She struggled out of the door he opened and let him take her arm. They climbed the stairs to the mouth of the plane, their faces and Orla’s swollen stomach pressing into the wind. She could feel Amadou’s concern, his reluctance to let her go. But Orla had to go. Floss had insisted, had cajoled a doctor into agreeing with her, into scribbling a note. “You’re be flying private,” Floss said to Orla, “and you’ll have a doctor with you 24/7. You’ll be totally safe, and besides, like, who says pregnant women can’t fly this late? Women can do anything.”

  After Amadou helped her step onto the aircraft, after the door had been closed, Orla sat and nodded while the pilot showed her the map. It was Orla’s first time to the Caribbean, and she had imagined all the countries bunched together. But she saw, as the man pointed to St. Lucia, that the one she was headed to was farther than she thought, almost all the way to South America. Later, she would be certain that this—the long distance—was why Floss had chosen the island.

  * * *

  Orla hadn’t said yes right away. She had ignored Floss and Aston for weeks, even though they wrote her daily: short, pleading texts that also asked after her health, and long, pleading emails about their metamorphosis into grounded people, about the upstairs room they were saving, in case. Floss attached a photo once, and Orla couldn’t resist. The room was tiny, and already lavender. It had a round stained-glass window with a rose carved into its middle.

  Aston had been right: the baby was a girl. A nurse had slipped up and called it “she” at Orla’s six-month checkup. “I’m so sorry,” she had gasped, looking like she might cry. “But how do you feel, now that you know?” She wiped the goo from Orla’s stomach. “A girl is wonderful, isn’t it?” Orla had nodded. But all she felt was fear, and an understanding of why she had delayed this moment. It made everything real.

  Randomly, Floss and Aston sent her pink peonies that same afternoon. No message on the card, just their names. Orla shoved the glass cube to one end of the counter and set her laptop down. She thought she might Facebook-message Danny. She was thinking she should tell him the truth. Then she made the mistake of looking at some new pictures he’d posted. Being from Mifflin, she got the logic behind them: it was his penance for spending time in her fancy world, acting this much like a hick. Orla saw that he had bought a pickup truck and raised it high off its tires. The rear windshield had a decal that said, “Jack ’Em Up—Fat Girls Can’t Jump.”

  “No,” she said aloud when she saw it. That was the end of telling Danny.

  Polly sent her notes on Orla’s book by messenger. Red ink filled the pages—brutal double-circles, incredulous question marks. Orla’s eyes swam. She slid the papers back into their orange envelope. She turned the envelope over and saw that there was another piece of mail stuck in its seam: her rent check for the next month.

  Downstairs, the super, Manny, was sitting with his son, Linus, who had just come home from school. Orla watched the boy’s eyes flit down toward her breasts as she asked why her check had been returned.

  “Because your roommate bought the apartment.” Manny smirked, his lip twisting up over a graying incisor. “How do you not know this?”

  I just didn’t want you to worry about rent and stuff, Floss wrote when Orla asked if it was true. Consider it yours for life. “I,” Orla thought. Not “we.” She had suspected, the minute she stepped onto Pineapple Street, that it was Floss’s money behind this. Renting big houses in Brooklyn, buying dinged-up Chelsea units—Floss had been forcing down free vodka and borrowing dresses for years now, acting like she wasn’t paying any attention to what she was doing. But Floss was always paying attention. She had been saving up for just the right thing.

  No matter what you decide, Floss added, when Orla didn’t respond.

  OK, Orla finally wrote. She walked down the hall and looked into Floss’s room for the first time since the movers had been there. It was so big, and she had been there before Floss. Why hadn’t she ever thought to take it for herself?

  Like Aston said, Floss went on. Your family.

  Orla’s thumbs couldn’t help themselves. It’s you’re.

  I think its your

  It’s IT’S and it’s YOU’RE

  I know I’m just fucking with you now

  Orla didn’t know what to say next. Floss was starting another thought, her little gray text bubble wavering, disappearing, reappearing. When she couldn’t watch anymore, Orla went back to the lobby. Manny was gone, but Linus was there, spinning slowly on his father’s stool.

  “I want to get the wall taken down in my apartment, the one I put up to make it a two-bedroom,” she said to him. “Do you know what your dad tells people for that?”

  Linus reached into a slot in the desk. He passed her a business card. “This guy,” he said. “I think it’s twelve hundred dollars.”

  “Oh, no.” Orla shook her head. “I paid that up front.”

  “Yeah.” Linus smiled ruefully. “They charge you twelve hundred to put it up, twelve hundred to take it back down.”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Orla said, then, “Sorry.” She had forgotten for a minute that he was just a kid. “Hey,” she said, changing her tone and leaning over, tipping her cleavage forward. “Completely unrelated—could I borrow your dad’s ax?”

  An hour later, the wall was gone. It lay on the floor in pieces that had chimed improbably as they fell. A jagged edge remained along the walls and ceiling, hinting at what had been there. The air was misty with flecks of drywall, bouncing in the sunlight that hit Orla’s living room furniture—her couch, her rug—for the first time ever. Everything was even more worn and cheap-looking than she thought.

  Her phone buzzed. Orla pulled down the silk Hermès scarf she had been using as a makeshift mask, wiped her fingers on her sweatpants, and picked it up. A column of messages from Floss, delivered while Orla hacked at the wall, was waiting.

  Don’t want to overstep but I thought of a cool name, if it’s a girl. Wanna hear

  Marlow

  Because it has all the letters of your name

 
; Like you’d always be with her

  Just a suggestion, of course

  Orla began to cry. She cried the way she hadn’t since she started living with roommates. Her weeping echoed off the walls of the newly empty apartment. It came to Orla suddenly, the key that had eluded her all her life. There was only one trick to making a choice, and that was doing it fast.

  I like Marlow, Orla texted back. And the baby is a girl.

  Then, before she could think better of it:

  Actually

  Can you come over?

  * * *

  The time between then and now had been a blur of paperwork and meetings and consent. Over and over, Orla consented. She signed all the standard contracts surrendering her parental rights, and she signed plenty of other things that had been drawn up just for them. When she got to the agreement that called for her to stay inside for the last two months of her pregnancy, Orla looked up from her place at the table, where she sat alone. “This seems intense,” she said.

  Every face on the other side—Floss and Aston’s legal team ran six deep—smiled. Someone patiently explained. It was presumed that the three of them would do a magazine cover after Marlow was born, with an exclusive tell-all on their “extraordinary arrangement,” as Melissa had them calling it. A stray paparazzi shot of Orla would complicate the negotiations. They had been lucky that there hadn’t been any so far.

  So Orla stayed inside. She confronted Polly’s notes and worked on adding to her manuscript. When she ran out of things to do and went down to get her junk mail, she tilted her head against the front door’s glass and checked for Mrs. Salgado. Orla never left anymore, and neither did Anna’s mother. She just sat in her lawn chair and knit. Sometimes, when the wind blew down Twenty-First Street, the end of her work would lift and flutter across the door, so Orla could see it from the lobby. The scarf that Mrs. Salgado was making was coming along nicely.

  * * *

  On the plane to St. Lucia, Orla’s pretending to sleep finally turned into sleeping. She woke to the doctor gently shaking her arm. She blinked her eyes open and looked at him. He was younger than she expected, maybe in his early forties, tall, Indian, with a neat, trim waist and dark eyes that he held politely at half-mast as he roused her.

  “Orla,” he said. “I’m Dr. Kodali. Do you mind if I check your vitals? And I’d like to have you stand, for a minute, to help your circulation.” He offered his arm formally, with a hint of a smile, like he was asking her to dance.

  Soon, they were on the ground, saying goodbye to the pilot, descending to a waiting town car. It sped off as soon as Dr. Kodali pulled the door shut. The car clung to the tight curves that wound up the island’s mountains. The baby shifted inside Orla, following the pull of the wheels.

  They moved, after a long while, back toward the ground, and passed the long lanes to several brand-name resorts. The driver braked his way down a hill. Banana tree fronds brushed the roof of the car. When the trees parted, they were in the brick driveway of a cream-colored, Spanish-style building. A woman in a perfectly pressed white polo emerged and got Orla’s bag from the trunk, then Dr. Kodali’s. Carrying the bags as if they weighed nothing, she skirted the blue-tiled fountain and led them down a footpath, toward a villa set apart from the resort’s main house. The woman spoke quietly the whole time. Orla could tell that she was imparting information about the resort and how to enjoy it, but she couldn’t hear a word and didn’t think she would need it, anyway. She was under strict orders to remain indoors or on her balcony, resting, and to call Dr. Kodali first if she needed to go anywhere.

  The woman stopped under the bulb that lit the villa’s vestibule. She handed each of them a key. Dr. Kodali’s door was to the left, Orla’s to the right.

  “Second floor there is a hot tub on each of your verandas,” the woman whispered.

  “You can’t use that,” Dr. Kodali said to Orla.

  Orla nodded. “I know.” She had not yet turned her phone back on. She asked what time it was.

  “11:30 p.m.,” the woman said. “One hour ahead of New York.”

  Orla thanked her and touched her key to the door. Back in the city, she thought, Floss and Aston would be going to sleep. Their wedding was scheduled for nine in the morning, with a brunch reception to follow. Getting married first thing on a Friday, and they couldn’t have been happier. Floss had been flushed with pleasure when she told Orla the news at her ultrasound: a cable network had agreed to air the wedding live. Flosston was back on camera.

  * * *

  The drapes in the villa were blackout, and Orla was never not tired now. She might have slept right through the wedding if not for a calf muscle spasm. She looked at the clock on the nightstand, heaving, as the pain started to fade, and saw that the wedding was due to begin in exactly seven minutes.

  The gummy bears in the villa’s minibar were eleven dollars, but she figured she was celebrating. She grabbed them and sat down on the bed in her bra, resting the bag on her planetary middle. Her skin was stretched so taut it was translucent. It seemed there were a thousand veins just beneath its surface. The only thing more unbelievable than a life growing large inside her, Orla thought, was the idea of it sliding out of her body, leaving her one person again.

  She turned on the television, one of those low-definition models that only hotels still seemed to have, and found the channel. Two anchors, the male and female version of each other—thin, tanned, tawny highlights, teeth so white they were almost blue—sat in high canvas chairs at the back of a tall, open space. Behind them, people in black bustled by, looking frantic, while people in furs and glitter ambled toward their seats, pretending not to realize when they sashayed into frame.

  The first thing that told Orla something was wrong was the straw. There were bales of hay stacked everywhere. She couldn’t locate the ornate curves of the Plaza ballroom Floss had shown her weeks before. “My theme is retro holiday chic,” Floss had declared, circling her mouse over the massive chandelier. “Red and green and gold and crystal and brocade. Very Jackie Kennedy holiday White House party. The dress is super Jackie, don’t you think?” Floss’s dress had a bodice so sheer, she had to have her stomach waxed. There was a time when Orla would have pointed this out, but instead she had only nodded. She was never not tired.

  A minute later, the anchors identified themselves—Gianna and Chip—and trilled that they were “broadcasting live from The Foundry in Long Island City, New York.” Orla stopped chewing the stale green bear between her teeth and checked her phone. There was no word from Floss or Aston, but something must have gone wrong—a paparazzi invasion at the Plaza, perhaps, or a burst pipe at the last minute.

  On-screen, Gianna’s eyes were watery and red. “We understand that this wedding will coincide with a major announcement from the couple.” She sniffed, then added, “My apologies to all of you at home—I’m allergic to hay. We didn’t know there would be hay.”

  “Indeed we didn’t, Gianna,” Chip chortled. “What are we thinking here, about this theme? Farmhouse chic?”

  “I guess probably yes, Chip,” Gianna said, wheezing.

  The show cut to commercial. Orla texted Floss: Just saw you’re at The Foundry. Hope everything’s OK. She paused—she wanted to add a warm wish of some sort, but what was the thing to say to someone whose wedding was mostly being watched by stay-at-home moms on their second coffee? Break a leg and enjoy every second, she wrote, feeling generic and distant. The dialogue told her the message had been read, but Floss did not respond.

  Orla peed, and decided while washing her hands that she had to pee again. By the time she came out, the network was playing a pretaped package about “Flosston’s high-drama road to forever.” Then the montage faded and was replaced by a live shot of the empty altar: a crude wooden structure, also filled with straw.

  “We’re interrupting our package,” said Gianna with the air of a war reporter, “becaus
e there’s something happening here at The Foundry, where the wedding of Aston Clipp and Floss Natuzzi is just about to begin.” She paused. “A small horse—a pony—”

  “I believe it’s a donkey,” Chip shrieked. “Donkey!”

  “A donkey is being led down the aisle here,” Gianna went on.

  The camera whirled. A heavyset woman led a donkey, gray and groomed, down the aisle by a red leash.

  “I am,” Chip said, “so confused, Gianna.”

  Gianna put a finger to her earpiece. “I’m being told that the donkey is being followed by an ox and several sheep.”

  “Yes, we can see them now,” Chip said. “There they are. So perhaps this is a zoo theme?”

  “Adore that,” Gianna sighed.

  The bag of gummy bears crinkled under Orla’s tailbone as she leaned forward, trying to figure out for herself what was happening.

  “And now we see the groom proceeding down the aisle,” Chip said. The camera followed Aston approaching the altar. He was wearing a long-sleeved tunic that fell to his knees and laced up the chest. It was made of something that looked like burlap. On his feet were simple brown sandals.

  Gianna flipped the cue card in her hand and looked at Chip. “We were told that Aston would be in a Gucci tux,” she said. “I’m not sure what’s...”

  She trailed off as a whooshing gasp went through the crowd. Chip and Gianna both raised themselves out of their chairs, trying to see what was happening. Gianna looked uncertainly at someone off camera while Chip hopped up, took a few steps out of frame, and quickly returned, panting. As he climbed back into his chair, the cuff of his pants rode up, exposing his leg above his sock. Orla saw his real skin—it was pasty, half the color of his made-up face and hands. “This is unbelievable,” Chip said, breathless. “Even for this couple, this is a stunt beyond—Hold on, we’re working on getting you all a shot here—”