“Yes. I think so. I mean, I have. I have made a decision.”
“And?”
“I’m going to keep it.” She caught a quick flash of relief—maybe even joy—in the Aviator’s expression. Still, she could tell that he was trying hard not to influence her. “This is a child,” she said, quite purposefully placing a palm over her belly, “who has determinedly clung to life. I have to respect that. And, it feels like so far my life has been a long string of subtractions. This baby is a plus,” she finished, feeling long-winded. It felt good to say out loud the conclusions she’d reached alone. It felt good to have someone to tell, to escape the isolated rumblings of her head.
“What about him? Javier?”
“He doesn’t matter.”
“You’re certain? We could try to find him for you.”
Lily shook her head. “He’s out of the picture, and that’s where I want him to stay.”
“All right then,” the Aviator said, standing. “I need to shower. Do you want to stay out here longer, or shall I wheel you back in?”
“Wheel me,” Lily said, feeling like royalty. “And then let’s tell Jack over lunch.”
“He’ll be ecstatic. And, frankly, he’ll also be a fussbudget. That’s my prediction.” The Aviator circled behind her and began pushing. Lily reached a hand across herself, placed it on top of the Aviator’s, and kept it there in steady, wordless gratitude.
* * *
—
LILY TOOK DELICIOUS afternoon naps, and beneath her caftans and loose-fitting cotton shifts her pregnancy began to show.
She ached for Javier, for what she’d imagined him to be, what she thought she’d had with him. But she’d talked herself into so much with him, reasoned away his unpardonable flaws, and trumpeted the virtues she’d strived to discover in him. She’d mistakenly believed that her childhood method of dealing with the world—her stubborn, Scallywag determination—was the way to make her relationship work. But now she realized that as an adult she had more options than sheer obstinacy. True strength, she concluded, came from knowing when to change direction; stubbornness was not the same as strength.
And, strength came from wrestling with the past’s wounds—just as she was doing, just as the Aviator and Jack did. Javier hadn’t mustered the fortitude to do more than give lip service to overcoming his father’s brutality. Instead, he repeatedly succumbed to the reflexive temptation to hurt her, to lash out every time he felt vulnerable, every time he was fearful. By contrast, Lily felt the beginnings of pride in herself, for what she was trying to do with her life. For how much she’d already accomplished and overcome.
The Aviator took her to a bookstore in a shopping mall close to the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, and Lily chose three volumes from the motherhood shelf. Ever the good sport, the Aviator even endured a fabric store, where Lily’s wheelchair didn’t fit down narrow aisles and he had to ferry bolts of cloth back and forth for her approval. She cut out patterns for maternity tops and daydreamed about the baby blankets and tiny outfits she’d gather in preparation for the birth. The obstetrician gave her a due date of March 1971, and the Aviator didn’t dissuade the doctor when he assumed that the Aviator was Lily’s husband. It weighed on Lily that the child would be expensive. Giving birth would only add to her existing hospital bills. But the Aviator assured her he wanted to do this, and she was trying to unclench Scallywag’s stubborn, independent fists.
As for Jack, he was beside himself with glee at the thought of being an honorary grandfather. “I will dote and dote and dote,” he told Lily over dinner one evening. “And Stirling will be silly and talk baby talk. Which means that you, Lily Decker, you will have to be the disciplinarian.” Jack winked.
* * *
—
IT WAS OCTOBER, and Geri was flying back to Vegas in the afternoon. In just seven weeks since her arrival in Albuquerque, Lily had progressed to two far less bulky walking casts, and crutches had replaced the wheelchair. She could now take care of herself successfully, alone. She’d even managed to paint her own toenails and shave her legs above the casts, a bit of grooming she never expected to enjoy so much.
The four of them were seated on the flagstone patio off of the library, eating fruit salad and Jack’s cheese soufflé, watching Albuquerque’s skies. The early morning temperature was perfect for the flight of hot air balloons, and several of them touched down briefly in the shallow waters of the Rio—a baptism ritual for first-time passengers. The balloons were wonderfully cheerful, with bright colors and varied patterns, and when the burners fired, they roared like dragons, setting off dogs for miles around.
“It’s my favorite time of year,” the Aviator said. “The skies are a deeper blue, and the cottonwoods are just starting to turn.”
“Perfect temperatures,” Jack added before going inside to change the record. In a few minutes, Kay Starr’s voice drifted their way.
“I shared a magazine with her.” Lily grinned. “But I had the cover.”
“Really? What was it?” Geri asked.
“The casinos have those weekly newspapers—they put them in the hotel rooms and around town. Maybe you’ve seen them,” she said, directing her comment to Geri. “Anyway, I was on the cover of The Saharan. The caption was Showgirl of the Year Ruby Wilde Is Ready for Summer!, and I was posed—demurely, of course—on a beach towel, with nothing more than a minuscule bikini and a big-ass smile.”
“And poor, neglected Kay Starr?” the Aviator asked. “Where was she while all this was going on?”
“On the inside pages, with the other acts. She’s a beautiful woman, really,” Lily said. “Perky brunette flip. And she was definitely a rose amongst thorns when it came to the other performers.”
“Who?”
“Don Rickles, for one.”
They all laughed and then quieted as Starr began singing “You Were Only Fooling.”
Lily listened to the lyrics. It was her love life, in a nutshell: the man was lying with kisses while the woman was falling in love.
“So, the woman in the song,” Lily said after it ended. “She believes his lies. Maybe he’s even lying to himself; maybe he believes what he tells her. Whichever. How does she protect herself from men like that?”
Jack smiled. “Oh, Lily. Girl, the only way to protect yourself is to stop living.”
“If you’re not vulnerable, you can’t love,” Geri said with an impressive amount of confidence. “You have to be willing to risk heartbreak.” She began stacking their plates. “As for me,” she continued, “I’d rather trust than not. And I know that means sometimes I’ll get hurt. But to walk around thinking everyone’s out to get me? No thanks,” she said. “And now I have to finish packing.”
Lily wondered how much of Geri’s speech had been a prescription aimed directly at her.
* * *
—
THE HOLIDAYS WERE coming, and with Geri gone, Lily had even more time to herself. She often found herself daydreaming, seated outside in a patch of sun, or taking increasingly steady, exploratory walks in the woods along the river beneath a flickering gold canopy of cottonwoods.
The casts were gone, and she walked with a cane. She’d sewn long granny dresses and skirts with elastic waists, and she’d let her hair grow. Her skin seemed fresher without the plaster of makeup. Maybe, too, it was all those pregnancy hormones, but she felt more beautiful and certainly more real than she’d ever felt parading around Vegas.
Lily took her time on her walks, often sat on a stump simply to watch the world. Sometimes she looked up to find a fleeting white chevron of migrating snow geese high above, and she thrilled at the trilling of sandhill cranes headed south along the river’s flyway. She thought maybe Emerson was right about nature’s healing powers, its ability to lend perspective. At the same time, she knew that the lightness she felt was due to the family she’d found, the
acceptance and safety she felt with Jack and the Aviator. And, she knew it was the expectation of new life that brought such a steady peace to her. Her child. Her child!
Jack and the Aviator converted the casita’s second bedroom to a nursery. They wrangled about colors and painting techniques just as any familiar couple would. Jack teased the Aviator about his specially purchased painting coveralls, and at one point he dabbed sage-green paint onto the Aviator’s cheeks while Lily laughed. The Aviator wanted to read all of the instructions for the crib assembly, and he laid out the parts to be sure everything was included. Jack, meanwhile, began putting the crib together, dismissing instructions as “a crutch for the incompetent.” They bought her a changing table and a mobile modeled after an old-fashioned carousel, with rabbits, horses, chariots, swans, and elephants. One day, the Aviator came home with a new turntable and a pile of children’s records—recordings of the stories of Peter and the Wolf, Cinderella, Snow White, and Muffin, the dog who got a cinder caught in his eye and had to spend several days blind, traversing a city only by sound and smell.
Jack monitored her nutrition, making her special protein shakes, and the Aviator went through a book of baby names, placing stars beside his favorites, much as he’d identified appropriate motels in that long-ago AAA guide to Las Vegas. Her pregnancy was an idyll more enduring, more real than what she’d had in San Francisco with Javier. This time, she felt a permanent foundation beneath her feet—not dreamy, wishful clouds. Lily had not ever felt this sense of ease. She’d not ever before felt this kind of faith in her future. It surprised her—that she could feel this way despite a minimal bank balance and no job or income. How little contentment had to do with money.
In Javier’s wake, she still hadn’t felt the compulsion to draw blood. At first, she assumed it was because of the shouting pain of her injuries, a substitute for the pain she created with her blades. Then there had been the struggle of physical therapy—something she’d thought would consist of relaxing massages but was instead more about traversing fields of pain to regain function and balance.
But something had changed, and Lily couldn’t quite touch the essence of it. She felt as if she were chasing the lovely lavender skirts of Change, forever nearly always within reach of catching hold of that beautiful dress material and stopping Change so that she could ask, Why? Where has the need gone?
“I was remembering something,” Lily said one mid-January evening as they sat in the library after a meal of chicken cacciatore and lovely, crisp salad greens. She’d tried to tell Jack that she should cook for herself, let the two of them resume their private lives, but he’d been insistent: Lily was part of their family. If they wanted a private evening, they’d tell her. Until that happened, and as long as she wanted to, she should be at their dinner table.
She fingered the long fringe of the silk piano shawl Jack had bought for her on one of his monthly forays to an antique store in Santa Fe. It was embroidered with pink roses and Stargazer lilies and made her feel utterly feminine, like a true mother-in-waiting.
“What’s that?” the Aviator asked, looking up from his well-thumbed copy of Main Street. “What do you remember?”
“In Winslow. You said ‘someday,’ and I had the feeling that there was something specific you wanted to ask me. And right now, today—tonight—I think I can answer whatever question it is you wanted to ask.” She looked at his face bathed in the warm lamplight and thought about how much more she’d come to love him in these past few months. Sometimes, the breadth of the love she felt for him, for Jack, made her feel as if her body had no boundaries.
“Oh,” he said, sliding his bookmark into place and setting the book on the cushion. “I think maybe it’s none of my business, Lily.”
“What? What could possibly be off limits between us? After all we’ve gone through? With all that’s coming?” They’d shared her baby’s movements, even touched the bump of an elbow or knee pushing at her skin. Now, she noticed Jack warily observing the Aviator’s face. “And you?” she asked Jack. “Why are you looking so worried?”
“Because I’m afraid of what Stirling will do with whatever information you give him. I’m afraid he will use whatever you tell him to fashion yet another whip with which to beat himself.”
“I won’t,” the Aviator assured Jack.
Jack shook his head. “You will. It’s what you do, my love.”
It was the first time Lily had seen them let down their guard to this extent. She glimpsed their circumspect, private life as a couple. She felt Jack’s fear—and his love; both were palpable.
“I think one thing I’ve learned living here with you two is this,” Lily said. “It helps to get things out into the open. So let’s just clean the wounds. Let’s do what we have to, to get them to heal. I want my child to live without so much secrecy. Without the shame I’ve known.”
The Aviator stared at her for an uncomfortably long time, as if he were waiting for her to backtrack and come to her senses.
Lily held her silence.
“Tell me what happened,” the Aviator said, finally. “Tell me what those people did to you. What I set you up for.”
Lily nodded once. She pressed her lips together, felt her eyes filling with tears—not for herself, but for him, the person she loved best in this world. Jack was right; the Aviator would use her story to add pallet after pallet of bricks to the burden he already carried, the guilt that gripped every fiber of his being. “I feel myself wanting to exact a promise from you first,” she said. “But I know that’s useless, because you’re going to be exactly who you are. You’re going to take the blame. And it’s not your blame. I don’t know how to make you believe that.”
“But it’s not yours, either,” he said. “And yet you’ve carried it. I can see that. Jack can see that.”
“Oh, fuck.” She sighed, looking toward the ceiling. Careful of the shawl, she instead took the hem of her maternity top and used it to wipe her eyes. “Don’t get up,” she said to Jack before he could go for a box of tissues.
A strong gust of wind made the wooden garden gate behind the house bang suddenly, and all three of them jumped. Jack stood and fiddled with the logs on the fire.
“I’m trying to think of how to summarize,” Lily began.
“I want to know it all,” the Aviator said as Jack picked up Main Street and sat in the book’s place, close to the Aviator. He put his arm about the Aviator’s shoulders, a rare display of affection that gave Lily just one more clue as to how worried he was about the direction of their conversation.
“She was strict, Aunt Tate. Maybe no more so than other parents would be, but there was little warmth. She didn’t know tenderness. Kindness was a weakness, to her. And, I realize, too, that she’d never been a parent. She didn’t know—really—what to expect of an eight-year-old child. How much to require of a child. Or a teenager, for that matter.” Lily took a deep breath. “To put it simply, even though she tried, I don’t think she knew how to love me.”
The Aviator nodded; he’d clearly made a decision not to interrupt.
“I know she tried, but she was limited. I see that now.” She glanced at Jack, the Nobel Prize winner of caretaking. “Aunt Tate knew how to manage a household, so she managed me. And she hid in her religion.” Lily took a deep breath. She could feel a trembling beginning in her hands, and she folded them together beneath the shawl to conceal them. “She blamed me for things I didn’t do, and she readily, eagerly, punished me. She would belittle or punish me and then the next day leave me some gift as an apology. It was very confusing. She just always saw me as guilty, and I came to believe her. I think she took out all of her jealousy and envy—what she’d felt about my mother—and put it on me. Especially as I began to receive attention for my looks.” She looked intently toward the Aviator, tilted her head to make her point. “The books you sent were a balm, but it was dancing that saved me. You gave me t
hat.” She smiled tenderly. “It saved my life.” He nodded, his face still grim, anticipating. “It let me use my body, feel my body—in a good way. Unsullied.”
It had to come now. Lily could feel her swift heartbeat. She wasn’t sure she could do this. She wasn’t sure she could tell anyone, let alone a couple of men—even a couple of men who had such unmitigated, accepting love for her. She heard the snapping of the fire, the wind howling its way across the patio. A storm is blowing in, she thought, in more ways than one. She swallowed, steeled herself.
“He came into my room at night,” she said, seeing Jack’s hand tighten on the Aviator’s shoulder. “He did things to me.” Lily paused. “No. That’s not good enough,” she said. “That’s not sufficiently honest.” She shut her eyes momentarily. “At first he touched me. Then he had me touch him.”
The Aviator put his forehead in his hand, and then she saw him brace himself and return his gaze to hers.
“He forced me to perform fellatio. Eventually, he fucked me.” Lily swallowed her tears. She took another deep, stuttering breath. “He did it for years. He was a foul, disgusting brute of a man. But the worst—or maybe the worst,” she said, “was when my aunt chose him over me. She took his side.”
“God,” the Aviator said, and in that one word was immense, distilled anguish.
“Lily,” Jack said. “Oh, Lily.”
“He said he was teaching me. And that I was irresistible.” She held her chin up, defiant now. “It wasn’t his doing. He was helpless. I made him do it.”
The three of them sat there, saying nothing. No one moved. A profound stillness held them all in place.
“I don’t know what to say,” the Aviator said at last.
“There isn’t anything to say,” Lily said.
“I can’t fix it. I can’t make it better.” The Aviator’s voice was subdued.
“What would that even look like?” Jack asked.
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