So Jo and her girls had moved into a condo. Kim, then Missy, had finished high school and started college. Every year, Bethie had invited her sister and her nieces to come for a week or a month or even the whole summer, and for three years running, Jo had turned her down until finally she’d agreed to send Lila.
“I should warn you, she’s pretty miserable,” Jo said.
“We’ll be fine.” Bethie asked when school ended, bought a ticket in Lila’s name, and lined up a summer’s worth of activities for her niece. “We’ll take care of her,” she’d told Jo. Jo had just sighed.
Bethie knew that Lila had always been a challenge. She figured that any unpleasant behavior on Lila’s part was surely a result of her father’s abandonment, of Dave Braverman ditching her mom for that evil minx of a Nonie Scotto. “I never trusted him,” Bethie had railed to Harold the night she’d gotten the news. She’d been pacing through their living room, making a circuit from the gas fireplace at one end to the newly installed French doors at the other, with her manicured nails digging into the meat of her palms. “And you know what else? I sent that bitch a jam sampler for Christmas!” Harold, in his deep, sonorous voice, had told her, “Let it go, hon.” He’d grabbed her, midpace, squeezing her shoulders until she could laugh at herself.
“I’m glad it’s Lila,” she’d told Harold as they’d waited at the gate. Of all her nieces, she felt the most connected to Jo’s youngest, who seemed to be struggling more than her sisters. Kim and Missy had sailed through school, both of them distinguishing themselves in academics and extracurriculars, while Lila was floundering, and did not seem to have evinced any special skill or talent. Nor had Bethie failed to notice the timing of Lila’s birth. Jo must have gotten pregnant right after their big fight. Which meant, Bethie supposed, that she was at least a little bit responsible for Lila’s existence, the same way she was at least a little bit responsible for Jo’s marriage and life in the suburbs.
There was also the way Bethie had found herself thinking about her own childlessness more frequently, as she had slipped from her thirties into her forties. Early on, she and Harold had talked about adoption, or about becoming foster parents, but between her business and his work, plus the charities to which they both gave not just money but time, they were busy and, it seemed, neither one of them wanted children enough to make an aggressive case for them. Bethie was also not certain how eager an adoption agency would be to place a child with a biracial couple. So she contented herself with her extended family. With six siblings, Harold had more than twenty nieces and nephews, ranging from toddlers to young adults, in addition to Kim and Missy and Lila. Bethie loved her work, she loved her husband, she loved her nieces when she got to spend time with them . . . and, she could admit, she also loved it when her guests went home, and it was just her and her husband again.
She wondered if that made her—to use her mother’s old word—unnatural. Every time she talked to a reporter—and, lucky for her, Blue Hill Farm had done well enough that she’d been interviewed half a dozen times in the previous few years, four times for print outlets and twice on TV—the subject would come up. Do you and your husband have any children? The why not was never spoken, but it was absolutely implied. Bethie always gave the same answer, one that she’d arrived at over time and had fine-tuned with a media coach. My husband and I were friends in high school, but when we reconnected, my biological clock had just about wound down. I’m lucky to have three beautiful nieces who spend part of the summer with me, and I’m a mentor with Big Brothers/Big Sisters.
“I wonder what would happen if I said, ‘I just never really wanted kids’?” she’d said during their first media-training session, and both Rose of Sharon, who, by the 1980s, had shortened her name to just Sharon, and the media coach, whose name was Beverly Husner, said, “Don’t say that!”
“Why not?” Bethie and Sharon had rented a conference room in the Doubletree Hotel for the afternoon, in preparation for their interview on CNN, which was doing a piece on “The New Entrepreneurs.” Beverly had brought her own camera, and her own lights, and had borrowed a television set from the hotel. For two hours, she’d played the reporter, peppering Bethie and Sharon with questions, recording their answers, then playing the tapes back to show them where they’d said um or uh, I mean or you know or like, or where they could have brought their answers back to Blue Hill Farm, which they’d been instructed to mention, by name, as often as they could. “I mean, seriously,” Bethie continued. “Would it be the end of the world if I just said I never wanted kids?”
Beverly cleared her throat and fiddled with the VCR remote. Sharon said, “It makes you sound un-feminine.”
“Unnatural,” Bethie murmured, remembering her history with that word, the way her mother had flung it at Jo across the Thanksgiving table all those years ago. “Seriously? In this day and age?”
“Seriously. In this day and age,” Beverly said. “The world still expects women to want babies. And if you’re a successful businesswoman, they don’t want to think that you sacrificed the pitter-patter of little feet for money.”
“It’s not fair,” said Bethie, and Sharon said, “Hey, think about the dumb stuff I get asked.” Sharon lowered her voice to a contralto and leaned toward Bethie with an expression of fake solicitous concern. “So how do you do it? How do you manage? How do you balance everything? What happens if you’re out of town at a business conference or on a sales call and little Amanda gets a fever, or Ryan gets in trouble at school?” She snorted. “Name me one man who ever gets asked if he misses his kids while he’s working. And I can’t just tell them the truth, which is—duh—I’ve got a nanny. And a cleaning lady. And my mom comes most weekends. There’s no way I’d be able to do this without them.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Bethie said. “They don’t expect men to do everything. They don’t care if men have help, and they don’t ask men if they have regrets.”
“They surely do not,” said Beverly, fitting her camera into its hard-sided plastic case. “And someday, the world might change. Someday, they might ask Bill Gates why he’s not at his kid’s spelling bee instead of inventing computers, and they might let a successful female CEO off the hook for not having babies, or maybe even for not getting married at all. But we’re not there yet. Not even close.”
Beverly clicked her case shut, and Bethie had gathered the printouts she’d been given, about not wearing patterned clothes or dangling earrings and hiring a professional to do your makeup, even if the station told you they had a makeup artist, because you never knew what kind of time they would have or what kind of job they would do.
“Lila!” Bethie called, waving. “Over here!” Lila’s head lifted, and she gave a wan, limp wave and began plodding, head bent, toward her aunt and uncle. Poor thing, Bethie thought. Lila looked lost in her oversized black hooded sweatshirt. An angry crop of pimples studded her forehead. Her nose looked too big for her face, her feet looked too big for her body, and in spite of her braces, she still had an overbite. A bright yellow Walkman protruded from the pouch of her hoodie, and its earphones were slung around her neck. Bethie opened her arms, saying, “Hi, honey. We’re so glad you’re here!”
* * *
By Lila’s third day in their house in Buckhead, Bethie decided that her niece was clinically depressed. After five days, Bethie was convinced that she, too, was going to end up needing professional help if she couldn’t get Lila out of her funk. And after a week of Lila in residence, Bethie was starting to wonder if Lila had endured some trauma similar to what had happened to Bethie when Bethie had been her age, if some tragedy or violation, not just the divorce, was making the girl so sullen and sad.
Lila rarely smiled and never laughed. There was no light in her eyes, and nothing, no trip or treat, no music or movie, no restaurant or television program, seemed to bring her joy. No matter what Bethie and Harold proposed—a visit to the Coca-Cola museum, an afternoon at a Braves game, even shopping at the Lenox Square Mall for new c
lothes, which both Kim and Missy had loved at the same age—Lila would assent with the same sigh, the same resigned nod, and she’d go through the day with the same plodding, head-down shuffle. “They’re okay, I guess,” she said when Bethie brought Esprit shirts and Gunne Sax dresses to the changing room.
“So should we get them?” Bethie asked, her hands on the stack of clothing that Lila had tried.
Lila shrugged.
“Do you like them?”
Lila shrugged again.
“Is there anything else you want to try?”
That time, Lila had shrugged and sighed, and Bethie had sighed, too, gathering the clothes in her arms and handing the salesgirl her credit card. “C’mon, let’s split a Cinnabon,” she said. The smell of the pastries perfumed the entire lower half of the mall, and she could already taste the sugary icing. Lila followed along behind her, carrying the shopping bags like they were full of rocks and not pretty new sweaters and dresses. In the food court, she picked at her half of the bun and answered Bethie’s questions about school and friends and her sisters with grunts, single-syllable responses, and another spate of sighs. NYU, where Missy was enrolled, was “fine, I guess.” Philadelphia, where Kim was in school, was “okay.” School was fine, her friends were okay, the new apartment was “okay, I guess.”
“And how about Nonie?” Bethie still couldn’t fathom the speed with which her brother-in-law had upended his family . . . or how Jo restrained herself from driving over to where Nonie and Dave lived together with a can of lighter fluid and a match. “Do you like her?”
Lila fetched a sigh from the depths of her scrawny frame and poked at the remnants of her cinnamon bun. “She’s fine.”
“And how about her kids?” Bethie asked. “She’s got a boy and a girl, right?”
“They’re okay, I guess,” Lila said. “It’s fine.”
“Fine, fine, everything’s fine,” Bethie had murmured to Harold that night in bed. They’d assumed their usual position, with Harold on his back in the middle of the bed and Bethie on her side with her head on his chest. “Except it isn’t. There’s no way things are fine.”
She’d been—she could admit it now—anxious about having a child in the house, even just for the summer, afraid that she wouldn’t be up to the job of taking care of a girl on the cusp of being a teenager. She remembered how, when her nieces were little, minding them took every minute of every day. Bethie had watched her sister scuttling around in a permanent crouch, with a baby on her hip, ready to grab Kim or Missy before they fell into a swimming pool or ran into the street, and when they finally went down for a nap or went to sleep at night, Jo’s second shift would begin, the cooking and the cleaning, the laundry and the shopping.
“What’s the saying?” Harold asked, his deep voice rumbling in Bethie’s ear. Over the years, he’d gotten good at channeling his father, from the puffed-out chest, to the preacherly cadences, to his endless supply of wise sayings. “Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems?”
Bethie sighed, thinking she would have preferred a toddler trying to put everything in her mouth to Lila’s wall of sullen silence. She and Harold would talk, and laugh, and play Motown music while they cooked or cleaned or puttered, but even with the music and the conversations Lila was sucking every particle of joy and light out of the house. She seemed to carry her own cloud of gloom around with her, and her sighs and muttered answers could stop a conversation cold.
Bethie wanted to ask Jo for advice, but Jo had enough to handle without her sister calling to say, “I think your kid needs help.” I can do this, Bethie told herself. If she’d figured a way to go from selling jams with hand-lettered labels at farmers’ markets to supplying restaurants and hotels all over the South, she could surely pull one little girl out of a funk.
Except she couldn’t. During the week, Lila attended High Meadows Day Camp, where Sharon sent her kids. “They’ve got everything,” Sharon had said. “Swimming, archery, kickball, soccer, waterskiing, canoeing, gymnastics, arts and crafts . . . shoot, I want to go!” At eight in the morning, Lila got on a bus, which took the kids out to Roswell, where the camp was spread out over forty acres, with a creek, and hiking trails, and a farm with goats and pigs. She got a nice tan, but on the days when Bethie came home early to meet her, she’d climb off the bus looking as miserable as she’d been when she’d gotten on, with her hair in tangles and her mouth set in a frown. How was camp? Fine. What did you do? Nothing. Lila never brought home anything she’d made in the craft cabin, even though Sharon said that her own house was overrun with braided lanyard key chains, carved wooden plaques, and ceramic pinch pots. Lila never mentioned any friends, or asked to visit other kids on the weekends. When they went over to Sharon’s house, Sharon’s boys, Luke and Jonah, would cannonball into the water of the backyard pool, or race each other from end to end, and little Annie, who was six, would follow Lila everywhere, her eyes full of adoration, desperate for even a crumb of attention from the older girl. Lila ignored Annie, and ignored Lucas and Jonah, and even Sharon. She’d wear her black hooded sweatshirt or sometimes, as an exciting change of pace, her navy-blue hooded sweatshirt, and she’d sit in the shade, with her hood pulled up over her ears and her hem pulled down over her knees and her Walkman headphones plugged into her ears, scowling at the bright-blue water as if it offended her.
After two weeks, Bethie called the camp counselors, who said that Lila was quiet but seemed to be enjoying camp. “Enjoying camp?” Bethie repeated that night when she and Harold were in bed.
“It probably just means she’s not making any trouble,” her husband replied. He smelled like Crest, and he was wearing his soft plaid nightshirt, which came down past his knees. Bethie called it his nightie, and Harold would shrug and say, I’m secure in my masculinity. Go ahead and laugh. This thing’s comfortable.
“What can we do?” Bethie asked, her voice fretful. Harold took her in his arms.
“Not much more than what we’re doing right now,” Harold said. He slipped his warm hands underneath her pajama top and rubbed her shoulders. Bethie gave a happy sigh and closed her eyes. “We let her know we’re here for her. She knows that we’ll listen if she wants to talk.”
“Big ‘if,’ ” grumbled Bethie.
“That’s all we can do,” Harold said. “She’ll come to us when she’s ready.”
But after another week, Bethie decided that she couldn’t wait. On Saturday night, she went to the guest room where Lila was staying and sat on the edge of the bed. In anticipation of Lila’s arrival, she’d fixed up the room with a new pink-and-yellow bedspread and boxed sets of Trixie Belden and Sweet Valley High books, which, Sharon assured her, were all the rage for girls Lila’s age.
“Lila,” she began, “is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” Lila muttered.
“And you’re sure camp’s all right? Because, if it’s not, we could find you something else.”
“I could just stay home,” Lila volunteered. “I could help Sidney make dinner. I could help Isobel clean.”
Bethie shook her head, frowning. “I don’t want you working. I want you to enjoy yourself.” Sidney was the young man who prepared dinner for them four nights a week, which was expensive but cheaper than eating out. Even though Bethie enjoyed cooking, she was rarely home early enough to get dinner on the table. As for cleaning, she’d been thrilled when she’d been able to afford a housekeeper. Isobel vacuumed, changed the bed linens, even did the laundry, and Bethie paid her handsomely, feeling relieved that those chores were no longer her responsibility.
“I don’t want to interrogate you. I know there’s a lot going on at home. But you don’t seem happy,” Bethie said.
Lila bit her lip and didn’t answer.
“Is there anything you want to talk about?”
Lila shook her head.
“Anything I can do?” Another headshake. Bethie tried to breathe through her mounting frustration and said, “If you need anything, yo
u know where I am. I love you, honey.”
Lila didn’t respond. Bethie waited until she was sure that she had nothing to say before slipping out of the girl’s room, down the hall to Harold.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Everything’s just fine,” Bethie said, imitating Lila’s hangdog droop, moving across the room in Lila’s bent-shouldered shuffle, reciting Lila’s Eeyore-like refrain. It reminded her painfully of her own wandering years, when she’d regarded everyone with suspicion and tried to hurt them before they could hurt her. She wanted to save Lila the way Jo had saved her from Uncle Mel, the way Ronnie had pulled her through the pillowed birth canal and into another life, but Lila wouldn’t let her get close enough to try.
“Poor kid,” Harold said quietly.
“Poor kid,” Bethie replied, pulling on her robe. She took her time in the big bathroom, with its his-and-hers sinks, its spacious, glassed-in shower, its deep soaking tub and the separate commode, all of it done in creamy white marble, and the forest-green tiles, hand-painted in Mexico, that had taken six months to arrive. She’d told Harold how surprised she’d been when Jo had announced her third pregnancy, how she’d been convinced, after Jo’s visit to Blue Hill Farm, that her sister was preparing to make a change in her life. When Jo had called three months later, her voice unusually shy, saying, “I have some news,” Bethie would have bet a week of the jam shop’s proceeds that Jo was calling to say that she was leaving her husband. Instead, she’d said, “Dave and I are having a baby.” As if Dave would be right there in the hospital, giving birth.
And that birth had changed her sister. The next time Bethie had seen Jo, Jo had been lying in bed, in a bathrobe, the baby in her arms, looking different than Bethie remembered after the previous births—smaller, quieter, utterly exhausted. It had been a hard pregnancy, Bethie knew, followed by a difficult delivery that had ended in a C-section and kept Jo in the hospital for six days, but it wasn’t just that. Bethie knew the truth. Jo hadn’t wanted another baby. Her sister would never say so. She probably didn’t even let herself think about it. But somehow, Lila must have picked up on her mother’s discontent and felt unwanted. And unhappy. So unhappy. The only time, all summer long, that Bethie saw even a hint of excitement or joy was when the Salters down the street hired Lila to babysit. Lila had come home at eleven o’clock on Saturday night beaming, with twelve dollars in her pocket and plans to sit for Alex and Meghan the following Friday. “Are you sure?” Bethie asked. “We didn’t invite you down here to put you to work.”
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