by Leigh Tudor
She knew that Loren was curious as to what had occurred, based on a number of subtle comments she had made, but she just wasn’t ready to share. And holding onto that last vestige of control felt somehow essential to her mental stability.
Another plus to living in Wilder and instrumental to her overall esprit d’coeur, was that Madame Grand was still a part of her life. But in an even more significant way after having discovered the true origins of their familial ties. And although discovering the woman who had managed her life and career was actually her grandmother was at first unsettling, it was now reassuring, as there was something more warm and intrinsically safe about their relationship that wasn’t there before.
Madame Grand was more than a confidant, she was part of her legacy, providing a connection to her mother. Someone who she couldn’t remember.
Also, the new school year had started and was actually going well.
When the less literate girls in her class called her stuck-up and made fun of her advanced vocabulary and stellar GPA, thanks to Madame and a multitude of tutors at the Center, she would only smile to herself, knowing that they would one day be an insignificant blip in her life.
And then there was Nate.
The unexpected and added bonus of sharing their experience in the basement of the Center had brought her and Nate closer. Out of nowhere, they could finish one another’s sentences and seemed to know what the other was thinking or feeling.
It was truly uncanny.
Cara considered Nate the equivalent of a little brother with whom she had shared a traumatic experience, morphing into a spiritual connection. But she would still catch his lingering gaze every now and then and soon learned to shut the bathroom door when she was brushing her teeth while he was at the house.
That was just weird.
Landon and Samantha returned to Wilder soon after Cara and Nate, after recovering from wounds inflicted by Samantha’s father. The very evening they returned, Cara and Nate sat down with them at the picnic table behind the house where they each shared details surrounding their near-death experiences. Experiences no one else in town, including the adults, would ever believe.
With the exception, of course, of Madame, Levi, Jimbo, Loren, Mercy, Trevor, and Alec. And in Cara’s mind, that was more than enough.
After purging all of their stories they agreed to never mention it again. Leaving it all behind them as distant memory, but also a common thread experience that no one else could ever defile or denounce.
At school events, the foursome became one another’s staunchest allies, coming to each other’s defenses whenever warranted amongst a young demographic who regarded the tearing down of the less popular kids a daily sport. Well, for some anyway.
It was becoming all the more obvious that Cara’s and Landon’s feelings for one another hadn’t diminished, even after all of the trauma. Not even a little bit.
That said, Cara was sensitive to Nate’s feelings. She thought he would have been threatened by her continued attraction to Landon, but instead, Nate was encouraging it once again.
He really was quite the enigma.
The only explanation Cara could come up with was that he was still working under the premise that Cara needed to work through three point five romantic relationships before getting to the “one.” Which he would be in prime position for when the time was right.
And after building a diversified financial portfolio and more muscle mass.
Cara leaned her head on her hand while her fingers caressed the keys. Then she heard the side door to the kitchen open and close. Thinking it might be Madame, she sat straight and began playing Balakirev’s “Islamey,” arguably one of the most complex piano pieces ever composed.
“Chill out, you little poser.” Mercy’s voice rang through the kitchen. “It’s just me. Madame is still at the grocery store.”
Cara instantly released her squared-off shoulders as Mercy sauntered into the living room with a purple popsicle in her mouth. She kicked off each of her sandals, one barely missing Madame’s most recent purchase, a delicate vase that looked totally out of place in the house, and dropped her body into one of the overstuffed chairs.
No one had been able to get Mercy to cough up why she and Trevor made a last-minute detour through Raley on their way home from the Center. Both of them exhibiting enviable levels of solidarity, despite Madame Grands’ elite-level interrogation skills. But each time the subject was broached, they’d look at one another with silent intensity, and maybe even deep-seated concern and remained tight-lipped.
“You know,” Mercy said, pulling the popsicle out of her mouth. “Madame Grand doesn’t care if you play the piano or not.”
“I know,” Cara groaned, leaning her head into her hands. “I guess I feel like by not practicing, I’m dismissing everything Madame did to get me out of the Center and protect me all those years.”
“Do you even like playing the piano?”
“Sometimes,” she responded. “But then there are times I wish I were doing something else.”
“Okay, right now, what would you rather be doing?”
“I dunno, bingeing Netflix, giving myself a pedicure, reading poetry.”
Cara winced as Mercy’s nose scrunched up in judgment. “Did you say reading poetry?”
“What?” Cara asked, chipping at her nail polish. “No one thinks anything of a boy playing mind-numbing computer games but walk in on a girl reading a first edition elegy by Emily Dickinson, and they sign her up for therapy.”
“Alrighty then,” Mercy said. Reaching to the side of the chair, she opened Cara’s iPad and set it on the coffee table. “You pick out the Netflix show while I pick out some nail polish in your room. But reading poetry is a hard stop for me.”
Cara clapped excitedly. “Okay.” She happily hopped off her bench and into the chair next to Mercy.
As Cara started searching through the Netflix library and before Mercy made it up the first step, the front door flew open, and Loren blew into the room like a windstorm, slamming the door behind her, and leaning against it as if hiding from armed insurgents.
“Um, you’re not supposed to be out of the house,” Cara pointed out.
Mercy added, “Girl, you’re not supposed to be out of bed.”
“For your information, I was never put on bedrest,” she said breathing heavily and looking out the window. “That was all part of Alec’s Gestapo-style prisoner of war tactics to keep me calm.”
Cara thought Loren was looking anything but calm. She looked a bit unhinged. “What are you wearing?” she asked, taking in Loren’s clothing.
She pointed at herself angrily. “Oh, this ridiculous ensemble? This is a fluffy robe that Alec somehow thought would help me to remain subdued and encourage me to remain bedridden. It’s not working.”
Mercy gingerly approached Loren as if closing in on a rabid honey badger. “I’m not saying this to make you mad, but you look like a strategically placed needle to your cheeks would make a loud popping noise and you’d flit around the room like a hot air balloon.”
“Mercy!” Cara admonished, giving her a chastising glower as Loren’s lower lip trembled.
“Are you saying I’m f… fat?”
“Oh good Lord,” Mercy groaned. “When did you become the emotional one?”
Loren sucked in at hearing the ultimate put down of being pegged as emotional.
“Ignore her,” Cara said, popping out of her chair and shaking her head frantically with both palms up in the air. “You’re not fat. You’re pregnant. You’re beautiful and pregnant.”
“Do you know how hard it is to do… NOTHING?” Loren cried with her hands outstretched. “I get up to pee and Alec and Jimbo are waiting outside the bathroom to help me walk back to the sofa. And their go-to to keeping me quiet and content, is to ply me with food. Look at me, I’ve turned into a pork belly from eating pork bellies. Which are unexpectedly delicious by the way…”
Cara and Mercy glanced at one anothe
r, silently communicating that their usual solution of heating up whatever leftovers were in the refrigerator when Loren was having one of her meltdowns, no longer an option.
“So today,” Loren panted, continuing her rant. “They were in the front living room, staring out the window, conspiring on how to go about adding a wheelchair ramp to the front porch. And I just lost it. I threw on this monstrosity of a robe, grabbed my slippers, and military crawled through Hercules’s pet door with my car keys in my mouth. By the way, not an easy thing to do when you’re eight and a half months pregnant,” she said, pointing at her rather large belly. “I watched them staring at me from the window and squealed the tires as I flipped them the bird.” She shoved her middle finger in the air for dramatic effect and then peered out the living room curtains and mumbled, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Alec showed up with a cowbell to hang around my neck.”
“Okay,” Mercy said, clapping her hands together. “What can we do for you…” But then she lost focus. “Ohmigod, your fuzzy peep toe slippers match your robe and your toes look like Jimmy Dean pork sausages.”
Loren’s eyes and mouth went wide, and Mercy covered her mouth.
“Really, Mercy?” Cara admonished. She turned to Loren, lowering her voice. Determined not to fixate on the food stain running down the front of the furry robe.
“Look at me. And whatever you do, don’t listen to Mercy,” Cara said, waving her hands in front of Loren as if she were distracting a cornered tiger. But instead Loren stared at her sausage-sized toes. “Look at me.” Cara clicked her fingers until Loren finally looked up. “Remember that in just a couple of weeks, you’re going to have a beautiful and healthy baby, and your swelling is going to go down, and you’re going to be back to your old self.”
Cara glared back at Mercy and whispered, “Sometimes you have the sensitivity of a doorknob.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said to Cara and then to Loren. “I’m sorry, but you literally look like you’re wearing an albino woolly mammoth costume.”
For the love of…
Just as Cara’s shoulders fell while shaking her head, bracing for the onslaught of more sobs, something else happened.
Loren laughed.
Turning her head to make sure her sister hadn’t lost her last mind, she took a double take. But instead of seeing a sad and swollen pregnant sister, she saw a hysterically laughing pregnant sister. Loren holding the doorframe in one hand and the underside of her belly with the other, doubled over with laughter.
Cara and Mercy glanced at one another, hesitating, just in case it was a false alarm that would only turn into more hysterics, and then they themselves began to laugh. Until all three were doubled over and wiping their eyes from the sheer awesomeness of being together.
And then a splatter.
Cara and Mercy’s focus followed Loren’s as she looked down at her feet to see that her furry slippers were now sopping wet pelts of fur.
“Did you just pee on the floor?” Mercy questioned.
Cara was the one to respond for a silent Loren. “I think her water broke.”
“Water broke?” Mercy quipped, as if she had never heard of such a thing.
Cara ran to the kitchen to get a dish towel as she yelled back, “Do you know nothing about women’s reproductive organs and how they function?”
Mercy was uncharacteristically quiet, but then piped up,“Sorry, no. They didn’t teach that in Advanced Art Heists or Chokeholds 101.”
Cara returned with a dish towel and realized what Loren needed was another set of slippers and a clean night gown and robe. Thankfully, she didn’t have to say anything as Mercy came to the same conclusion, gave her a head nod, and shot up the stairs. Funny how she and Mercy had developed a telepathic communication skill that was once only shared between her older sisters.
Loren just continued to stand there, stock-still, as if in shock.
Suddenly, there was a banging on the door, which Loren quickly opened to a wild-looking Alec Wilder with hair sticking straight up and looking about ready to scream, except he couldn’t because of her condition.
“Why are you here, and not in bed at your house?” Each word came out clipped, but then his eyebrows crashed together as he realized that Loren wasn’t moving, with her legs splayed apart. He then looked at the floor discovering why.
“Baby, did your water break?”
“No,” she said, as if that was an absurd question.
Cara gave him a slight nod indicating otherwise, while innocuously rubbing the back of her.
Picking up on her silent communication, his eyes returned to Loren. “If your water didn’t break, what happened?” he purred.
“I don’t know. But I’m not supposed to deliver for a couple weeks. The baby isn’t ready. I’m not ready.” Her volume grew steadily higher.
He towered over her hunched body and rubbed her back, giving Cara a slight head nod indicating he would take it from here.
Mercy stormed down the steps with an overly large sweat shirt, sweatpants, and a pair of gunmetal gray Crocs.
One of Cara’s eyebrows rose while looking at the shoes.
“What?” Mercy asked, plunking them on the floor. “They’re waterproof. And I don’t want them anymore.”
Mercy walked into the hospital waiting room, tucking her shirt into her jean shorts.
“Did you just have sex?” Becky hissed under her breath.
Mercy almost stumbled into her chair at the accusation. She ignored the heated inquiry as she took the predetermined seat next to her friend, while Trevor took his next to Jimbo on the opposite side of the room.
Her eyes checked to her right in case Samantha, Ally, or Cara were on to their little stress-releasing activity. But the girls were all hunched over Cara’s device smiling at what was probably a TikTok video.
Madame and Levi seemed equally preoccupied as Madame Grand paced the floor and Levi drank a cup of coffee.
Lustfully, her eyes were back on Trevor’s. She gave him a little wink, and he returned it, as he rubbed his thumb across his bottom lip.
Aaand she was ready to go again.
“Eww,” Becky whispered. “That is just wrong.”
“What? The room was sterile.”
“I’m talking about you two making gross sexy eyes at one another. But having sex in a hospital room full of ‘God knows what’ kinds of germs is also high on the seriously disgusting list.”
“We were safe. We did it in a linen closet.”
Becky rolled her eyes and responded with quite the sarcastic tone. “Well, as long as it was in a hospital linen closet, you should totally be protected.”
Mercy fiddled with her purse, looking for a piece of gum. She didn’t need protection. Not the anti-baby-repellent kind anyway. Which reminded her, she and Loren needed to have that conversation with Cara and look into a tubal reversal for her as well.
Maybe Cara’s surgeon would have better luck than hers did undoing Dr. Vile’s surgical efforts in the baby-maker-disabling department.
She wasn’t sure how Cara would take it. It wasn’t a topic of conversation she was looking forward to, and sometimes it seemed like the Ingalls sisters were never going to fully escape from their past. But Cara needed to know and to be a part of the decision concerning how to move forward, if not fully in charge of it.
Mercy would never again discount the luxury of making her own life decisions. And whatever Cara decided to do concerning her reproductive organs, Mercy was on board and fully supportive.
If not her birthing capabilities, at least Mercy’s head was back to rights. She was painting like a fiend, and she had no doubt there was a strong correlation between her heightened level of creativity and her newly reestablished fiancée status with her real live, honest-to-goodness, sexy as eff, husband-to-be.
She wiggled her ring finger, making the diamond sparkle from the light coming in from the windows, and her heart swelled the size of a rehabilitated Grinch.
Glancing at her b
ona fide fiancé, she caught his silly hand gesture and blushed.
“Oh for the love of...”Becky snarled with an exaggerated eye roll. “Did he just do the heart sign thingy with his hands over his left pec?”
Mercy hissed back, “If it bothers you so much, quit watching.”
“I can’t. You two are like watching a train wreck. I’m driving by, minding my own business, and there it is. And I know I shouldn’t look because, blegh… but I can’t help myself, and when I do look, I’m staring straight at the most gruesome part of the wreck with all of the blood and guts and stuff.”
“That was a little overly descriptive.”
“Well, your PDA is way over the top.”
“It was a harmless heart symbol with his hands,” Mercy defended. “And he did it over his chest. It’s not like it was over his junk or anything.”
“You mention your boyfriend’s nether regions again, and I’m waiting out in the car.”
“Geez, grumpy much?”
“I’m not grumpy.”
“You know what you need?”
“Don’t say it…” Becky warned.
Mercy could feel her friend’s body coil up like a snake next to her.
“You need to get laid.”
“She said it,” Becky replied with pursed lips.
“I’m serious. You need to hit up Lucky’s and…. Oh wait…hang on…”
Before she could turn away, Mercy caught Becky’s face turn a damning shade of I-love-Gus crimson red.
Mercy twisted in her seat and looked her in her friend’s guilty eyes.
“Stop staring at me,” Becky said, avoiding eye contact.
“You like Gus,” Mercy gasped loudly in her ear.
“No, I don’t.” Becky batted her away, scanning the room for eavesdroppers. “And lower your voice.”