“Blame me.” Her voice was hoarse. “Just blame me.”
“I’d rather blame it on the sailing.”
“That would work, too.”
She looked up at him, hoping that he would see in her eyes how sorry she was, how much her heart ached. She looked up at him, knowing that his expression would gut her.
Yet his face was lifted to the elements. He was searching the sky, taking note of the scuttling clouds, probing their depth for any hint of rain. He turned his face this way and that, using it as a compass to determine the direction of the wind. He looked unnervingly careless, though an engagement of nearly two years had just collapsed between them.
Then in a moment of crystalline clarity, she saw in her mind’s eye a whole new view of their relationship, peppered with moments like this, passed over with unnerving detachment, ending in calm, rigid silences. The chill that had blown through her heart moments ago dropped a few thousand degrees, threatening to freeze the very marrow of her bones.
“Tell them anything,” she said. “Tell them that I caught you in bed with a naked supermodel.”
“I won’t do that.”
“It’ll shut everyone up.”
“Better if we keep this cordial.”
“You don’t have to avoid unpleasantness, not this time. You can tell any story you want. I’m beyond the pale now. I’ll back you up.”
“You really don’t care, do you?”
“I do care. I care about you.”
Just a flicker, a little light, in those dear blue eyes. “I mean you don’t care about what people think. About Birdie, about your choice of lifestyle, your choice of friends.”
“No, I don’t care. Never really have. I’ll tell them any story you like.”
“How about the truth?” He shoved his fists in his pockets. “I’ll tell them you never loved me.”
“No.” She hauled herself off the boards. She flicked the cigarette onto the dock. She crushed it under a foot as she swept up her purse. “That’s the one thing I won’t say.”
“It’s the truth.”
“The truth is,” she said, slipping the topaz ring off her finger, “this hurts all the more because I really do love you.”
“Not enough to marry me.”
The ring gleamed in the sunlight. She took the two steps that brought her to the edge of the dock. She held it out to him. She looked deep into his searching blue eyes as he took it into his palm. The wind played in his hair. The sun lay bright on his broad shoulders.
She searched for an answer that didn’t come.
Sometimes, there were no words.
As softly as she could, she turned away from Parker Pryce-Weston and headed home.
that weekend
It was the longest walk Marta had ever made.
She stood up from the couch and climbed across Wendy’s feet, and then sidled past the broken chair. The carpet was knobby and thin beneath her feet. She felt her friends’ gazes like warm breath on the back of her neck. She trailed her fingernails along the wall as she approached the bathroom door.
In her mind came the image of Esperanza, her first babysitter. Marta had idolized the fifteen-year-old with her press-on nails and dangling gold earrings and rhinestone-studded jeans. Esperanza was full of life, always laughing on the phone. When Esperanza stopped babysitting, Marta’s mother wouldn’t tell her why. A year later, Marta glimpsed the sixteen-year-old in front of a five-floor walk-up not far from the school, struggling to carry an infant as she folded the stroller with one hand already laden with groceries.
Marta had always hoped she’d be smarter than this.
Just before she turned into the bathroom, she closed her eyes and tugged on the gold cross around her neck, the one she’d received on her first communion, and whispered a prayer for a single blue line.
On the edge of the sink lay the white stick.
She saw it, and the breath rushed out of her, and with it came a strange strangled sound, and then her knees hit the cool tiles of the bathroom at bruising velocity. Spots swam before her eyes.
Then they were all there, clutching at her, Dhara’s hair sweeping across her face, Kelly pulling her upright. Wendy picked up the stick and the box and compared the two, the little furrow between her eyebrows deepening as she announced the news.
Marta’s heart pounded as they pulled her off the bathroom floor and led her back to the living room. Her legs weren’t her own, and the vaulted ceiling danced before her. They eased her onto the couch, murmuring words she could hear but didn’t understand. All she could think of was that she was pregnant.
Oh, God, she was pregnant.
Kelly offered her a cup of steaming tea. Marta hesitated. “Is there caffeine in this?”
“No,” Kelly said. “Just chamomile.”
“I can’t drink caffeine now. I can’t eat seafood now. I can’t drink whiskey now.” Marta brought the cup to her lips with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. “I can’t go to law school now.”
Wendy exchanged a glance with Dhara. Marta read the unspoken communication and knew there was no avoiding the conversation.
“Oh, God, I was so stupid.” Marta squeezed her eyes shut and let the tea warm the palms of her hands. “Please, scream at me. Tell me how stupid I was.”
“Marta,” Wendy said gently. “Nobody is going to yell at you.”
“It was a condom fail. I thought the timing was all wrong. I didn’t think…”
“It could have happened to me and Josef,” Wendy said. “It could have happened to Kelly and Trey.”
Marta looked anywhere but in those three pairs of worried eyes. This wasn’t really happening. She was just having a very bad dream. She’d been so stressed, waiting on acceptance letters from law schools, finishing up her senior thesis, trying to keep up with schoolwork and summer job applications, trying to figure out why—despite the fabulous sex—her boyfriend, Chuck, had dumped her two weeks ago for that fawning mousy-haired English major. She wished someone would pinch her. She wished she could wake up and find her life all neatly planned again.
“It’s still early.” Wendy sat close, her bare arm pressing against hers. “Those tests aren’t one hundred percent accurate. It could be a false positive.”
It wasn’t. Marta knew, deep down, as sure as she’d ever been about anything. Her body had already started changing in small but perceptible ways. Her breasts were tender, and there was an odd fullness across her lower abdomen. She was pregnant, and if nature followed its course, in eight months she would give birth to a daughter or son.
Oh, God.
Marta rattled the teacup onto the coffee table and stared at her shaking hands as if they didn’t belong to her, as if her whole body didn’t belong to her. This couldn’t possibly be happening to her. It was happening to that other girl, the one with the dark tangled hair quivering in her place on the sofa.
In the tense silence, she sensed another unspoken communication passing between Wendy and Dhara. She knew they were weighing how to broach a subject they knew Marta did not want to hear. The subject was complicated by the fact that Kelly was here—adopted Kelly, the abandoned Gloucester baby—rocking on the other side of the coffee table, her eyes glazed, her pale face a mask of shock.
Marta knew what Kelly was thinking. She knew it as if Kelly were screaming it from the rafters. Kelly’s biological mother had faced the same choices that Marta faced now. There was one decision that woman did not make, a choice that was the reason a full-grown Kelly was now here in this room. Kelly’s mother had instead chosen to leave her two-day-old daughter swaddled tight on the firehouse stairs, giving Kelly life, even as she forever gave up the chance to raise the brilliant, beautiful redhead she’d brought into the world.
Marta already knew what she was going to do. She’d spent the last two and a half weeks pretending she wasn’t thinking about this, every morning, every night, and every moment in between, when in truth she was burning out desk bulbs drafting flowcharts for every
possible outcome.
With a sinking heart she thought of her mother’s double shifts, the lack of family vacations, the little economies her parents had practiced in order to pay Marta’s way through college. With her throat tightening, Marta thought of Chuck and the quagmire of issues the two of them would need to work out. And then, for one last time, she thought of her whole Life Plan, going up in a ribbon of smoke.
“This is going to break my mother’s heart,” she said, as she cleared her throat and tried to collect herself, wiping the moisture from the corner of her eyes. “She had such great hopes for me. But she will help me.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I can’t raise a baby alone.”
Without a word, the girls clambered onto the sofa. Dhara slung an arm around Marta’s neck, pulling her close. Wendy’s face dug into her shoulder. And Kelly, climbing barefoot over the coffee table, grasped Marta’s cheeks in both hands as she gave her a long, solemn look. She smothered Marta in her wild hair as she pressed her lips close to her ear.
“Look around you, Marta. You are not doing this alone.”
chapter seventeen
So, basically, I met the Ghost of Christmas Future at a speed-dating event,” Marta said, “and everything she predicted came true.”
Marta braced her elbows against the splintered gunwales of the wooden rowboat and slumped at the stern. She scanned the shores of the Adirondack lake as Wendy pulled the oars to propel them farther away from the Wainwright family cabin. Marta felt like she’d lost about six pounds in confession and gained ten more in public failure. But it felt good to finally share the whole story. Her life was madness. Every time she came up with a hopeful new plan, fate swept in and knocked it right over.
She was tired of doing this alone.
“Girl, you have a pair of melon-size cojones.” Wendy checked over her shoulder, aiming the bow of the boat to the center of the lake. “In that situation, I would have excused myself to the ladies’ room and clawed my way out a dirty broken window.”
“Rat me out.” Marta ran her fingers through her hair, tangled from driving two hundred miles with an open window. “The whole coven will be here tonight. I need an intervention.”
“It’s my bachelorette party.” Wendy pulled the oars hard. “I’ve got other plans.”
“I’ve broken two rules at least. I didn’t wait six months after Carlos, and I went after an ex.”
“No can do. We’ve reached our official summer intervention quota.”
Marta trailed her fingers in the water. “You know, my abuela used to warn me to stop casting off my boyfriends like old socks. She said one day I’d wake up, and I’d be—”
“Sockless?”
“Alone.”
“You’ve got me and Kelly and Dhara and a hundred and fifty-two close relatives, at last count. You should be screaming for privacy.”
“Wendy, you have to admit that I’m heading down a path that leads to Stouffer’s single servings and an excess of goldfish.”
“I like frozen dinners.”
“Wendy.”
“Is this some sort of Roman Catholic thing? A need to confess, pay penance, be absolved?”
Marta flicked her wet fingers at her. “Two thousand years of tradition, chica. It works.”
“Yeah, but I’m no priest. And right now, I’m the last person you should be asking for romantic advice.”
Marta disagreed. Wendy was the best person to ask for advice. Marta had ducked out of work on a Friday just to arrive here before any other bachelorette party guests. But as she watched Wendy spin one oar straight and then dip it back in the water, Marta suddenly noticed how thin her friend looked in a fitted T-back top and bike pants. Wendy’s shoulders looked bony, her hips angular. Wendy’s throat corded with each pull of the oars.
Poor girl. That wedding was really taking a toll. Marta hoped Wendy’s mother would back off a bit, give Wendy some breathing space. But before Marta could make a joking comment about General Bitsy, Wendy stopped rowing.
“Marta, I want you to do something for me.” Wendy twisted the oars and laid the blades inside the boat. “Turn around, put your feet up, and lay your head on this seat.”
“What?”
“Trust me.” She patted the wooden bench. “I’ll lie next to you. It’ll be snug, but we’ll fit.”
Marta gripped the edges of the boat. She hadn’t been too keen about going out on the lake in this rickety dinghy, but she’d arrived at the cabin just as Wendy was about to take a solo row around the lake. It would have been rude to demur. “Don’t you think you should row? So we know where we’re going?”
“You came here for advice, right?”
She nodded with some reluctance.
“Well, my advice right now is to shut up and hit the deck.”
Marta lay down upon the hard boards, suppressing a sigh. What she really craved for the weekend were mudpacks, Swedish massages, and an IV of pomegranate Cosmos. But if this little trip out on the lake was any indicator, it looked like Wendy was going to turn this party into one of those granola-eating, bike-riding, weird communing-with-nature sort of weekends.
Above the gunwales, all Marta could see was wide-open sky. She braced the heels of her sneakers against the bow. “Tell me that there are no waterfalls nearby.”
Wendy scuttled down, then swiveled to lie down beside her. “It’s a little mountain lake fed by little mountain creeks.”
“No nearby white-water rivers? No weird currents that are going to grip the bottom and send us swirling?”
“The most dangerous things around here are the black flies, and the season has passed.” Wendy pulled her ponytail from under her head and sent it dangling over the edge of the seat. “Relax. Look at the clouds. And tell me once again why you decided to go speed-dating.”
Marta flexed her feet, trying to take comfort in the solidity of the wood beneath her flats. “Do you remember what Kelly said about probabilities at the hospital that day? It hurt my brain while she was talking, but later, thinking about it, I realized that some of it actually made sense. I’m never going to find an appropriate single guy unless I start looking for one, and at that point, it’s just a numbers game—the more guys I meet, the more likely it will be that I’ll find someone good.”
“Listen to you. It’s like you’re picking fruit off a conveyor belt.”
“Actually, yes.”
“It also means you’ll likely reject a perfectly fine one because of a few superficial bruises.”
Marta grew warm, thinking of how she’d criticized all the men who’d passed by her table, making instant judgments, instant rejections.
“I just don’t think you can summon Mr. Right,” Wendy said, “any more than you can ignore him once he shows up.”
“I did a damn good job ignoring Tito though, didn’t I?”
Marta absorbed for the thousandth time the pinch of that ugly truth. She blinked up at the sky to stop the prickling at the back of her throat. The sky was blue, so blue, and scuttled with little white clouds. Beneath the weathered boards of the boat, she could hear the gurgle of the lake water. The whole dinghy rocked gently. It should be comforting, like snoozing on a hammock strung between two trees.
It wasn’t.
“Listen,” Marta said, stretching her palm against the side to establish some sense of equilibrium. “You know I’ve never really had a problem finding a guy. The real problem is what happens after I’ve found him.” The boat bobbed more vigorously, as if it were caught in a wake. “I always thought attraction led to great sex led to a relationship led to love, right? But no, that’s not how it works. Not for me anyway. Something happens after the sex and before the love. Are you sure we’re safe floating around like this?”
“Relax, Marta.”
“I mean, I’m perfectly okay with sitting back up.”
“Relationships,” Wendy reminded her. “You were giving me the lowdown on relationships à la Sanchez.”
Marta strained to hear the sound o
f a motor, but heard nothing but birdsong and the burble of water. She took a deep breath. She was with a Wainwright, whose distant ancestors probably played lacrosse with the Iroquois and thus had a pact with the local Native American lake deity.
“For me,” Marta said, “a relationship has always been about attraction and then great sex and then really great sex. But except for Tito, who is, like, the most patient man on the planet, none of those guys ever hung around after the initial rush of excitement. And, honestly, here’s the scary part: until Carlos dumped me, I really didn’t mind letting them go.”
“Okay, I’m about to say something you’re not going to like. Are you going to swear at me in Spanish?”
“Possibly.”
“Then I’ll pretend I just don’t understand the curses you taught me in Aruba.” Wendy flattened her sneakers against the bow. “Marta, you’re treating your reluctant singlehood like it’s an IPO. A project to strategize, to be tackled, managed, bullet-pointed, and marked by discrete little steps to success.”
“No kidding.” Marta felt a little sheepish. Even now, her fingers itched for a legal pad and the comfort of a pen, but when Wendy had urged her onto the boat, Marta had left her briefcase behind, unwilling to risk the Italian leather. “That’s just a coping device. It’s the way I always tackle problems.”
“Hey, do you manage our relationship like that?”
“Of course not. Oh, for goodness sake, I’m not blind. I know relationships are messy. You guys are up in my face all the time but I love you anyway. I get that. I know that to really know someone, it takes time, and you have to take the good with the bad. But I gave Carlos sixteen months. Sixteen months, Wendy, and still it didn’t progress.”
“That’s because you were concentrating all your fierce Sanchez energies achieving Life Plan bullet-point sixteen.”
“Yeah. Making partner.”
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