by Kerry Clare
“I only found out this morning,” she said. “Well, confirmed it, I guess. I haven’t been feeling right for a while, but it could have been so many other things.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“Not according to the test we did.”
“We?”
“Carly.”
“She knows?”
“I needed someone,” said Brooke. “And you’ve been busy. I didn’t want to bother you, just in case it turned out to be a false alarm.”
“And you’ve been to a doctor?”
“Not yet.
“Just to be sure. I don’t know—isn’t that a thing people do?”
“I don’t know what people do,” she said. “I’ve never been here before.”
He said, “Me neither.”
“Really?” It was unusual, floundering into the wide unknown together. Usually Derek was the one with all the experience.
But he hadn’t understood her. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“Nothing.” He was struggling, mercurial. Usually he was the one she could count on to be steady. She took a deep breath to keep from crying. “Really, I didn’t mean anything,” she said. “I just think…that I need you to be careful with me right now.”
“I am being careful,” he said. But he wasn’t. He was angry. He was being unfair.
She said, “And how am I supposed to know even? About everything that you’ve been through. Why should I just assume—”
“That I’m not the kind of guy with a pattern of getting girls pregnant?”
“You’re twisting my point,” she said. “I never said a pattern. But these things happen. They’re happening now. I didn’t know.”
“Well, it’s never happened to me before,” he said. “What kind of person do you think I am?”
“It could happen to all kinds of people,” she told him.
He said, “It’s irresponsible.”
“It was an accident,” she said, now her turn on the defensive. “The pill. It’s not a hundred percent reliable.”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t mean you’re irresponsible.” He shook his head. “I mean, I don’t know. I’m out of my depth here. I’ve got no idea.”
“Me neither,” she said, and she took his hand, and he held hers, squeezed it—and the relief at that. How incredible that it only took one person to make you feel you’re not alone.
He was feeling it too, how much it meant, saying, “I’m going to take care of you. I believe in taking responsibility—you know that. That’s what I’m telling you. So you don’t have to carry all this alone. I’m right here,” he said. Then he said it again: “I’m right here.” Delivering her everything she’d wanted—in anticipating this moment, she would never have imagined joy.
They were quiet after that, until the buzzer sounded and the food arrived, and when he went to the door to get it he didn’t even tell her to go wait around the corner. There she was on the sofa where anyone could see her, although nobody did because the delivery guy never looked up from his order.
Derek brought the boxes over and spread them out on the coffee table. “This is okay for you?” he asked. “The pizza?” As though she was particularly delicate, which he’d never treated her like before. She liked it, his solicitude, even though it made her uncomfortable too, because there was no room in Derek’s life for a girlfriend who was a diva. If this was a test, she still had to play it cool.
She said, “Pizza’s amazing,” and took a bite to prove it, which was easy to do because she was famished. Together they ended up polishing off every morsel, sitting close together, and even though notifications kept arriving on his phone—she knew, because since they’d come home it had been buzzing—he never picked it up to check. Every single part of his attention was on her, and she felt stupid now that she’d even thought of not telling him, at how much she’d underestimated him, that she’d thought the burden would be hers alone.
Saturday, Later
Shondra Decker was right: Brooke was hard to track down. Do a search for her online, and you’ll come up with a blonde high school social media star who lives in the Midwest and unboxes beauty products, and even if you drill down into the other Brooke Ellises who are less internet-famous, the only references you’ll find to Brooke herself are from some old site that lists high school graduation dates, and an archived news article from an essay contest she won when she was seventeen. She had always been wary of putting too much of herself online. She had classmates who’d had full-scale mental breakdowns via video blog, and once that stuff is out there, there’s no going back. When she began working in politics, she closed most of her accounts, and turned the remaining ones to super private, and even on those, she never posted much, using them mostly to keep up to date with friends and family.
So where had that photo in the newspaper come from? She wondered if Derek would assume she’d been the one to release it, along with everything else she’d blabbed to the reporter. Would he actually think she’d do something that dumb? Who else, she considered, had been cropped out of the shot? Whose birthday had it been, anyway? Examining her face and Derek’s, their expressions—they looked like they were having fun, and anyone would think that they’d been good for each other, and there it was on the front page of the newspaper for the world to see.
Although—the photo was zoomed in so much to compensate for the cropping that the image was pixelated, and it was not a terrific shot of Derek, the angle emphasizing the lack of definition in his jawline. He wouldn’t like that picture, Brooke knew, for many reasons. But would he remember that they’d been happy? It was only a little more than a year ago, which was hard to believe, and the night had been a good one. She could remember pieces of it. Those smiles hadn’t been staged. She remembered Derek kissing her in the street at the end of the night, when going back to his place together was still a thing that was new and she thought they had a future.
DEREK MURDOCH’S GIRLFRIEND SAYS HE’S “ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS”
She read the headline again, and then sank down on the front steps to read the article. She wasn’t ready to go back in, where her parents were up and waiting. Last night when she arrived on their doorstep, she’d given them the lowdown: “Derek and I were involved, I’m sure you knew, and now there’s going to be this story in the paper.” And they’d been as unsurprised by the news as she’d been expecting, but they had questions. Were she and Derek still involved, and if not, why? And what did it mean to be “involved,” exactly? Did this revelation have anything to do with the allegations he was facing right now?
They demanded: Had Derek hurt her? Why was she being implicated in this? Didn’t newspaper reporters have anything better to do with their time?
Brooke felt now like maybe her parents even understood—the way allegations against Derek could have blown up like they did, how the press can make something out of nothing at all. “And I’m not even his girlfriend,” she had to remind them, since they refused to grasp that part of the situation. They kept asking her, “Well then, why not?”
It turned out that there was nothing particularly damning in the article. Until recently, it started, Brooke Ellis, age 23, had worked as a political staffer in the office of Derek Murdoch, of whom rumors had been flying for years that he was prone to relationships with younger women who worked in his office. They knew her major, and the year she’d graduated. That she’d started working in his office as a summer student, and how she’d worked for him for years after that. Their relationship was described as “on-again, off-again,” and “sources said” she’d accompanied him on several official trips. And she considered again where the photo had come from, from where Shondra Decker had received her information. She wondered how much those sources really knew, and how much they were actually saying.
Brooke was described as hardworking, cheerful, effective at her j
ob, so it was unlikely to be Marijke the reporter had been talking to. Well-liked, the article said, but in particular by Murdoch, who’d picked her out of the crowd as a favorite quite early. And when reached, she had refrained from comment except to say, “Derek was never anything but a gentleman to me. He’s one of the good guys. He’s one of the best guys.”
The article went on to say that Brooke had left Derek’s office suddenly a few months ago, and moved back to Lanark, where she had a job at the public library. And then it went on to quote local real estate agent Jacqui Diamond of Diamond Realty, the “top realtor in town” (who had more guile than Brooke had given her credit for), described as a close friend and former classmate. “She doesn’t look well these days,” Jacqui had shared. “She looks like someone who’s a bit haunted, to tell you the truth.”
This part wasn’t good, what with her being haunted, and confirming all the rumors about Derek’s proclivities. “On-again, off-again,” it said, which was a polite way of saying that he was stringing her along. But it hadn’t been like that. Shondra Decker didn’t get it at all, and Derek would hate the article, all of it. Even the part where Brooke said he’d never been anything but a gentleman. It was true that with actual gentlemen, no one ever had to spell it out.
But the story also could have been so much worse. Brooke was relieved, and Derek should be too, although her parents would have no appreciation for this particular silver lining. They’d been worried about her already since she’d come back to town, hesitatingly providing the distance she’d been demanding of them so that she could be accountable to herself. But now they were going to think that she’d gone and messed up her whole life, and they weren’t completely wrong.
In the street, a car slowed in front of the house, and the driver rolled down the window. Looking confused, he pulled over and got out. Brooke should have gone inside immediately, but wouldn’t that only have made her look like she had something to hide? That this guy might have something on her, and all the power was his? It was first thing in the morning, and she was wearing pink pajamas left over from high school, her unbrushed hair like the worst kind of halo. There she was frozen, locked in his gaze as he walked up the driveway, arms swinging.
“You’re Brooke Ellis?” he asked, confused, because surely he’d not been expecting it to be so easy to track her down, to find her waiting on the porch in her PJs. And she was so frozen that she couldn’t even answer him. She didn’t want to acknowledge he was there. “I’m Tom Payton, from the Globe National.” The Daily Observer’s rival broadsheet—had he come all the way up here for this? “Nice morning,” Tom Payton was saying. “I was wondering if you might be able to answer a few questions.” He gestured toward the newspaper in her hands, the photo on the front page. “I assume you know what all this is about.”
Suddenly Brooke found her voice enough to say one thing. “I have no comment.” The she got up and brushed off her baggy pajama bottoms. The matching top had a pink kitten who was claiming not to do mornings. It was obvious why she hadn’t brought these things to the city with her when she’d left home. Everything here that was hers were all the things she’d left behind.
Tom Payton was still talking, and so she said it again: “No comment.” She couldn’t even hear the words he said, just the sounds, the noise, he was making. That photo, that article, was going to be on doorsteps all over the country this morning, and the storm was just beginning—she couldn’t let people see her like this. She didn’t want people to see her at all, and so she went inside and shut the door.
Her mother was waiting. “Who’s that?” she asked.
“A reporter,” she said. “From the Globe National.”
“And what did you say to him?”
“I said nothing.”
“But he came all this way,” she said, peering out the window, pulling the curtain aside.
“Are you serious?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you want to deal with this. Set the record straight. The phone has started ringing too.”
“Reporters?”
“No, but anyone we’ve ever known,” she said. “They’re all wondering if we’ve seen it.” She gestured toward the paper in Brooke’s hand. “Do I want to see it?”
Brooke said, “It’s not that bad. I mean—” She showed her mom the photo where they looked happy. It could have been so much worse.
Her mom reached for the paper. “I’m going to read it,” she said. “If everybody else is, I mean. I don’t want to be the last one to know.”
“There’s not much to know. It’s almost nothing.” Brooke regretted keeping the relationship a secret from her family, and she knew this was the part of the story her parents would be disappointed in, the part of the story that would keep them from understanding that Derek had been good for her, that they’d been good together.
Tom Payton was knocking at the door. “Ignore it,” Brooke said, and she handed her mom the paper. She should read it now and get it over with, like ripping off a Band-Aid. It had to happen, but even the idea made Brooke cringe. It was strange that her mother’s learning the details of her adult life could make her feel like such a child.
But Brooke’s mother was not considering the paper yet, too uncomfortable with ignoring the reporter. “Are you sure?” she asked. It was so contrary to her hospitable instincts, and what if the neighbors saw him out there knocking? There were two cars in the driveway—obviously someone was home.
“He certainly is determined,” her mother said.
“It’s his job to be,” Brooke reminded her. “Don’t worry about him. He’s still being paid.”
“You don’t think it’s a good idea to talk to him anyway?” she asked. “He might go away then.”
“He won’t,” Brooke said. “He’ll only attract others, like ants.”
Eventually the knocking ceased, and then her dad went around the house and closed all the curtains. “How are you doing, kiddo?” he asked Brooke, which was his way of expressing concern. Neither of her parents knew what to do with her. They’d both read the article by now, but they hadn’t said anything about it, and Brooke didn’t know whether or not this was doing her a favor.
Her mother tried a different approach. “Derek never hurt you,” she said. “Like they said—those girls—those things they said he did.”
And Brooke said, “Oh, god, Mom,” and she couldn’t tell her anything. There was a distance between them that was impossible to bridge right now, except with her embarrassment. “It was really, really fine,” she said. “He never hurt me. Not once.” Or at least not in the ways her mother was supposing.
“I don’t like the way he’s left you so stranded, though,” her mother said. “What happened there? Have you heard from him today? He had to have seen it.”
“He probably has,” Brooke agreed.
“But he’s in town? This isn’t fair to you. Couldn’t he come over? If we’re talking about gentlemen.”
“It’s really complicated.”
“He gets a lot of leeway, your Derek,” she told her. And privately, Brooke had to concede that this was true.
“It’s not his fault,” said Brooke. “And you like him. You’ve met him.”
“But I never knew,” her mother said, “what was going on between the two of you. Even though I knew there was something. He seemed nice enough, as your boss. I mean, I voted for the guy. But look at us now—we’re barricaded in our house.” Someone was knocking at the door again.
“That’s not his fault,” said Brooke.
Her mother said, “But it seems like nothing ever is.” The knocking started up again, and they stood there, frozen, until it stopped. “The doorbell hasn’t worked in years,” she said. “It feels like a blessing now.” Brooke followed her into the kitchen. “Have you eaten?” her mother asked. “You need to eat.” Brooke’s mom struggled with breakfast because soup
wasn’t much of an option, and while usually her fussing would have annoyed Brooke, at this moment it was welcome, such a mundane, ordinary thing. If a person was hungry, she ate, and Brooke loved that anything could be so simple.
But then they were distracted by a noise at the back door, through the laundry room just off the kitchen.
“Did you lock it?” Brooke’s mom asked her father.
“I don’t remember,” he said. Did he really need to be so thorough? Maybe the whole family was overreacting?
Perhaps not, because then they heard the door opening, and footsteps, someone coming around the corner through the laundry room. But it was only Nicole, demanding, “What’s going on here? I knocked and knocked, and no one answered. And the doorbell’s still broken.”
“Why were you knocking?” their mother asked. “We thought you were another reporter. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“The front door’s locked,” said Nicole. “There were reporters here?”
“Just one, so far,” said Brooke. “But it’s still first thing in the morning. Better safe than sorry.”
“So you’re just going to keep hiding?”
“Name one good alternative to that,” said Brooke.
Nicole had none to offer. “Just makes it seem like you have something to be ashamed of.”
“They won’t stop until I do,” said Brooke. And now she was imagining herself hiding indoors for all of time, suffering the effects of vitamin-D deficiency. Was this her life now? She was supposed to go to work today, but she couldn’t imagine sitting up there in front of the public, her own face on the newspaper front pages she’d have to hang up on the racks. Could she ever go anywhere again? She’d have to call in sick. Surely Morgan would understand.
“I can’t believe you told them that,” Nicole said.
“What?”
“That Derek was a gentleman? Give me strength. He doesn’t need his ego fed.”