Bombshell (6 page)

I'm not sure how long I let the tears roll quietly down my face, my body shaking with the effort of holding back any sobs that might wake Angie, but the tide eventually stopped, allowing me to turn and look at my sleeping friend with a sad smile. I really hadn't lost a thing, had I? I still had my best friend. My family, whom, I realized with a sudden shiver of unexpected anxiety, I needed to call.

There was no hurry, I thought as I felt myself slip into sleep. And I was nearly submerged in a blissfully unconscious state when the sound of a cell phone ringing jarred me awake once more.

“Shit,” I heard Angie mutter. She glanced at me as I eyeballed her groggily. “Sorry, Grace,” she said, scrambling from the bed.

I watched her shadowy form move across the bedroom and out the door, which in her hurry to get out of the room, she had left ajar. Open just enough for me to hear her rummage through her pocketbook, locate the still-ringing phone and silence it.

“Hey, sweetheart…” I heard her say.

Justin, I realized drowsily.

“I know, I know. I miss you, too, baby….”

I felt my insides soften along with Angie's voice as I imagined Justin in their apartment alone, longing for Angie just as surely as she was longing for him.

To be so loved—

My heart sank with sudden swiftness.

I realized I
had
lost something tonight. Something even greater than a fifty-one-year-old woman I had never known, yet was bound to in the most intimate of ways.

Hope.

T
he last person I expected to revive my spirit was Irina Barbalovich, but when I stepped into the office on Monday morning and found a seven-foot-tall cardboard effigy of her staring me in the face, I felt oddly bolstered. Maybe it was the way her pretty blond hair blew in the nonexistent wind, or the way she stood, hip jutting, chin tilted as if she had every reason in the world to be happy.

I suppose she did, judging by the amount of money the Dubrow clan was dangling before her pretty blue eyes, hoping to lure her in.

“What's with the Irina doll in the lobby?” I asked Lori, who was already at her desk.

“Dianne ordered it,” Lori replied. “I think she's planning on inviting Irina up to the offices for a tour.”

I nodded at this bit of information, studying the face of the woman everybody wanted to call their own.

“She's pretty amazing, huh?” Lori said, coming to stand beside me. Her gaze roamed from Irina's cardboard face to mine. “You know, you could be her mother.”

Her
mother?
Alarm shot through me and my hand went to my cheek, as if my advancing age was suddenly apparent for the entire world to see.

Lori blushed, probably because she realized her comment had landed right on my thirty-four-year-old ego. “What I meant was, you two kinda look alike. You know, similar coloring, the shape of the face…”

I smiled. As a face-saving comment, it was a good one. I suppose it's not every day a woman gets compared to the reigning supermodel.

I studied the image more closely, then realized that whatever faint resemblance Lori saw likely had to do with the fact that we both had roots in Eastern Europe. I guess there was a similarity in our facial structure and in the slight tilt to our eyes, but she looked more Slavic than I did. “My mother was Ukrainian,” I said, unthinkingly. Then I realized that was probably the first time in my life I had ever referred to Kristina Morova as my mother. And in light of the new revelations I had had over the weekend, the word stabbed at me.

Lori blinked, then frowned. “Really? Didn't you tell me your parents were Irish?”

Now I was frowning. I suddenly remembered that no one in the office knew I was adopted. Mostly because I didn't feel a need to share my personal history with anyone, outside of Angie, Justin, the DiFranco family and the few boyfriends I
had allowed myself to open up to. According to ninety percent of the world, my parents were Thomas and Serena Noonan, a retired history professor and his lovely musician wife, living in New Mexico.

“My father is Irish,” I said, backpedaling. That was true. Black Irish. My adoptive mother was, technically, a mix of Irish and German and a bit of English thrown in. I bit back a sigh as I thought of my parents, realizing that I still needed to call them—had assured Angie I would do so.

But suddenly I wondered what telling them would accomplish. Nothing had changed in my life. Not really. In fact, once I let go of the harrowing disappointment the letter sent through me, I found myself feeling lighter. More free. I suppose there was something to the notion of living without expectation. If you had nothing to look forward to, you had nothing to lose.

“Her hair's longer than yours. And not as blond,” Lori was saying now.

“Yeah, well, that's a good hairdresser for you,” I said, a hand moving to my chin-length locks as I tried to engage myself. “Her eyes are bluer,” I added absently, my thoughts still on all that I did not want to talk about.

“Still, there's something there,” Lori persisted, as if sensing some unease in me and hoping to cover it over by raising me to the heights of Irina's beauty.

I stared hard at the effigy, suddenly wanted to resist any link to the supermodel. Any link that might somehow tie me to Kristina. But as I studied Irina's cool confidence, I realized there was something I could learn from her. What was Irina Barbalovich but a farm girl from Russia with a pretty face? She had started her life afresh the moment she had landed in this country. I could start anew, too.

It was all marketing, after all.

So I quickly put aside any lingering emotions and refashioned myself as Grace Noonan, daughter of Thomas and Serena Noonan. Brooklyn born. Long Island bred. Columbia University educated, compliments of my father's tenure in the history department. Talented, successful, smart.

It was a good thing I did, too. Because despite the fact that Claudia had tried to claim the Roxy D campaign for herself, she needed me.

And, I discovered, I needed this campaign, too. If only to forget…

Forget I did. I even canceled my therapy sessions in favor of the soothing rhythms of work. In fact, I worked so hard, it got to the point where I didn't even know what day it was.

“Lori, did that agency ever get back to us with a bid?” I said, stepping out of the whirl of paper that had become my office over the past two weeks. I glanced down at the proposal I still held in my hand. “Says here they have to get back to us by October second. Maybe you ought to give them a reminder call—”

Lori giggled, causing me to finally look up at her.

“Grace, it's the ninth already,” she said, her exasperation apparent. Lori thought it was hysterical how I could sweep through blocks of time without ever realizing what month we were in, or what day we were on. I don't know why it happened—I didn't question it. Maybe I figured it might keep me younger longer if I completely ignored the passing of time.

I glanced down at my watch, as if to verify the truth of her words. I frowned. “Ummm, would you give them a follow-up call?” I said. Then, turning on my heel, I headed back to my office, filled with a vague sense that some other event,
momentous or otherwise, should have taken place in this time frame.

I was about to consult my day planner when realization hit.

My period. My fucking period.

It was…late.

A flurry of other realizations followed. Like that persistent ache in my breasts of late, with no follow-up act. And my cramps—was it my imagination, or did they feel different?

My gaze dropped to the half-eaten corn muffin slathered in butter that sat on my desk. I never ate corn muffins. This morning I'd had a raging lust for one. With butter, no less. I never ate butter except when I was in restaurants and couldn't resist the bread basket. This morning it was all I could think about. It was all I craved…

Suddenly the half-muffin I had already ingested felt in danger of making a reappearance.

I sat down, rolling the rest of that muffin right back up into its wrapping and depositing it promptly in the wastebasket next to my desk.

It didn't mean anything, I told myself, consulting my day planner and trying frantically to remember when I'd had my last period. I never really kept track, but I could usually figure out approximate dates by events in my life, as what I wore was sometimes impacted by the period factor. Ah…here, we go, I thought, spying the words “Met Fund-Raiser” written into the last week of August. I remembered I didn't want to wear my silver-blue dress because of the old bloat factor—that Botticelli belly of mine sometimes bordered on blubber right before my period. Then came the weekend with Ethan, when he opted out of sex because I was menstruating (he was a bit squeamish—another reason to be glad
he
was out of the picture). My finger skittered forward to the next event
I'd marked. That dreadful Wagner opera that even Ethan hadn't wanted to endure any longer, so we snuck out, went back to my place and—

“Fuck!”

“Grace, are you all right?” Lori called.

I leaped from my seat, startled. Then, as if by instinct, I strode toward the door. “I'm fine…fine,” I said, nodding distractedly at her. “I, ummm, need to… Uh, hold all my calls.”

I shut the door, went back to my desk, stared down at my day planner once more and began to calculate, counting the days between my period and that ill-fated night. Oh, dear God. I could have been ovulating, for chrissakes.

Of all the nights for the latex to give out…

I put my hand on my stomach, gazing down as if I could divine what was going on inside my body just by looking at it. I tried to imagine a child growing inside me, and suddenly I saw it, alive and nestled in my lap. I could almost feel the warm weight of her—I felt certain that it was a her—against my body.

And I got that feeling again. That warm wash through my veins that I had felt that night with Ethan. Except this time it felt more like…longing.

“That's insanity,” I insisted to myself, and then, as if to punctuate my words, my intercom buzzed, indicating I had a call from someone in the office. Claudia, I thought, recognizing the extension that lit up my caller ID screen.

I picked up. “What's up?”

“What do you mean, what's up? We have an eleven o'clock. It's 11:05. Not that I want to
disturb
you.”

I bit back the retort I wanted to make, letting Claudia's sarcasm slide. I sometimes think she takes delight in seeing me fuck up, which isn't often. But could anyone blame me
for forgetting we were meeting with a prospective ad agency this morning?

Needless to say, I was a bit preoccupied.

My preoccupation did not end with my eleven o'clock. Because it was leaning toward eleven-forty-five when I finally began to emerge from the dense fog that had descended over my brain ever since I'd done my little calculation. I was utterly useless during the meeting. Well, not totally useless. I mutely handed over the focus group research while Claudia pontificated on what we hoped to bring to the younger market to the two reps who had come from the Sterling Agency. Not even the chiseled good looks of the elder of the two—Laurence Bennett, approximately thirty-eight, approximately one position away from agency president and, depending on how you viewed his presentation style, practically flaunting that ringless left hand at us—could revive me.

I might not even have noticed his good looks, had it not been for the gleam I saw come into Claudia's eye when, after she had gone over the slides laying out the desires, the hopes, the dreams and, more importantly, the buying habits of the 18-to-24-year-old set, Laurence winked and jokingly suggested that he was glad
he
wasn't so young anymore.

From then on, I saw a new tension in Claudia's movements as she went through the rest of the slides. In fact, if she'd had a tail, it would have been riding straight up into the air the way my mother's cat's had whenever some randy tom meandered through our yard.

Not that Larry noticed, I was sure. If nothing else, Claudia was subtle about her desires, or that desire was even part of her makeup. Nine times out of ten, the guy never even noticed she was female, much less attracted to him. Which probably accounted for the fact that Claudia hadn't gotten
laid since her husband left her for a younger woman five years ago.

Somehow the sight of her preening today filled me with a sadness I could not fathom. What was the point? I wondered as I watched their heads lean together to examine a chart Lori had created which summed up the research. It all would result in nothing anyway, I thought.

My hand went to my stomach reflexively.

Whereas this…this was…
something.

 

What it was, exactly, had yet to be determined. And probably could have been determined sooner rather than later by a simple stop at Duane Reade for a pregnancy test. Yet somehow I was reluctant to verify what my body seemed to be saying.

Instead I fed it. Quite literally.

I went home that night and ate an entire pint of butter pecan ice cream. And that wasn't the only indulgence I caved into. There was the bag of jalapeño cheddar potato chips I devoured, quite guiltlessly, along with lunch the next day. The Fettuccine Alfredo I grazed on at a café on my way home from work.

By the time I came home at week's end, a tub of chocolate-covered pretzels in tow, I realized something else.

I liked the solitude of my life. The sight of my message-less answering machine did not bother me. Not even the memory of Michael's confident grin as he gazed lovingly at Courtney had the power to hurt me. Nothing did. Not even Kristina Morova, I thought, carefully tucking her sister's letter in my desk drawer, certain now there was no real reason to reply.

Six chocolate-covered pretzels later, I slid out of my work
clothes in the small dressing area in my bathroom, seeking out the soft cotton yoga pants that had become my evening uniform as of late. As I began to slide them on, I caught a glance at my naked body in the mirror on the back of the door and stood, hesitantly turning sideways to check for any visible changes.

And began to imagine that the roundness I saw in my abdomen had nothing to do with my recent indulgences and everything to do with the longing that had taken over my mind.

A baby, I thought, running a hand over the small swell.

Suddenly everything seemed…possible.

 

A cold breeze accompanied me up the steps of the building where Shelley Longford, C.S.W., kept her neat little office, and as I climbed them I felt, for the first time in weeks, a sense of anticipation. Maybe it was because, for the first time since I had been coming to see her, I was actually looking forward to it.

I had news to share, after all.

“So what makes you think you're pregnant?” Shelley said, finally breaking the silence she had fallen into ever since I cheerfully made my announcement, effectively sidetracking her interrogation as to why I had canceled my recent appointments. And as I embellished my story with the dates of my last ovulation, the bloatedness I felt, the tenderness in my breasts, I saw her usually placid expression purse with suspicion.

Clearly she wasn't buying it. “The symptoms you describe could easily be premenstrual.”

I bristled. “I think after nearly thirty-five years, I know my body,” I argued, suddenly aware that I
was
arguing. In a some
what calmer tone, I added, “I mean, have you ever been pregnant?”