The Weird Sisters (28 page)

No, he was just being nice. She’d take it as nothing more than that. Well, maybe she could drink a little less. And make sure that she looked good when she went out for a run, just in case. And Edward . . . She wasn’t quite ready to give up that particular drug yet. No. It was so nice to be able to forget for a little while.

FOURTEEN

T
he fluorescent light flickered, idly threatening to burn out altogether. Cordy stared up at it, her eyes burning from the disco-ball sputters, and waited. “This will be a little cold,” the nurse said, and held up a tube of gel, drizzling a thin line on Cordy’s stomach as though she were topping a sundae. The sensation was, indeed, cold, though less unpleasant than a chilly stethoscope or, worse, an icy speculum. Cordy turned her head to see the monitor as the nurse pressed the wand against her skin.

Nothing for a moment, a blur of white, the pressure of the plastic against her belly, and then the nurse pushed harder, angling her hand back and forth. “Your uterus is retroverted,” she said conversationally, and Cordy said, “Oh,” as though she knew what that meant.

“No big deal,” the nurse said, continuing to press. “It’ll tip itself the right way by the second trimester.” She slid the wand, and then stopped, pushing again.

“Ah-ha!” she said, as though she had just located an elusive contact lens, and clicked a few mouse buttons, marking tiny plus signs on the screen. She pushed again, slid over the slickness of the gel, clicked again. “Looks like about ten weeks,” she said.

Cordy peered at the screen, trying to make something out in the din of pebbled gray space. The image spread out like the cartoon beam of a flashlight, and in the center, she could see the kidney-shaped darkness of her uterus. Inside, a white circle like a clenched fist, marked from end to end with the tiny plus signs. The body did not look so much like a baby as a tiny intruder, a gallstone or an ulcer, and Cordy stared at it curiously, wondering about its origins.

Inside her, the tiny thing turned, and Cordy could see the articulated vertebrae of its spine, the swell of a head like an alien, and in its unformed ugliness, she instantly loved it.

“Mine,” Cordy whispered to herself, her fingers reaching toward the screen. “Mine.”

N
othing had ever been just hers before. Clothes, books, toys, jokes, once Rose’s or Bean’s—or worse, both—then were Cordy’s. The curse of the hand-me-downs. New-to-me, not just plain new. Cordy remembers in particular a dress she had coveted, watching it go from Rose to Bean, waiting impatiently for the day it would be hers. A soft brown plaid, Peter Pan collar, puffed sleeves, skirt like a ringing bell around our knees running home from church.

She had wanted it desperately, had traced its lineage through her sisters, had counted the times they wore it, ticking away the wears until it would become hers. The fabric washed into softness, the lace at the collar pulled away from the fabric, our mother mended it. Good as new. But not new. And then, finally, the day Bean had outgrown it, cast it aside. Cordy grabbed it from the pile of clothes in the laundry room, ran to her own room, slipped it on.

It was too small. Bean had bloomed late, Cordy early, both of them springing into their teenage bodies at the same time, and it did not fit her. The tiny pearl-sheen buttons gaped at the chest, the delicate sleeves strained when she reached her arms forward, the feminine collar choked her. Cordy ripped the dress off, stuffed it in the garbage can, mourned it bitterly for years afterward, lime on chapped lips.

But this baby, this would be hers forever. That sense of wonder kept her warm as she dressed, pulling her clothes on with a tender respect for the swell of her belly, as she floated out of the sterility of the office into the parking lot to Dan’s car. He’d wanted to drive her, but she’d insisted on going alone. A thrust of nausea hit her hard, and she braced herself, one hand on the car door. Swallowing the sick rush in her mouth, she turned and leaned against the warm metal.

There would be no more leaving now. No more drifting on the jetstream, no more picking up on a whim and skipping out on unpaid bills and unwanted lovers and unsatisfying jobs. This hand-me-down was staying. Forever.

Cordy’s eyes watered, and she wiped them with her shirt cuff, blinking into the sun. The edge of the car key pressed against her skin, a reassuring pain.

But she could go, couldn’t she?

She could leave right this minute, disappear into the darkness of the map, shudder into a new town, another new life. The promise of a full tank of gas and an empty future ached inside her.

No. She couldn’t. Because even in that new incarnation, she would still be carrying a baby inside her. She’d never be able to disappear again.

She drove back to Barnwell, through acres of waving sheaves, green in the water-swollen summer. She walked through the empty kitchen and dropped the keys on Dan’s desk in the back of the Beanery without stopping to say hello, and walked home, her hands resting on her stomach. Though it was neither physically possible nor technically true, she felt as though she had started the day with nothing to her name and ended it with something to call her own. When Dan came by after work, she was standing in the kitchen, punching down dough, and staring out the window at the sprinkler, which was spitting arcs of water into the dissolving sunlight.

Dan leaned against the counter, arms crossed, hair hobbit-thick on his arms. His voice was low, deep, and Cordy thought of the rumble a man’s voice made when her head rested on his chest. “What are you going to do?” Dan asked, leaning forward. Above his eyes, his eyebrows furrowed dark and wide.

The dough stretched warm and elastic in Cordy’s hands, and she rolled it between her fingers lovingly, turning it to cover the surface with shortening, painted white around the inside of the bowl. She pushed it back to the center of the stove, placed a wet towel over the top. “I’m going to have it,” Cordy said. “I’m going to have a baby.”

Dan nodded, pulled his eyes from Cordy, looked at the refrigerator, where for years we had hung art projects and homemade magnets and now was a repository for expired coupons, notes from Rose that no one ever read, and one set of Shakespearean magnetic poetry, which had currently been arranged into a number of lines, including, “Tongue tart lustily among knights,” and, “Kate resolv’d blush footed groves hey kissed.” (Authors: our father, the former, and Bean, the latter. Thought it would be the other way around, didn’t you?)

“When are you due?” he asked.

“Christmas,” she said. “Or thereabouts. You don’t think I’m a bad person, do you?” She looked up at him, eyes round and bright.

“Why would I think that?”

“I can’t afford a baby,” she said. “This wasn’t really part of the plan.”

“There’s a plan?” Dan asked, mock surprise. “No one ever tells me anything. Let me have a look at this plan.” He smacked his hand, open palm, on the stove top, and the bowl shuddered agreeably.

“Don’t be an ass,” Cordy said. “I’m like one of those women they make documentaries about. A burden on the state.” She looked gloomily at her hands, still sticky with dough, and went to the sink to wash them.

“Okay, let’s put the cart back behind the horse for a minute,” Dan said. “This is not the smartest decision you could make right now. But for you, it’s the right one. So you make your decision and you go with it, or you spend nine months wishing and washing back and forth over whether or not you’ve done someone wrong.”

“Right,” Cordy said, and her voice fell to a whisper again. She dried her hands on the dish towel and they slipped again to cover her stomach.
Mine.
Nothing had ever been hers. Nothing.

B
ean had been surprised at how hard it had been to do something good. She and Aidan had brainstormed a dozen charities, but every one had been full up with volunteers for the next three months. Who knew?

When she’d finally gotten to the bottom of the list, to the house-building duty Aidan had initially suggested, she’d nearly been ready to lie and tell Aidan that they were full up, too. Working outside? In this heat?

But she was really in no position to go pissing God off any more than she was doing on a daily basis, and lying to a priest and cheating a charity out of volunteers was two strikes too close to being struck down by an avenging angel. So she made the call, and of course they were delighted to have them. Of course.

She borrowed some of Cordy’s clothes, which couldn’t have gotten any grungier if she’d skipped the manual labor and rolled directly in the dirt, limited her makeup to sunscreen, mascara, and lip gloss, and headed out to the site. She was sitting on the trunk of the car, swinging her legs and whistling, when Aidan arrived with a group of the volunteers from St. Mark’s.

They’d all carpooled. Shit. She should have thought of that. That was what good people did.

“Bianca,” he said, shaking his head when he saw her. “You look far too nice for this.” She looked down at her clothes, surprised, since a look in the mirror before she’d left had made her fairly sure she’d be yanked off the street to serve as an orphan understudy in a revival of
Oliver!
He tapped his fingers against the arm of her sunglasses. Her hand went protectively, covered the mother-of-pearl logo. Well, she could have gotten them on Canal Street. He didn’t know.

“I’m not afraid to get dirty,” she said, the oversized lenses hiding any flicker of insecurity. Pursed her lips, shook her hair. She held up her hands, free of nail polish. “Bring it on.”

Bean didn’t know any of the other volunteers there. The people she’d known from school had grown wings and flown, just like her, albeit with less spectacular crash landings. Her friends from the loud, beer-drenched parties, the tough, cruel-mouthed girls and the menacing, heavy-handed boys, had disappeared into the ether; moving, taking jobs—real jobs that paid less every week than those sunglasses had cost—or having children, becoming grown-ups before the thought of adulthood had ever crossed her mind.

But the others in the St. Mark’s group were nice, were kind, were welcoming. She knew some of them from the library, a young mother who came in with her children, the couple who had bought the hardware store and had donated supplies for today. Three professors, fresh-faced and newly anointed. And all of them, Bean found, were more useful than she was. We lived a life of the mind in our house, which was all well and good, but sometimes Bean wondered, back when the threat of The Bomb had hung above our heads like the Sword of Damocles, what would happen to us if the end did come? No one would need people like us. Poetry and art would be useless. We would need farmers, and carpenters, and scientists, and leaders. But not a disgraced adulteress of an office manager with a useless ability to quote Shakespeare and a budding knowledge of the Dewey decimal system.

For she could now, admittedly not with the panache of Mrs. Landrige, surely, take you easily and directly to the section you wanted, occasionally hone in on the exact book, pull it off the shelves and place it into your grateful hands, and then wave away your thanks carelessly. But here, put to fetching and carrying, she felt clumsy and in the way, arms spread awkwardly across plywood, rushing back and forth between the spit of the saw and the noisy sting of hammers in her ears. Soon she was sweaty and tired and she knotted her hair in on itself and wiped off the mascara sweating its way down her cheeks and tried to forget who she really was and why she was really there.

At lunch, she sat in the shade next to the young mother from the library. “It’s so nice to meet someone my age,” the woman said. Amanda.

Bean started at that. She looked at Amanda, the tiny bouquet of wrinkles beside her eyes as she smiled, the bow of a frown line between her nose and her mouth, her hair messy, her hips widening. Were they the same age? Bean had grown so used to thinking of herself as a twentysomething, just another fabulous gal about town, living some glamorous roman-à-clef-to-be. When she was little she would calculate how old she would be at the millennium, and it had seemed so ancient, so far in the future that it could not possibly be connected to the girl she was at that time. But now, here she was, past that inconceivable age, even.

She folded in on herself and ate her sandwich silently as Amanda chattered on beside her, until it was, mercifully, time to go back to toting barges and lifting bales.

At the end of the day, Bean was sore and splintered, divested fully of makeup, hair gone wild (but alluringly so, she had checked in the windows of the roofer’s truck).

“How are you feeling?” Aidan asked. His hand rested on her back, Bean automatically straightened, her shoulder blades wings on her back, the same way she did whenever she saw an old woman hunchbacked with age.

“I’m beat,” Bean said, twisted her lips into a humble smile. “But I feel good. Like after a really good kickboxing class, but better.”