“How can this be? How long have you known?”
“The other night. After we made love. I knew immediately. Something was happening inside me. Even while we were making love, it felt different. Down there. I called my friend Allie this morning. I asked her if she felt different immediately after conceiving. And you know what? She giggled! She said that at least for little Ellie, she had some kind of strange intuition she’d become pregnant again just after she and Clive finished making love one night. We’re going to have a child!”
Trish’s staring up at me, beatific, her cheeks aglow from the tears that slide over them. The fuzzy feeling of having stepped into a dream comes upon me. I’m not sure how this can be, the timing of it. Laurel was two months pregnant by the time she told me she missed her period. Trish asks if I love her. I don’t know the answer. If this happened nine months earlier, I never would’ve gotten entangled with Laurel, but now that Laurel had her baby, I don’t know what to do. The screws are tightening faster, harder. There’s a dull ache in the back of my head, a tremble to my hands. I’m not man enough to be a father to two different babies, a partner to two different women. My mind races to the baby books I’ve read. I made love to Trish thirty-six hours ago. Actual fertilization would’ve occurred anywhere from a few hours to a full day after that. Trish’s fertilized egg would still be traveling down the fallopian tube toward her uterus. How could Trish be aware of an embryo that has yet to implant itself in her uterus?
I’m not going to turn my back on Laurel, and there’s no way I can turn my back on Trish if she’s carrying my child. I’m a man smooshed between two alternate realities, one with Trish and one with Laurel, two opposed ideas of my future that are irreconcilable.
“Now that I’m pregnant, you don’t need Laurel anymore. You can get rid of her. Call it a deacquisition,” Trish says, with a giggle. “We’re going to have a baby of our own. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even have two babies! Aren’t you happy?”
Chapter Thirty-One
TRISH
I take James’s hand in mine and watch his startled eyes as I undo the silk sash to my bathrobe. There’s a fire raging in my brain, ants in my fingertips. I’m so excited I can barely stand still. Surely, he sees it too: the burgeoning baby bump. In a few weeks, my breasts will become fuller, and my face will develop the healthy glow of pregnancy. This morning, I got sick again. Morning sickness. I took a Valium and then another and then another, the warmth of pregnancy radiating throughout me. A pregnant woman is attuned to her body. No one can tell me I’m not pregnant. The other night, I feasted upon James’s touch, but today I need his touch in another way. I guide his hand to my body, feeling his warm fingers on my belly.
“Give it a moment,” I say. James’s breath becomes stilted. He looks at me questioningly. I press his hand to a spot inches below my belly button, where the top of my panties would sit if I were wearing panties. “Do you feel it?”
“What?”
“The baby, silly.” For years, I yearned to be one of those glowing expectant mothers who’d lovingly guide friends’ hands over their bellies, sharing with them the movements of their child. Something pulses inside me, startling me, a little trigger of excitement making me feel pink and rosy. “I think it just kicked. Isn’t it amazing?”
James’s hand jerks away.
“Honey. Please. It’s our baby.”
“Trish. Seriously. You’re not pregnant. You can’t be pregnant. Even if you were, you can’t know it yet this early.”
Just then, the baby—Laurel’s baby—cries from upstairs. The sound is clear, distinct, a caterwaul of hunger and need. James’s expression changes. The elation I expected from him upon feeling my baby kicks now comes over him—but it’s Laurel’s baby, not mine, who excites him. He pushes open the dining room door, but I charge past him, causing him to stumble and fall to the floor.
Last night, at Rock Creek Park, I found the perfect spot to abandon Anne Elise. The creek was just beyond her, the sound of its rushing waters loud enough to drown out the wind that shook the branches of the trees around us. I stripped off her receiving blanket, snatched away her knit cap. Given the weather—snow and slush and frigidity—Anne Elise wouldn’t have survived more than a couple of hours. She was sleeping when I laid her down. I stood, debating whether to cover her with leaves and sticks to further conceal her should anyone happen by. A heaviness I had not expected came over me. I’m not immune to the tug of sympathy. I started to walk away, following back the path of distinctive hexagonal tread marks my new boots had made in the snow.
I turned back toward Anne Elise. She opened her eyes and sneezed. Already the cold was getting to her. Her face was alabaster white, her great blue eyes wide and vacant. It was more than just the fear of culpability and imprisonment should Anne Elise die that made me stomp back through the snow toward her. I could not turn away. Looking at her, I was looking at a baby-sized version of myself, the girl I might have been if I’d been born to lowlife reprobates with a drug-addled past. I hadn’t even sat her down for a full minute. She knew she was being abandoned. I reached down and picked her up. I brought her to my chest, zippered up my bubble jacket. She was cold, and it took minutes to warm her. I’m a good person. James has told me so, several times, in the past. I rubbed Anne Elise’s hands in mine, warming the color back in them, and pledged to raise her as my own.
“You’ve taken her!” James says, still on the floor where I pushed him.
I race up the stairs, running, panting, my heart pounding. I had hoped Anne Elise would stay quiet long enough for me to sweet-talk James into leaving Laurel. I reach for the bookshelf. A button is hidden beneath a loose plank on the bookcase’s second shelf. I push it. The bookcase retracts into the wall, revealing the narrow passage that leads to the wood-paneled hideaway nook where my father retreated almost every night while I was growing up. It’s something out of a spy movie or a cheap horror film, this hidden room. Musty and dusty, it’s a veritable fire hazard cluttered with banking ledgers and secret papers far too valuable and compromising to store elsewhere. Only after I entered college and sounded out my classmates did I comprehend how unusual it was to grow up in a house with secret rooms.
I flick on a light switch. The room hasn’t been renovated since the late 1940s. Splits and cracks run down the wall’s wood paneling and the warped floorboards, the overhead light fixture discharging a burst of burned-electric ozone every time I turn it on. Anne Elise is in a cardboard box atop my father’s old desk, about the only suitable place I could think to hide her. She’d been here all along, staring at the cobwebs drooping down from the ceiling. Amazingly, she slept without a sound while Adderly and his detectives searched the house last night. I lift Anne Elise out of the cardboard box. Holding her, I’m filled with a sense of calm and a sense of purpose that all my years of being Jack Riggs’s daughter had never been able to provide.
James, having galloped upstairs, stands at the entrance to this secret nook. I point a baby bottle filled with formula toward Anne Elise’s sweet mouth. Her pink cheeks redden with exasperation.