No, Lily thought. Oh, no.
“I got pregnant,” Morgan cried. Her body swayed toward Lily’s, like she wanted to rest her head on her mother’s shoulder, like she wanted Lily to hold her, but Lily couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. She sat, stunned and frozen, her body turned to a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife, listening as Morgan sobbed and told the rest of it. The pregnancy test. Telling Olivia. The plan they’d made. The appointment at the clinic in Syracuse. What she’d done there, with Kayla and Andy’s connivance, the day before.
“Are you mad at me?” Morgan cried, the words barely intelligible. “Do you hate me?”
“Oh, honey. No. No. Of course I don’t.”
“And you can’t be mad at Andy or Mrs. Presser.” She’d raised her head and looked at Lily intently from her streaming eyes. “You can’t be. It’s not their fault.”
“I’m not,” said Lily. “I’m not angry at anyone. I just—” She breathed in slowly, her mind a whirling tangle. “I just wish you’d told me. I wish I’d been with you.”
“But it isn’t—but you don’t…” Morgan wiped at her eyes, then swiped at her nose with her sleeve and finally turned to look at her mother. “You think it’s murder,” she said, her voice very low.
Lily got up from the bed and went to the bathroom. She turned on the taps at the sink and ran the water until it got hot. She soaked a washcloth, collected a hand towel and a box of tissues, and sat next to her daughter on the bed. Gently, she used the warm, damp cloth to wipe Morgan’s face, the way she’d done when Morgan was little, sticky with chocolate or her favorite marmalade. Other kids liked grape jelly or strawberry jam on their toast or with their peanut butter sandwiches, but Morgan had always liked marmalade. You have a sophisticated palate, Don had told her, and Morgan had spent days repeating the phrase in her piping, little-girl voice: I have a sophisticating palate! Morgan’s narrow shoulders shook with sobs. Her eyes were squeezed shut, like she couldn’t even bring herself to look at Lily, and Lily felt shame snaking up her throat, as undeniable as the tide, as memory.
“I have something I need to tell you,” Lily said, and waited until Morgan opened her eyes and looked at her, before she drew a deep breath and began.
“When I was eighteen,” she began, “I had a boyfriend.”
* * *
Once upon a time, Lily Mackenzie had been Lily Lawrence. She had grown up in a small, rural town in central Pennsylvania, a town where the school district gave kids vacation on the first day of hunting season, where there were six churches and a Christian day school that sent three buses of students to Washington for the March for Life every January. Lily and her parents and her two older brothers had lived in a small Cape Cod–style house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms and a crabapple tree in the backyard.
During her last year of high school, Lily had grown three inches and two cup sizes, and convinced her mother to let her put golden highlights in her brown hair. Lily dabbed Calvin Klein’s Obsession behind her ears every morning and wore push-up bras to school, and the boys she’d known since kindergarten, the boys who’d ignored her in favor of her prettier, bolder friends, had started taking notice. So had her best friend Sharon’s older brother, Benjamin.
They’d met at a party at Sharon’s house, on a Saturday night in June after she and her friends had finished high school. There’d been a bonfire in the backyard, a cooler full of ice and bottles of soda (and another cooler, in the back of a classmate’s trunk, full of beer). Lily remembered the dress she’d worn that night, pink eyelet cotton, with a flounced, tiered skirt, and thin straps that set off the tan of her bare arms and shoulders. She had never felt so pretty, so desirable, and when Ben had walked over to her, two beers held by their necks dangling from one hand, appreciation on his face, she’d felt lucky. Special. Chosen. Ben and Lily had spent the whole night talking, first by the bonfire, then on a couch in Sharon’s living room. He’d asked for her number and brushed the lightest kiss on her lips at the end of the night, one finger tucked under her chin to tilt her face toward his, and he was nothing like the high school boys who’d shove their tongues inside your mouth like they were trying to inspect your molars, when they weren’t knocking their teeth into yours. Ben’s mouth had been gentle, and he’d tasted like whiskey, and he’d smelled like aftershave. Lily had been instantly besotted.
Her parents hadn’t approved. Ben was twenty-three, and Lily was three weeks away from her eighteenth birthday. He was a man, and she was a girl. They’d told her she couldn’t see him, which, of course, had only made her want to see him even more. So they’d met in secret. It had been easy enough. Lily hadn’t even had to lie. “I’m going over to Sharon’s house,” she’d tell them. She wouldn’t bother adding that Sharon was at her summer job as a lifeguard; that Sharon’s parents were both at work, that no one was at Sharon’s house except Ben. All summer long, she invented sleepovers, movies and parties, bonfires at the lake, and last-minute babysitting jobs.
Lily had grown up going to church every Sunday. She’d promised to stay a virgin until she got married, but her promise had felt misty and far away when Ben had his mouth pressed against her neck and his hands up her shirt or down her pants; like words spoken by a stranger. They’d had sex half a dozen times, and they’d always used condoms, but then, when the week before her college orientation had arrived, Lily’s period didn’t.
Ben had panicked. “I can’t get married,” he’d said. “I can’t have a kid. I don’t even have a job!” By then, Lily had noticed that he hadn’t been trying very hard to find one. She didn’t blame him. If she had a nice place to stay, parents to pay the bills, and a mother to cook her dinner every night, she might not have put much effort into a job search, either.
Lily had taken a home pregnancy test and, when it had given her the news that wasn’t news at all, she had called up her pediatrician, Dr. Rosen, who’d been taking care of her since she’d been a baby. He’d told her to come in at the end of the day, when the office was empty except for the receptionist and the nurse. She’d sat on the exam table, in the little room with the poster of the food pyramid on the wall, where she’d been weighed and measured and checked for ear infections and poison ivy. With her eyes on her lap, she’d asked about confidentiality.
“You’re an adult now,” he’d told her. “So the standard rules apply. Anything you tell me stays between us.”
She’d told him what had happened. He’d asked her questions, his voice calm and nonjudgmental, and then a nurse had come to take a urine sample, just to be sure.
When the test had come back positive, Dr. Rosen had written out three prescriptions, tearing each sheet from his prescription pad and slipping them into an envelope before handing them to her. One had been for birth control pills. The other two had been for the medications that would end the pregnancy. “There’s a pharmacy in Harrisburg that keeps this in stock,” he’d said.