I was confused by this bit of conversation, but I sensed I should go along with it. Geoff knew something I didn’t, and I wanted to know it, too.
“Well, I am grateful for that,” I said. The table sat by the window, and I could feel the cold panes. Below me was the sidewalk and the place beneath the elm where I’d seen Mary Rae that first night. Geoff poured out our tea, oblivious. “These are gorgeous cups,” he said, eyeing the Limoges.
I drank the tea, scalding my tongue, and waited.
“Have you banned him from your place?” he said. “It might be easier on you if you packed up his things.”
“I was planning to do that,” I said. “I’ve just been so busy with school.”
The truth was, though I’d continued to attend my classes, I was barely paying attention in them and had begun neglecting assignments.
Geoff eyed me over the rim of his cup. “You’re going to be busy helping raise a baby,” he said. “She’s lost the plot, if you ask me, expecting you to be part of the whole thing.”
I shrugged and set my cup in the saucer. My hand shook, and I buried it in my lap. I could hardly believe this story Del had told him.
“You’re a better person than I’d be,” he said. “Don’t think some of us haven’t put two and two together—I mean Will takes off, and Del is knocked up. Everyone is being so hush-hush.”
He sipped the last of his tea and laid a hand on Suzie’s head. I thought of the things we each could infer about the other through the plaster wall that separated our apartments—the pacing of the floorboards, the sounds of lovemaking. The odd pleasure it lent us to know things that the other might never confess. And then, how difficult it was to know the person we were closest with—how our bodies together never guaranteed anything.
Geoff said Anne was shocked by the turn in events. “But that’s often the way with unplanned things. A bit of a surprise that often ends up being lovely.”
I didn’t dare sip my tea and reveal my trembling hand. I simply nodded at him, and he saw my distress and changed the subject. “It’ll be spring eventually. Slow to arrive, you know. But it always does.”
Though it was March, there were no signs yet of the thaw that signaled spring’s arrival. Geoff didn’t usually have a problem dominating a conversation, and he did that while he drank his tea, switching topics, until he couldn’t resist returning to the highlight of the day.
“Where is the old scoundrel?” he said. “I haven’t seen him around.”
“You should ask Del,” I said.
“She told me to ask you,” Geoff said. He spun his cup in its saucer. “Sounds like neither of you has a clue.”
I gave him a feeble smile. “That would be Del’s problem now, wouldn’t it?”
Geoff stood to go, brushing the excess tobacco from his lap to the floor. In the doorway I told him to wait.
“I found a necklace in your car,” I said. “It was an amethyst pendant.”
Geoff didn’t seem too surprised. “I don’t drive many women around in my car. But if you girls gave someone a ride, maybe they lost it? You might ask Will, too. He’s borrowed the thing a few times in the past.”
“Well, I’ll ask him if I see him,” I said. After Geoff left I stood listening to him cross the hall, open his door, and enter his own apartment.
I went downstairs and knocked on Del’s door. She opened it with her usual flourish.
“There you are!” she said. “Mother says she’s tried to reach you, and you aren’t returning her calls.”
“So?” I said. I walked past her into her apartment.
“She wants us to come home for Easter.”
I watched Del put her hand on her abdomen, though nothing yet showed beneath her oversized sweater. She saw me looking, and then pulled the sweater tightly closed.
“I know it’s surprising,” Del said, matter-of-factly. “But I saw a doctor in Milton, Alice took me, and it’s true. I’m due in September.”
I felt a lurch of guilt. Our mother would be furious. I could hear her accusatory voice now: “How could you have let this happen, Martha?”
“Were you going to tell me?” I said.
“I thought you already knew,” she said. “After what you said in Buffalo.”
I’d made a comment about Jane mistaking the Institute as a place for unwed mothers, but that could hardly serve as evidence that I knew about the pregnancy. “I didn’t know,” I said, icily.
“I was planning on giving the baby up for adoption,” Del said, “but I’ve been thinking, the genetic makeup might really predispose this child, you know, God, to any number of problems, and maybe someone else should take it, someone in the family who has experience and can show some compassion, and give it siblings and a nice bed to sleep in. Or crib. A crib at first, right?”
Del had scrunched her face, and her expression switched from wide-eyed to puzzled, and back.
Like a thrown switch she had gone off again. I suspected she had either stopped her medication or the doctor she’d seen had readjusted it.