The Finishing School

“She was having an affair with her history teacher.”


“Mr. Fithern?” she cries, sitting upright. “From the Model United Nations?”

“Yes.”

“She worshipped him,” Deirdre remembers. “She talked about him all the time—”

“She was in love with him. And he was supposedly in love with her.”

“Wasn’t he married?” Deirdre says. “To one of the teachers at the school?”

Kersti nods, giving Deirdre time to absorb it all.

“Still,” Deirdre says, her voice smaller, barely audible. “It was so long ago.”

“For what it’s worth, I think someone might have pushed her,” Kersti says, the sentiment crystallizing even as she says it out loud. “I spoke to Mrs. Fithern the other day. She’s the one who told me Cressida was pregnant.”

“She knew?”

“Fithern told her. She thinks Cressida tried to kill herself. Apparently they both do.”

“Well, we do have the suicide note,” Deirdre acknowledges. “Maybe they’re right.”

“Yes, it’s very neat and tidy. But we both know that note is bullshit.”

Deirdre is pulling nervously at the strand of pearls around her neck. “Oh, Kersti. Honestly, what can we do now?”

“You can open an investigation in Lausanne.”

“What for?” Deirdre cries. “It won’t give Cressida her life back. It will just humiliate her and ruin her—”

“Her what? Her life? Her reputation? Does that really matter anymore?”

Deirdre buries her face in her hands and cries silently, her narrow shoulders shaking. She flings out an arm in search of a tissue. Kersti jumps up and hands her the box.

“You really think someone pushed my baby?” she says, blowing her nose.

“I think it’s worth looking into it, Deirdre. At least worth talking to Bueche and Harzenmoser.”

“I can’t go back there—”

“I’ll go with you,” Kersti says. “I’ve been invited back for the Lycée’s hundredth birthday. We can go together.”

“There must be some sort of statute of limitations,” she says. “Besides, what would I ask them? What could they possibly tell me after all this time? I would just embarrass myself.”

“Bueche and Harzenmoser covered up the note and they covered up the affair. They must have known about it. Everyone knew at the end. They shut it down before the police even had a chance—”

“I don’t know.”

“Madame Hamidou could help you,” Kersti says. “She might still be there. She loved Cress like a daughter.”

Deirdre frowns.

“Is there anything else you haven’t told me?” Kersti asks carefully. “Do you have the ledger, Deirdre? Is there something in there . . . Are you still protecting her?”

Deirdre shakes her head and opens her mouth to say something, but before she can respond, a young girl about eight years old gusts into the room, breathless and red-cheeked. “Mama?” she says, flopping down next to Deirdre and eyeing Kersti with curiosity. Mama? Kersti thinks, shocked.

The girl is exquisite, with pale green eyes and curly auburn hair tied up in two high pigtails. She’s nearly as tall as Deirdre and just as slender, wearing sparkly leggings and a sweatshirt with a bejeweled peace sign.

“Darling,” Deirdre says, daubing the corners of her eyes and trying to regain her composure. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Why are you crying?” the girl asks, staring at Kersti.

“We’re talking about Cressida,” she says. “You know that makes Mama sad. Sloaney, this is Kersti, Cressida’s friend from school. Kersti, this is Sloane.”

“Hi, Sloane.”

“Hi.”

“How old are you?”

“Seven and three-quarters.”

“Sloaney,” Deirdre says, “the heels of your socks are filthy. Please go and change them and start your homework.”

“Can I have a snack?”

“Laylay will cut you a mango.”

Sloane slides off the couch with a reluctant groan and shuffles out of the parlor. When she’s gone, Kersti turns to Deirdre. “She’s beautiful,” Kersti says. “She called you Mama.”

“Yes.”

“She can’t be yours,” Kersti says, guessing by the child’s crazy mane of curls, her pale green eyes, and the perfect curve of her mouth who she belongs to.

“When Cressida was twenty-seven,” Deirdre explains, “I flew her to a fertility clinic in Colorado for in vitro.”

“My God. She’s Cressida’s daughter?”

“Right after Cressida got back to the States, I had them do a D-and-C to make sure nothing from the first pregnancy would interfere with a future pregnancy. Just in case. At the time, I still hoped Cressida would recover and lead a normal life. Eventually, it became apparent that she wasn’t going to get better. So in 2007, I found a sperm donor and a surrogate, and now I have my Sloane.”

Kersti remembers the little girl’s room she saw the last time she was here. She should have guessed. Deirdre has created a replica of Cressida.

“She’s the light of my life,” Deirdre says. “My second chance.”

“Does she know Cressida is her mother?”

“I’m her mother,” Deirdre states.

“You’re her grandmother.”

“I’ve raised her as my own.”

“Who does she think Cressida is?”

“Her sister. My first child.”

Kersti is speechless. She has to concede that the frozen eggs were an ingenious idea if the goal was to preserve Cressida’s legacy, rather than to re-create her.

“I have no regrets,” Deirdre tells her. “We’ve still got fifteen frozen eggs in storage—”

Fifteen eggs.

The words land like a bomb. What occurs to Kersti in that moment is so utterly insane, it astonishes her with its perfect irony.

“Anyway,” Deirdre says. “I’m going to think about it.”

“About what?” Kersti asks, completely lost in her own thoughts.

“About going to Lausanne and speaking to Bueche and Harzenmoser—”

“Deirdre,” Kersti blurts out, knowing this is her only chance; that if she’s going to have a baby she has to make it happen any way she can. “I have a proposition for you.”





Chapter 22





LAUSANNE—November 1997



At midnight, Kersti bursts out of her room to get Cressida. She still isn’t used to them not sharing a room. They both have single rooms on the fourth floor now, which is supposed to be a privilege for the top senior students. Kersti’s lonely, though. Her small room with the single bed and the sloped ceilings sometimes feel like a cell. She misses Cressida’s company.

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