“Fifteen minutes to St. Alden’s,” Jay says, studying the app on his phone.
They boarded a Thameslink train at St. Pancras station, after having spent two days in London. They stayed at the Soho, a stylish boutique hotel on Richmond Mews, between the Tottenham Court and Leicester Square tube stations. The location was perfect, central enough to allow for as much sightseeing as they could cram into forty-eight hours. They took a double-decker bus ride, waved hello to Big Ben, made pit stops at Trafalgar Square, Kensington Palace, and Hyde Park. They went to Harrods and bought two Harrods of London onesies and two Burberry playsuits. Jay was thrilled Kersti was too pregnant to shop for clothes for herself; he couldn’t stop converting the cost of everything to Canadian dollars. This burger is thirty-five Canadian dollars! This latte is $15! This onesie is $120! Wi-Fi is $40 a night!
They had dinner at a tourist trap pub in Covent Garden where the food was horrible and overpriced—(my fish and chips were $40!!)—and then they enjoyed a rain-soaked walk through Leicester Square and down Shaftesbury Avenue to Piccadilly Circus. When they got back to the room, their hands were black from the soot in the air. The tap water turned gray as they scrubbed their hands, and neither of them could get clean in the shower. “Even my snot is black,” Jay complained.
After managing to also cram in a brief visit to the National Portrait Gallery, see a play in the West End, and gorge on curry at Masala’s in Earl’s Court—which left her chest aflame for hours—Kersti was ready to move on.
She gazes out the window as the English countryside flies by, with her hand resting comfortably on her belly. She’s nineteen weeks pregnant with twin boys, a revelation that still has her reeling.
The first Kuusk boys of their generation. Kersti saw them at her eighteen-week ultrasound. At first, they were adorably curled up against each other, sleeping head-to-toe in an upside-down spoon; and then they got restless and moved, and there they were: two distinct and irrefutable penises.
Kersti was more shocked than anything else. She was certain she was having girls. Jay wept with joy, staring dumbfounded at the screen. “My sons. My sons,” he kept repeating.
Kersti’s first reaction was that her parents would be disappointed. The Kuusk women breed girls. They have daughters. She knew as she lay there watching those beautiful little kidney beans in her belly that she was being irrational, crazy; but the yearning to fit in with her family, to feel accepted by them, is a relentless thing, its choke hold seemingly indestructible. It robbed her of being able to fully experience that moment in the ultrasound room.
But then something happened that shocked her even more. When she told her parents, they were ecstatic. Her father actually cried. Her mother danced her around the living room.
“Finally!” Paavo thundered. “One of my children is giving me a grandson!”
“Two,” Kersti said.
“Two grandsons!” he cheered. “Palju ?nne!”
They pulled out the vodka and toasted the good news in filmy water glasses. Her father slapped Jay on the back and kissed Kersti three times on her cheeks. “Terviseks!”
“Grandsons,” Paavo whispered, his eyes watery and his cheeks flushed. “I had given up. Turns out Jay’s Jew sperm is good for something!”
Kersti glanced over at Jay and laughed nervously. For the first time ever, not following that narrow Kuusk path has given her some value within the family.
“You’re too happy they’re happy,” Jay said in the car on the way home. “You weren’t this happy when we found out the sex.”
“I know,” she admitted. “But you know how my dad makes me feel. It’s just . . . for once I’ve done something he’s proud of. For once.”
Jay sighed. “I’m glad my Jew sperm could help,” he said, and then dropped it.
It’s a thirty minute-ride to St. Alden’s, where the St. Alden’s School for Boys is cozily nestled beside one of the oldest abbeys in England. Kersti’s been doing research and, as it turns out, Mr. Fithern hasn’t done too badly for himself. St. Alden’s School has one of the best reputations in the country. Their website’s wordy “Ethos” promises to “provide an excellent education whereby young men will achieve the highest standard of academic success and develop character and self-discipline.”
They must not have known when they hired Mr. Fithern that he was fleeing a scandal in Switzerland, and that he was completely devoid of both character and self-discipline. He obviously fooled them, just like he fooled everyone at the Lycée.
As the train moves deeper into Hertfordshire, Kersti stares out the window at the rolling green hills, with its hamlets of Tudor cottages, weeping willows, and patches of purple anemones. A lovely brook shimmers alongside their train, as though rushing valiantly to keep up with it. The sun is shining for the first time since they landed at Heathrow, transforming the scenery from the wet gray blur of London into a bright, colorful postcard.
“You know,” Jay says. “We could just spend our time chilling and exploring. We don’t have to visit that teacher—”
“Yes, we do.”
“Why?”
She looks at him as though he’s gone mad. “Because Cressida is literally a part of me now,” she says. “I have to do this for her, Jay. I have to do this for all of us.”
When they arrive at the Inn at London Colney, a restored redbrick coach house next to the Colne River, Kersti wanders the grounds while the sun is still shining, figuring it might be her only opportunity to take in the view before the sky turns dark and opens up and the damp chill returns to the air.
The inn faces a Tudor-style public house across the river, accessible only by a honey-colored stone footbridge canopied by willow trees and oaks blooming with catkins. Kersti heads off toward the bridge while Jay goes inside to check them in. She stands there for a little while, staring down at the rippling water, listening to the orchestra of birds. She notices a small owl staring at her from the branch of an oak tree, his round eyes fixed on her intently, his body perfectly still.
She peers down into the river, which is a significant drop. She thinks about Cressida tumbling from her balcony onto concrete and a wave of nausea pushes its way up into her throat. She’s so close to Lausanne now. In another two days, she’ll be pulling into the Gare, just as she did a little over twenty years ago. Only this time she’ll be with Jay, not her mother. Now she’s a grown woman, a success on all fronts, no one’s shadow anymore. The babies move inside her and it feels like flapping butterflies. It still surprises her, the force of their sudden movements, how strong they already are.