Not My Daughter

Five blocks away, Sunny Barros was nowhere near as relieved when her husband came home from work. ‘She’s what?’ Dan asked her. Their daughter stood nearby, but he was looking at Sunny, who was absolutely beside herself.

‘Pregnant,’ Sunny mouthed. She couldn’t say the word again.

‘Jessica?’ he asked and turned to the girl. ‘Is this true?’

She nodded.

‘Who’s the boy?’

‘You don’t know him, Dad.’

Dan looked at his wife. ‘Who is he?’

Sunny shook her head and pressed her mouth shut. It was either that, or scream.

‘Mom’s angry,’ Jessica said calmly. ‘I’ve been telling her that it’s fine. People have been having babies since Adam and Eve. She’s convinced it’s the end of the world.’

‘Excuse me, Jessica,’ Sunny cried, but stopped when her ten-year-old daughter skipped into the room. ‘Darcy.’ She pointed upstairs. ‘Violin practice. Ten more minutes.’

The child looked wounded. ‘I’m just saying hi to Daddy. Hi, Dad.’

Sunny pointed again, waiting only until the child left before eying Jessica. ‘Tell him what else you told me.’ She looked at Dan. ‘Jessica planned this.’

‘Planned to get pregnant?’

‘Decided she wanted a baby,’ Sunny specified. If the girl had gone looking for the one thing that would dismantle the tidy life Sunny had so carefully crafted, she had found it.

‘Is this true, Jessica?’ Dan asked.

Jessica eyed him levelly. A tall girl with long brown hair and Dan’s verbal skill, she spoke with confidence. ‘Bringing a child into the world is the most important thing a person can do. I want to leave my mark.’

‘At seventeen?’

‘Age doesn’t matter. It’s what’s inside. I’ll be the best mom ever.’

‘At seventeen,’ Dan repeated. Looking at Sunny, he scratched his head. ‘Where did this come from?’

Sunny didn’t answer. Folding her arms against the coming storm, she waited. Dan was smart, well beyond the contracts he negotiated for Perry & Cass. He saw cause and effect, and was eminently predictable. Sunny had always loved that about him, but it was about to work against her.

To his credit, he considered other options first. Looking at Jessica again, he said, ‘Is it school pressure? Fear of college?’

Jessica smiled smugly. ‘My grades are great. That’s one of the reasons I knew I could do this.’

She had her father’s brains – tenth in her class without much effort – but this had nothing to do with grades, or apparently with brains, Sunny decided. ‘Do you have any idea—’ she began, but stopped when Darcy whipped back in.

‘My lamp just blew out. It needs a new bulb.’

‘I’ll replace it in a minute,’ Sunny said and turned her around. ‘Until then, use the overhead light.’

‘I don’t like the overhead light.’

‘Use it,’ Sunny ordered and turned back to the others. ‘And there’s another problem. What do we tell Darcy so that she doesn’t do this herself in seven more years? This is the worst kind of example to set.’

Dan held up a hand and returned to Jessica. ‘You talked about going to Georgetown.’

‘Percy State will do.’

‘Will do?’ He lowered his voice. ‘Is it Adam?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

‘Jessica!’ Sunny shouted.

Dan lifted his hand for quiet. ‘You are dating Adam, are you not?’

‘I have been, but he isn’t the love of my life.’

‘He has to marry you if he’s the father of this baby,’ Sunny argued.

‘I haven’t said he’s the father,’ the girl insisted. ‘Anyway, the donation of sperm doesn’t make a man a father. Involvement does, and the father of this baby won’t be involved. I’m raising it myself.’

‘Raising it yourself?’ Dan asked. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘Maybe not to you and Mom. When everything in your world is as neat as this kitchen—’

‘What’s wrong with this kitchen?’ Sunny asked in alarm. Their kitchen – their house – was larger than many in town, reflecting Dan’s position as head of the PC legal department and Sunny’s as manager of Home Goods. She had decorated every inch of the place herself and took pride in seasonal additions from the store, like the hand-blown glass bowl of pine cones on the table. Their kitchen reflected everything they had worked so hard to achieve. She hadn’t expected an attack on this front.

‘Nothing’s wrong with the kitchen, Mom,’ Jessica replied serenely. ‘That’s the problem. Nothing is out of place. Nothing clashes. Our lives are very, very organized.’ She looked at Dan, who looked at Sunny.

‘Where is she getting this?’ he asked, sounding mystified.

‘Not from me,’ Sunny vowed, but she knew what was coming.

‘From your mother?’

It was the only possible explanation. Sunny didn’t have to study Jessica’s cell tab to know that she talked with her grandmother often. The girl made no secret of it. She and Delilah had always gotten along, and no warning from Sunny could change that.

Delilah Maranthe was the embodiment of all Sunny had tried to escape. Her parents had been the eccentrics of the neighborhood, bent on doing their own thing. Born Stan and Donna, they went to court to become Samson and Delilah. They bought a house in suburbia and, under the guise of returning the property to its natural state, refused to mow the lawn. Ever. They spent weeks before Halloween baking cookies and rigging up elaborate electronics, though the local children were forbidden to visit. To Sunny’s utter mortification, they appeared at her high school graduation dressed as graduates from the century before.

To this day they remained odd, and though some people found a benign charm in their behavior, Sunny did not. Had her parents ever been benign – had they had an ounce of caring or foresight, they wouldn’t have saddled their children with silly names. What kind of mother named her child Sunshine? Sunny would have gone to court to change it herself if she hadn’t been adamant against following in a single one of her parents’ footsteps. And Buttercup? That was her older sister, who had simply shrugged it off and gone through life as Jane.

Sunny had been more vulnerable, suffering the taunts of schoolmates, and though no one in Zaganack knew her as Sunshine, the fear of discovery haunted her. She had raised Jessica and her sister to be Normal with a capital N.

Now Jessica was pregnant, saying that sperm didn’t make a man a father, and that their lives were too ordinary – and Dan was looking at Sunny like it was her fault. But how could she control Delilah Maranthe? ‘It’s not enough that I had to escape my mother when I was a child, but now she’s corrupted my daughter!’

‘This has nothing to do with Delilah,’ Jessica insisted, which irritated Sunny all the more.

‘See, Dan? Not Grandma. Delilah.’ She turned on her daughter. ‘A grandmother shouldn’t be called by her first name. Why can’t you call her Grandma?’

‘Because she forbade me to. She just isn’t a Grandma.’

‘There’s our problem,’ Sunny told Dan.

‘Why are you always so down on her?’ Jessica argued. ‘Delilah happens to be one of the most exciting people I know. Face it, Mom. We are totally predictable.’

‘I have a job other people would die for,’ Sunny reasoned.

‘We follow every rule to the letter.’

‘I’m respected in this town.’

Jessica raised her voice. ‘I want to stand out!’

‘Well, you’ve done it now. What are people going to think?’

‘They’ll think it’s fine, Mom, because it isn’t just me. It’s Lily and Mary Kate, too.’

Sunny gasped. ‘What?’

4

Susan waited only until Lily had gone upstairs before opening her cell. Seconds later, without so much as a hello, Kate asked, ‘Do you know what’s going on?’

‘Not me. I was hoping you would. You’re my guru.’

She heard a snort. ‘I’ve mothered my kids through broken bones and head lice, not pregnancy. How’s Lily?’

‘Confident. Naive.’

‘Same with Mary Kate.’

‘How could this happen?’ Susan asked, bewildered. ‘We taught them the right things, didn’t we?’

Kate interrupted the conversation to say, ‘No, Lissie, she is not a loser. There’s a solution to this.’ Back to Susan, she muttered, ‘But I haven’t a clue what it is. I have to go, Susie. Mary Kate is being crucified here. It’s going to be a long night. Can you come to the barn tomorrow morning?’

Susan had a lineup of morning meetings, but would gladly reschedule a few. ‘Be there at ten.’

The prospect of talking with Kate was a comfort. Likewise, perversely, the idea that Susan and Lily weren’t the only ones with a problem.

But the more Susan thought about it, the more frantic she grew. Three girls pregnant by design? There was a word for that, but the mother in her couldn’t say it. And the school principal? She couldn’t even begin to think it.

One pregnancy could be hidden. Not three.

One might be accidental. Not three.

One would quickly be last week’s news. Not three.

‘Mom?’ Lily’s whisper came through the bedroom darkness. ‘Are you sleeping?’

‘If only,’ Susan said quietly. If only she could close her eyes and make it all go away – find it was just a bad dream, a relic of the panic from her own past – I can’t do this, I’m alone, HELP! No, she was not sleeping. ‘But you should be,’ she said quietly. ‘You’re sleeping for two.’

‘I’m also peeing for two. Did you talk with Kate?’

Susan glanced at the door where Lily stood backlit, a stillslim silhouette against the frame. ‘Only for a minute. We’re meeting in the morning.’

‘Mary Kate says her mom’s really upset. It’s the money issue.’

‘It’s more than that,’ Susan said. If money ruled the Mellos, Kate and Will would have stopped after the twins. But Kate would be upset, like she was, about the consequences of what their daughters had foolishly done. ‘Any word from Jess?’

‘No. She’s not answering my messages. I think she’s mad at me. She told Mary Kate that Sunny went berserk. Jess blames me.’

‘Why you?’

‘Because we had agreed not to tell. Only I got pregnant before they did, so I was farther along, and I knew you knew—’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘You may not have known you knew, but you knew,’ the girl insisted, ‘and once I told you, the others had to tell their moms, even though they wanted to wait.’

Susan didn’t argue about what she had known when. She was already beating herself up about what she should have seen but hadn’t. Girls like theirs didn’t do things like this.

But they had now. And waiting to tell moms? ‘Funny thing about being pregnant,’ she mused, wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘Before long, it shows.’

‘But by then, it would be too late to do anything about it,’ said Lily. ‘Jess is worried they’ll make her have an abortion. If they do, she’ll run off to her grandmother. I have no one but you, Mom. If you didn’t want me here, I could call your Aunt Evie, but she’s like, what, eighty now?’

Susan put her chin on her knees. ‘Sixty, and you’re not calling Aunt Evie.’

‘Well, if I had to, I would – or I’d call Dad’s sister. She likes me. I mean, it’d only be for a little while.’

‘You’re not going anywhere.’

‘I’m sorry if I’ve messed things up.’

Susan wanted to say that she hadn’t. Only she had. The fact of Susan sitting in bed, missing Lily’s warm body but unable to open the covers for her to snuggle, spoke of a huge mess.

‘Don’t be angry,’ the girl whispered.

‘Why not, Lily?’ Susan shot back. ‘My signature accomplishment last year was the establishment of a school clinic where students can be treated for things they don’t want to discuss with their parents. That clinic is staffed by a real nurse, with a real doctor on call, either of whom could have given you birth control if you’d wanted to have sex. Do you realize that I pushed for this specifically to minimize student pregnancies?’

Lily remained silent.

‘Mm,’ Susan concluded softly, ‘I’m speechless, too.’

‘You’re missing the point. This is not an unplanned pregnancy.’

‘No, you’re missing the point,’ Susan parried with a spike of outrage. ‘This town lives and breathes responsibility. This family lives and breathes responsibility. What you’ve done is not responsible. You can talk all you want about knowing what you’re doing and being a good mother, but you’re seventeen, Lily. Seventeen.’

‘You did it,’ Lily said meekly.

And that, Susan realized, would haunt her forever. She had worked so hard to get past it, but here it was again. And now she had no idea what to do. She certainly couldn’t call Rick. He had trusted her to raise Lily well, and she had failed.

Heartsick, she turned away from the door and curled into a ball. She didn’t know how long Lily stood there, only knew that she couldn’t reach out to her, and by the time she rolled back to look at the clock, the doorway was empty.

Susan rarely called in sick, but she would have done it the next day if she hadn’t planned to meet Kate at the barn. Inevitably, someone would see her going there. But Zaganack looked out for its own. If you were sick, people knew; likewise, if you were supposed to be sick and showed up elsewhere.

The prospect of leaving school at ten kept her going, and when she finally ran down the stone steps and climbed into her car, she felt better for the first time that day. She would have walked if she’d had time; the barn wasn’t far, and the November air was crisp, still fragrant with the crush of dried leaves. But she didn’t want to lose a minute.

No ordinary barn, this one had a past. Originally built on the outskirts of town to house horses, it had also hidden its share of escaped slaves heading to freedom north of the border. For years it had housed nothing but cobwebs and mice, but for Susan, Kate, Sunny and Pam, who saw PC Wool as their own personal ticket to freedom, it held an appeal. When the last of the Gunn family died and the property went up for sale, the women lobbied for the barn. Envisioning it as a tourist attraction, Tanner Perry, grandson of Herman Perry and husband of Pam, had bought it and moved it closer to the rest of Perry & Cass. The tourist part had never quite materialized, but the success of PC Wool more than compensated.

Parking beside Kate’s van, Susan ran inside, past stalls of raw fiber, shipping cartons and computers, all the way to the back. There, tubs for soaking fiber and shelves of dye lined the walls. A separate section held newly painted wool, now hung to dry, while ceiling fans whirred softly above. A skeining machine stood nearby.

Had she not been preoccupied, Susan might have admired a mound of finished skeins. A blend of alpaca and mohair, these were the last of the holiday colors she had conceived the summer before. Rich with dozens of shades of cranberry, balsam and snow, they were the culmination of a year in which sales had doubled. Not only had PC Wool earned its very own section in the Perry & Cass catalogue, but after becoming the darling of the knitting blogs, it had experienced an explosion in online sales.

A large oak table stood at the heart of the work space. Old and scarred, it was the same one on which they had put together their first season of colors ten years before. Back then, the table was in Susan’s garage, and PC Wool had only been a dream, conjured up during child-free evenings with a bottle of wine and good friends who loved to knit. Even now, a large basket in the center of the table held small knitting projects, while the bulk of its surface was covered with skeins waiting to be twisted.

Dropping her coat on a chair, Susan went to Kate. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Been better,’ Kate replied. Her eyes were heavy, her hair a riot of ends sticking up around the bamboo double-pointeds at her crown. She opened her arms.

This was why Susan had come. She needed comfort. Petite Kate, with her big heart and can-do approach, had always offered that. ‘If it had to be anyone,’ Susan whispered, ‘I’m glad it’s you. What are we going to do?’

Kate held her for another minute. ‘I do not know.’

‘That’s not the right answer. You’re supposed to say that everything will work out, that this is just another one of life’s little challenges, and that what happens was meant to be.’

‘Aha,’ Kate barked dryly, ‘at least I’ve raised you well. You can keep telling me that. Right now, I’m not a happy camper.’

‘What does Will say?’

‘Pretty much what you just did. But boy, this came from nowhere. How can smart girls do something so stupid?’ Reaching for a hank of yarn, she deftly twisted it until it was tight enough to double back on itself. ‘My daughter’s neck,’ she murmured as she tucked one end into the other.

‘I’ll ditto that,’ Susan said, and the angst of the past thirty-six hours poured out. ‘I can’t get past the anger. I can’t ask Lily how she’s feeling. I can’t hold her. She’s been my little girl for so long, but now there’s this other…other…thing between us.’

‘A baby.’

‘It’s not a baby to me yet. It’s something unwanted.’ She waved a hand. ‘Bad choice of words. What I meant to say was that this is not what we needed at this stage in our lives. Lily was supposed to have all the choices that I did not. What was she thinking?’

‘She wasn’t alone.’

‘Which blows my mind. I’ve always loved that our girls did things together. They’re all good students, good athletes, good knitters. I thought they’d keep each other from doing dumb things.’ She had a new thought. ‘Where’s Abby in all this?’

Kate leveled her a gaze. ‘Mary Kate refused to say.’

‘She’s pregnant too?’ Four would be even worse than three – though three was surely bad enough.

‘Mary Kate just stared at me when I asked.’

‘Meaning that Abby is either pregnant or still trying.’

‘All I know,’ Kate said, ‘is that Mary Kate begged me not to tell Pam.’

‘But if Pam can keep this from happening to Abby—’

‘That’s what I said, but Mary Kate said Abby would do it anyway, and she’s probably right. Of the four girls, she’s the least anchored.’

Like her mom, Susan thought. She didn’t have to say it. Kate knew. They had discussed it more than once.

‘Besides,’ Kate said, ‘it’s not like Pam can lock her in a chastity belt.’

Susan snorted. ‘Not many of those around these days, and what do we have instead? The Web. Information enough there to make naive seventeen-year-olds feel they know everything. What was Mary Kate’s excuse for wanting a baby?’

Kate twisted another hank. ‘She’s been a hand-me-down child. She wants something of her own.’

‘Isn’t Jacob that?’ Susan was generally skeptical of high school pairings, but she liked Jacob Senter a lot. He was a kind boy, dedicated to school and devoted to Mary Kate. Lily had no one like that.

‘But between school and loans,’ Kate explained, ‘it’ll be years before they can get married. She wants something now. Something her sisters don’t have.’ She screwed up her face. ‘Did I miss this?’

‘She had love,’ Susan argued in Kate’s defense.‘When I wasn’t busy with the others. She has a point, Susie. Her solution may be misguided, but I see where she’s coming from. Lily, now, Lily had you all to herself.’

‘But only me. She wants family.’

‘She has Rick.’

Rick. Susan felt a little tug at her heart. ‘Rick is like the wind. Try to catch him.’

‘Have you called him?’ Kate asked cautiously.

Susan pressed her lips together and shook her head.

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘I can find out.’ Not that it mattered. His cell number was linked to network headquarters in New York. He could be anywhere in the world and her call would go through.

Reaching him was the easy part. Telling him what had happened would be harder.

She practiced on Kate. ‘When Lily was little, she wanted a brother or sister. That was before she realized her daddy wasn’t around. Once she understood that Rick and I weren’t together, she turned matchmaker. You’d really like Kelsey’s daddy, and Kelsey has a sister and two brothers, and they need a mom like you.’ Susan smiled briefly. ‘It was sweet. Sad. She always wanted a big family, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to get it.’ Grabbing a hank of yarn, she twisted it as she, too, had done hundreds of times. ‘She keeps reminding me that I was seventeen when I had her, but it’s because I was that I know how bad this is. They’re not ready physically. They’re not ready emotionally.’

‘Neither am I,’ Kate said tiredly. ‘For years my life was a blur of diapers, runny noses and interrupted sleep. I hyperventilate when I think of it. I can’t go back.’

Susan wasn’t as worried about going back as moving ahead. ‘At least you know it’s Jacob. Lily won’t tell me who the father is. She says he doesn’t know. How crazy is that?’

‘You have no idea?’

‘None.’ And it bothered Susan a lot. ‘She told me when she had a crush on Bobby Grant in second grade. She told me when she got her first kiss. That was Jonah McEllis. She gave me a blow-by-blow of her relationship with Joey Anderson last year. And in each case, I wasn’t surprised. A good mother would know if her daughter liked someone, wouldn’t she?’

Kate snickered. ‘Like she would know if her daughter planned to get pregnant?’

‘How did I not see something?’ Susan asked, baffled. ‘I look now, and, yes, there’s a difference. Her breasts are fuller. Why didn’t I notice before?’

‘They weren’t fuller before,’ Kate reasoned. ‘Or her clothes hid it. Or you thought she was just filling out. Susie, I’m asking myself the same thing. My daughter is two months pregnant, has been drinking milk by the gallon, has thrown up lots of mornings, and I thought it was the flu.’

Susan actually smiled. Pathetic as the situation was, she felt better. Venting always helped, especially when the person on the other end was in the same boat. Kate would love her regardless of what kind of mother she was.

‘Have you and Lily talked about options?’ Kate asked.

Susan could only think of three, and abortion was out. She reached for more yarn. ‘I mentioned adoption this morning.’ She twisted the hank and looked up. ‘Lily threw the question back at me. Could I have done that? We both know the answer.’

‘What was it like?’ came a third voice. Sunny unbuttoned her coat as she approached. ‘Having a baby at seventeen.’

Susan didn’t have to pull at memories. She had been reliving the experience in vivid flashes since dinner at Carlino’s Tuesday night. ‘It totally changed my life. My childhood ended – was over, just like that.’

Sunny joined them at the table. Clearly on a break from work, she had her hair in a plum bow that matched her sweater and slacks. ‘I know you’re estranged from your parents,’ she said to Susan. ‘I don’t know the details.’

They weren’t something Susan dwelt on. ‘My parents couldn’t deal,’ she said, ‘so I went to live with an aunt in Missouri while I had Lily and finished high school. Aunt Evie was great, but she had no kids. She didn’t know what I was going through, and I didn’t dare complain. It was scary. My doctor was one step removed from my father. He delighted in telling me all the risks of having a baby at seventeen.’

‘Like?’

‘Like a seventeen-year-old’s body isn’t ready to carry a baby to term. Like I was at risk for anemia, high blood pressure, preterm labor, and my baby could be underweight and have underdeveloped organs.’

Kate looked frightened. ‘Is all that true?’

‘I believed it. Now I know that most of these problems arise because teenage moms typically don’t take care of themselves. But my doctor didn’t say that. I was terrified. There were no classes at the local hospital. I had some books, but they weren’t reassuring. I was only seventeen. I dreaded childbirth, and then, if I survived that, I was going to have to take care of a baby who would be totally helpless and who might have developmental issues because I was seventeen.’