“I like it,” Milly said. “I like all the different shades of blue and green you use. What is it?”
He took a breath, about to declare something serious. “It’s a monster that’s not mean but not friendly, either. It’s an in-between monster.”
“An in-between monster,” Milly echoed, fighting back her delight, trying to keep a straight face.
“An in-between monster that doesn’t do bad or good, he just watches everything.”
That’s what God is, she thought instantly. God just watches us and doesn’t lift a finger. “Ah, I get it,” she said. “An in-between monster. That’s very good.”
“What are you drawing?” He stood over her now, hands on his hips. He’d picked up a bit of Sister Ellen’s bossy affect.
She held the paper up to him. “It’s a house that I saw last week that I like a lot.”
Mateo examined it blankly. “Whose house?”
“I don’t know. I just saw it and I liked it.”
“You’re a good drawer,” he said.
Milly beamed. “Thank you!”
She went back to the boys’ home the next several Saturdays. One Saturday, she finally got Jared to go with her. He enjoyed himself immensely, especially with a boy named Tranell who only wanted to draw Mariano Rivera over and over again.
Leaving Ellen’s house one Saturday, he put his arm around her and asked, “Can we have a baby? I wanna be a dad and draw with my son. Or my daughter.”
She tightened inside. She’d always known that if they stayed together, this would come up. But now? They were both twenty-seven! Jared knew she was on the Pill. She laughed, trying not to sound nervous. “Um, can we table that discussion for another five years?”
“Five years?” he protested.
“Okay, fine, five months,” she said.
But she was actually dealing with that very matter in eight days, when she hadn’t had her period. She’d forgotten to take her pills to Montauk with her Labor Day weekend, the weekend Diana died. So now, without saying a word to Jared, she bought a test at the drugstore and tested herself positive. Without a word to Jared, she visited the doctor, who confirmed it. She walked out of the doctor’s office dazed. Back at work, she went in her tiny little office she’d barely settled into yet — it was only early October — and called Drew in L.A.
“Well, hello, Millipede, what a lovely surprise!”
“Do you have a second?”
Drew paused. “Why, what is it?”
“I just found out I’m pregnant. I just found out, like, twenty minutes ago, at the doctor’s. I haven’t told a soul yet.”
Drew gasped. “Oh my goodness. Well?” She paused. “What should I say? ‘Congratulations,’ or ‘Oh, dear,’ or ‘What are you going to do?’”
“‘What are you going to do?’” Milly said. “And I’m absolutely certain I’m not going to have it. I’m just not going to have it. I’m not even going to tell Jared, I’m just going to take care of it and pretend it didn’t happen and I never missed that weekend of the Pill and just move on like it didn’t happen.”
“Millicent,” Drew said sternly, “slow down. You have plenty of time to decide if it only happened a month ago. And why on earth aren’t you going to tell Jared?”
“Because he’ll want to have it, that’s why!” Milly said bluntly, as though Drew were an idiot.
“Well, doesn’t some part of you want to have it, too? People are having babies now, Millipede. I’d probably have a baby with Christian now if I accidentally got pregnant.”
Accidentally! thought Milly. What an idiot I am! “Accidentally!” she shot back at Drew. “There you go. You have no plans of getting pregnant. You have a life.”
“Yes, but I’m saying were I to get pregnant. You don’t want to even consider it?”
Milly paused and composed herself a little bit, lowered her voice. “I am not bringing a child into this world with my genes. I am not going to watch that and perpetuate the cycle.”
“Oh my God,” Drew said. “You are not even bipolar. And your mother has been on meds and more or less fine for years now.”
“No, you’re wrong, I’m on antidepressants now. I think the whole bipolar cycle thing is starting in me and it’s starting with depression, not the manias, just like it did with my mother.”
Drew was silent for several moments. Milly pictured her in front of her computer with the dog on her lap, cold coffee at her elbow. Milly could hear Radiohead in the background.
“Oh, hon,” Drew finally said. “Can I ask you one thing? Can I ask you to just sit with this for a few days? You have time. Just sit with it.”
“Just sit with it while it gets bigger in there and more human and this becomes harder and harder to do?”
“Listen to me: you have plenty of time. And I seriously think you should tell Jared. You live together.”
“Can I sit with it just until tomorrow and we’ll talk then?”
“Yes, sweetheart. I’m here working all week so call me any time you like. But. . this could be a wonderful thing, you know.”
Milly sighed, crestfallen. “Thank you, Drew-pea,” she said, and hung up.
Later that night, she went home. But she did not tell Jared. In fact, she consciously put on a sort of mask before she went into the apartment so he wouldn’t even suspect something was wrong. She just blocked it out. And the next day, and the next day, and the next day, she called Drew, telling not another soul. Drew put her in touch with a big psych researcher at Columbia, who told her, in effect, there were no diagnostic tools extant to predict if her child would be mentally ill, or what the chances were. The researcher said instead that by the time the child came of age, treatment would have been fine-tuned to the point where it really wasn’t a problem. But Milly kept picturing years of watching a child in fear of the first terrifying signs of morbidity or mania, or both.
Finally, she called Drew and said, in a steely voice, “If I flew you out here, would you go with me to the abortion?”
Milly waited quite a few moments before Drew spoke. “Let me ask you one thing,” Drew finally said. “If you were to set aside this fear you have, would you want to have this child?”
Milly tried to consider the question honestly. She liked her new job. She liked teaching art to the boys on Saturday. She liked working on her own stuff in the studio on Sunday. She liked having just a bit of money for her and Jared to travel with. “At this point?” she asked Drew. “Not now. No.”
Another long pause from Drew. “Okay then, I will fly out, and you don’t have to pay my way. I’ll schedule some meetings and write off the trip. But one thing: I can’t stay with you unless you tell Jared. That is just too weird for me to be spending a few days with the two of you so we can go off and secretly have an abortion and try to keep that from him and be all, like, la-di-da.”
“It won’t be so hard if we’re doing it together,” Milly reasoned.
“I don’t think it’s right that you’re not telling your boyfriend of, what, five years now?”
“Six years, technically.”
“Six years, then,” Drew said. “You are putting up a wall between the two of you and I think you are going to regret it.”
Milly respected Drew’s opinion, so this gave her pause. But in her head, she didn’t see any reason why she needed to tell Jared. So she went ahead and scheduled the procedure, informing Drew. In doing so, she put up a wall that even she was a bit stunned by. She didn’t tell Jared, and in not telling him, she started to resent him in his ignorance of the situation — couldn’t he intuit she was pregnant and in distress? She didn’t tell her mother — that would go to the heart of the whole painful matter. But what surprised her the most was that she didn’t tell her shrink. She couldn’t stand one more person after Drew telling her this was something she might regret. She had to stay strong and keep her resolve and just get this over with. Deep down, she had no intention of ever having her own baby — ever. She would not watch her own genetic curse unfold before her eyes in the form of her own child.