In those initial moments of studying her face-and yes, she looked as terrified and unmoored as he did-he waited for his anger to surface. This was what he was worried about-his anger. But instead he felt a profound sadness-his mother had ruined her life. Marcus’s life-as the summer had taught him and as his father had promised-would move on past the murders. But for Constance this prison was the last stop.
Constance sat and Marcus sat and they both picked up the phone.
Her voice was the same soft-and-scratchy tone, forever irritated by constantly explaining the basic tenets of the English language to kids who didn’t want to learn.
“Hello, child,” she said. “I’m glad you came.”
When she spoke, Marcus remembered one of the words Kara Schau had given him: “acceptance.” He didn’t have to forgive, he didn’t have to understand. All he had to do was show up. And here he was.
“Hello, Mama,” he said.
Winnie was standing a foot or so behind Marcus, a mere observer to the proceedings, but she teared up as she watched Marcus and Constance. She wondered what it would be like to see her father again for fifteen minutes. She would be tempted to give him news-about falling in love with Marcus, or about Beth being married before, or about Garrett becoming a father himself-but then she realized that she would do what Marcus was now doing: telling his mother he loved her.
Winnie couldn’t hear Constance’s voice, but she read her lips: I know, child, I know. Just the way Arch knew, wherever he was, that Winnie loved him and would keep him alive every way that she could.
It might have been the sound of Winnie crying that brought Marcus back to himself. He pulled Winnie forward, closer to the glass.
“Mama,” he said. “This is Winnie Newton, Arch’s daughter.”
Winnie had imagined this introduction twenty times the night before as she tried to fall asleep. She imagined Constance falling to her knees in gratitude, waxing on and on about what a great man Arch was. But now, in the actual moment, when Marcus handed Winnie the phone so that Constance could speak to her, what Constance said was, “I would have known you anywhere. You look just like your father.”
And this, of course, endeared Constance Tyler to Winnie forever.
By holiday time, Piper was six months pregnant. As Garrett moved through the days of his life-classes, the end of soccer, the beginning of intramural floor hockey, weekends with friends at the movies, even the occasional date (which he kept secret from his mother and sister)-it was easy enough to forget that the first girl Garrett had ever loved and might still love a little was suffering physically and emotionally as Garrett’s child grew inside her on an island thirty miles out to sea. At times-when Garrett took Brooke Casserhill out to dinner at a Peruvian chicken place, for example, where they were able to smuggle in a bottle of wine lifted from Brooke’s father’s wine cave-Piper seemed far away and less than real. She seemed like folklore. But at other times, mostly in the dark hours when Garrett should have been sleeping, Piper and her plight took on a gravity that nailed Garrett to his bed.
He tried to figure out what she expected from him. She accused him of being a kid. Well, yeah-he was seventeen years old, a senior in high school, just like she was. Had she wanted him to marry her?Raise the child?If that was the adult thing, and maybe it was, then Garrett conceded: it was out of his reach. He couldn’t do it.
He called her every month after her doctor’s appointment, and their conversations consisted almost entirely of the clinicaclass="underline" how much weight had she gained?(Fifteen pounds.) What was she measuring?(Twenty-four centimeters.) Did the AFP screen come back normal?(Yes.) Did she test positive for ges-tational diabetes?(No.) When would she sign up for Lamaze classes?(After the first of the year.) The baby kicked all the time now, Piper said, and the girlfriends who’d shunned her when they found out she’d let that summer kid impregnate her were now the ones who were most eager to lay their hands on the firm sphere of Piper’s belly and feel the baby drum from the inside.
Garrett had had no idea that a single baby could consume so much mental energy; always, in these conversations with Piper, it seemed like there were a hundred small points of discussion all revolving around the baby. In history class, Mr. Rapinski spoke of women in Third World countries who excused themselves from the assembly line of whatever factory they worked at, gave birth in the restroom and handed the infant off to a family member to care for at home. But it was nowhere close to that easy for a couple of white American upper-middle-class teenagers.
Garrett didn’t tell anyone in New York about Piper or the baby, and he forbade Beth and Winnie to mention it to anyone but Kara Schau. His mother understood. “Every man, woman, and child is entitled to one secret,” she said. “I had mine, now you have yours.” Garrett hated putting himself in a similar situation to his mother, and he wondered if the adult thing to do was to come clean, confessing to everyone he knew that he had impregnated his summer girlfriend and then left her to deal with it by herself. Then he could accept blame; he could wear the scarlet letter. You want to be back in New York where you can pretend none of this ever happened, Piper had said. She was right! Garrett didn’t want to be whispered about; he didn’t want the information fermenting his teachers’ opinion of him as they wrote his college recommendations. He didn’t want to lose any friends. He couldn’t wait until March when Piper would birth the baby, then give it away, and the ordeal would be ended.
The holidays came, and because they were the first holidays without Arch, they could only be described as bearable. In January, Beth took the twins to Hunter Mountain to ski, and for the break in February, the three of them flew to Palm Beach and stayed at the Breakers. Garrett praised his mother for these trips, these distractions, and helped out as much as he could-carrying luggage, arranging the limo to and from the airport, and being as amiable as possible.
While they traveled, he found himself thinking about the baby more often. He’d never realized how many children inhabited the world. Babies in car seats and strollers clogged the train station and airline terminals. Garrett heard their cries during takeoff and landing. He noticed, in every public bathroom he used now, the beige Koala changing station bolted to the wall. These had been there all along-they hadn’t been installed to torment him-and yet he never remembered seeing one before. At Hunter Mountain, Garrett, Beth, and Winnie ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant and Garrett became so preoccupied with a blond two-year-old boy at the next table who did a fire engine puzzle over and over, shrieking with delight each time he completed it, that Garrett barely touched his fajitas. At the Breakers, he separated from his mother and sister and lay on a lounge by the baby pool where he watched the little ones cavorting in their water wings. A baby, an actual baby, lived inside of Piper and this time next year that baby would be crawling or walking or swimming. His child. His little boy or girl. It hurt him in a way he couldn’t name. It was worse than heartbreak. It was worse, in a way, than losing his father.
Beth thought that March would never arrive, but then, of course, it did. They marked the one-year anniversary of Arch’s death quietly-dinner in the apartment with Arch’s mother. Trent Trammelman called Beth in the morning to say that the law firm was donating money in Arch’s name to establish a scholarship fund at Danforth. Arch’s secretary, now the secretary for a new attorney, sent flowers, and a bunch of thoughtful souls sent cards. Beth hated the idea of a death day as an anniversary, and yet once it was past, she felt relieved. A milestone survived. Since Christmas, friends had been inviting Beth over to meet men-single, divorced, widowed-and once Beth caught on, she always begged off, saying, “Please, it hasn’t even been a year.” Now that the anniversary had come and gone, her excuse vanished. And yet, Beth couldn’t bring herself to think about dating. All she could think about was their impending trip to Nantucket.