Page 6 of Starry Tides
“I know you saw Meg today,” Elliott said. “I’m guessing you saw that she was…”
“That she was what?” Helena asked finally, when the nerves set in.
“She’s pregnant. With my baby,” Elliott said.
Helena felt the weight of the world on her shoulders. She hadn’t realized Meg was pregnant, although her hair had been lush and flowing, and she’d looked like a portrait of vitality.
“I see,” Helena said.
“Yeah. Well. I figured you’d learn it eventually, and I wanted you to learn it from me,” Elliott said. He thought of himself as the good guy, the hero. “But there’s more.”
Of course there was, Helena thought.
“Meg and I got together before you and me split up,” Elliott said. “We were having an affair.”
Helena pressed her hand over her mouth and told herself not to scream. She remembered how Elliott’s mood had shifted, how he’d become someone else. He’d wanted to shove Helena out of his life and replace her with Meg—one of their friends.
She wondered if Meg’s ex-husband knew. She guessed he did, as everyone in Orangeburg knew everything about everyone else.
Well, they didn’t know anything about Helena, at least, not till today.
A jolt of anger went through Helena, surprising her. “Why are you telling me this?”
After all, it didn’t matter if he’d been having an affair, not now that they’d been divorced for five years. They had different lives because they were strangers.
He sighed. “I guess I wanted to clear my conscience. Before the baby comes.”
Helena hung up on him after that. In the silence of her living room afterward, she gasped for air before finally getting up the energy to go to the kitchen and drink a glass of water.
She couldn’t believe she’d ever pledged her life to that man.
4
Nantucket Island
Three days after Bethany’s so-called “menopause party,” she was at the gynecologist. Dr. Schreiber wore horn-rimmed glasses and a passive expression that made it difficult for her to read his thoughts. Bethany often wondered how she came across to her patients: warm and inviting or stern and passionless. Sometimes when you were delivering the worst possible news, it was difficult to know exactly how to express it. Nothing was easy.
But Dr. Schreiber, now, was giving her what should have been good news, she supposed. He was telling her that despite her age of forty-five, she was pregnant with her fourth child. “You’re about eight weeks along,” he said.
Although Bethany had read the pregnancy test herself and seen those two pink lines, she gaped at him as though he were speaking a different language. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought I was in menopause.”
“It happens more than you think,” he told her. “Some of the symptoms are the same.”
She already knew that. She’d spent nearly every sleepless night since Saturday reading stories from women who’d had babies in their mid- to late-forties. Most of the women sounded exhausted, as if they were at the end of their rope. Some of them said that this was the greatest blessing to ever befall them, but other women said that those women were lying.
It was a strange and murky world, Bethany knew.
“I’m too old,” Bethany said nervously. “I mean, isn’t it unhealthy?”
“The pregnancy looks perfectly healthy right now,” Dr. Schreiber said. “I don’t think we have anything to be worried about right now. Of course, we’ll closely monitor the situation. We’ll keep tabs. We’ll do bloodwork. But all that to say, you aren’t the oldest pregnant patient I have right now. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.”
But was it reasonable? Bethany thought that word choice was bizarre. “Reasonable” was synonymous with “logical,” she thought, and nothing about having a baby right now was logical. She got up, thanked the doctor, and floated through the waiting room, through the back hallway that led away from the clinic, and into the greater Nantucket hospital. She was headed into surgery, in fact, an open-heart surgery during which she’d have to have her wits about her.
As soon as she had her scrubs on, her worries ran away from her. She couldn’t focus on the baby, nor on her family’s future, not when she had someone’s life in her hands.
As it happened,this was the final week of the kids’ school before summer break. Many months ago, Bethany and Rod had arranged a family vacation, and as soon as Bethany got homefrom her (fully successful) open-heart surgery, she had to pack. Tommy, Maddie, and Phoebe were bubbly with anticipation for the upcoming trip, and Rod was eager as well, trying on various button-down shirts and asking Bethany which one to bring.
As Bethany moved through her house and filled her suitcase, she struggled to make sense of this new world. She still hadn’t told Rod nor her kids about her pregnancy. She wasn’t sure when the perfect time would be.
