Nine Perfect Strangers (30 page)

52

 

Jessica

“How far along are you?” asked Heather from her position in the corner of the room. She sat up and rubbed her knuckles so hard into the sockets of her eyes that Jessica winced. You needed to be careful with the delicate skin around your eyes.

“Um, let's see. Two days,” answered Jessica. She put a hand to her stomach.

“Two
days
?” said Carmel. “Do you mean your period is two days late?”

“No, I'm not late yet,” said Jessica.

“So you haven't done a test?”

“No,” said Jessica. Jeez. What was with the Spanish Inquisition? “How could I?”

This was so weird, all of them standing around in this small room like they were at an office party, but they were talking about her periods.

“So you might not be pregnant?” asked Ben. Jessica couldn't tell if his shoulders dropped with relief or disappointment.

“I am,” said Jessica.

“What makes you think so?” asked Carmel.

“I just know,” said Jessica. “I could tell. As soon as it happened.”

“You mean you knew at the moment of
conception
?” said Carmel. Jessica saw her exchange a look with Heather, as if to say:
Can you believe this shit?
Older women could be so condescending.

“Well, you know, some mothers do say they could tell they were pregnant at the moment of conception,” said Heather kindly. “Maybe she is.”

“I bet a lot of women think they ‘know' and then it turns out they're wrong,” said Carmel.

“What's the big deal?” said Jessica. Why did this strange fuzzy-haired woman sound so angry with her? “I mean, I know, we weren't meant to be touching during the silence.” She glanced up at the silent dark eye of the camera watching them. “We weren't meant to be taking drugs either.”

The sex had happened in the dark on their second night at the retreat. Not a word spoken. It was all blind, silent touch, and it had been raw and real, and afterward she lay awake and felt a wave of peace wash over her, because if their marriage was over, so be it, but now there was going to be a baby, and even if they didn't love each other anymore, the baby was created from a moment of love.

“But wait, she's on the pill,” said Ben to Heather and Carmel, as if Jessica wasn't even there. “Can that happen?”

“Only abstinence is one hundred percent effective, but if she's …” Heather looked at Jessica. “If you've been taking the pill every day, at the same time, it's probably unlikely that you're pregnant.”

Jessica sighed. “I went off the pill two months ago.”

“Ah,” said Heather.

“Without telling me,” said Ben. “You went off the pill without telling me.”

“Uh-oh,” said Lars quietly.

“You didn't mention this last night,” said Ben. “When we were ‘speaking from our hearts.'”

He sarcastically quoted Masha, his face stone hard, and Jessica thought about last night, and how their words had flowed like water. But she hadn't told him last night about going off the pill. She'd still kept secrets even when she was high. Because she'd known it was a betrayal.

She
should
have said it last night, when his face was all soft and she felt like they were two halves of one person. She'd felt like that was a beautiful truth the drugs had helped her discover, but it had been a beautiful lie.

“Yeah,” said Jessica. She lifted her chin and remembered the kissing and how, as they'd kissed, a single thought had blinked on and off like a neon sign in her head:
We're okay. We're okay. We're okay
.

But they weren't okay. Nothing she'd thought last night had been real. It was all just drugs. Drugs
lied
. Drugs fucked you up. She and Ben knew that better than anyone. Sometimes Ben's mother sat and cried over the pictures of Lucy before she fell for the lies of drugs. Now that was a “transformation.”

“Don't waste your money on this stupid retreat,” Jessica's own mother had said before they came here. “Give all that money to charity and go back to
work
. Then your marriage will be just fine. You'll have something to talk about at the end of the day.”

Her mother seriously thought Jessica could go back and work in that shit-kicker job when she now earned more in bank interest in just one month than she used to earn in a whole year. Jessica couldn't make her mother understand that once you had that much money you were changed forever. You were worth more. You were better than that. You couldn't go
back
because you could never see yourself that way again. Rationally, she knew it was just dumb luck that had gotten her rich, but deep, deep down an insistent voice in her head told her:
I deserve this, I was meant for this, I AM this person, I was always this person
.

“Oh dear. Take it from someone who knows: getting pregnant is not the best way to try to save a marriage,” said Carmel.

“Well, thanks, but I wasn't trying to save my marriage,” said Jessica.

“What were you trying to do, Jess?” asked Ben quietly, and for a moment it was like last night, just the two of them together in their little boat floating down a river of Ecstasy.

“I wanted a baby,” said Jessica.

She was going to document her journey on Instagram. Sideways shots of her “baby bump.” A stylish gender-reveal party. Blue or pink balloons would fly out of a box. Hopefully pink. People would put heart emojis in the comments.

“I was scared you'd say no,” she told Ben. “I thought if we were going to break up I'd better hurry up and get pregnant.”

“Why would I say no? We always said we'd have children,” said Ben.

“Yes, I know, but that was before we started to have … issues,” said Jessica. She couldn't have borne to hear him say, “Are you kidding? Us?”

“So this baby isn't anything to do with me,” said Ben. “You assumed we were breaking up and wanted to have a baby on your own?”

“Of course it's to do with you,” said Jessica. “I only wanted your baby.”

She could see him soften, but then, idiotically, without thinking, she said, “You're the father. You can see it whenever you want.”

“I can see it whenever I want!” exploded Ben. You would think she'd said the worst thing in the world. “Gee. Thanks.”

“No, I didn't mean—I just meant,
God
.”

Their words no longer flowed like water. Now their conversations stopped and started in hard little jabs.

“It's probably premature to be sorting out custody visits,” said Lars.

“I doubt she's even pregnant,” said Carmel.

“I
am
pregnant,” insisted Jessica. “I just hope these drugs haven't hurt the baby.”

“You won't be the first or the last to have got drunk or high in the very early days of pregnancy,” said Heather. “I'm a midwife, and the things some mothers have admitted to me, especially when the partners have left the room! If you
are
pregnant, there's a good chance your baby will be fine.”

“So much for being the antidrug crusader, Mum,” said Zoe.

“Well, there's nothing to be done now,” said Heather under her breath, although Jessica could hear her perfectly well.

“I've been taking folate tablets,” Jessica told her.

“That's great,” said Heather.

“Yep, so great: folate, a little LSD, and some Ecstasy,” said Ben bitterly. “The perfect start to life.”

“Don't worry about it, she's probably not even pregnant,” said Carmel in a low voice.

“What is your fucking
problem
?” Jessica's voice rose to an embarrassingly high pitch. She knew she shouldn't be swearing and showing her emotions like this, but she felt suddenly very upset.

“Hey now,” said Napoleon soothingly.

Frances, the romance author, plonked herself down and went bright red in the face as if she'd never heard the f-word in her life.

“Sorry,” said Carmel. She lowered her head. “It's probably just envy.”

“Envy? You're, like, jealous of
me
?” said Jessica. Wasn't this woman too old to feel jealous? “Why?”

“Well …” Carmel laughed a little.

The money
, thought Jessica.
She's jealous of the money
. It had taken her a while to realize that people of any age, people she considered grown-ups, of her parents' generation, who you would think wouldn't care that much about money because their lives were virtually done, could still be jealous and weird about it.

“Well, you're thin and beautiful,” said Carmel. “I know it's embarrassing to admit this at my age—I've got four beautiful daughters, I should be way beyond this—but my husband left me for a …”

“Bimbo?” suggested Lars.

“Sadly not. She's got a Ph.D.,” said Carmel.

“Oh, honey, you can still be a bimbo with a Ph.D.,” said Lars. “Who represented you? I assume you're still in the family home?”

“It's fine. Thank you. I'm not complaining about the settlement.” She stopped and looked at Jessica. “You know what? I'm probably jealous of you being pregnant.”

“Haven't you got four children?” said Lars. “That seems like more than enough.”

“I don't want any more children,” said Carmel. “I just want to go back in time to when everything was beginning. Pregnancies are the ultimate
beginnings
.” She put a hand to her stomach. “I always felt beautiful when I was pregnant, although I must admit my hair looked preposterous. I've got all this thick black Romanian hair, so when I was pregnant, it went wild.”

“Wait, why did it go wild?” asked Jessica. She was not prepared for her hair to go wild, thank you very much. Surely there was a shampoo and conditioner to fix that.

“Your hair stops falling out when you're pregnant,” said Heather. “So it gets thicker.” She touched her own hair. “I loved my hair when I was pregnant.”

“I'm sure you
are
pregnant, Jessica,” said Carmel. “And I'm sorry.” She paused. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” said Jessica. Maybe she wasn't pregnant. Maybe she'd just made a fool of herself in front of these people. She looked at Ben. He was studying his bare feet as if they had the answer. He had huge feet. Would their baby have huge feet too? Could they really be parents together? They weren't too young. They could afford a baby. They could afford a dozen babies. Why did it seem unimaginable?

Tony had gone to the bathroom and come back with a damp towel that he wordlessly handed to Frances. She pressed it to her forehead. She was sweating.

“Are you not well, Frances?” asked Carmel.

Everyone looked at Frances.

“No,” said Frances. She waved a languid hand in front of her face. “Just … you know how you talked about how much you liked beginnings? I've got my own personal
ending
going on here.”

“Ah,” said Heather, as if that made perfect sense to her. “Don't think of it as an ending. Think of it as a beginning.”

Carmel said, “When I was a teenager, my mother used to wear this
pin that said, ‘They're not hot flushes, they're power surges.' I was absolutely
mortified
by it.”

The three of them laughed that self-satisfied middle-aged-woman laugh that made you want to stay young forever.

53

 

Frances

“You all right?”

Tony sat on the floor next to Frances, in that uncomfortable way men sat on the ground at picnics, as if they were looking for somewhere to stow their legs.

“I'm okay,” said Frances. She pressed the damp towel to her forehead as the wave of heat continued to engulf her. She felt strangely sanguine, even though she was locked in a room with strangers having a hot flush. “Thanks for the towel.”

She studied him. His face was pale and there were beads of sweat across his forehead too. “Are
you
okay?”

He patted his forehead. “Just a bit claustrophobic.”

“You mean like properly claustrophobic? Not just
I really want to get out of here
claustrophobic?” Frances let the towel drop to her lap.

Tony tried to bend his knees up toward his chest, gave up, and stretched them out again. “I'm mildly claustrophobic. It's not that big a deal. I didn't like being down here even before we were locked in.”

“Right then, I need to distract you,” said Frances. “Take your mind off it.”

“Go right ahead,” said Tony. He smiled a half version of his full-on smile.

“So…,” said Frances. She thought about what Napoleon had said yesterday before their smoothies had had their full effect. “Did you suffer from that ‘post-sports depression' when you gave up football?”

“That's a really sparkling topic of conversation to hit off with,” said Tony.

“Sorry,” said Frances. “I'm not at my best. Also, I'm interested. My career might be kind of ending right now.”

Tony grimaced. “Well. They say that a sports star dies twice. The first time is when they retire.”

“And was it like a death?” asked Frances. It would feel like a death if she had to stop writing.

“Well, yeah, kind of.” He picked up a half-melted candle and pulled off a chunk of wax. “Not to be dramatic about it, but the game was all I knew for all those years, it's who I was. I was a kid straight out of school when I started playing professionally. My ex-wife would say I was still a kid when I finished. She used to say it stunted me. She had this phrase she'd picked up somewhere: professional sportsperson, amateur human being.” He put the candle back on the floor and flicked away the piece of wax with his fingertips. “She used to repeat it every time I … demonstrated my amateur approach to life.”

There was a hurt look in his eyes that belied his light humorous tone. Frances decided his ex-wife was a witch.

“Also, I wasn't ready to finish up. I thought I had one season left in me, but my right knee thought otherwise.” He pulled up one leg and pointed at the offending knee.

“Stupid right knee,” said Frances.

“Yeah, I was pissed off with it.” Tony massaged his knee. “A sports-doctor friend told me that retiring is like coming off cocaine; your body is used to all those feel-good chemicals: serotonin, dopamine, and—
bam—
suddenly they're gone and your body has to readjust.”

“I don't think I've ever experienced those feel-good chemicals doing exercise,” admitted Frances. She picked up the candle he'd discarded and dug her thumbnail into the soft wax near the wick.

“You probably have,” said Tony. “Doing certain types of exercise.” He paused.

She blinked. Wait. Was that
innuendo
?

He continued talking. Maybe she'd got it wrong.

“You probably find this laughable but there were some games where we were all where we were meant to be and we all did what we were meant to do, and it all just came together, like a piece of music or poetry or … I don't know …” He met her eyes and winced, as if preparing himself for derision. “Sometimes it felt transcendent. Like drugs. It really did.”

“That's not laughable,” said Frances. “That makes me want to take up AFL.”

He gave a deep appreciative chuckle.

“My ex-wife used to say that all I ever thought about was the game. It probably wasn't much fun being married to me.”

“Oh, I'm sure it was,” said Frances without thinking, and caught herself staring at his massive shoulders. She changed the subject hurriedly. “So what did you do after you stopped playing? How did you re-create yourself?”

“I set up a sports-marketing consultancy,” said Tony. “It's done well—you know, for a business run by an amateur human being. I thought I was doing better than a lot of my teammates. Some of them really fucked up—I mean … stuffed up their lives.”

“I feel like fucked up is the correct phrase to use there,” said Frances.

He gave her his full “Smiley” grin. It really was the funniest smile.

“You're kind of annihilating that candle,” he said.

She looked guiltily at the mess of wax in her lap. “You started it.” She brushed the wax onto the floor. “Go on. So you set up this consultancy.”

“I had one friend who said to me, ‘Don't you hate the way that everyone only wants to talk about who you
used to be
?' but I honestly
never minded that. I liked it when people recognized me; I never mind talking about the man I used to be. But anyway … late last year I started to get these symptoms, this incredible fatigue, I just felt something was wrong, even before I got on Dr. Google.”

Frances felt herself go cold. She was at an age where people in her circle didn't imagine serious illnesses, they got them. “And…?”

“So, I took myself off to my GP, and he ran a lot of tests, and I could tell he was taking it seriously, and I said, ‘Are you thinking pancreatic cancer?' Because that's what I was thinking—that's how I lost my dad, and I know it runs in families. And the GP just gave me this look, I've known him for years, and he said, ‘I'm covering all bases.'”

Oh, damn it to hell.

“It was just before Christmas, and he called me in to give me the results. He pulled out the file and, afterward, I realized I had these words in my head, and I was saying them to myself, and it just … shocked the life out of me that I would think that.”

“What words?” asked Frances.

“I was thinking,
Let it be terminal
.”

Frances blanched. “And … but … is it?”

“Oh, I'm fine,” said Tony. “Nothing wrong with me, except that I obviously don't have a healthy lifestyle.”

Frances exhaled. She hoped not excessively. “Well, thank goodness.”

“But it shook me up—that I would think that, that I would
hope
for a terminal diagnosis. I thought,
Mate, how fucked-up is your head?
”

“Yeah, that's bad,” said Frances. She felt energized in that bossy female way that she knew drove men crazy, but there was really nothing you could do about it once you felt that sense of righteousness surge through you, because they were such idiots. “So, right, you've got to get this fixed. You need—”

He held up his hand. “I've got it under control.”

“It's really very bad that you thought that!”

“I
know
it is. That's why I'm here.”

“So you probably need—”

He put his finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

“Therapy!” she got in quickly.

“Shhh.”

“And—”

“Zip it.”

Frances zipped it. She held the wet towel to her face to hide her smile. At least he wasn't thinking about his claustrophobia now.

“Tell me about this bastard who scammed you,” said Tony. “And then tell me where he lives.”